Intellectual property, the online life, and physical death 2010

The recent loss of my dear friend Brad Graham and the memories it brought up of another wonderful person we lost too soon, Leslie Harpold, has me thinking about what might happen to my online presence when I die.

In remembering Brad, many of us began to worry that his wonderful voice online as expressed in his Bradlands.com website might be lost to us as Leslie's was.

I'm fortunate to have a family that understands and celebrates the important role the Web plays in my life. My mother – who could, as my principal emergency contact on all documents calling for such a thing and beneficiary on any life insurance policies I've ever had, argue persuasively that she is my primary heir – has a thriving online life herself, primarily through Flickr. She's also, like me, a writer and would, I think, understand my desire that my works be preserved.

However, the legal position is unclear. My websites have always had copyright statements - either explicitly or implicitly "All Rights Reserved". Some of my Flickr content is Creative Commons licensed, but I have not taken the time to review and update all of my public creative output and its stated license terms.

And why is the legal position unclear? Because I do not have a will. Because of course I'm not going to die anytime soon. Of course. Never mind that Brad was younger than I.

So, yes. I should make a will. But I'd also like to find a way to make it easier for people to declare their intentions without that step.

We in the United States have CC0, which is basically a "No Rights Reserved" license. We have traditional copyright which protects our work for 70 years after our death. But we don't have an easy way to say "While I'm alive, this belongs to me, but after I die, I want to give it to the public domain."

Evan Roth has suggested an "Intellectual Property Donor" sticker for the back of your driver's license, just like an organ donor sticker, but it's unclear that this would be binding since it does not appear on the works to which it applies. It seems to me that a succinct statement which could appear on the work itself, much as a copyright statement does, would be easy to use and legally stronger.

I've got some homework ahead of me, learning more about this topic. I'll be looking at sites like The Digital Beyond and, in particular, their list of service providers in this space. I will also be attending the session "Become Immortal: Understanding the Digital After Life" at SXSW Interactive in March.

Please share your thoughts in the comments and let me know if there are other resources I should be checking out.

---

The clever Lillian Chow remembered the details of what I only had a vague echo of in my head: Neil Gaiman wrote a great post about this concern and provided, with assistance from lawyer Les Klinger, a tool – a simple will – to help address it. This takes the approach of naming trustees rather than turning things over to the public domain, but it does provide a model we could start from.

Any estate, copyright or other lawyers want to weigh in in the comments on that idea and/or on a phrase which could be used on the bottom of a website to reference it. Something like "Copyright © John Doe during my lifetime, transferred to public domain upon my death, per my will."

Step by slow step, pulling it all together 2009

*phew* Even for web geeks sometimes this stuff can be such a long slow haul.

What I want is for my blog at MetaGrrrl.com to reflect all my online publishing as MetaGrrrl. That means, currently, that I want to have my tweets from Twitter and my photos from Flickr to appear inline along with longer blog posts.

It would also be swell if when I post to my blog, that would also be reflected in Twitter with a tweet.

All of this is made much more complex by the fact that I use advanced templates. Yes, I'm greedy; I want the maintenance ease of TypePad and the control of Movable Type. Fortunately, Six Apart usually gets me at least 80% of the way to where I want to go and frequently does so with more ease and elegance than I expected.

In theory, I've now linked my Twitter account to my TypePad account, but so far I haven't seen it actually work. Perhaps that's because the new little mini Compose function doesn't actually share out to Twitter, which seems bizarre since it's intended for short content, but might be true.

---

Aha. Finally found a Share This Post help page with some screen shots and I wasn't getting the options in the interface. I deleted the Twitter account and re-added it and now it seems to be tickety-boo.

Eleven years. 2009

Eleven years?! Holy cow. I've been writing this blog for eleven years. What a lovely time it's been! Wonder how the next eleven will be?

I believe I'll celebrate with a vacation near the ocean. See what little treasures the tide washes up...

Nine years ago today 2008

On May 24, 1999, is the first use of the term "blog" on this site. (The title was added later since my posts were untitled in that distant era).

Brad posted about exactly the same thing the day before me so he got the OED reference, darn him. :)

I was working with Ev & Meg on a contract project at HP at that time, so I was almost certainly the vector for Peter's "wee blog" to be converted to verb form "we blog" and thence to the name Blogger.

I had Blogger blog #11 and helped test this new little "side project" of the Pyra gang. The rest is history. Good times, good times.

As Brad puts it so well, happy birthday, you awkward, uneuphonious little word!

9 Years 2007

When I was 9 years old I went on a big trip with my folks to Scotland & Norway and still feel the echoes of that wonderful trip today.

What will MetaGrrrl.com do now that it's nine years old? Exploration, new friends, new horizons, new foods, new ideas... that's what I'm hoping for.

Thanks for reading and commenting and being part of my adventure!

Venerable 2006

To my amusement this evening I received some spam with the subject line

when to stop blogging

and I just had to laugh because tomorrow is MetaGrrrl.com's 8th birthday.

When to stop? Not yet!

MetaGrrrl Classics #1: Best product endorsement ever 2005

December 21, 2000

Thanks again, Neale!

Wait, how can I be a trendmonkey and behind the times? 2005

And in the category "Best second comment on a weblog" the winner is danf for

Of course, you would probably start a live journal now that several other popular bloggers have mentioned having private livejournals and other switching to live journals already.

Honestly, do you ever do anything other than follow? I use to enjoy your site. But you seem to just tag along with everyone else. GTD? You started writing about it months after it broke, like it was some new deal. Now this live journal rant when it's already been passed around the web.

I'm disappointed, really. Thanks for the previous years, though. I'm sad you changed.

I know, I know, cheese? EVERYONE writes about that. Pictures of baby rhinos? SO old hat. And, really, who DIDN'T quote Greg Brown lyrics this month?

Sheesh.

Other bloggers are talking about LiveJournals? Dude, I'm just writing about 'em because someone turned me on to a really good one and I've read 3 years worth of posts in the last 3 weeks. Given my blog-centric past, it made me wax philosophical. (And what's funny is I've been reading that journal so much I think I missed the other discussions you reference).

To clarify: I post about things that I find interesting, amusing, beautiful, useful and/or significant. And I've been doing so since 1998.

This may come as a shock to you, but MetaGrrrl.com is not in fact a news site or the home of the meme-of-the-week.

Nor do I write it to please you. If it does, cool. If not, there's a big wide web out there and don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.

I am curious, though; hey everybody, what do you think are the classic Dinah posts? You know, before she sold out.

Soundtrack for this post? Tool.

I'm not trading this in, but... 2005

... after much consideration, I have to concede that one of the differences between a blog and a LiveJournal is that the latter seems to be more likely to develop the kind of community that leads to strings of fantastic comments.

For example, a couple years ago (yes, when I find a site I like I do tend to dig for those deep album cuts) Gordonzola asked everyone what they hate and generated an enormous response. Replies included:

- lysosy's hatred of "PolarTec couples. You've seen them. They wear khakis and fleece pullovers with hiking boots, and their Golden Retrievers sit in the SUV under the kayak. The girls pull their ponytails through the hole in the back of the cap, and the guys always have skinny legs."

- amarama's long list includes SUVs with "Free Tibet" stickers and White men who only date Asian women.

- capn jil hates lots of stuff I agree with, but especially "white people with fugly dreadlocks"

- I'm also right there with misia when it comes to "People who send me multiply-forwarded urban legend e-mail. (OH MY GOD THEY'RE PUTTING KITTENS IN BOTTLES!)" and elusis on "Top-quoters in email" and wasop regarding "People who take their dogs everywhere.  A dog is not a child substitute, and it does not need to help you pick out a new throw blanket at Crate and Barrel.  " and the anonymous poster who railed against "anyone wearing so much cologne that I can taste it when I am not actually licking them at the moment"

And then there's this gem from msjen:

People who teeter around SOMA on Friday and Saturday nights, holding each other up as they stagger to their cars (parked in valuable parking spaces), giggling and announcing how drunk they are.

When I lived near MIT frat row in Boston, where this of course happens a lot, I proposed building a satellite death ray that would be triggered from space by any human that yelled "Whoooo!!!" and had a certain blood alcohol level.

I think it's time.

Seven years good luck 2005

Happy birthday, metagrrrl.com. Seven years of blogging. Almost 2500 posts. Wow. I guess I found my medium.

Sure was a nice weekend here in San Francisco. I had a great time Saturday night. My friends Len, B.J. & Bev and I went to dinner at Sneaky Tiki (pricy but fun, with tasty appetizers). On the way there Len and I shared a cab with a nice woman we met at The Trolley Stop Where The Trolley Never Seems To Be Coming and in our 6 block ride together heard the nutshell version of her life which entailed decades as a Southern Baptist preacher and head of a funeral home business in Texas before realizing a few years back that none of that was right and he was a she. "On Sunday I said farewell to my congregation, on Monday I sold my business and by Wednesday I was on my way to San Francisco to begin transitioning." We all agreed it was good to let go of the things that don't fit in your life and she said "yes, like Southern Baptism, the Republican party and conservative Texas". She positively radiated that "I'm on the path that is absolutely right for me" vibe that's so energizing. I love this town.

After dinner, Len, B.J., Bev and I walked over to Natoma Street to a little tiny hidden theater space to see TVLand Presents Star Trek Episode 4: Mudd's Women at Theatre Tableau Vivant. Tremendous fun and Leigh Crow does an amazing job as Kirk. Marvelous satire and yet also capturing why he's a such a likeable character. I'll definitely be watching for TVLand's next show.

Had a lovely lazy Sunday brunching and puttering around Open Studios with a certain very pleasing fellow.

So, my weekend having including all the necessary ingredients: alone time to kick back, hanging out with friends time, getting chores done time, laughing time, enjoying local creativity time, kissing a handsome man time, being fed tasty food time, and the aforementioned sipping cocktails, clever interior design, flirting with cute boys, outrageous fashion, witty friends and more than my minimum recommended weekend allowance of gender-bending, I'm ready to face the week.

Absolution 2005

My friend David writes, and I heartily concur,

NO, I'M NOT KEEPING UP WITH YOUR BLOG.

I would like to. I really would. I like it and I like you.

But we're now well past the point where we can keep up with all the blogs worth reading from the people worth keeping up with.

I just can't do it any more.

I've been faking it for a while. Months. Maybe a year. If we've met and I look confused about something you told me, and if you said, "I blogged it," as if that should be explanation enough, I've made some excuse as if I read every one of your posts except that one.

The truth is, I probably haven't read your blog in weeks. Months maybe.

And I don't expect you to have read mine.

I don't want to lie any more. I don't want to feel guilty any more. So let me tell you flat out: There are too many blogs I like and too many people I like to making "keeping up" a reasonable expectation, any more than you should expect me to keep up with Pokemon characters or Bollywood movies. You shouldn't expect me to and I'm not going to feel guilty any longer about my failure.

I will read your blog on occasion, either because I've been thinking of you or because something reminded me of you. Maybe it'll be because you sent me an email pointing a post you think I'll enjoy. Go ahead! I'd love to hear from you.

But I hereby release you from thinking I expect you to keep up with my blog, and I preemptively release myself from your expectations.

Otherwise reading each other's blogs will become a joyless duty. And we're too good friends to do that to each other.

[This post written Saturday morning just before 10am, but posting deferred until Monday so as to provide more time for those people who aren't reading my blog a chance to see the announcement about the Carmina Burana production.]

I am not a journalist, I'm a writer. 2005

"Folks, journalism is a craft. It takes a lot of time to learn to do well. There are rules, written and unwritten, that are applied. Laws that matter. Experience that you have to earn. Journalism - good journalism - is really, really hard.

Blogging, like you're reading now, is not hard. It's not supposed to be. A lot of people have worked very hard to make blogging as easy as typing a thought and hitting a button. That's the beauty of blogging - anyone can do it, about anything.

So again I say: Please, for the love of all that's good and holy, do NOT turn bloggers into journalists!"

Derek Powazek, Bloggers Don't Let Your Children Grow Up to Be Journalists

Another year already 2004

How busy have I been? So busy that I didn't write a new essay for Discardia in September. So busy that I keep forgetting what day it is. So busy that I didn't post anything on Sunday to celebrate my blog's sixth birthday.

Happy birthday, MetaGrrrl!

(So busy that's all I'm gonna say right now!)

Site Work 2004

Feeling focused this evening so I'm trying to tie off some loose ends with completing my migration from my old Movable Type site hosted by the excellent folks of Hurricane Electric. It's a time-consuming chore which I, unfortunately, only whittle away on from time to time as energy and geeky moods allow.

Currently cleaning up some November 1999 posts, fixing titles and confirming links still work.

Stop. Design. 2004

I hit an odd rhythm this evening. After a delightful morning sleeping in and then puttering around the house - which is looking just great these days thanks to some furniture rearranging effected by my good housemate Chris - and an afternoon of friendly hanging out*, I found myself a little wiped out in the early evening. Partly it was being over-heated from my hike back up over the hill from Cole Valley, partly it's probably the low number of calories I'm consuming (running an approximately 500 calorie per day deficit most days as I lose weight on the hacker's diet), and partly it was just the option to flop out a little bit after a fairly intense week of work.

I decided that I was under no social obligation to attend the Annie Lin/Goh Nakamura show, as much as I enjoyed their last one. Having given myself permission to stay home, I puttered a bit on the computer (upgrading software and downloading NetNewsWire to give it a try) and thought about making dinner though the small snack I'd had at Reverie hadn't fully worn off.

Some time mid-evening - I wasn't paying attention to the clock - I decided to lie down for a nap. That felt so good that after an hour or so I decided to just go to sleep for the night....

...and woke up again at 11pm feeling great. I was refreshed and clear-minded, ready to get up and do things. So, I did. Dinner at midnight, watched some Simpsons, and a pleasant time reading the archives of Douglas Bowman's Stopdesign log. I always find his writing worth my time, but have been sporadic in reading the site. Since I was in a web design-y mood, want to dig deeper into Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and will be giving a presentation later this year on "Building a Business Case for Web Standards", reading his log from day 1 forward was the ideal place to spend my time. I've still only up to about a year and a half ago, but I expect it will go a little faster as I get into the range where I'm more likely to have read the posts while they were fresh.

One thing is definitely clear after spending over two hours on a single site: good design makes reading more enjoyable. Even something so simple as a link to the previous and next entries at the very bottom of the page makes a huge difference.

So, two changes on MetaGrrrl.com tonight:
1) a global search & replace to change all instances of unencoded ampersands to the proper & format for better accessibility and page validation;
2) the previous/next navigation links are now repeated at the bottom of the my individual entry archive pages.

Thanks, Doug.

*An afternoon in which I met Joel in person after an online friendship leading up to his 1000 mile bicycle ride down the coast from Seattle and, thanks to a suprise encounter on the street with Min Jung, we got to visit with a cool crowd of photobloggers at the lovely Reverie cafe in Cole Valley.

This is a post from ecto 2004

I'm giving ecto a try on the assumption it's the best way to understand its capabilities.

Speaking of second chances, I've also got a post half-written about Technorati's site improvements, but they were getting hammered from all the CNN/politics.technorati.com attention so I figure I'll check back later when I have more time (and/or don't feel so much like watching movies).

One thing I can see right off the bat is that ecto will allow me to easily adjust my post dates, solving my problem with filling in my pre-October-1998 history. Go, ecto!

(And damn if I ain't impressed with the interface just in the course of writing this first post. I thought Movable Type and TypePad were good, but this is a great power user setup!)

How I Use TypePad 2004

Though Mena's question was specifically about use of Movable Type, I thought I'd go ahead and answer the question too because I switched from Movable Type to use Six Apart's hosted solution, TypePad, and am finding it sufficient for my needs.

I have three weblogs: MetaGrrrl, Discardia, and a new one in development which is a conversion of a very old project to use of a content management system. About once every year or so I get a wild idea and start some new project. This often occurs right after SXSW. (I swear domain registration should have a breathalyzer and a 48-hour cooling off period... hey now, that'd be a cool site: dead domains. All those abandoned projects and wacky joke URLs and stuff people get all excited about and then never fully realize or do anything with... and it could be a group weblog or maybe anyone could add their little stories and... NO. Stop. Step away from the keyboard. ... See what I mean?) Anyhow, say 3 real weblogs plus the occasional litle side thing.

I have 7 TypeLists - which Movable Type folks would probably have to use another "weblog" for - of which 4 are now obsolete and in the process of being moved to regular posts (see Kottke Mode), 1 doesn't even need to be a TypeList and I should just hand code the rotating handful of entries, and two are legitimate ongoing uses (my Pals list used in my About page and the Other Discardian Writing list).

So, if I was MT instead of TypePad, I might max out at a dozen weblogs technically speaking (though I really only need 5) and 3 or 4 authors. Note that only 3 weblogs are distinct separate sites and thus count toware my license. I'd be fine with the Personal Edition at $70 and I'd be paying at least $25 a month to someone like Hurricane Electric to host it for me. Instead, I have a Pro TypePad account which costs $14.95 per month minus discounts (for switching to it during beta test and pre-paying). I'm a very happy Six Apart customer.

The Great Migration Continues 2004

Tonight as the wind blustered around outside, I put in another good chunk of time working on moving all my old website content into TypePad. There are now about 5 months of old Blogger posts to move in, assign titles and catagories to, and test links.

Then the entire history of the blog proper will be in one content management system. However there's also some side content that needs to be added. Some I've worked in already, but not by any means all. On the bright side, thanks to the new Files tab in TypePad I was able to very quickly confirm that I did already do the first cut on moving my old thesis pages in. This has been such a long, intermittant project I couldn't remember if I still had that chore ahead of me.

Getting all the migration done won't mean every post has had a title and category assigned, but at least I'll have it in one searchable, easy-to-backup location with a familiar and friendly interface for all my editing.

More comment spam 2004

Slept in this morning and so only caught the tail end of today's assault on my comments. Same pattern as yesterday - a bunch of Alexander Morozov/3FN.net sites - only this time on the theme of incest rather than beastiality. I deleted the 350 or so comments and hope that they were gone before Google's indexing 'bots came through. Then again, though, since this pattern has been going on for a while and is such a blatant attempt to jack search engine results, I wouldn't be surprised if most of the search engine sites have or are considering blocking these sites from appearing in results at all.

The only way to cure comment spamming and fake portals and bad keywording and all those other techniques is for them not to work in driving visitors to the promoted URLs. The responsibility for that lies with the search engine makers, though the rest of us can help by deleting the stupid content when it's under our control.

Blocking by IP won't work, I'm fairly well convinced. In the attacks on this site the originating IP changes every 10 or so comments and I'd not be surprised to find they belong to insecure servers the spammers are illegally using as origins, much as they would for mailing spam. (Thus the other thing we can do to protect the Web from these abuses is to keep any servers under our control very secure).

Hammered with comment spam 2004

Oo, look how much attention I'm getting today.

You might want to block the following IP addresses from commenting on your websites:
163.17.64.123
202.28.27.2
163.17.64.123
210.3.7.150
207.28.34.234
212.21.228.26
213.88.162.236
217.218.233.74

I received many comment spams (mostly beastiality related) from each.

I'll delete the rest after we finish going over the evidence to see if we can trace the source.

If you've suffered a similar attack, please let me know. I'd like to put together some information for Google so they are aware of the probable search-result-jacking attempt.

***

Update: spam still rolling in. TypePad support working on the issue. Appears, based on the hosting of a commonly promoted domain, to be a certain much-loathed Russian spammer.

Given the rotating IP's, it's probably not worth adding them to your block lists. I'm hoping for a higher level door to slam closed against this crap.

***

Hmm, on the bright side, I'm accumulating a bit of interesting data of how these comment spammers work. I hope it will be helpful for blog software creators (most of whom are friends of mine) and the fine folks at Google and other search engines.

Get a frickin' grip, MT bloggers. 2004

I can't believe the way people are freaking out over the fact that the next incarnation of Movable Type might actually cost money. For gawd's sakes folks, it's great software: compensate the people who make and maintain it. Or stick with the version you have. That's fine too.

And, really, it costs how much? $150 tops for personal use and that's 10 weblogs! For someone like me with 3 weblogs, it would cost $70. And, if I read the announcement right, I could apply the money I already paid for it - which I seem to recall being $50 because I was so impressed with the software - so it'd be $20 for the upgrade.

How much is other software which you might use every day? Quicken? $30-50 Microsoft Word? $200 Eudora? $50
But this isn't just like those other things, this is a communication device, so how much do you pay each month for, say, your internet connection? Or your mobile phone?

I think the Movable Type pricing is perfectly reasonable. Yes, SixApart will probably lose some "customers", but how useful are customer who think your product isn't worth paying for?

I pay for my software for the same reason I don't pirate music: I think craftspeople deserve to be able to make a living off what they do.

Kottke mode (integrated lists & posts) 2004

Ever since Jason Kottke first moved his sidebar content into the main flow of his blog posts, I've been wanting to find a way to do that in Typepad. Today I woke up with the answer: abuse one of the other available fields and the conditional tagging possibilities of Movable Type.

Below this post [when it is viewed in the Month Archive view] is a little movie review of Rat. Notice how it's a small amount of content consisting of a pointer to something else online and a very short comment. In the past, I've had this sort of thing in the sidebar of the site, but that has the problem of introducing very recent content into my archive pages and distracting from the topic or time the page is supposed to focus on. It also plays merry hell with search engine results since words from these little mini-posts appear on the same page as the words in the archived posts and are assumed to be part of the same context when, in fact, they aren't.

So, how did I do it? I appropriated the "Extended" post field and it's conditional tags, made use of the Movable Type tag <MTElse> and applied some special styling.

Note: this approach requires use of Advanced Templates in Typepad.

For example, in my main index template, I now have:

<MTEntries>
<$MTEntryTrackbackData$>

<a id="a<$MTEntryID pad="1"$>"></a>

<MTEntryIfExtended>

<div class="extended"><$MTEntryMore></div><div style="clear: both;"></div>

<MTElse>

<MTWeblogPostIfShow field="date_header">
<MTDateHeader>
<h2><$MTEntryDate format_weblog_date="1"$></h2>
</MTDateHeader>
</MTWeblogPostIfShow>

<MTWeblogPostIfShow field="post_title">
<h3><$MTEntryTitle$> <span class="fadeout"><$MTEntryDate format="%Y"$></span></h3>
</MTWeblogPostIfShow>

<$MTEntryBody$>

<p class="posted">
Posted on <$MTEntryDate format="%B %e, %Y"$> at <$MTEntryDate format="%I:%M %p"$> <MTEntryIfCategories> in <MTEntryCategories glue=", "><MTBlogIfArchives archive_type="Category"><a href="<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>"><$MTCategoryLabel$></a><MTElse><$MTCategoryLabel$></MTElse></MTBlogIfArchives></MTEntryCategories></MTEntryIfCategories> | <a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>">Permalink</a>
<MTEntryIfAllowComments>
| <a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>#comments">Comments (<$MTEntryCommentCount$>)</a>
</MTEntryIfAllowComments>
<MTEntryIfAllowPings>
| <a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>#trackback">TrackBack (<$MTEntryTrackbackCount$>)</a>
</MTEntryIfAllowPings>
</p>

</MTElse>

</MTEntryIfExtended>

</MTEntries>

and I've added these entries to my style sheet (some, admittedly, more in confused attempts to fix problems with the image floating out the bottom of the box than in answer to a specific design intent):

.extended {
border: 1px dotted red;
width: 75%;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
padding: 3px;
}

.extended p {
text-align: left;
}

.extended img {
float: left;
margin: 2px;
}

I made similar changes to those in my main index template to my archive pages, but decided in those contexts I want the "posted..." line to appear so that people have access to commenting, trackbacks and permalinks. Visit the Memetic archive to see this.

Now I just need to make sure I didn't ever use that extended post format for an actual continuation of a post. Let me know if you ever spot something in this indented, dotted border style that isn't a little link or short media review, won't you? Ta.

I should also say thanks to Nikolai Nolan for assistance with using the CSS clear:both trick to make sure an image floated in one of these little mini-posts doesn't extend down beside the title for the next post. Unfortunately, I subsequently broke something. Anyone got an idea what I'm doing wrong with that image?(Oh and why won't CSS let me tell the image "don't impinge on anyone else's personal territory" instead of having to tell everybody else not to let the image bug them? Weird mental model, sez I, and fervently hope I've missed something along the way and it isn't that wacky.)

p.s. Note that since the Typelists only display the date and not exact time of entry creation, all these former Typelist items I'm migrating into the new format (i.e. all prior to today) have made up times.

What Are You Lookin' At? 2004

Normally I get a hundred or two hundred hits a day on my website. Today I've gotten 450 so far. Only some of them are me working on this project, so what is going on?

Tell me (in the comments), what brings you to MetaGrrrl this fine day?