Month: May 2004
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Facades of Albania Pallati’s
Some of you might already know, but I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Albania. I’ve actually written a lot of essays and taken a lot of photos, but haven’t had the chance to post them in a while. One of the Peace Corps people took some stunning photographs of front facades of Albania in…
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Ton of Bricks
Added Jim Roepcke’s Have Browser Will Travel to my permanent links. He gave a good intro to python at a plone conference. (The other slides/presentations are archived here). Roepcke alerted me to the amazing interview with soldier Jim Massey about his participation in the killing of innocent Iraqi civilians. There are chilling quotes everywhere: Q:…
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Python Introductions
Here’s a gameplan for how to learn Python. Here’s a kuro5hin introduction to python , an Online guide to learning python with frames. And Guido von Rossum’s famous tutorial . I’ve been looking for time to play around in python for a while, but have never gotten the chance. Mark Pilgrim has a python tutorial…
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Newsfeeds, RSS and Syndication
Lately I’ve been learning about RSS Syndication. Here’s a list of rss parsers. For Plone, here’s some info about cmffeed, how to add feeds within Plone howto, a chapter (PDF) from Ben Hammerly’s book on content syndication and RSS 2.0. What I really want to know: how to integrate and filter newsfeeds from various sources.…
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Too Much Writing
Laura Miller wrote a wonderful piece, For some, it’s like a loss of virginity; you never forget the book that defeated your na?ve faith in the contract between an author and his or her reader, the promise that your time and effort, even your irritation, will be fairly repaid. (In my case, it was ”A…
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Images of Woman (Lots of Them!)
Shanna Germain talks about participating in a massive nude protest against Bush. I’ve nothing against this protest (although it seems rather silly). However, let’s not call it a political protest; call it an aesthetic protest because really the point of the protest is not to call attention to Bush (the George W. kind) but their…
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Frasier’s Departure
I just now watched the final episode of Frasier. It was delightful, sentimental and full of so many surprises that I just am left speechless. I never forgave the show for sewing up the Niles/Daphne thread too easily a few years ago, and I expected a low key tear jerker a la Friends. But that…
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Oreilly Interview on Fresh Air Terry Gross
You know, I thought I’d seen everything. But judging from my web traffic, it appears that a lot of Oreilly fanatics are searching for all the weblogs mentioning “Fresh Air interview” and Bill Oreilly and then writing asinine comments on them. I deleted three comments already. Some thoughts about that. First, you Oreilly heads, get…
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From a photocontest about how to save the world:
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Eurotastes
Kieran Healy on the bad taste of Eurovision Song Contests. The songs themselves have evolved in interesting ways. ?Diggi-loo Diggi-ley? represents the high-point of the nonsense-chorus Eurovision song, designed to appeal to the multi-lingual audience. This lowest common denominator approach produced successes throughout the first thirty years of the contest, including such classics as ?Boom-Bang-a-Bang?…
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Lessig defends fair use
Orielly.com article about the Kahle v. Ashcroft Case. It gives an excellent analysis of what is to happen post Eldred. A long quote from Larry Lessig (hope it qualifies as fair use!) Copyright owners and their lawyers are likely to continue advising would-be copiers that they are infringers even when the proposed copy would be…
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Why “Friends” Does Not Suck
I was disappointed by yesterday’s finale of Friends (but was not surprised that the writers chose the easy way to tie up plots). The quintessential Friends moment came when Joey decides to break down the Foozball machine and both of them give homage to the miniature wooden players. I saw several good wrapups of what…
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Friends and Sexual Harrassment
Interesting thought piece by Johanna Grossman about a sexual harrassment lawsuit in the writers’ room at Friends’ TV show. Telling the show’s writers that they could not talk about sex would certainly inhibit their ability to invent and draft scripts. But giving them carte blanche to say, draw, and do anything — no matter how…
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Kirstin Summers is a very fine person!
It’s a long story, but Kirstin Summers is a very fine person. She is not a dufus.