| victory at work. alfons maria mucha. |
[Mar. 24th, 2007|03:14 am] |
Last night was a very long night. I don't have anything to say about it here; I just want to note that it was a very long night, and leave it at that.
I was productive today. I was so productive. Jay "played defense" for me by answering questions, dealing with nitpicks and trying to figure out what Steve wanted, while I got more accomplished in one day than I had all week. Amazing, that. I think there's a lesson here for how to maintain productivity while still being responsive to the customer's wants. By the end of the day, I was able to go walk over the the conference room and make "touchdown" hands at Jay, letting him know that the configuration file had generated the view and its dependent tables. There's more testing to be done, but I ended the week on a victorious note.
(Thanks, Jakarta Commons Digester, for making XML configuration files ridiculously easy to parse!)
I spent an hour and change circumnavigating the mall repeatedly. I don't get to walk often enough, and it was really nice to be able to do so. Carin was working the until-closing shift, so I paced the mall before heading in to absorb some reading at Borders, and come up with an idea for dinner. Fried Rice
- 1 cup rice
- 3 cups water
- 1/2 onion
- 2 eggs
- Spot of grease
Set a timer for fifteen minutes. Chop and fry the onion in the oil while you cook the rice. Beat the eggs. When the timer goes off, pour the egg over the onions, and wait about thirty seconds before putting the rice in as well. Break up the egg with a spatula as you stir the rice around for about five minutes. Did You Know that despite being made in the 1890s, the works of famed Art Nouveau artist Alfons Maria Mucha are still in copyright? Because he died in 1939 (hauled off by Nazis, terribly tragic), his works are still copyrighted in France, where he created most of them. Now, I'd thought that the rule for copyright here was "if it was published before 1923, it's public domain", but it's a bit more complicated. Since the Uruguay Round Agreements Act of 1994 took effect, copyright was restored to works published in other countries;this was challenged in Golan v. Gonzalez, the response to which ("of course we can pull things out of the public domain!") drew on the earlier asinine decision in Eldred v. Ashcroft.
So, everyone mark January 1, 2010 on your calendars as Alfons Mucha Liberation Day, as long as France doesn't extend its copyright term again in the next three years, which is by no means guaranteed.
However, Mucha took a tour of the United States between 1906 and 1910, where he made some posters (that one's from Chicago in 1909, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art), and may have painted a self-portrait during that time period. Because these were published in the United States, they may be in the public domain as of now. My legal staff (read: the Cat) is looking into that, and while it's ridiculous that nineteenth-century art is still bound by copyright, at least it's not all like that. And at least we get something on Public Domain Day here in America.
No comments. I was feeling apolitical, and sad about Mucha. So very sad. |
|
|
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
grendelkhan's journal