Privateline.com: Daily Notes Archive

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Tuesday, November 17, 2003

How to get permission without getting permission

Question: I've found a great file on the net and I want to use it in print or at my site. But every e-mail I've sent to the copyright holder gets ignored. No replies. What now?

Answer: Make sure you offer to credit them, link back to their site, or both. Be very diplomatic. Keep copies of each e-mail you send. After your third or fourth attempt try language like this: "I've not received a response to use your file. Nor a response of any kind. While you haven't granted permission, you have certainly not objected. Unless you object now I will go ahead with the use I have planned. I consider this e-mail a release. Have a nice day."

Do you now have a legal copyright release? No. But you do have a nice paper trail that displays a good faith effort on your part. And a complete lack of vigilance to defend their copyright on their part. Go ahead and get on with your project.

Monday, November 16, 2003

Too many things to do and describe. Site work and new writing continues.

In a few hours time, and only a two minute drive from my house, Arnold Schwarzenegger will become the new governor of California. He replaces Gray Davis, a corrupt, failed Jesuit. Took a nice hike in the rain this Saturday in Lagoon Valley, an undeveloped five mile wide area between Vacaville, California and Fairfield. From the tallest hill I could see into the back of the state prison, the so called Correctional Medical Facility, where Charles Manson once stayed, to the flight line at Travis Air Force Base. Reading Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. Unflattering portrayal of Christ before Pontius Pilate but I am staying with the book. A central character to come is a large black cat that swills vodka. As the owner of a large black cat, and someone who drinks vodka myself, well, I indeed must keep reading.

Two months ago I bought "Don't Look Back" on DVD, a film of Bob Dylan's 1964 solo acoustic tour around England. The words and singing continue to haunt me, Dylan was as clear spoken then as he is incomprehensible now. It does not concentrate too much on concert footage, rather on the publicity whirlwind surrounding Dylan as he travels It's a great film, with Joan Baez, then Dylan's girlfriend, making some wonderful impromptu performances. The writing, the writing! Dylan inherited, unwillingly, the mantle of Woody Guthrie. Dylan, unlike Guthrie, was a poet first, then a social activist. A singer in the folk style sometimes. I ramble, the last stanza of Only a Pawn in Their Game:

Today, Medgar Evers was buried from the bullet he caught.
They lowered him down as a king.
But when the shadowy sun sets on the one
That fired the gun
He'll see by his grave
On the stone that remains
Carved next to his name
His epitaph plain:
Only a pawn in their game.

November 16, 2003: Sunday

I don't like electrical symbols any more than mathematical equations. They're hard to remember, non-intuitive, and when first learning electronics, contribute more confusion than clarity. In the tube discussion I am writing it will be necessary to describe the triode in relation to the circuit it is wired to. A triode an amplifier or radio does not make, it is a collection of components that gives us our equipment.

As Dante writes to me, "There is nothing magical about vacuum tubes or transistors in general. They have no unique properties that allow them to take a small signal and amplify it's amplitude and/or power. They are part of an entire process that involves a low power input circuit controlling a higher power output circuit. A common analogy for an amplifier is to think of it as a black box with two input leads and two output leads. It doesn't matter what is inside. For now."

For now. But we need to explain the triode to state why it was so important. Only the transistor was a greater development than an electron tube. And these two devices, the tube and the transistor, were the most important inventions in the history of the telephone system. Describe we must. In my upcoming articles I will try to supply pictorial diagrams and not just electrical symbols.

Look also at the diagram below these first two graphics. Exploded diagrams are used often to portray mechanical things, like cars. And model cars. Why not electrical circuits?

Tube diagram