Project Gutenberg Audiobooks
I’m very interested in the work that Telltale Weekly is doing. They are creating a library of audiobooks of public domain works from the Project Gutenberg collection. There is a whole lot to like about this setup. The books will be pretty cheap (looks like ~$2/ hour of the recording) and released without DRM but [...]
The End of DRM Ebooks (for Me)
In this blog I have talked about DRM and ebooks quite often. One of the theoretical oppositions to DRM is that as technologies change, one loses access to them. Well, it’s no longer theory for me. As I’ve made the decision to get a Sharp Zaurus for the next PDA, I can’t use my typical [...]
Spanish Class, Week 4
It’s rough out there! I think this week was the one where we started hitting the wall. Before, the exercises were pretty constrained so we didn’t have to work so hard. Now that we’re conjugating verbs and increasing the vocabulary, it’s approaching free-for-all time where the teach just asks us questions and we do our [...]
One More Zaurus Point
I forgot to mention yesterday that although a week ago I was ready to buy the Clie TJ-25, I really am not happy with the decision of Palm One to drop support for Mac OS X. I like the idea of having an open system that I can conceivably work with. I also really like [...]
Zaurus
Since I’ve been talking about getting a Zaurus, one of my coworkers pointed me towards an article on /. today that links to a roundup of apps for the Zaurus. I continue watching eBay and Craiglist hoping for a 5600 that hits my price range. I’ve decided that if I’m going used, I’d rather have [...]
Cubs Fans, Optimistic and just plain Mystic
So finally it looks like the foolishness about Steve Bartman will be laid to rest. I’m glad they are grinding up the ball, maybe sometime in the next decade or two they can quit obsessing over it. Lots of teams have late-season meltdowns (as a Braves fan I see it most years) but Cubs fans [...]
Letters to the Editor
If you are unhappy with the actions of our sitting president, from unjustified invasions to erosions of the liberties and freedoms that make this country great, from granting large gifts of federal money to the richest Americans to his faux support of our troops while cutting their pay and benefits, friends I have something for [...]
SNL on Georgia and Evoluion
Bill Shunn reminded me of a joke on SNL’s Weekend Update that made me laugh so hard we missed the next two.
“In Georgia this week, a compromise was reached that will allow the word ‘evolution’ to continue to be used in classrooms. As a trade-off, however, the word ‘dinosaur’ will be replaced with ‘Jesus horse.’”
Lessig on Gray Tuesday
Lawrence Lessig weighs in on Grey Tuesday. If there exists a compulsory right to remake music, I don’t see why there shouldn’t be the equivalent for sampling.
NEA is a “Terrorist Organization”
Via Making Light comes this link to the story of US Secretary of Education Rod Paige calling the NEA a “terrorist organization.” His basis for this is the fact that they don’t like the unfunded mandates of the No Child Left Behind program. Wow. As if that wasn’t inappropriate enough, check out this “fuck you” [...]
Grey RSS
I hadn’t thought about greying out my RSS until I saw that Nelson Minar had. If I did this right, the rest of these should be grey, even in aggregators. At least, the ones that support the stylesheet attributes inside their rendering should be the same grey as the HTML is.
Gray Tuesday
Today is not only Fat Tuesday, but also Grey Tuesday. In honor of that, I’m darkening up my background a little. It was already light grey, I’m just making that fact a little more noticeable. The folks at Downhill Battle have up on their site a copy of the cease and desist letter that EMI [...]
Drastic Measures
Over the last month, I started getting a trickle of comment and referer spam on this blog. It seems to always come in on the day view page for December 7, 2003. At one point, the blosxom community figured out that comment spammers were googling on common text in the default writeback. The writeback for [...]
John Shirley on Nader
Here’s SF writer John Shirley saying similar stuff to what I did about Nader. It does and did matter which party was elected in 2000 and it will again. Nader’s assertion that it doesn’t becomes more obviously self promotion as the veneer of serving the public good flakes away. Via BoingBoing.
Ralph at Nadir
Mark Schmitt at The Decembrist has some pretty harsh words for the Nader 2004 candidacy. I agree with him that I don’t think Nader will have a significant effect on this election. The crux of Nader’s 2000 platform is that there was no significant difference between Gore and Bush, which I think we can all [...]
Logey Weekend
I spent a significant chunk of the weekend feeling like my head was too heavy to lift. I ended up sleeping through the afternoon yesterday in one of those dazed sleeps where the dreams were monotonous and I felt bored by them but too exhausted to get up. I feel better today. Getting a lot [...]
Date Problem with Blosxom
There’s a problem I’m having with blosxom right now. It’s a low level annoyance, not so important to be a jet scrambler but it really has been irking me. If I make a post in the evening (my home and the server are both in US Central time), it will appear as the correct day [...]
Craig Clevenger on the Bomb
One bit of bad timing was that the Technorati business for the Contortionist’s Handbook coincided with a server migration or something that had Craig Clevenger’s site offline during it. Now that it’s back up, he has nice things to say about me and my efforts on his behalf. He remains knocked out by Jonny’s blog [...]
Doing, Not Having
Via Brian Buck comes this link to an article that says people get more satisfaction by doing things than by having things. Interesting stuff, especially considering the overwhelming importance we place on owning things in this culture. I’ve grown terribly weary of these materialistic TV commercials (yes, I know they are as old as the [...]
Charlie Stross on Copyright
In his blog, Charlie Stross makes many good copyright points. I stopped discussing this topic in online fora, because someone invariable would play the “but I make my living from copyright and you don’t” card. Instead, I now just point to the same points I was making but made by people who do earn their [...]
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