Idiotprogrammer: Texas Literary Blog

Month: September 2006

  • Reviews of Exercise Videos

    I’m going to keep a page detailing my reactions to various exercise videos. (See also my previous post about exercise ball workouts). You can also read reviews (and sample video clips) on collagevideos.com. I’ll update this over time. Vids without comments are things I’ve bought but haven’t used yet. They include vids which seem to…

  • Blowhard on documentaries

    Michael Blowhard deconstructs the PBS documentary: There was Stephen Foster up on the screen, but hopelessly buried under layers of bureaucratic battles, petty moral and career rivalries, futile attempts to get everyone on the same page, an infinity of small resentments — the whole tedious, snake-eating-its-tail drama of good intentions. The show was smoothly-enough done;…

  • Sony Reader reviews

    Preliminary reviews of Sony Reader are out! See this exhaustive review by Bob Russell. Teleread’s David Rothman weighs in . Tim Oreilly makes some remarks about the difficulty of the XML + graphically intense content. In a nutshell: meets lots of geek expectations, but RSS feeds won’t be as open as originally supposed. Although Sony…

  • Refuting Republican Rhetoric

    Jonathan Weiler and Marc J. Hetherington offer ideas about how to rebut Republican rhetoric: As far as moral issues are concerned, it is important to make the Republicans’ implicit appeals to authoritarian concerns about difference into explicit appeals. In her book about the 1988 presidential campaign, The Race Card, Tali Mendelberg showed that implicit racial…

  • Limewire accuses media companies of antitrust violations, consumer fraud, and other misconduct

    Read the Limewire countersuit against the RIAA. (Start at Page 22; that’s where it gets good). Ask yourself, do Limewire’s complaints about exclusivity agreements (and dead end licenses, i.e., licenses that forbid redistribution) apply to ebook distribution as well? Limewire’s brief (which I find brilliant and far-reaching) makes introductory claims that Limewire gave music companies…

  • Grokking Health Care Plans

    This just in. Over-the-counter cough medicine has no demonstrable health benefits. Instead of laughing at our previous ignorance, I’ll ask another question: does that mean the only way to get good cough medicine is to pay for a doctor’s visit? That means a $5 solution is now a $100+ solution. Creativetechwriter on the need to…

  • Relative Position of Mistakes & (the Drew Carey Phenomenon)

    The $90 webcam that helped launch the career of LonelyGirl15 (aka Bree). A nifty gadget which apparently uses up a lot of CPU resources. (About the only worthwhile comment on the NYT blog): Nietzsche once wrote that truth is nothing but the relative position of mistakes. Well, the topology changed, but the story remains. Personally,…

  • Crime Statistics for my apartment

    Please note: I am creating a link to crime statistics for my current apartment complex (Ashford Court Apartments in Houston Texas). Update: As expected, people searching for Ashford Court apartments on google now will be able to find this crime statistics page for Ashford Court easily.  That’s good. It should help future residents have accurate…

  • Literary Catching Up

    Scott Esposito on Michael Martone: Recently I read another book by Martone. It’s called The Blue Guide to Indiana, and this title is actually derived from a series of travel guidebooks called “The Blue Guide to . . .” Quite hysterically, when Martone published his Blue Guide, the publisher of the other Blue Guides sued–he…

  • How does Youtube do it?

    Surely you’ve wondered how Youtube a)makes money and b)avoids copyright infringement disputes. I’ve finally figured out what’s going on thanks to Fred Von Lohmann’s editorial: YouTube and its users may have a number of good copyright defenses. In my opinion, most of this video-sharing should qualify as fair use — after all, this is noncommercial…

  • Comments being eaten?

    Anybody make a comment only never to see it appear? Moderation is enabled, so it doesn’t show immediately, but if you don’t see anything within 24 hours, something is seriously wrong. Let me know idiotprogrammer @ fastmailbox .net

  • Non-sport Feeds

    Matt Yglesius is blogging on his own these days. No more TPM Cafe or American Prospect. While adding his new blog to my bloglines feed reader, I noticed that has several feeds instead of one (including a no sports feed. ). Which one do I choose? The one with full articles of course. After obtaining…

  • One picture a day

    Michael Blowhard rounds up the best videos in the  take-a-picture-of-yourself-for-several-years genre.

  • To clarify…

    Oddly after posting my last thing–getting married (and blogging about it), the thought occurred to me that casual surfers might assume that the person getting married is in fact me. Obviously, that is not the case. (And how would I blog about it if it were me?) I’m reminded of the slashdot editor doing his…

  • Getting Married (and blogging about it)

    I’ve been following Leah’s weblog for 6 years (when she was 14 years old on Diaryland!). In fact, when I first started making web pages in 2000, Leah’s site gave me good ideas about how to get started (She has a great eye for design). Now it seems she got married. That’s great, and I…

  • When am I going to be famous?(Sigh)

    Mark Morford criticizes the PBS decision to suspend the host of a kiddie show for doing a funny video short poking fun of virginity pledges (called “Technical Virgin”). And, of course, PBS, spineless as a jellyfish licked by Pat Robertson, immediately fired her. They claimed that the dialogue in Martinez’s humor videos somehow meant she…