Randoms On My Mind

Virginia Tech ripped us off on football ticket shipping this year. For the past two seasons, tickets had been delivered FedEx 2-Day Air: quick to arrive, and easy to pick up after hours for those of us with jobs. This year, they charged us the same $15 for shipping, but chose UPS Ground instead and took a profit on the remainder of the money we paid. Result: tickets arrive 4 days later, and after their driver misses you at 11 AM, you have to throw a small tantrum over the phone to get them to take it off the truck at the depot so you can pick it up that night. If you think I’ve got experience with this, you’re right!

Disappointing news of the day: [Daryl][http://d103.com/] is calling it quits at D103.com as of the end of this month. I understand completely his not having the time to make it as good as he wants it to, as I’ve felt that way about BTN several times in the past year. A big complication for him is that, as a professional writer, a half-heartedly written blog could damage his professional reputation. For me, it’s simply a reflection of my priorities moving elsewhere; unless I do something deliberately stupid to poison my name on a Google search or start talking about work, the embarrassment of a poor effort is confined to the five or six of you that read regularly despite my slacking.

Speaking of other priorities, of the ten Nationals games I’ve attended since the beginning of June, the mediocre-at-best Tony Armas Jr. started 5 of them, including four in a row. Guess who’s starting tomorrow night?

Read More »

Fuming in the Negative

The business model of wedding photographers has been one of the most disagreeable surprises of wedding planning. (Other than that, I’ve found it relatively pain-free, though H may hold a different opinion.)

They’re professionals who are being paid to produce works-for-hire, and they charge accordingly. The catch is that they keep the copyright to the pictures that you have hired them to take of you. This means that you cannot legally reproduce these photos. So any time in the future, should you want extra copies, you go back to the photographer to pay horrifically inflated prices for prints.

Coders don’t work this way. When we get an assignment and are paid to produce it, we don’t get to hold back on a per-copy basis. (Intellectual-property disputes for programmers tend to run the opposite way, with employers attempting to claim rights to all code written while under contract, even if that code is not written toward the purpose of the contract.) Artists: same thing. If it’s painted for pay to hang in (say) a corporate office, they don’t get to charge every time the company prints a publicity booklet with their work hanging to one side of the CEO’s office photo. Musical composers may come close with commissioned works, but it’s generally understood that while those works are initially written with one customer in mind, the eventual goal is for the product to be published in the general market. Plus, music is far more personal to the composer than wedding photographs are to a photographer who does them at least 35-40 weekends of the year.

So let’s recap. Pay him an exorbitant cost for professional services to produce works that are personal to you, pay him a hyper-inflated cost for initial set of prints, and then he still owns your pictures?

I suppose it would be a lucrative business to get into, if only I could turn off my pesky conscience.