Almost fifteen years ago I took part in Shad Valley's Createch program, a “summer camp” where I think twenty students out of ten thousand applicants were chosen to spend a week fine-tuning their technology and entrepreneurial skills. It was hosted at the University of Calgary, which is located in the dry middle of Canada's prairies.
One of the other people who made it was a girl from Halifax, a city on the Atlantic Ocean in Nova Scotia. The first day there she was fine, but by the time she awoke on the second day she'd totally lost her voice on account of the sudden and dramatic drop in humidity, and she didn't start to get it back until the end of that week when her throat had mostly acclimatized.
I woke up this morning with a horribly dry throat; I mean, really unpleasant. I can only assume that I've undergone the same stress after having spent a week in the extremely humid environment of England.
While I was gone, someone had a freakout saying that because I was “independently wealthy”, IAM should be free. I'd like to briefly comment on that.
First of all, I'm far from independently wealthy. While my parents' families have five hundred plus years of aristocratic wealth behid them, I'm effectively disowned from that. They so despise the nature of the work I do that while I suspect they'd support me if I fell on hard times, they'd never drop a dime into my businesses. I haven't gotten any support from them since I left school to work ten years ago. So every piece of gold I have is earned by long hours of work on my part.
Second, and more importantly, the core statement doesn't make sense. Let's assume for a moment that I was wealthy, which is definitely not the truth. How does that make me responsible for paying the bills of someone who's chosen to slag me? Let's look at musicians. When a band becomes wealthy, do they have to play all their concerts for free, and give away a CD every few months to every fan (because that's the equivalent of what's being asked)? The concept is plain silly.
Of course, the person went on to say that it would be OK if I was a “big corporation” since it's only “selling out” to charge if you're an individual. WTF? When I heard that I admit I just laughed and wrote the whole thing off as sourcing from total lunacy and gave it no more consideration.
Now, time to go check out the news I think.
I've got about an hour and a half to kill before I can get to work on the image update (still doing some rendering on the main power box), so I imagine I'll get a chance to do some writing. I've really missed keeping on top of what's going on in the world. Outside of the obvious, that's what I missed most.
