No-maaaaaah!

Holy crap, the Cubs just traded to get Nomar Garciaparra! My experience from living in Chicagoland is that I am becoming a Cubs anti-fan for some reason. The longer we are here, the more I long to see them not even make the playoffs. Thus it has made me happy to see my Braves surge [...]

The Siderunners

I mentioned them in the previous post and I realized that I never made The Siderunners a band of the day, even though I’ve been listening the hell out of their CD. They have a page for their album at CD Baby that you can listen to the songs and even buy it straight from [...]

Old School File Trading

I’m writing up here this brainstorm that I had. With luck, maybe someone will take it and run with it.

I have on occasion checked out CDs from the library. Sometimes, I put those in a computer with RealJukebox or iTunes and ripped those things to keep afterwards. I realized not that long ago that if [...]

Buy my Bookshelves!

Any of you Chicago area readers of this blog need some sturdy-ass bookshelves? I have some for sale at a very nice price. If you say that you read the blog, I’ll even try to find some cool extra stuff to throw in (if you want it.) The new house has a lot of built [...]

Hard Truths from the Gaping Void

A few months ago I stumbled upon Hugh Macleod’s Gaping Void weblog, enjoying his crazed cartoons and his jaundiced insights. He has one post that he keeps adding to that is just completely fricking brilliant, called “How to be Creative”. The original post is good, but he has a couple elaborations that are even better:

Climb [...]

DNC on your iPod

I’ve seen this around in various places, but I give the credit on the link to the very first person I saw link to it, the incredible Dr. Jonny X. For those with an iPod and/or iTunes, you can for free get the audio of the speeches from the DNC. Now all it needs is [...]

Open Source Wheelchairs

Via Worldchanging comes this story about the Free Wheelchair Mission. They have a crazily simple design that can produce a usable wheelchair out of simple materials like lawn furniture and bicycle tire for a price of $42. Moreover, they are distributing this design openly and encouraging people to copy it in order to distribute more [...]

Insta-dreck

I saw a reference that Instapundit was opening up a comments thread for people to leave real time comments about John Kerry’s acceptance speech. Here’s what I think is a prototypical example of what is there:

1 minute: A war declared *on us* by terrorists
next minute: we went to war because we *wanted to*
Posted by: Zach [...]

BitTorrent of the INDUCE Act Congressional Hearings

Via Joi Ito’s blog I found this link to Lawrence Lessig asking people to download via BitTorrent the hearings on the INDUCE Act. Since one of the key points of the hearings is that P2P technology has “no potential for a substantial noninfringing use”, by in fact using P2P technology to download the hearings themselves [...]

Barack the House

Early this evening I saw the speech by Barack Obama at the DNC. What is there to say but “Wow!” As a current Illinois resident, I followed his ascent from just one member of a crowded Democratic primary field for the Senate race to a dominating candidate. People forget in the pyrotechnics of the Jack [...]

eBooks, Hard to Love

Here are a pair of articles about eBooks, both from people who are knowledgable users of them who are discussing the limitations of them. The first, from a link sent in by Mike Cane, is about how a guy that uses Microsoft Reader as his viewer got screwed because he buys so many devices (PCs, [...]

Shrook Comes back to Life

A new release of Shrook is out, V2.11, and along with other problems that have been fixed, it seems to have unboned the atom parsing that was boned in the previous release. I had a bunch of feeds that suddenly began coming in empty when I upgraded last time, which was a true pain in [...]

Week 18

Forgot to post this last week. This morning I was at 224 pounds – two pounds less than two weeks ago and 22 pounds down from baseline. I’m getting even a little farther under that 228 plateau that I was stuck on for so long. I did actually do a little strength training this week, [...]

WREK Alumni Weekend

I almost forgot to download the WREK alumni weekend MP3 files. Starting at 7 PM EDT tonight, they begin getting overwritten with this weeks stuff, so if you have any interest, time to get cracking. If you just want to listen, there are also links to playlists that you can use to just listen and [...]

Bandwidth Troubles

… but not with the computer, with life. Not only have I been too busy to blog much lately, but until last night I was hundreds of items behind in even reading my feeds. The new job is taking up a lot of time, as new jobs tend to do. I am trying like crazy [...]

A Little PR

Just in time for my leaving the company, Orbitz put out a little press release about the seatmap work I did for them. Pretty cool, no? When I first saw this, I thought it was some kind of reportage until I realized it was something Orbitz paid to put on the PR newswire. I do [...]

Day out in Evanston

I’m on my own in the house today, and I decided to get out on this beautiful day and bike around the city. I just felt like riding by the lake, and when I did I just happened upon Ethnic Arts Festival. I wandered around it for a little while, not buying anything but just [...]

WREK Alumni Weekend

This weekend at WREK they are commemorating the move out of their old studios by bringing in a lot of alumni to spin records all weekend. It’s half over and I still haven’t heard any of it, but I’ll save off all the MP3s and make myself a few CDs of the whole event. If [...]

RIAA, MPAA, BSA

Via Mitch Wagner comes this column about the BSA and how they cook the books to show losses to software piracy. It includes this funny and pithy insight:
In fact, I’ve always lumped the BSA with groups like the MPAA and the RIAA as organizations whose members sit on a massive pile of cash even as [...]

Clearing the Aggregator Decks: Environmental Links

This blog has been heavy on the personal stuff and light on links to cool stuff lately. Here’s the first of a few posts that are collections of interesting links that are building up in Shrook.

Here’s an article on how to hack a flashlight lightbulb with LEDs that will be brighter, last longer and use [...]

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