Here’s the response to my letter I got  from my MP, John Weston.

Please, someone, is there any answers here, or is this just an automated response using some of the words, but no verbs.

Dear Mr. Campbell;

Thank you for your letter regarding the proposed updates to the Canadian Copyright Legislation. I appreciate your presence in the community and your strong personal interest in improving Copyright legislation.

It is clear that Canadians are concerned with copyright and its implications in our increasingly digital environment. Extensive copyright consultations that took place across Canada this past summer received great public interest and participation, and I am following closely the proposed improvements to our legislation.

This government said that it would modernize Canada’s copyright laws and that is what we intend to do. That is why our government is taking this opportunity to listen to Canadians about what is important to them on copyright, and demonstrating leadership within the current copyright debate.

We recognize that new technologies are changing the landscape of Canada’s copyright law. Canada must adapt these laws to be more modern and flexible and our government is working to meet this challenge. Updated copyright legislation can only strengthen Canada’s ability to compete in the global digital economy.

I hope that this answers some of you questions regarding improvements to Copyright legislation.

Thank you again for writing.

Sincerely,

John Weston, MP
West Vancouver – Sunshine Coast – Sea-to-Sky Country

Here’s a letter a wrote to the Honourable John Weston, my Member of Parliament, voicing my concern over Bill C-32, the Canadian Copyright Reform Bill.

Dear Mr. Weston,

I am writing to you today to voice my concerns at what I see as a seriously misguided attempt to evolve fair and equitable law around the creation & dissemination of original works by artists, creators & authors.

Digital versus physical: property vs. ideas—I may lend someone my physical property, or I may sell or gift others my physical property. If I lend someone a book, once they have read and returned that book, the real value—the ideas represented by words & letters printed on paper and assembled into a book—is still mine, as well as imprinted into the mind of the person who I lent the book to. I still have the important aspect that is represented by the book, as well as the physical artifact, and most importantly, so does the person I lent the book to. In their mind. If the ideas represented by the creation of that book are important enough to the person who borrowed the book from me, that person will in all likelihood seek out more information by the book’s creator. As Tim O’Reilly, founder & publisher of O’Reilly Books has said: “More authors are victims of obscurity than piracy”. Mind share is very hard to build. This bill will not help anyone new to the marketplace do so.

Evolution & progress usually go in 1 direction. To attempt to enshrine into law rules that stop this from happening fossilizes business, creates monopoly, and builds frustration amongst consumers. When obviously better means of delivering customer value are available, and ignored, how can any political party that espouses an ideology of market-driven economics think that it is following that ideology by stopping the evolution of new business models? If the organizations that are so happy to meet with the sponsors of Bill C-32 are afraid or too lazy to innovate, then by current market-force economic theory, they should be forced out of the market by newer, more efficient providers of the same products & services. Market forces are not in effect when legislation is required to protect an industry’s value chains.

Most business-minded people work very hard to disintermediate unnecessary, wasteful steps in their business’s value chains. This is called maximizing efficiency, and delivering shareholder value. With the technology advances over the last several decades, and the familiarity and experience more and more people have with them, large distribution and sales networks are being made redundant. Is it honestly called “market forces at work” to fossilize the content consolidation businesses built in the middle of the 20th century, so that they can continue to monopolize in perpetuity what is no longer required in order to deliver to the market what customers want?

Government focus has been on discussing this with entrenched business models that want to keep things the way they were a half-century century ago. History, social science, technology & economic, does not work that way. Governments that implement legislation to fulfill the short-term goals of powerful lobby groups do not stay in power for long. The genie of a global network delivering the combined knowledge of all of mankind TO all of connected mankind cannot be put back in the bottle, on command of the declining content delivery industry. Governments were also lobbied by the stagecoach and livery industries to stop the spread of the automotive innovators in the early 20th century.

As the French learned in 1940, a fixed line of defence pointed in one direction simply means your opponents will manoeuvre around those defences, and defeat you that way.

Legislation, and the organizations that draft it, that does not explore and understand the landscape in which this legislation is intended to operate, make the situation worse, not better. This is akin to the Catholic church stopping Galileo from writing about his observations of the solar system, because it didn’t suit the Church’s ideology.

I urge you to voice questions to the House regarding these concerns. I am not alone in raising them, and I do not want to see my country create criminals out of its citizens to support the antiquated business models of industries that need to evolve, or go the way of the buggy whip manufacturers. That is not the way Canada does things.

Respectfully yours,

Bruce M. Campbell

Ever see one of those corporate-sponsored “fact” articles about how our manufacturers have gone “green” by reducing the material used in the production of the cans, bottles, tetrapaks, cartons, etc. that we all consume and dispose of every day? I recall an info-graphic showing a comparison of the construction and wall-thicknesses of soda cans over the years. The techniques used to produce the cans could easily be seen to be a better use of raw materials, more streamlined, etc., the weight had come down, the number of parts for each container has been reduced, the “Laverne & Shirley” style assembly line was made redundant, and cans, bottles et al themselves are lighter, stored better, have a full recycling life behind and in front of them, and have been seen by most people as a model of what could be done by marrying modern industry with a full undersdtanding of Earth Stewardship.

New! Improved! [Profit Margin!]

We’re paying the companies to make those improvements, with every instance of their product we buy. And when we recycle the container that we have used, we are effectively being paid way less than minimum wage to procure the raw material used to make the cans, back to the companies that will sell the product back to us, time after time after time.

Then we need to look at what we are actually purchasing in these containers. Such clever designs these days. all the ribbing, which adds to the strength and rigidity of thinner, more ergonomic containers. Drip-free caps. Splash-proof containers.

Waste? What’s that?

How much of the contents of your purchased consumable can you actually get out of the container? Do you dispose/recycle your containers with 1% of the contents sticking to the insides? Half a percent? That’s nothing, right? To you, and me, it’s nothing. We’re going to eat it, drink it, wash with it, spray it, etc. Even spill it. But for every drop you can’t use because the design of the container ensures you can’t empty it, that’s probably an additional 2 or 3 extra purchases per person per year. How many tubes of toothpaste does your family go through in a year? In a 100 ml tube, I’ll bet that the average person throws away 5%, because it’s impossible to get it out of the tube. Multiply by years, and total customer base, and you’ve got additional sales based on the idea of actual consumption being somewhat less than the promise of consumption, by my estimate of an additional half to 2 percent. Doesn’t sound like much, but that’s the typical sales commission for a Financial Planner, or a sales guy at your local massive furniture warehouse. I really would find it hard to believe that the priority for packaging design has “ensure contents can be consumed completely” is in the top 5 on the brief. Or even in the top 20.

This has got me a bit peeved. I strongly believe that humanity has got to take better care of the resources we have on this one, small planet. My kids wear a lot of recycled clothes. We ALL don’t need a car, a lawn mower, bicycles, etc. Most of us use these things a very small fraction of the time, yet we all seem to “need” them, because sharing is just too inconvenient. So why are we all paying the corporations that sell us this stuff for the privilege of reducing their value-chains through our training to help them with their waste?

Service Charges Galore

It’s not just physical goods either. Notice the service charges on your bank statements? Those weren’t there 15 years ago. Banks have reduced physical presence, invested in cheaper, faster and more distributed information infrastructures. Their costs have gone way, way down since the invention and mass-rollout of ATMs and on-line banking. Yet we are all paying more than we used to for the privilege of using these services as a “convenience fee”. Effectively, you’re paying extra to reduce the overheads for the banks. Does this seem reasonable?

The corporations claim that the costs per customer are tiny, and that someone has to pay for supporting all the services we all have access to. Does this mean that we have more services available to us than in our parents’ time? I don’t think so… My parents seemed to have more free time back then than I do now. Then again, CEOs only earned 50 times what the average employee did back then, instead of the 500 times of today. All that money’s gotta come from somewhere…

I’m currently following a Tweet-bot for a Web 2.0 creative sourcing service… you know, a Tweeter that posts jobs from oDesk, and other “crowd-sourcer, lowest bid with the most work wins” places, and it struck me that this kind of Tweet Account is the digital equivalent of the Contractors’ trucks circling the places where illegal immigrants hang out, waiting to get picked for those “cash only, no paperwork” day jobs so that the “employers” don’t then have to deliver benefits, or insurance, or even human rights!
Please tell me I’m out to lunch… please…

Microsoft is ending support for Windows XP SP2 in less than 30 days: http://j.mp/9B4zOS

This is kind of a big deal. The headline made me think about how many instances of Windows XP there still are out there, happily doing the work they were designed to do.

I can’t think of a single Windows-based client of mine that DOESN’T use XP. They’re either Mac based, or WinXP. I’m clearly not working at any big corporates, or even (today) mid-size companies, but that’s not where the real Corporate money will come from. Sure a few hundred high-end sales guys and their teams will get big payoffs for selling the licenses (!?!) to upgrade the JCN Corporation from Windows to Vista, then to 7. That’s already happened. I’m talking about the tens & hundreds of millions of private computer owners, and the small businesses and the home businesses, and the restaurants, clothes shops,  convenience stores, etc. that use XP as the base OS for their cash registers.

And I’m not just talking about the cost of the software. If the underlying hardware was groaning with the load of XP, imagine what it would be like with Vista or 7 on it? Gotta upgrade, people.

“Well, then I won’t upgrade. I’ll just keep on running XP” they’ll all say.

Ummm, I wouldn’t do that, if I were you. How many security patches get downloaded a week? A month? How long before some Belarus or Nigerian or Brazilian or Vietnamese programmer from Minsk or Lagos or Saõ Paolo or HaNoi  finds yet ANOTHER hole in the beautiful, elegant, finely thought-through and lovingly-crafted collection of 3 MILLION plus lines of code, creates an exploit, cracks your XP machine and steals all your data, damages some piece of firmware in an EPROM on the mother board, wipes your hard drive and causes your power supply to explode?

Yes, we in this room know that the previous paragraph is unlikely to happen, but those mom & pop stores, school teachers, families with 2 & 3 computers barely strung onto a WiFi LAN so they can all access the Internet at the same time won’t know that. It’s about as likely as getting hit by lighting. And I’m not saying that some people don’t put on chain-mail suits, stick an antenna on their heads, and go dance around in a thunderstorm. (YOU know who you are!) When you’re talking about risk, there will always be people like those that the journos point to, and the story will spread like wild fire across the Internet. The FEAR is the actual purchase driver, not the actual measurable risk.

And, oh, one other thing. New OS? New (secretly negotiated) legislation coming into effect GLOBALLY (ACTA) regarding Piracy and Copyright and 3-Strikes and people being kicked off the Internet by ACCUSATION of infringement?

Yesterday on Twitter, @CamCavers posted a link on  to this article from the Onion regarding World Domination from Starbucks. Funny, but it’s the wrong Multinational doing the execution!

At a tweeted prompting from Nancy Wu, who suggested Saturday morning in reply to my FourSquare post that “I should definitely report back to the Listserv/Graphic Designers of Canada community” about my experiences with this event, held at the NetWorkHub offices in Gastown on Saturday. I did some notes, which now look somewhat cryptic.

Since then, in the process of trying to assemble a report that will make sense to others, I have realized that while my notes mean something (increasingly less, as time passes) to me, every other person there was also taking notes, photos, videos, recordings, etc., AND POSTING THEM ON THEIR BLOGS.

What was remarkable about this event is that, until 9:30, there WAS NO AGENDA. That happened, alá Bar Camp, on the fly, with people proposing topics, then a show of hands and some jiggery-pokery around scheduling. Clearly everyone who ran a session had planned what they were going to do, but this looked damned amazing from where I was sitting.

Here are some places to go for more information:
MC & NetworkHub advisor, Raul Pacheco-Vega’s Blog post, with the running agenda of the day: http://bit.ly/d3aJkL

But I needn’t have bothered including that, as the organizers built A WIKI of the complete day, including notes from all the session leaders: http://freelancecamp.pbworks.com/

Jeremy Lim’s Excellent photography of the event: http://bit.ly/dCfIur

Catherine WInter’s Post: http://bit.ly/9pQfso

If you are on Twitter, feel free to look up all the entries for #604FreelanceCamp.

Google also pulls up Twitter posts, so there is a pretty good archive available there as well.

Honestly. Who needs to take notes any more when people can publish this amount of stuff in REAL TIME?

I’m thinking of leaving my Caps Lock key on all the time now, I’m so freaked out about the amount & quality of information available.

Ok, there still must be people who can’t figure out what all the Social Media fuss is all about.

On the morning of Wednesday, May 19^th, David Akin, a journalist I follow on Twitter who covers the Ottawa beat, specifically the PMO, retweeted (RTed, for those who need a glossary) some messages (tweets, ibid) from Mark Mackinnon, a a fellow journalist working for the Globe & Mail as a correspondent in SE Asia. Mark is in Thailand right now. Right where the bullets have been flying, literally. I didn’t follow Mark, but I do now.

Here’s the thread I saw that morning:

davidakin 7:34am, May 19 from TweetDeck

RT @markmackinnon: At least 5 wounded around me in park behind Wat Patum temple, one a friend and colleague.. gunfire continues

davidakin 7:35am, May 19 from TweetDeck

RT @markmackinnon: we’re the only corros left in temple. People around us terified. Red Cross can’t get ambulance to injured cuz of gunfire.

davidakin 7:35am, May 19 from TweetDeck

RT @markmackinnon: 7 dead 10 injured inside Wat Patum temple, which was supposed to be sanctuary. I’d guess 1500 to 2000 terrified ppl

davidakin 7:36am, May 19 from TweetDeck

RT @markmackinnon: Please RT. People around me are dying because they can’t get to hospital across the road because of fighting

davidakin 7:36am, May 19 from TweetDeck

RT @markmackinnon: More people will die inside Wat Patum unless we get ceasefire to get to hospital across the road.

I started following Mark after that. Here’s the result.

markmackinnon 8:08am, May 19 from mobile web

Thanks to all who Rt. we got all injured out in ambulances. Twitter may just have done this.

markmackinnon 8:15am, May 19 from Twitpic

Wounded man in ambulance leaving Wat Patum. Ceasefire negotiated to let wounded leave. http://twitpic.com/1p5j5l

When I mention stuff like this to people, especially in older forums like mail lists, I seem to always get questions about why it’s relevant to them, the group(s) being “interrupted” or to justify the off-topicness of my interest.

OK, there may be a challenge in linking what I posted to the mandate of communications design (which was the forum I initially posted to).
I’ll take a stab at it though.
Communication channels in our world are changing, in many ways, and very, very rapidly. Speed of communications, delivery mechanisms, production methods, and probably far more relevant to both culture and economy, in ownership.
There is a lot of push-back in the world (and, dare I suggest it, on this list) towards these new kinds of comms channel. We all know (and quite a few conveniently forget) the typical comments about the “silliness”, “pointlessness” ADHD-culture that, if Twitter isn’t an exacerbation of, it’s certainly a presenting symptom. Unfortunately for people who are still thinking this, the numbers suggest those opinions aren’t valid.
If professional visual communications design is to stay relevant, doesn’t it behoove the practitioners to ensure they fully understand the attributes & applications of any ascending communications channel? YouTube with 2BB items, FB with 400MM users, LinkedIn with 100MM+ users, Twitter with approximately the same. These are tomorrow’s mass media outlets. They’re just not controlled by the 20th Century Status Quo media corporations (at least, not yet).
How is posting an example of great, effective, IMPORTANT  communications, using a channel that only allows 140 characters at a time, but reaches a significant percentage of the connected population of this planet in near real-time, any different from posting a link to the latest Swiss poster or retro book cover design exhibition? Each has constraints about the media and approaches to execution. Each channel can be made to sing in the hands of someone who truly understands the constraints imposed by the choice of outlet, and knows how to push the envelope on the media to hand. Oh, and the visual part? How about celebrating that due to the efforts of countless interactive designers, the content of these communications channels can be viewed via dozens if not hundreds of different presentations, through the work of various developers and standards users & promoters.
Subject matter aside, it’s the meta-lessons to be learned about execution within this channel that I found important.
Which is why I posted it.

Update

I’ve had a few people thank me for the list, and while it may be some time before I get any robust feedback, hopefully people will find something useful, mind-altering, or entertaining out if these recommendations.
A friend of mine recently asked me for some suggestions of good stuff to read, as she’s on a bulk-it-up read-avore diet. Here’s my list of the past year or three’s “Must-reads”—

Non-Fiction

Misha Glenny, “McMafia”
If Capitalism won the Cold War, why is the world worse off now than it was then? A very, very scary read… but then I WANT to know what’s hiding under the bed!

Douglas Rushkoff, “Life Inc.”
Does more to clarify WHY the world is the way it is now than any other book I’ve read. Ever.

Noami Klein, “No Logo”
Journalistic work about the ascendency of branding in our world, and the marketing/propaganda efforts that made it so.

Naomi Klein, “Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”
Exposes the cabal of Chicago School economics and multinationals & imperial ambitions of certain nations, and the effect this is having on the world.

Naomi Wolf, “The Beauty Myth”
Brilliant dissection & analysis of the economic creation of beauty and how gender roles & stereotypes have been pegged to a market valuation, just like gold or oil.

Naomi Wolf, “The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot”
A polemic on the end of the republic and the creation of an empire. Says more emotively what Noam Chomsky has put forth in some of his works on the subject. While published in the height of the Bush/Cheney years, when totalitarianism seemed a more overt danger in the US, all the forces that created that risk are still in place, and could become ascendant again. The parallels to the death of the Roman republic seem terrifyingly strong to me. There is (or was—you never know when stuff gets pulled—very Orwellian!) a YouTube video of Wolf lecturing to a University audience on this topic. A must see!

Sam Harris, “Letter to a Christian Nation”
Epistle to wake up, grow up, and put aside childish things, stop believing in the “Sky Bully” and stop using “Faith” as a control of others with less power. Not as dry or ego-filled as Dawkin’s “God Delusion”, it’s tightly structured, and soundly written.

Rhonda Britten, “Fearless Loving”
Seemingly out of place on this list, I found this book helped me understand myself, and how I fit into the world, why I thought about things and emotional attachments to things, and how to stop worrying—or at least begin to stop—about what people thought about me, or whether they would like me.

Three Novels:

Arthur C. Clarke & Stephen Baxter, “The Light of Other Days”
A brilliant romp through what happens to society when the rules of time, matter, and therefore people change from those we all assume work.

Andrew Davidson, “The Gargoyle”
This thing is a gothic romance. The best damn gothic romance I could never contemplate picking up, much less flash though, enjoying every word, and being completely transported. Magical work. Literally.

Will Ferguson, “Happiness™”
Another “Magical Reality” tale, about the search for that ultimate, final, universally effective self-help book… what if someone actually wrote it? How would the world we know, designed to make each of us as miserable as possible to generate a maximum as possible profit, look like if we could no longer be positioned or restrained by our fears & neuroses?

Video

But of course books aren’t the only way to ingest information. A few videos online that I found both moving and enjoyable:

Joss Whedon, accepting the award from the Harvard Humanist Society:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTY8-XPhTzQ&feature=player_embedded

Joss Whedon, delivering a keynote speech at the Equality Now Conference:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYaczoJMRhs

George CarIin’s two most memorable routines:
George Carlin – Religion is bullshit.

George Carlin – Saving the Planet

And, this video of the noted author & co-father of the cyber-punk sub-subgenre, Bruce Sterling, delivering the keynote to Reboot-11.

Other

For a continuous feed of things happening in our world, filtered & focused by intelligences not yet in the power of the Status-quo media channels, and unbeknownst to them, these upstarts are cybernetically enhanced! BoingBoing.Net

If you are aurally inclined, tune into the Blog/Podcast DyscultereD where hosts Anthony Marc, Andrew Currie & Mike Vardy tell it like it is (or at least, how they think it is) about technology, politics, culture, entertainment, gaming, etc. with a uniquely Canadian spin.

And, for more another eye-opening experience, Cory Doctorow is Canada’s own superhero: a mild-mannered Science Fiction author by day, evil corporate giant prosecutor by night. Cory has written Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom, a short story collection calledA Place So Foreign and Eight More, Eastern Standard Tribe, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, a collection of essays called Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present, and the current run of books Little Brother, a NY Times best seller, Makers, & just released, For the Win. So why aren’t those books all up in the Novels section?
Because Doctorow’s really hard to categorize (like, *blush* me)—he’s an activist (ex-Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation), an entrepreneur, a journalist, and an extremely outspoken & passionate advocate for sane, intelligent legislation regarding creative works, intellectual property, and copyright. You can find free downloadable copies of his stuff at his site, Craphound.com.

Kottke recently published a chart showing the relative stock performance of Apple and Microsoft over the last 25 years. The first impression is startling. Anyone remember when Apple stock was under $12? I do. Remember when Jobs got kicked out, and a year later, a lot of MS fanboys starting taunting Apple-fans for their misguided loyalty?

Long term thinking is not something our society, and more importantly, our economy, has much patience for. Or any patience, come to think of it. That word seem to have disappeared from the popular culture. When was the last time you heard a politician urge his/her audience to “be patient”? Doesn’t work, right?

Looking back at the graph, we see the little line of Google moving up, some 20 years after the initial splash of AAPL & MSFT. Still low on the chart, we see Google paralleling the rather flat performance of Microsoft. Considering how Apple did in it’s first 20 years, I wonder what this graph will look like in another 10?

Someone tweeted yesterday (I think it was Clay Shirkey, retweeting Kottke) that if he’d bought Apple stock instead of his old G3 iBook, the shares would be worth $140,000. Of course, maybe the work he did and got paid for on that G3 is worth way more than that. But the statement does raise an eyebrow.

Apple’s Jobs & Wozniak created their company becuase they wanted to change the world. Gates & Allen created Microsoft to make a lot of money, and ultimately, aspired to rule the [commercial, corporate computing] world. There’s a huge world-view of difference in those two primary motivators. People who want to change the world have a slightly larger perspective from those who merely want to rule it. You need a far, far bigger brain to imagine the effects of the former. Who knows what things will look like when Google, Twitter, et al. are approaching their 30th birthdays?

How long do you expect your technology purchases to last? My venerable workhorse laptop, a 1st Generation MacBook Pro, has been, I recently learned, crashing due to overheating. Neither of its cooling fans are working. I should have been able to detect this months earlier, but I had neglected to reinstall a system monitoring utility the last time I rebuilt my hard drive, and so didn’t have the obvious indicators in front of me. Bjango makes a great little widget application called iStat Pro, which can be configured to give you as much or as little information as you are ever likely to need to monitor the health of your Mac.

So Apple, I have generally been pretty happy with your offerings over the last 25 years (THAT long?), and certainly this MBP has been a workhorse for me, pretty much key to any living I’ve made in the last 4 years. With this current issue, I have just realized that there has been a problem with heat dissipation for quite some time now, and simply didn’t think there was any issue until the frequency of crashing entered the realm of many times a day.

The opinion now coalescing in my stressed out brain (I can’t live without my computer! Really, it’s my livelihood) is that this situation has been developing for some time. I now recollect, in the distant past, the fans racing like Formula 1 Ferraris under the heavy foot of a Schumacher. It wasn’t until I browsed through the Apple Support Discussion Forums, armed with the error code revealed by the Hardware Diagnostics app that came with the MBP (where the hell did I put those discs? Oh, up there.) did I realize that something was very, very wrong. People on the ASDFs reported logic board replacements, heat sensor replacements, AppleCare being invoked many, many times, leverage being applied to to senior AppleStore managers to get a decent resolution, etc.

“So what?” you may say. “Stuff breaks down all the time. That’s what the world is like.” OK, I’ll agree with you on a lot of things. Cars need tuneups & oil changes, wheels aligned and tires replaced. But shouldn’t a laptop be designed (and have that design tested) to ensure that a key part of it’s continuing function, cooling, continues to function to the usable life of the computer? Eh. That raises the question of “What is the usable life on a MacBook Pro?”

Longer than I’ve owned this one for. Other than the fans, and a new, bigger hard drive which I replaced myself, it’s been a great machine. If I also want to replace the fans myself, I can’t get source the parts in Canada, so I’ve either got to send the MBP in to get fixed—way out of either warrantee or AppleCare—or mail-order to the USA for the correct parts (with all the grossly inflated shipping, time, etc., incurred), then spend 1–2 hours tearing my machine apart. Oh joy. I’d better make sure I get the correct part numbers…

Ah well.

Update

I finally got the fans (Thanks to MacStation Yaletown—$37 each!), put aside some time, arranged my tools and repurposed a foam egg carton as a parts repository, then reviewed the procedure on iFixit.com’s amazing site—if you have any kind of aptitude with tools, are reasonable organized, and have more time than money, give it a try—and suddenly I’ve got a machine that can cool itself again!