Month: February 2005
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On First Lines and Literary Tastes
Dan Green responds to Ed Champeon’s post about how publishers thin slice the slash pile. For Dan, a quibble. You call Stephen Dixon’s story “Red stops in the park to watch an opera rehearsal.” an undistinguished sentence. I disagree. It sets us in medius res in a rather bizzare setting, and it sets the action…
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Bob Dylan and Poets
Mark Ford on poetry, plagiarism and bricolage. And no poet can be for long unaware that however new a ?mixture? may at first seem, to return to Sterne borrowing from Burton, it is also a pouring ?out of one vessel into another?, the result of love and theft, to quote the title of a book…
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Farting Computers
I kid you not, but my web server is making farting sounds. Every 10 seconds or so. This PC is really on its last breaths. Need to ask a preist (Richard Stallman?) to perform last rites.
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Nonparent’s Thoughts on Babies and how to raise them
Enroll your kid in a Chinese language class ASAP. By the time she’s in college, Mandarin will be the language of business. Don’t buy your kid a camcorder or cellphone before her 10th birthday. Don’t videotape your childbirth. Aren’t some things sacred? Kids love blocks. And zoos. And Happy Meals. Don’t bother creating a college…
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Stealing Web Designs
Pirated Web Designs and Open-source web designs. I’m no design guru (although I’ve been learning a little about validating code), but I’ve often stolen designs and design ideas from other people. For important front ends, yes, I try to make it unique. But a lot of times when starting a blog or making a basic…
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Bush Policies Increases Abortions
Nick Kristof on the failures of abstinence-only education: In 1988, a survey by the Alan Guttmacher Institute found that only 2 percent of sex-ed teachers used an abstinence-only approach. Now, the institute says, a quarter of them do. Other developed countries focus much more on contraception. The upshot is that while teenagers in the U.S.…
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Odds and Ends Part 3
Nate Aune wrote a summary of the Plone Vienna conference . Nate has been working on plone4artists, a project which interests me, but I’ve been distracted for the last few months. He put together a great-looking Bostonjazz site. Here’s his thoughts about using the Composite Pack plone product for members to arrange their own index…
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Odds and Ends, part 2
Survey of ebook devices and software. Openberg is an open ebook reader. Jon Noring says that this doesn’t overlap with the openreader project they’re working on. The more, the merrier. Awful college courses: # English 202: A Painstaking Review of Every Mediocre Essay Published by The Bitter, Self-Obsessed Professor # English 291b: Language Disorders and…
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Catching Up
I have a lot catching up to do. I’ll be brief. In the next year or so I’ll be writing short essays about music videos. Here’s one of my favorites: Fantastic Plastic Machine: Please Mr. Salesman. The yahoo music site has a good collection of vids. Saw Kristin Hersh live at the Mucky Duck in…
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Up, up and away! (Without a keyboard or mouse)
Hi, about two weeks ago my server had a hardware problem. It’s up again (though I can’t figure out how to get the keyboard and mouse to work). I was actually transitioning to a new server anyway, and in fact was going to change to a new server. The good news is that for the…