Saturday, August 21, 2004
Xtreme Online Camping
We just looked for an ideal campsite for next weekend, then reserved it online (the only way, believe it or not) out here in South Nowhere, using the cell phone as a bluetooth bridge. Niiice.
My kid just wanted to see how to find images of people on the Web, and then wanted to get a close-up of this particularly creepy one of his father. We're still at the campground, by the way.
... and now we're moving down the road (paused momentarily to type this up), listening to Rockabilly Radio, over a Belkin Bridge to the FM band. Cool. Now we're tuned in to Jambalaya Jam. Other than KPIG/KPYG (which we can sort of get here), there's nothing on the ordinary radio like this.
This is so fucking cool and liberating I can't stand it. Pounding the steering wheel along with the music while I drive the old Subaru down the Santa Ynez Valley toward the sunset...
Fighting words
Fighting for Radio is my latest (and perhaps largest) SuitWatch, at Linux Journal.
Weak end conditions
As the summer drowses schoolward, a few links for your weekend, while I get ready to go off and have fun with the kid...
Tom Adelstein says DHS Secretary Ridge Gives the Go Ahead to Linux. Like many government contractors, the provider of ERN (Emergency Response Network) Systems maintains a low profile. ... while it saves lives.
Jim Thompson on the compounding of everything you already hate about PowerPoint (ab)users:
Is this what you want to leave behind in the brains of your potential customers, management, or staff? Yet another twist on flaming logos?
Stephen Johnson on What I Didn't Do on my Summer Vacation:
...the longest stretch of time that I have experienced with a sub-28.8 dialup connection for nearly a decade.
Ruby Sinreich's It must be Sleazefest:
I just walked by a crowded Local 506 and heard "no fucking clapping, you assholes" from the stage.
Photos of the Drag King contest at the DNA Lounge are up, courtesty of JWZ.
Chuck Digate: I may be inspired to be more prolific myself. Who would have thought?
Rob's Blog: I will continue to capitalize these words... While Sheila Lennon wonders, Is it a place? "The new home of Mind"? (from the cymbal-clashing manifesto on the Barlow link) Is a blog an object in space? Is it a page? A channel? Is this just about labels and language? Don Marti adds, That's a bad idea, because there's a difference between "the Internet" and "an internet". Four of us also wrote this about that exactly five years ago, in August, 1999.
Denise Howell on Grokking Grokster:
Want to really get a blawger on a roll? Writing a headline or story that superficially, inaccurately, or sensationalistically looks at a legal decision will do it every time.
James Seng: Email, a Dying Technology. Today, I see emergence of other communication tools, like IM and RSS and they are especially popular among teenagers.
Information wants to be free in the same way that nature abhors a vacuum. It's not some moral view, it's the natural state of affairs. It’s the path of least resistance. And with communication tools becoming more and widely available, information is finding it easier and easier to be in it’s natural, free state.
Don Marti says Information wants to be $6.95. (Although Apple and Real have recently discounted certain degraded forms of information to $.99 and $.49.)
The difference is that between communication and commodity. When we inform somebody, we don't just "deliver" a fixed sum of "content." We literally change the other person. We cause them to know something they didn't know before. We literally form them. The respect we gain for this is the incalculable grace we call "authority." To be an authority is to have the right to form the thoughts and beliefs of other human beings. Not just to "brand" the hides of their minds with the name of some product. Nor to "deliver content" to their wide-open ears and eyes.
We are all authors of each other. But that doesn't mean you have to sign your work. Or that any of it weighs any more than the pixels it's printed on.
Network-Centric Advocacy: I like the idea of a online issue cocktail party.
Gang on
Yesterday's Gillmor Gang is up. One of the best, I think.