random bits

[cellio]

I'll be reading torah at Friday-night services at the end of August. Nifty. (And Saturday morning too, but my congregation's main service is Friday night and we read then too.) Reading on Friday night has generally been limited to the rabbis.

Rob at UnSpace (unspace) wrote a good entry about blogs and plagarism today. I know that at some level "information wants to be free", and I've certainly snagged the occasional article from a free-but-registration-required site for my own archives or to share. And maybe I'm depriving the original site of hits, which I hadn't thought about much before. But more importantly to me, even if information wants to be free, it doesn't want to be incorrectly attributed. There's really no excuse for stealing a person's reputation by stealing his words -- especially on the web, where attribution and linking are so easy.

The installation of air conditioning for our second floor continues. Actually, the installation per se is done; we have cool air flowing. Yet to be done is some plaster work to make the holes go away, and a lot of clean-up. I'll be curious to see whether they put the bookcases they moved back in the right places (maintaining alphabetical order); the last contractor who needed to move them didn't get that right on the first try.

Today's mail brought another non-trivial trinket from a charity -- one I've already told to stop doing that. They lose points for two things this time: (1) sending me this stuff anyway (that's not why I sent them money -- and, in fact, it's been more than two years since I sent this one money precisely because of this sort of thing) and (2) sending me a personalized item with someone else's name on it. If the Goltz family is out there, act quickly to claim your piggy bank, 'cause it'll be going out with the trash in the next few days. (That's sad in a way -- if it didn't have a name on it, I might have been able to give it away.)

For those who follow Real Live Preacher (preachermanfeed): he moved his site and someone set up a new RSS feed at rlpreacher_blog. I don't know if they're going to eventually edit the original feed with the new link, but you might want to pick up the new one just in case. Edit: They merged the feeds, so you don't need to do anything.

Comments

Re: That must have been scary!

[ichur72.livejournal.com]

It was scary! The incident did drive home to me how important it is to be careful and put me in a position of being able to give tips to other writers, but I would not want to go through it again. *shudder*

According to how I was taught (and FWIW, I never took any journalism classes in college -- did all my learning on the job, starting with my college newspaper), you can avoid issues of plagiarism by reframing information from another source in such a way that 70% of what you write differs obviously from the original. Using the info is fine; using all of the same turns of phrase is not. I have heard of people being accused of plagiarism when it's not straight copying but more like copying 9 out of every 10 words.