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In Honor of Bike To Work Week at the University of Victoria, I created this little video with the help of Elizabeth (thanks for your wonderful video work Elizabeth!).

It has been a running joke here at the Law Library that I’m so anxious to go home after work I just ride down the loading dock stairs so I can make a faster get-a-way. Have a great Bike To Work Week Everyone! Enjoy!

I’ve got a bad back this morning so I’m going to do a “copy & paste” blog posting this morning. The embedded video below is great, and dovetails nicely with my previous post on Manufacturing Happiness. Enjoy!

“Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central belief of western societies: that freedom of choice leads to personal happiness. In Schwartz’s estimation, all that choice is making us miserable. We set unreasonably high expectations, question our choices before we even make them, and blame our failures entirely on ourselves. His relatable examples, from consumer products (jeans, TVs, salad dressings) to lifestyle choices (where to live, what job to take, whom and when to marry), underscore this central point: Too many choices undermine happiness.” - from the TED website

“The Secret to happiness is low expectations.” Low expectations make it much easier to be pleasantly surprised.

Dan Gilbert gave a great 20 minute lecture at the TED Conference about Happiness and how we stumble into it, and how we create it ourselves.

Our brain is a simulation machine… It is great, but it tends to overemphasize the effects of major events in our lives. For example we tend to overestimate the potential upside of good things that happen to us, and tends to overemphasize the potential downside as well. If something happened over 3 months ago, it has virtually no impact on your current happiness. A great example of this is the opposite cases of the lottery winner, and someone who becomes a paraplegic. After one year, both individuals are at the same level of happiness that they we at before their supposed life changing events. Very counter intuitive.

We have with-in us the ability to create or “synthesize happiness”. In other words we can look for the good in everything that happens to us, and can genuinely feel happy. He gives examples of people who have had terrible things happen to them (like being put in jail for 20 years for a crime the person did not commit), and how they say that that terrible thing was the best thing that happened to them. These people looked for the good in what they experienced and “created” or “synthesized” happiness.

Dan talks about how we tend to place a higher value on happiness that we encounter by chance rather than by happiness that we create ourselves. Natural happiness is when you get what you want, and synthetic happiness is what make when we don’t get what we want. In our society we tend to believe that natural happiness is of a higher quality than synthetic happiness. Why? “What kind of an economy would we have if people believed that they could be just as happy with the ’stuff’ they currently own, rather than going out and buying new stuff at the shopping mall, that marketers have told us that will make us happy?”

He goes on to explain that “Synthetic” happiness is just as good as “Natural” happiness. Watch the 20 minute video for the details… It’s great!

Lastly Dan talks about how excessive choice is the enemy of synthetic happiness. We seem to be able to more easily create happiness when we are stuck with a choice or stuck in a particular situation. We find ways to be happy with what we are stuck with. If we have multiple choices or opportunities to change our choices we don’t have the same sort of ownership of the situation. We may change the situation or what we have, so we unconsciously don’t invest in it by synthesizing happiness. Ironically enough, if people are given a choice to be in a situation where they can change their minds, or simple make a choice and stick with it, most people with opt for the situation where they can change their minds, which will tend to make them less happy.

Want to make your own map with custom pins showing important locations (important to you in any case). How about custom directions? Look no further than Google’s "My Maps". All you need is a Google account, and then surf on over to Google Maps, and click on to "My Maps" (you’ll be prompted to sign on if you are not already).

You can just have fun playing around with the maps, or possibly do something more useful:

• You can send people directions to a party or event.
• Give conference attendees directions to hotels, restaurants, or other places of interest.
• Want to create a Sight seeing tour? Now’s your chance.
• Plot Crime rate statistics.
• Identify Neighborhood watch homes.
• Paper Route delivery (or non-delivery) map.
• Cool photo album, with pins put in where the pictures were taken.

Some of the features that could come in handy depending how how you want to use the system:

• Maps can be made public or private.
• You can draw lines on the map (sometimes the routes it suggests, just aren’t right!).
• You can embed pictures or videos in the pop-outs from pins.
• Email your maps to friends.
• Embed maps in a web page.

Lastly, here is a map of my neighborhood in Victoria, BC., complete with all the important locations to our family. Enjoy!

Ever wondered how much it costs to run your computer? That depends on how energy efficient your computer is, and how much electricity costs in your city. I can at least tell you how much it cost me to run my Dell Dimension 4600 in Victoria, BC, Canada.

To start with, I had to get something that would allow me to measure the amount of electricity that my PC was using. The best gadget I found for the job (maybe I should say the least expensive gadget I found) was the kill-a-watt. It is a great little tool that you plug into an electrical outlet, then plug in the appliance that you want to measure, and within a couple of minutes, you’re done… you know how much electricity the appliance, or in our case computer, uses.

So how much does it cost to run our home computer all day and all night? The total cost is $60 per year. Electricity in Victoria, BC costs $0.0633 Canadian per Kilowatt Hour (kWh). In California the average cost is about $0.12 US per kWh. So to run my computer in California would cost $114 per year, or $9.50 per month. If we only ran the computer during the day for 12 hours a day, we could cut the cost of running it in half to $57 per year (in California).

This made me think about where I work, and how much we could save if we turned off our computers at night. In my building at the University of Victoria, Faculty of Law, we have about 120 computers in the building. Most run 24×7 so that they can get windows updates at night. The total cost of running those computers per year is about $7,200. That’s a lot of money!

If we were able to only run the computers during business hours (say 10 hours a day) we save $4,200 per year! Something I’ll look into. I just need to get the computer updates happening during the day… I wonder if my boss will split the savings with me?

I was listening to a podcast today that featured an interview of Tim O’Reilly (a famous technology book publisher). At the end of the conversation the interviewer, Steve Hargadon, asked Tim if he had any advice for students. Tim’s advice rang true to me. I wish someone had given me this advice as I was going through High School and University:

My best learning experiences were with teachers who were excited and passionate about their subject. Ask around your school to find out who are the most exciting and passionate teachers. When you find that list, go take their course, it does not matter what it is. - Tim O’Reilly

The best grade I received in my University career was in Probability & Statistics 151. Before taking that class I has consistently done poorly to average all my math related courses. Stats 151 was different. It was different because the professor was excited about the subject, and had a knack for using interesting gambling and farm examples to help illustrate concepts as he taught the class (some of the farm examples were a bit off the wall). Inspired by the "A" grade I received in his class I took one more statistics course, and with a more average teacher, I received a more average grade.

So I repeat the advice from Tim O’Reilly:

Find out who the best teachers are at your school (or in the faculty if you’re at a University), and then take classes from those teachers, no matter what the subject!

If you are not a geek, you probably have no idea what the head line for this blog post means. If I were a citizen of the United States, living in the US, I would have just broken the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by simply having posted the following jumble of numbers and letters:

09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0

Why you ask… Well, that jumble of letters and numbers is the hexadecimal key needed to decrypt and watch the new HD DVDs. According to US law, because I am publishing information that could help someone circumvent copy protection software, I am breaking the DMCA. The knowledge and software tools to break the copy protection of regular DVDs has been widely known for some time now.

So why would I want to circumvent the copy protection of a HD DVD, or a DVD for that matter… unless I were a criminal wanting to steal the contents of the DVD? There are a number of reasons why:

1. If I want to play a HD DVD on my laptop, there is currently no way to do it unless I circumvent the copy protection and copy the contents of the DVD on to my laptop. Currently there are very few laptops with HD DVD drives.
2. If I want to play a HD DVD on my Linux computers at home I will have to circumvent the copy protection. There are no legal HD DVD players for Linux. If I want to play a HD DVD on my Linux computers I will have to use "illegal" software to do so (using the above key).
3. If I want to play a HD DVD on my iPod I will have to circumvent the copy protection to do so.
4. If I wanted to take a small piece of video to play as part of a class presentation (which is perfectly legal under the fair use doctrine in copyright law) I would have to break the DMCA in order to capture that little bit of video.

The copy protection built into HD DVDs severely limits how and where I can watch the movies. In the case of the iPod, I could pay for another version of the movie so I would watch it on my iPod, but I don’t really want to pay double just to watch the movie on another device. Buying multiple copies of the same movie would make the Movie Picture Association of America (MPAA) happy though; and richer. Somehow I think greed and the buying of politicians votes are part of this long and sordid story.

In any case, once the hex key had been discovered (The person who cracked the key said he did so in order to watch movies on his laptop), someone posted the key to the Digg.com social web site. Shortly after, Digg received a DMCA take down notice from lawyers representing the group who created the HD DVD encryption technology. Digg took down the posting, but it was immediately posted again, and promoted to the home page. Digg tried to take down all the postings, but by Tuesday evening they had given up. Every single page promoted to the home page of the web site had the offending key in the posting. Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, wrote on his blog:

After seeing the hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be. If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Kevin and the Digg community know how moronic and unfair the Movie industry is behaving. Real criminals will not be stopped by the DMCA or copy protection. They only hurt people who want to have some choice in how they consume their digital content.

Canada does not yet have an equivalent to the DMCA, but it looks like it might be coming. Michael Geist, a law professor, talks about the "Canadian DMCA" which will probably be introduced in Parliament this spring, in the guise of copyright reform. Write your federal politician, and let’s make sure we don’t get our own version of a very bad law.