Month: November 2005
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Hi-de-Ho
An mp3 to get you hopping: Hi-de-Ho by Jawbone More about Jawbone. On another note, I’ve noticed that many artists are migrating to myspace. It’s a mediocre space, but full-featured and apparently making enough money to stay afloat.
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Productive Use and Copyright
Can you buy a CD, make mp3s of the songs and then sell the original CD? Yes, says William Patry. Plus, a good discussion of productive use vs. transformative use vs. fair use.
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Gulag Rhetoric and Dostoevsky
Is it appropriate to use words like “gulag” when describing excesses and abuses of the the U.S. military machine? The Crooked Timber folks debate this. Anne Appelbaum writes: Even more broadly, “Gulag” has come to mean the Soviet repressive system itself, the set of procedures that prisoners once called the “meat-grinder”: the arrests, the interrogations,…
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Pinter, Words, Actions
Here’s Harold Pinter’s poem American Football (on the 1st Gulf War): Hallelullah! It works. We blew the shit out of them. We blew the shit right back up their own ass And out their fucking ears. It works. We blew the shit out of them. They suffocated in their own shit! Hallelullah. Praise the Lord…
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Random Geek Stuff
Mozy, a free online backup tool. And security? Tips for taking photos. This sounds hopelessly esoteric, but in doing research for a work project I found this great introduction to memory caching techniques. Horray for the web! I’ve started reading Web Component Development with Zope 3 by Phillip von Weitershausen. It looks good.
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Slashdot vs. Digg
From a discussion of Slashdot vs. Digg: Digg’s comment systems suck. Hard. Digg’s pages are full of bloat, 50+ javascript files, slow loads. Slashdot has extreme fanatics for *nix systems. Slashdot won’t ever host a decent MS article. Digg likes to pretend to hate MS, too. Digg’s editor-free system brings some real turds floating to…
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Andy Rooney on US Bullets
Andy Rooney on the Military-Industrial Conflict: Now, we have the hurricanes to pay for. One way that our government pays for a lot of things is by borrowing from countries like China. Another way the government is planning on paying for the war and the hurricane damage is by cutting spending for things like medicare…
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Run to Jay’s Fast!
Brett Spackman, in a Interview about his wacky documentary Run to Jay’s: Tournament of Champions Brett: One really important aspect is the actual purchase of the soda. We used to wait to give the money to the cashier and get change back. That quickly changed when one of the guys ran and there were a…
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High school SAT scores and Wishful Thinking
In the same article previously cited: Yet consider what must happen at a school like Yale, where 17,735 applications came in last year. After all have been opened and put in files with the students’ SAT scores written on the front, they are read in descending order. Obviously, other factors will be considered, and some…
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Overpriced Higher Education and Alternatives?
I keep swiping del.ic.ious links from people that it’s a wonder I haven’t broken down and started my own account. (I used to tag and catalog bookmarks with Backflip, and since then I haven’t looked back. One of the reasons is my memory is fairly well-organized, and if not, google seems to find almost everything…
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More Brains! We Need More Brains!
Overnight I have been feeling glum about the new constitutional amendment to forbid gay marriages in Texas. I am not gay, but these preemptive prohibitions bother me, if only because they are so meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Liberals are startled that such intolerant measures are passed by such large margins (72%). But…
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Something I forgot
Something I forgot: A few weeks ago I came across a brilliant literary/geek essay, so brilliant I printed it out and made a point to comment on it. Up until 10 seconds ago, I had completely forgotten it. Now, where did I find that URL? Oh, yes, here it is. I will link to it…
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Contradictions & Bucking Projects
Dr. Caligari as a radio play? What will people dream of next? Portnoy’s Complaint as told by puppets? One show I’ve been flipping over recently has been How I Met Your Mother. Clever sitcom with the typical fall-in-love subplots, with lots of backnarrating and surprises. Plus, the sidekick has a blog (which he mentions in…
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Bush Administration Wimps Out Again
Once again, the Bush Administration punts and signs a treaty that causes price increases in garments. (James Kanter writes). Gene Sperling writes: Low-cost imports can cause job dislocation and real pain, but it is also the case that the higher prices that come from trade barriers can be like a regressive tax that hits poorer…
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Open Sour and Gimp Tutorials
Is it just me, or does it seem strange that there hasn’t been a decent Gimp manual published in English in the last 4 years? And that a developing country like Brazil has one? Gimp tutorials Grokking the Gimp tutorial. More tutorials. Tutorials: Gimp and Layers
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Open Usability Projects
Strange I haven’t seen this before: openusability, a group of folks who do user testing of open source projects. Lots of linux-based projects, so I guess it goes with the territory. Here’s a ruby-based book collection desktop application, Alexandria. YAML, a data serialization method for data structures that can’t use tabs (python for example). I…