Boston Bound

I’m flying to Boston on Thursday to catch up with The Redhead, but I’m also squeezing in time to see my Beantown peeps. Wendy’s organizing a gathering in Boston on Friday; see here for more details.

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Uncategorized

Carnival of the Canucks #15

This week’s Canadian blog linkfest is being hosted by the blog with the Atkins-compliant name, The Meatriarchy!

If you’ve missed any installment of the Carnival, you can always check the archives.

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In the News

Fluorescent

[ via The Meatriarchy ] “Fluorescent” is Korean slang used to describe someone who takes a

little bit longer to get the joke. Well, that’s the kind way of putting

it.

(Think about how fluorescent tubes light up when you turn them on and the derivation of the expression will become clear.)

Adam Daifallah seems like a pretty sharp guy, but as we all do from time to time, he had a moment of fluorescence:

Until now I have always defended Ann Coulter against her detractors,

many of them my own (often conservative) friends. I find her writing

style crisp, original, and not to mention hilarious. I especially love

her acerbic barbs at Ted Kennedy.

But I’m afraid in the last two

weeks she’s crossed the boundaries of good fun and good taste to the

land of the indefensible/despicable. What really put me over the edge

was this line from her column last week on The Passion:

Being

nice to people is, in fact, one of the incidental tenets of

Christianity (as opposed to other religions whose tenets are more along

the lines of “kill everyone who doesn’t smell bad and doesn’t answer to

the name Mohammed”).

I mean, that is just unbelivable. It

is beyond the pale. It crosses the line. She was always pushing the

limits before, but she seems to have kicked it up yet another notch —

and her column this week, also on The Passion and tearing a strip off New York Times columnist William Safire, isn’t much better.

Ah, the old “wogs smell bad” canard. I thought that was a thing of the seventies,

when I was a “New Canadian” and taking weekly lumps from the Sons of

the Family Compact for the crime of having been born elsewhere. And the “all Muslims are jihadis” stuff is a bit much.

Well, Adam, better late to the party than not showing up, I always say.

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Uncategorized

Neuromancer audiobook, read by William Gibson, online

At some point during Gideon Strauss‘ blogger convivium last Christmas, I mentioned to him that I used to like programming while listening to a set of MP3s of William Gibson reading Neuromancer.

I kept them on my OpenCola-issued laptop while I worked there, and I

forgot to make a backup copy before dutifully handing it back when I

got laid off.

Gideon, a Gibson fan, asked me to let him know if I ever found more

copies. I’d forgotten about his request until this past weekend, and a

little Googling found me this site and this site, which has 8 MP3s, representing four 90-minute cassettes of the Neuromancer audiobook.

According to this page on the William Gibson Aleph, U2 — one of Gideon’s favourite bands — contributed a track to the audiobook.

Gideon, everyone: enjoy!

“The sky above the port was the the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel…”

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Uncategorized

It’s going to be one of those weeks…

…where it’s work, work, work. I’ll try and get caught up with my

“blogligations”. The usual blog entry will appear later tonight.

In the meantime, a little trivia about the blogs I write:

Categories
It Happened to Me

The Lessig Audiobook Project

Last night at 11 (my timezone, Eastern Standard Time, a.k.a. GMT -5), AKMA wrote:

Anyone feel like recording a chapter of Lawrence Lessig’s new book?

The license pretty clearly indicates that, so long as we’re not

making a commercial venture of it, we can make a recording of

(“perform”) the text. There are a Preface, Introduction, fifteen

chapters, a conclusion and an afterword. If you’re willing to

contribute an MP3 recording of a chapter (ideally, hosting it on your

own server — but I’ll bet we can gird up the Disseminary

to host chapters for you, if you can host it yourself — drop us a

comment and let us know which chapters you’ll take. Heck, we could have

duelling chapters; which version of chapter 5 do you like, Accordion Guy’s or Jenny the Shifted Librarian’s?

(Disclaimer: I just typed their names in there. They haven’t offered or

anything. Yet.)

12 hours later, this item has already appeared on Boing Boing and

received 26 comments on AKMA’s site, and a flurry of email has appeared

in my inbox regarding this project. All on a Friday night! I have deduced two things from this:

  • Lessig’s work is important to a lot of us who work in that strange intersection of creative and technical.
  • I clearly need to teach my fellow bloggers how to party. It’s Friday night, people!

I have signed up to read a chapter, but haven’t chosen one yet.

I’m going to go look over the book and see if there’s one that tickeles

my fancy or if there’s one that nobody’s volunteered to read yet.

I will see if I can convince Boss Ross and Boss Ross’ boss Elliot Noss

to contribute a chapter. They’ve got great speaking voices and their

contribution to the ‘Net at large is far greater than mine. I write a

blog and helped generate some buzz for P2P; they’ve helped make the

Internet work.

But not today. I’ve got an aunt and uncle from the Philippines whom I’m joining for lunch at the St. Lawrence Market, followed by catching up with Cory’s book reading, a haircut, a couple of birthday parties to attend and a friend from out of town who need to sample some more of the local night life.

While I laud my fellow bloggers’ industriousness, I suggest that they

turn off the computer and get some fresh air. And a double rye and coke!

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Uncategorized

Blogware’s new "Post" tab

<P>If you were to log into your Blogware Control Panel right now, you might be surprised when you see that the Navigation Bar now has a new tab:</P>
<P><IMG height=130 src=”http://blog.blogware.com/images/2004/03/post_tab/FirefoxScreenSnapz001.jpg” width=645></P>
<P>The new tab, the <STRONG>Post Tab</STRONG>, is simply a more convenient version of the <STRONG>Post Menu</STRONG>, which is tucked all the way up the upper right-hand corner of the page:</P>
<P><IMG height=181 src=”http://blog.blogware.com/images/2004/03/post_tab/FirefoxScreenSnapz007.jpg” width=304>
<P>Using the <STRONG>Post</STRONG> tab is simple: whenever you want to post a new entry, click the <STRONG>Post</STRONG> tab. You will be immediately taken to the <STRONG>Post Article</STRONG> page, as shown below:</P>
<P><IMG height=382 src=”http://blog.blogware.com/images/2004/03/post_tab/FirefoxScreenSnapz002.jpg” width=649></P>
<P>The Options submenu for the <STRONG>Post</STRONG> tab allows you to choose the kind of entry to post. The default is <STRONG>Article</STRONG>, but you can also click on <STRONG>Photo</STRONG> to post a photo to one of your photo albums…</P>
<P><IMG height=382 src=”http://blog.blogware.com/images/2004/03/post_tab/FirefoxScreenSnapz003.jpg” width=649></P>
<P>…or <STRONG>Music Review</STRONG> to post a new music review…
<P><IMG height=382 src=”http://blog.blogware.com/images/2004/03/post_tab/FirefoxScreenSnapz004.jpg” width=649></P>
<P>…or <STRONG>Movie Review</STRONG> to post a new movie review…</P>
<P><IMG height=382 src=”http://blog.blogware.com/images/2004/03/post_tab/FirefoxScreenSnapz005.jpg” width=649></P>
<P>…or <STRONG>Book Review</STRONG> to post a new book review…
<P><IMG height=382 src=”http://blog.blogware.com/images/2004/03/post_tab/FirefoxScreenSnapz006.jpg” width=649></P>
<H3>Note</H3>
<P>Switching from one entry type to another (say, from Article to Book Review) in the middle of working on an entry will cause that entry you were working on to be erased.</P>