Month: August 2005
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Now, a Major Motion Picture!
I’ve fallen away from political analysis. It just seems so pointless. And besides I am a busy man. However, this meta-analysis by Jay Rosen captured what I think lies at the heart of the problem: The brutalizing of McClellan was no recovery of courage by a suddenly-awakened press. It was the Bush team’s bald assertiveness…
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Jon Udell on Using Screencasts
Jon Udell’s Screencast (with audio) about how to use del.ic.ious. Here’s his essay about which tools he used to make a screencast and what challenges he faced. More about screencasting. I’m pleasantly unaware of using del.ici.ious for cataloguing your information. I’ve used bookmark manager programs with varying levels of success, and eventually I just give…
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Commenting is a Full Time Job
After looking at Jason Kottke’s funny post about the Craig’s List offer to post 5 comments for $10 on your weblog, I’ve noticed that some A-list bloggers spend a lot of time responding to people. Tim O’Reilly writes a lot of responses. Doesn’t he like have a business to run? And the litbloggers–Scott, Dan, Michael…
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What (if anything) is wrong with RSS?
Dwight Silverman asks: why aren’t more people using RSS feed readers? His readers give answers.
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The Crumbling Phase
Michael Blowhard on the transformation of arts criticism and tastes by sites like Arts and Letters Daily. How humbling it must be for the professional tastemakers to discover that 1) They aren’t the only people around with knowledge and taste, and the ability to express themselves, that 2) Much of what they value most highly…
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New Buffy Episodes
Juliet Clark of Dream Factory reports some new Buffy episodes underway: Out of My Mind (aired October 17, 2000) Riley and I are getting to be good friends. We’re tracking a pair of lowlifes who have been terrorizing the UC Sunnydale campus with a series of dimly lit illegal boxing matches and offscreen murders. We…
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Public Radio and Anti-Ipod Rants
Added to my blog/rss roll. Doug Kaye’s ITconversations weblog (which for the moment is easier to navigate than the itconversations.com site itself). I expect with the drupal makeover, that will change. I listen to these talks all the time. Most recently I listened to Doug Kaye wrote an interesting essay about the future of public…
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Things Found in the Woods
Have you ever found porn in the woods? This metafilter thread is relatively safe for work (although some of the text is explicit). I’m embarrassed to say I read this entire thread.
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Mumbai Floods
Book critic Uma from Indianwriting gives a firsthand account of the recent Mumbai flooding: Some cabbies asked for 1500 rupees for a 150-rupee ride. Robbers looted abandoned cars. Upmarket hotel lobbies offered stranded people neither a place to stay, nor even water to drink. They turned them out. “Otherwise they will never leave,” said a…
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Divorces and Failed Marriages
FRANCINE PROSE writes a enjoyable review of a Eudora Welty biography: Like her subject, Marrs understands that character is ultimately unfathomable and wisely makes no attempt to explain how, by the tender age of 22, a well-brought-up Mississippi girl found the intellectual confidence and flat-out nerve to send Virginia Woolf a fan letter expressing her…
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Google: William Gerhardie’s Futility
Tim O’Reilly and company weigh in on the google/library issues. This may be a side issue to the main issue, but I frequently try to research old titles that might be public domain, or might not. One terribly confusing thing is that publishers frequently release “new editions” with trivial post-1922 changes/additions to pre-1922 works. It…
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Patriotism is a Magnet
Tom Tomorrow writes compellingly of the loss of military lives: Speaking of which…I have no doubt that Cindy Sheehan–who has paid the biggest price a parent can pay–will continue to be attacked by people who think they’re doing all they can by putting ribbon magnets on their SUVs. (And isn’t that ultimately the pefect metaphor…
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Time-Warner Forgets
Oops. Time-Warner people forgot they didn’t have the rights to make the film Dukes of Hazzard. Looks like their Errors & Omissions insurance premiums are going to go up….way up! Came from a really nice group intellectual property weblog. A little learning is a dangerous thing. Tom Delay on pay raises. “It’s not a pay…
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Pre-emptive Patents
Stephen Shankland writes an interesting analysis about why Microsoft is aggressively seeking patents in response to open source patents. He quotes Red Hat’s Mark Webbink: “Their interest only came along once they had their dominant position, because patents gave them the ability to restrict competition. That’s what patents are about: maintaining market share and preventing…
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Violet Hunt Part 2
More things found about Violet Hunt: Nancy Smith discusses the section on Violet Hunt in Deborah Martinson’s book ” In the Presence of Audience: The Self in Diaries and Fiction” When she was in her forties, she hooked up with Ford, an up-and-coming writer in his early 30s. He was already married, but separated, not…
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Who is Violet Hunt?
I’ve been going through birthdates of authors and just discovered an author who might be a very interesting project for me. Violet Hunt. Here’s what wikipedia has on her: Isobel Violet Hunt (September 28 1862 – January 16, 1942) was a British writer, now best known for her supernatural fiction. Her father was the artist…