I'm trying to free up some space on my hard drive (70 GB of music on a 200 GB drive will do that to you) so am looking through my duplicate MP3 files (which make up ~10 GB of that collection). 

Looking closer, I see that there are a few songs that I have no less than SIX different copies of, all by the same artist (ie. not cover versions by other artists.) 

Some are because the song was released on the original album then on a greatest hits album and maybe one (or even more) live albums or reissues.  Then I also end up with copies of the same song due to some collections I've downloaded like "Rolling Stone's Top 500 Songs", "Top 500 Alternative Songs", "Top 101 Love Songs" - stuff like that - where the song might show up a couple times as well. 

Here are the tunes that I have six copies of...
John Lennon - "Give Peace A Chance"
John Lennon - "Imagine"
John Lennon - "Woman" 
(The first two are Lennon songs I'd expect to show up in enough places to get me up to six copies but "Woman" was a bit of a surprise.  I guess it hit a couple "Love Song" anthologies I have to put it over the top.)
Michael Jackson - "Billie Jean"
REM - "Losing My Religion"

The solution seems pretty straight-forward - every time I see a copy of a song that I know is the exact same version of a song I already have (ie. one from the original album, one from the greatest hits collection but not one from the original album and one from a live album) - delete it.  Which works in a digital landscape. 

But my problem is that I grew up in the analog age and I still respect the integrity of the album and even of the "Various Artists" collections.  So even for those "101 Best Love Songs" groupings, I'm reluctant to delete the duplicates because then it becomes "83 Love Songs That Happen To Be Songs You Don't Already Have Copies Of" and the integrity of the original 101 songs is lost. 

Yeah, stupid, I know but that's what I'm struggling with today.  (As that hard drive fills up even more, I suspect I'll become a lot more easily convinced to delete the duplicates.)   

I've written about the Saskatchewan Single Integrated Library System before but now I see this massive project to bring all of our regional and city library systems together in a single consortium arrangement is getting some mainstream media coverage as well. 

A job for a librarian who will coordinate the technical aspects of the project has been posted as well. 

Stopped by the Regina KidSport's Chili Cook-off in downtown Regina today for a bowl of delicious NDP chili (no, it wasn't vegetarian for those who think all NDP'ers are granola crunchers.) 

The various Regina and area MLA's who were tending the table were being coy with whose recipe it was so I developed a couple theories - either new leader Dwain Lingenfelter was slaving over a hot stove all night.  Or they just placed a big order with Tim Horton's.  I've got a loonie on the second explanation. 

Found this clip on Reddit and though it's a bit different than my usual Music Monday clips, I thought it was worth sharing as it's definitely got music in it and it's a pretty cool visual too! (Of course, it'll probably come out that this is a viral advertising campaign for Coke One or something. )


But assuming it's legit, I'm sure there's a lesson here about the differences between being a leader and being a follower. 

The clip starts with one lone guy doing what I've heard described as the "monkey dance", that same dance you always see some neo-hippie doing off at the side of the stage at Folk Festivals.  But the difference here is that he eventually attracts a crowd who all dance with him (I still can't decide if that first couple guys who go up to join him are doing it in a slightly mocking way or if they're sincere as well.) 

I've been thinking a lot about leadership, reading a lot about leadership and trying to distill my own philosophy into something concise.  And what I've come up with is this: I wonder if, at its simplest, leadership is about being actively engaged - with your work, with your life, with your world and what's around you? 

That crowd sitting and listening to the performance is engaged but in a fairly passive way - perhaps in a way that many of us are passively engaged at work or at home or school or whatever.  But the brave, unique soul choosing to dance to the music is actively engaged.  And by this small act of leadership, he inspires his fellows to be actively engaged as well.  As I said, pretty cool. 

Or maybe not...man, I'm thirsty! 

(I swear that I didn't know when I made my Coke One joke that there would actually be a story about Coke using possibly illegal viral marketing techniques.  But of course there was...)

As is probably quite obvious, I try to post to this blog on a daily basis at the minimum.  I occasionally miss the odd day (and even then, I sometimes back date posts the next morning to keep up the daily post record - if you see a post dated anytime within ten minutes to midnight, that's a pretty good clue that it's a backdated post) but rarely more than that in a row.  Even during holidays or when I'm mostly away from a computer for other reasons, I tend to find Internet access or pre-post a few entries in advance or whatever. 

Shea had a family reunion this weekend and I wasn't sure whether I'd post or not but in the end, I decided to let it slide for the weekend.  This is partly because my new iPhone only had spotty coverage at the regional park where we were camping (literally, I would get no service standing by the camper then walk back fifty feet to the firepit and get a bar and a half...sometimes.)  That was enough to check e-mail and do a Facebook update here and there but that was about it.  Add in the fact that I can post to my blog from the iPhone but that I can't access all of the blog's editing tools, only the very basic ones, made me say "Ah, we'll just let it slide for a couple days."

For example, here's one of the photos I sent to Facebook of Pace "driving" his Grandpa's new 1970 dune buggy on the knee of his Uncle Marsh... 

I have to admit that blogging's felt like a bit of a burden lately too - I think this is partly because I felt so inspired writing about Ryan Meili's campign for the leadership of the Sask NDP that the comedown afterwards was bigger than I expected.  Writing about libraries, technology and other topics that catch my attention is still fun but maybe not as meaningful as my political blogging? 

I don't know - I'm sure I've gone through lulls before (hell, my third post ever on this blog is titled "Day Three and Already Nothing to Write About") and on that note, I'm heading for three and a half years as a blogger (hard to believe) so maybe that's part of the restlessness I feel?  I have a couple ideas floating around - I've joked about adding more of those semi-easy recurring features like my "Friday Fun Link" and my "Music Monday" things - I was thinking of doing a "picture of the day" now that I've got the iPhone and have a camera with me pretty much 24/7.  I've also been tossing around the idea of moving to a new server and converting to WordPress.  Finally, I've also been thinking of changing the focus of my online energies to more life streaming (which is what a lot of us online are already doing to varying degrees with our Twitter tweets and our Flickr photos posts and our Last.fm music scrobbles and so on...) 

I don't know - maybe I'm just burned out from a weekend of fun in the sun and lots of visiting and lots of chasing kids around a campfire and lots of beer and so on.  Hoepfully I'll recoup a bit in the next day or two and get the fire back (er, as much as anything about libraries can get you fired up.  Well, actually maybe it can!  Thanks to DJ for the link on Facebook!) 

Amazing what getting a mobile phone will do in terms of making your realise that your blog is quite, uhm...heavy...with all kinds of marginally useful widgets, random links and assorted other junk. 

Luckily, there's a really easy way to use Google Reader to create a poor man's mobile version of your blog.

Just bookmark the following URL on your mobile and you'll have the condensed Head Tale ready to go whenever you want (the trick works for any blog/site with an RSS feed - just append the site's feed address to the end of this link):

http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/feed/http://blog.jason.hammond.net/blog/index.xml

(tip found at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/design/how-to-create-mobile-phone-optimized-blog/2132/)

We all have those songs that are so catchy or that have great lyrics or that we connect with so strongly for other reasons that we could put them on repeat on our music players and just listen to them over and over (in the old days, this same effect was accomplished by taping the same song over and over onto a blank cassette.  If your Walkman had auto-reverse, you were golden!) 

That 80's theme is somewhat appropriate as this list was inspired by my recent re-discovery of song #10 on the list...which I listened to repeatedly in the car tonight while driving to (and home from) a meeting.

10. "Blue Sky Mine" - Midnight Oil - okay, I looked - the song's from 1990 so technically not an 80's theme like I just said.  But Midnight Oil is definitely an 80's band in my mind.
9. "In the Air Tonight" - Phil Collins - admit it, you did the repeat-play thing with this song in grade six too.
8. "Copperhead Road" - Steve Earle
7. "Linda Put the Coffee On" - Ray Materick
6. "Song 2" - Blur (at least when it first came out, I did the repeat play thing - at a house party no less.  Don't know if I'd still play it repeatedly today.) 
5. "America" - Paul Simon
4. "And Your Bird Can Sing" - Beatles (yes, out of the entire Beatles catalogue, this is the one I go with!)
3. "Wake Up Boo!" - Boo Radleys
2. "Fairytale of New York" - Pogues (not just at Christmas either although that's obviously the ideal time for it)
1.  "Find The River" - REM

Because Cory Doctorow's new novel, "Little Brother" is the first e-book I'm reading on my iPhone (very readable, thank-you very much), I got to see his copyright notice which I'm reproducing here in its entirety because it's such a great summary of how copyright should work in a sane and rational world:

THE COPYRIGHT THING

The Creative Commons license at the top of this file probably tipped you off to the fact that I've got some pretty unorthodox views about copyright. Here's what I think of it, in a nutshell: a little goes a long way, and more than that is too much.

I like the fact that copyright lets me sell rights to my publishers and film studios and so on. It's nice that they can't just take my stuff without permission and get rich on it without cutting me in for a piece of the action. I'm in a pretty good position when it comes to negotiating with these companies: I've got a great agent and a decade's experience with copyright law and licensing (including a stint as a delegate at WIPO, the UN agency that makes the world's copyright treaties). What's more, there's just not that many of these negotiations -- even if I sell fifty or a hundred different editions of Little Brother (which would put it in top millionth of a percentile for fiction), that's still only a hundred negotiations, which I could just about manage.

I hate the fact that fans who want to do what readers have always done are expected to play in the same system as all these hotshot agents and lawyers. It's just stupid to say that an elementary school classroom should have to talk to a lawyer at a giant global publisher before they put on a play based on one of my books. It's ridiculous to say that people who want to "loan" their electronic copy of my book to a friend need to get a license to do so. Loaning books has been around longer than any publisher on Earth, and it's a fine thing.

I recently saw Neil Gaiman give a talk at which someone asked him how he felt about piracy of his books. He said, "Hands up in the audience if you discovered your favorite writer for free -- because someone loaned you a copy, or because someone gave it to you? Now, hands up if you found your favorite writer by walking into a store and plunking down cash." Overwhelmingly, the audience said that they'd discovered their favorite writers for free, on a loan or as a gift. When it comes to my favorite writers, there's no boundaries: I'll buy every book they publish, just to own it (sometimes I buy two or three, to give away to friends who must read those books). I pay to see them live. I buy t-shirts with their book-covers on them. I'm a customer for life.

Neil went on to say that he was part of the tribe of readers, the tiny minority of people in the world who read for pleasure, buying books because they love them. One thing he knows about everyone who downloads his books on the Internet without permission is that they're readers, they're people who love books.

People who study the habits of music-buyers have discovered something curious: the biggest pirates are also the biggest spenders. If you pirate music all night long, chances are you're one of the few people left who also goes to the record store (remember those?) during the day. You probably go to concerts on the weekend, and you probably check music out of the library too. If you're a member of the red-hot music-fan tribe, you do lots of everything that has to do with music, from singing in the shower to paying for black-market vinyl bootlegs of rare Eastern European covers of your favorite death-metal band.

Same with books. I've worked in new bookstores, used bookstores and libraries. I've hung out in pirate ebook ("bookwarez") places online. I'm a stone used bookstore junkie, and I go to book fairs for fun. And you know what? It's the same people at all those places: book fans who do lots of everything that has to do with books. I buy weird, fugly pirate editions of my favorite books in China because they're weird and fugly and look great next to the eight or nine other editions that I paid full-freight for of the same books. I check books out of the library, google them when I need a quote, carry dozens around on my phone and hundreds on my laptop, and have (at this writing) more than 10,000 of them in storage lockers in London, Los Angeles and Toronto.

If I could loan out my physical books without giving up possession of them, I would. The fact that I can do so with digital files is not a bug, it's a feature, and a damned fine one. It's embarrassing to see all these writers and musicians and artists bemoaning the fact that art just got this wicked new feature: the ability to be shared without losing access to it in the first place. It's like watching restaurant owners crying down their shirts about the new free lunch machine that's feeding the world's starving people because it'll force them to reconsider their business-models. Yes, that's gonna be tricky, but let's not lose sight of the main attraction: free lunches!

Universal access to human knowledge is in our grasp, for the first time in the history of the world. This is not a bad thing.

In case that's not enough for you, here's my pitch on why giving away ebooks makes sense at this time and place:

Giving away ebooks gives me artistic, moral and commercial satisfaction. The commercial question is the one that comes up most often: how can you give away free ebooks and still make money?

For me -- for pretty much every writer -- the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity (thanks to Tim O'Reilly for this great aphorism). Of all the people who failed to buy this book today, the majority did so because they never heard of it, not because someone gave them a free copy. Mega-hit best-sellers in science fiction sell half a million copies -- in a world where 175,000 attend the San Diego Comic Con alone, you've got to figure that most of the people who "like science fiction" (and related geeky stuff like comics, games, Linux, and so on) just don't really buy books. I'm more interested in getting more of that wider audience into the tent than making sure that everyone who's in the tent bought a ticket to be there.

Ebooks are verbs, not nouns. You copy them, it's in their nature. And many of those copies have a destination, a person they're intended for, a hand-wrought transfer from one person to another, embodying a personal recommendation between two people who trust each other enough to share bits. That's the kind of thing that authors (should) dream of, the proverbial sealing of the deal. By making my books available for free pass-along, I make it easy for people who love them to help other people love them.

What's more, I don't see ebooks as substitute for paper books for most people. It's not that the screens aren't good enough, either: if you're anything like me, you already spend every hour you can get in front of the screen, reading text. But the more computer-literate you are, the less likely you are to be reading long-form works on those screens -- that's because computer-literate people do more things with their computers. We run IM and email and we use the browser in a million diverse ways. We have games running in the background, and endless opportunities to tinker with our music libraries. The more you do with your computer, the more likely it is that you'll be interrupted after five to seven minutes to do something else. That makes the computer extremely poorly suited to reading long-form works off of, unless you have the iron self-discipline of a monk.

The good news (for writers) is that this means that ebooks on computers are more likely to be an enticement to buy the printed book (which is, after all, cheap, easily had, and easy to use) than a substitute for it. You can probably read just enough of the book off the screen to realize you want to be reading it on paper.

So ebooks sell print books. Every writer I've heard of who's tried giving away ebooks to promote paper books has come back to do it again. That's the commercial case for doing free ebooks.

Now, onto the artistic case. It's the twenty-first century. Copying stuff is never, ever going to get any harder than it is today (or if it does, it'll be because civilization has collapsed, at which point we'll have other problems). Hard drives aren't going to get bulkier, more expensive, or less capacious. Networks won't get slower or harder to access. If you're not making art with the intention of having it copied, you're not really making art for the twenty-first century. There's something charming about making work you don't want to be copied, in the same way that it's nice to go to a Pioneer Village and see the olde-timey blacksmith shoeing a horse at his traditional forge. But it's hardly, you know, contemporary. I'm a science fiction writer. It's my job to write about the future (on a good day) or at least the present. Art that's not supposed to be copied is from the past.

Finally, let's look at the moral case. Copying stuff is natural. It's how we learn (copying our parents and the people around us). My first story, written when I was six, was an excited re-telling of Star Wars, which I'd just seen in the theater. Now that the Internet -- the world's most efficient copying machine -- is pretty much everywhere, our copying instinct is just going to play out more and more. There's no way I can stop my readers, and if I tried, I'd be a hypocrite: when I was 17, I was making mix-tapes, photocopying stories, and generally copying in every way I could imagine. If the Internet had been around then, I'd have been using it to copy as much as I possibly could.

There's no way to stop it, and the people who try end up doing more harm than piracy ever did. The record industry's ridiculous holy war against file-sharers (more than 20,000 music fans sued and counting!) exemplifies the absurdity of trying to get the food-coloring out of the swimming pool. If the choice is between allowing copying or being a frothing bully lashing out at anything he can reach, I choose the former.

I found out about Paul MacLeod because I saw that Hawksley Workman had produced one of his early  albums.  (Oh, I see Hawksley did a few of them actually.)  I downloaded this song which I found on Napster or another early file sharing service then went out and bought the entire album (yes, I know, it still happens - even in a file sharing world.  I'll get into my personal philosophy on file sharing some other time... )

...at least until now. ;-)