If you’re still not up to speed on the “network neutrality” debate about the internet, and you’re not a hard-core techie, you can still find out what’s going on without being subjected to too much technobabble. A good starting point is a Washington Post piece titled The Coming Tug of War Over the Internet, but an easier-on-the-eyes one is this comic by Jen Sorensen at Slowpoke Comics, titled Web of Deception:
You’ve got to give “Peter”, whose answer for the algebra test question is shown below, some credit for at least being funny in the face of not knowing the binomial theorem:
By the bye, the answer is:
[Thanks to Adampsyche for the photo!]
If you’re in your twenties or older, chances are that you’ve seen the Far Side comic shown on the left: the caveman slideshow in which the spikes on the tail of a stegosaurus are identified as the “Thagomizer”, named in memory of an unfortunate caveman named Thag Simmons.
Although I’ve known that The Far Side comics are popular amongs nerds and scientists, I had no idea that the term “Thagomizer” had been adopted by paleontologists as an actual term. But that’s what happened, and now the word has its own Wikipedia entry and is seen mention by the Smithsonian, a book published by Scientific American and New Scientist magazine.
In addition to being Bastille Day, it is also the third anniversary of my joining Tucows as its Technical Community Development Coordinator. So far, in the course of this job, I have:
Three years later, I’m still enjoying it here. The place still passes the “snooze bar test” — the only reason I ever hit the snooze bar on the alarm clock on a workday is because I was up late the night before and not because I’m dreading another day at the office. At the start of year four, my job’s going to go through some interesting changes not only as a result of my changing departments, but also because of some exciting changes all ’round — not just within the company, but also our neighbourhood, the Toronto tech and creative communities and in our industry. It’s going to be an interesting time, and I’m glad to be here.
One of today’s questions on the Ask MetaFilter site is:
In my quest to become more distinctive, I’m looking for suggestions of harmless eccentricities to adopt. Who better than the MeFi hive mind to provide them? Anecdotes of eccentric folk you’ve known in the past welcome.
One of the responses mentioned that I always carry my accordion. I think “always” isn’t quite true; “often” is probably more accurate. I was also going to ask what was so eccentric about that when I scrolled down to see another response, which read:
You can’t adopt eccentricities though. The people who have them don’t know they have them and certainly don’t think of them as eccentric. False proposition entirely. Better – ask people what you currently do they think is eccentric and do it more often (though even that somewhat violates the principle).
Scrolling farther down, I found this response:
I know some eccentrics, and they don’t seem to have chosen eccentricity. The interesting ones are people who have gotten passionate about something, like playing the accordion, building wooden canoes, Chaucer, the history of our city and state, etc. Take a few of your interests, and become an expert. Do not share your expertise immediately. No one thinks of me as mysterious, but when they learn some of my past exploits (interesting, but not world- shaking) they are generally more interested/impressed than if I’d started out by announcing them.
I know some other ecentrics who are eccentric on purpose, and get pretty boring. Eccentricity without a foundation in authenticity will be crass, but if it’s based in an authentic passion, it will be intriguing.
It’s an interesting discussion — go check it out!
(If you’re wondering how I got into the accordion thing in the first place, check out the entry Why Accordion?)
This is just a quick note to congratulate Radiant Core, a company located just down the street from Tucows, who are also involved in Toronto’s BarCamp and Democamp. They’ve just announced that they’ve been retained by Mozilla to design and implement the official theme for the Firefox 2 release! Our heartiest congratulations to Jay and all the folks at Radiant Core!
(This article also appears in Tucows Farm.)
The company for whom I work, Tucows, and Serious Magic, a company that develops video communication software, have joined up to launch a contest called “Cow Tipping”. Contest participants have to create a tutorial video on their favourite software, hardware or web service using Serious Magic’s Vlog It! software, and the best ones will earn great prizes and be featured on the Tucows download site.
The best tutorial video will be deemed the grand prize winner and will be featured on the Tucows.com site. Its creator will receive:
Two runner-up videos will also be featured on the Tucows.com site and their creators will each receive:
In total, 30 videos will be selected from the entries and showcased on the Tucows.com site. Those videos that didn’t make the grand prize or the runner-up positions will still earn their creators these prizes:
I’ll post the full contest rules a little later on. In the meantime, if you’ve got an idea for a tutorial video, get to work!