As a published author I’m happy to have the government enforce copyright laws so that I get paid for my work. But the current proposals are heavy-handed attempts by the entertainment industry to stack the deck in their favor. I’m tired of this. I want copyright protections to make sense both socially and technologically. I want due process when someone’s web site is threatened with closure.

So this time I took matters into my own hands. I created a completely new hosting account and I’m migrating the stuff myself.

The site will probably be down for a couple of hours while they switch the domain name from the old host to the new host, but things should come right back up after that.

Some people might say: “Of course you should set up the revised site on your own!” The problem is that we can’t always tell how easy/hard something is supposed to be. The GoDaddy people hinted that it was a minor sort of thing: move some files and throw the switch. So I figured they could do it themselves without much trouble.

I was wrong.

I never expected it would take WEEKS to move some files onto a new server. I think the thing got stuck somewhere in their automatic process, in a gap that’s not really covered by customer service.

Originally I thought they’d done their photo the same way, but I was wrong. They “borrowed” a few thousand merit badges and constructed it by hand. Here’s the video:

The scouting group renews its charter every year here in the US, and the local Boy Scout council issues a charter to the sponsoring community organization, called the charterd organization.

The local commissioner is a volunteer who visits individual scouting groups on behalf of the local council. Commissioners are usually organized into districts and communities, and take care of packs, troops, crews, etc., in their own neighborhoods. Charter renewal gives the commissioner an annual opportunity to meet with a chartered organization’s leadership, report on the benefits produced by their scouting units, and thank them for their sponsorship.

So, here are my thoughts on how to present a charter.

Chartered Organizations

The first “scout troops” organized themselves around LTG Robert Baden-Powell’s earlier book Aids to Scouting (1899). The book uses the term “scouting” in its classic sense: a soldier who “scouts” the local terrain and enemy positions. B-P wrote the book for military professionals who needed to train others how to travel across enemy country, blend in to the local population, and spy on the enemy.

Following its publication, several schools organized groups of their students to study and practice the skills in B-P’s manual. Many young teens may have also organized scouting groups on their own. BP spoke with organizers of other youth movements (like the YMCA and the “Boy’s Brigade”) and decided to establish a “scouting” program that was “sponsored” by these existing organizations. These sponsors became the first chartered organizations.

This led to the “Browsea” experiment – the first Boy Scout camp – in 1907, and the publication of Scouting for Boys in 1908. Two years later, an official scouting movement arose in the US with the incorporation of the Boy Scouts of America. Here, the Boy Scouts organized their troops around chartered organizations, which served as sponsors of a sort and at least provided the troop with meeting and storage space.

Chartered organizations may be any community organization that wants to promote youth. When I was a kid, our Cub Scout pack was chartered by the Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) in my grade school. My Boy Scout troop was chartered by a church. The church we attended actually chartered a different troop – location and boy membership (i.e. friends) being more important than religious affiliation, at least when Scouting is concerned.

Charter Presentation

When I was a unit commissioner and had to present charters, I struggled a bit. I found suggestions for charter presentations that involved 30-minute, highly-scripted ceremonies. I doubted many chartered organizations really wanted to sit and wait through all that, especially if we repeat it every year. So I looked closer and focused on what was really required:

1. Explain briefly what the charter indicates: it’s permission from the local and national councils to operate the scouting program in their organization. The district and council volunteers provide guidance and help, but the main responsibility rests with the chartered organization, and the unit leaders they appoint.
2. Bring representatives from the pack, troop, or whatever, to summarize the good things resulting from the unit’s existence – number of youth served, major advancements (especially Eagle Scouts), and service activities performed. If they’re all busy, you can report for them, but it’s best to have a live representative (adult, youth, and preferably some of both).
3. Thank the unit representatives for the service of their adult leaders.
4. Thank the Chartered Organization Representative, whether present or not, for serving as the representative of the unit at the district and council level.
5. Thank the chartered organization members (or their representatives) for their previous support of this scouting unit.
6. Present the charter to the leader or lead representative of the chartered organization. For a religious group this may be a priest or pastor. For veteran organizations this may be the post commander. For most other organizations it is a president or chief executive officer.

The whole process may take 5 minutes or less, especially if the unit representatives keep their reports short and to the point.

When I do a charter presentation like this, I don’t like to use a fixed script. I sketch the role of chartered organizations and chartering in general terms. I speak directly to the audience to convey that I mean what I say about their important role in supporting Scouting. I don’t read from a script because it dilutes the importance I want to give what I say.

The Actual Presentation

When I finally present the charter, though, I try to give it extra weight by saying something formal (a.k.a. pompous). This is a 1-2 sentence presentation speech that I actually memorize. I must say it directly to the organization’s chief instead of reading it from a card. I replace the underlined parts below with the appropriate names, titles, unit numbers, and so on.

Titled name of organization’s chief, in acknowledgment of the support of the scouting program by Chartered Organization’s name, and on behalf of the National Council of the Boy Scouts of America, I present you the charter for the units identified by type and number (i.e. Pack 123 and Troop 456), and I pledge the cooperation and support of the Name of Scout Council and our Name of Local District volunteers. Thank you.

Every commissioner is different, and the individual words aren’t as important as the heart and enthusiasm that drives most scouting volunteers. If this doesn’t capture the spirit you want, then rewrite it. In any case, copy out the words you need to say, substitute the proper names, titles, and numbers, and be able to recite it from memory.

The Script

When I first put together this charter presentation I created an actual script. Since I know some people will feel more comfortable with specific words instead of making up their own, I include the recharter script here in Microsoft Word’s more-or-less portable RTF format.

Feel free to use, modify, and distribute the script as you see fit.

By the way, other ideas

Here are links to other charter presentation ideas:

• A typical – and lengthy – presentation ceremony is posted here and there.
• Grand Teton Council has posted a couple of concise and interesting pack-oriented charter presentations.

This article by Rick Smith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

I poked around on the Internet for ideas, and came up empty. Then I contacted the folks at Tekzilla, a web video magazine on tech that streams onto our Tivo. They made some suggestions that helped a little – but not enough – and asked listeners for other ideas.

Last week, the listeners came through. The winning suggestion was to use the incredible capabilities of GoodReader to upload hierarchies of files. I’ve been using GoodReader for several weeks, but hadn’t dug deeply enough into it to appreciate these features. Thanks to GoodReader, I’ve finally filled up at least half of my iPad!

My problem arose because I’d developed a personal library of ebooks and reference materials. To keep things tidy, I sorted everything into an alphabetical hierarchy of folders. At the top level I had 26 folders, one per letter. At the next level I generally had one folder per author’s last name.

My first strategy was to find a way to simply move the entire hierarchy onto the iPad. Then I’d direct the appropriate files to the appropriate apps. This would obviously work when moving the files to any traditional operating system or desktop. It failed miserably with the iPad.

Here’s the problem: the IOS interface doesn’t let end users grope around the actual file system. Each application gets its own chunk of hierarchical file storage. The only way to share a file between applications is to physically copy it to the other application’s file tree. The end user sees this as an “Open in iBooks” operation, or something like that.

iBooks Trouble

When I started with the iPad, I copied sets of individual files to specific apps using the iTunes sync interface. Once I had about a hundred books and articles in iBooks, I found the interface impossible to handle. iBooks would use “Title” and “Author” metadata, if available. If no metadata was available, iBooks leaves the author blank and names the book/article with the file name. This really stinks when you’re uploading a subscription PDF from “qmags” (IEEE uses them for distributing its Spectrum trade mag electronically). Annoyingly, qmags provides no metadata and gives every file an inscrutable, seemingly-random name that bears no relation to the magazine title or date. Once iBook grabs hold of that name it won’t let you use a different one.

My basic reaction has been to try to organize everything into “collections” inside iBooks. A collection is a poor-man’s subdirectory or folder, implemented directly by the application. You can’t (to my knowledge) import a folder structure into iBooks – you can only impose the structure book-by-book after the books are imported into iBooks. This is annoying when you have a thousand items in your electronic reading library.

The iAnnotate Dead End

My first big mistake with respect to iPad apps was my failure to figure out the “notes” function in iBook. Since it wasn’t obvious how to annotate a book or PDF from iBooks, I went looking for an app that would do it. I downloaded (and often paid for) several that looked promising. The best bet seemed to be iAnnotate, and I successfully used it to review a technical article for a journal.

After poking at iAnnotate for a while, I came across its Wi Fi sync function, also called “Aji PDF Service.” This replicates a hierarchy of PDF files from your desktop within the iAnnotate app on the iPad. It requires special software on your desktop to serve the files to the iPad.

I tried it. The process took a couple of hours to replicate several hundred PDFs from my desktop.

DropBox Good and Bad

DropBox is a web service that provides file synchronization between desktops. I used to do the same thing using sync software on various desktops in conjunction with a USB drive. DropBox performs the sync automatically as long as the desktop is active. The service provides file storage on the Dropbox.com web site. The site’s files replicate the hierarchical structure of the “Dropbox” folder established on the user’s desktop.

For example, if I add a folder with some files to the Dropbox folder on my Mac, the desktop agent will scurry around copying those new files onto the Dropbox site. This all happens in the background automatically. When I start up my PC, the Dropbox agent on the PC desktop checks its Dropbox folder against the web site. Since I added a folder with some new files, the PC desktop agent creates a corresponding folder in the PC Dropbox folder, and copies the new files into it.

Dropbox also has an iPad app that will download files from the file hierarchy and make them available on the iPad. Unlike the desktop agents, the iPad app doesn’t try to replicate the entire Dropbox folder hierarchy. You can navigate the hierarchy, but you can’t replicate it directly. At least, you can’t do it with the Dropbox app.

Fortunately, the DropBox protocol is sufficiently well-known and usable that several iPad apps have also implemented it. For example, I’ve been able to upload files to QuickDocs, a program designed to work with Microsoft Office files. Unfortunately, though, QuickDocs doesn’t make it easy to keep the files in place. I’d often lose a document if I lost network connectivity.

GoodReader to the Rescue

GoodReader has two features that make it perfect for my needs:

1. You can mount the iPad on your desktop through a Wi-Fi based local file server mechanism. Once it’s mounted, you can drag and drop a whole file hierarchy into GoodReader. I recommend using 802.11 N, if only because it’s faster. Even using my N channel, it took a couple hours to transfer 8 GB of files.
2. You can actually sync your Dropbox hierarchy with a copy stored in GoodReader. The service reps at Dropbox claim that their software won’t sync iPad files because of limitations in IOS, the iPhone/iPad/iPod operating system. GoodReader’s valuable feature suggests that the Dropbox folks just didn’t try hard enough.

In addition, GoodReader uses the built-in IOS support for many standard document, image, and video files to let users actually look at files within GoodReader. The program implements its very own PDF processing, partly to allow for making notes and partly to ensure proper handling of incredibly huge PDFs.

My main justification for the iPad is that it lets me handle PDF files for my upcoming textbook. Those files are typically 10-20MB in size.

So I’m really happy with GoodReader.

I admit I’m not up on the state of the art in zombie movies. Most of my knowledge was acquired from cheesy horror comics in my youth. Of course, everything we know about zombies comes from media depictions: written stories, TV, and movies. So the question of zombie odor doesn’t really apply to audiences. “Smellivision” was never a popular concept.

So, what do zombies smell like?

I’d expect an odor that the CSI types call decomp short for “decomposing (i.e. rotting) human bodies.”

This would make it amazingly difficult for zombies to sneak up on anyone, or stay hidden to prepare an ambush.

Though, perhaps, if there are lots of inactive zombies about (the dead undead) then it’s hard to distinguish their decomp smell from that of active zombies (the living dead).

Boy, what a stupid topic to write about.

The location is both a church and a designated polling place for the next-day election.

A row of parked cars indicated a meeting in progress. When we wandered past later, the meeting had broken up. Cooler and wiser heads must have prevailed, since the sign had disappeared.

When we were fighting Communism, no one imagined that we would win by mixing more religion into our politics. The Communists repressed all religions with ecumenical zeal, and we took pride in our ecumenical tolerance. On the other hand, Communists preached (without practice) that all races were equal as workers of the world. No doubt this helped shame our country into embracing equal rights in the 1960s.

Now that we’re fighting religious extremists, weak-hearted people think Al Qaeda must be right: religious extremism is the path to strength. So political activities worm their way into religious venues.

1. Automation is stupid. Until we get Do What I Mean brain interface debugged, cameras will make a best guess.
2. This is what I like about photography: the opportunity to exert control over how the image gets captured.

Although I learned a bit about photography years ago, I still blunder with camera settings. I didn’t mind the shutter speed while snapping pics of dancing. I find I have to literally exercise a special bit of my brain to look at the lighting of a scene. Otherwise I fail to assess backlighting or realize that the shadow will make a huge black slash through the image.

I find that I rely heavily on Photoshop-like software to redeem over- and under-exposed photos. It’s usually good for 1 or 2 stops on a digital camera, though the colors may suffer. Unfortunately there’s no related technology to un-blur a moving subject.

I Love xkcd from NoamR on Vimeo.

Now, if only Randall Munroe would respond to my emails and let me use a few comics in my textbook…

[UPDATE!] He said YES, so I’m reprinting his Map of the Internet in Elementary Information Security, assuming things progress as expected.

I assume this was a last-gasp attempt to boost circulation at the end of the big Back-To-School advertising season. I’ve received this sort of offer from them in years past.

This morning my wife fielded a call from the Pioneer Press disavowing the offer. I also received an invoice in the mail TODAY, instead of receiving it in six weeks. Thus, my free offer has been aborted about five weeks early.

This is no huge loss for our household. We get the Hastings Star-Gazette on Thursdays, the New York Times on weekends, and we go on-line for the rest of our news.

In past years, when the Pioneer Press offered us a free 6 weeks, we usually said “No,” especially if we were already receiving the Minneapolis Strib. We accepted maybe one of those, and canceled after weeks of excessive recycling.

I have to wonder what sort of back-room shouting and recriminations led to this reversal at the Pioneer Press. I suspect someone got fired over this.