Monday, August 1, 2005
Trash, but not talk
At the Fringe Festival in New York this month, my daughter Colette is putting on Basura! A new comedy of disposable puppetry:
"basura !" brings trash to life before your very eyes. Waste turns to wonder with lyrical beauty and hilarious physical comedy. Newspaper starts tap-dancing, shopping bags learn to fly, and wads of tape fall in love, bringing renewed joy to the lonely humans who discover them. Eclectic music rounds out this surreal awakening of the ordinary.
Also described as "puppetry for adults, but the material is suitable for all ages."
There are five showtimes from August 12 to 19. I'll be there for the last show on the 19th. The venue is PS 122 (formerly 'public school' but now 'performance space') at 150 First Avenue.
Other details are here.
Idea: let's meetup (like we did here) at Katz's Deli first.
Over there
The three latest at IT Garage: Web 2.0, Free Markets and Free Culture, Identity Workshop in October, Berkeley and User Management Inside,
Hatched plot
National Journal: 'Blawgmaker' Hatches Bid For Senate Seat. About Steve Urquhart, who's running, and blogging, for the seat held by Orrin Hatch.
Plot burial
Richard Stallman's home page says (and points to) Don't Buy Harry Potter Books. This was occasioned by RMS's disclosure of plot information (he couldn't have been the only one doing that — but don't follow that link if you want The Big Secret to stay outside your brain) about Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, I gather. Anyway, he adds,
The whole plot is now summarized in a Wikipedia page. If you feel you simply have to know what happens in the book, you can read that, instead of buying the book.
For more info on this, see this page.
At the first link, it now says this:
Wikipedia does not maintain an encyclopedia article on this topic. However further information may be found at Wikibooks, a Wikipedia sister project. Please see Harry Potter plots/Half-Blood Prince. Nothing more.
That last link goes to a page with a link to Harry Potter plots. Nothing more.
The plot page has a recursive link to the book title page. But it also has a link to a short synopsis of the plot. Don't go there if you don't wanna know. Meanwhile, here's RMS on the boycott:
Any law that gives companies the power to conscript you to keep their secrets is unjust. If we give this company a bloody nose, we will make the next company think twice before trying to exercise this power. This time, the book was fiction. Next time, it could contain information that a certain drug is killing people. You can be sure they would call that "trade secret" too.
Blog spam
Just found a pointer in my aggregator to this here. I'll link to it because I want folks to see what it is, but I strongly advise everybody not to click on any links there. It's clearly a blog spam site. A link farm.
These things have been proliferating lately. I know the RSS search engines do their best to not index them. I'm also sure they piss off Google, which is clearly being taken advantage of.
Has anybody posted what anybody is doing about it, specifically?
[Later...] Nice response and links from Josh Hallett.
Remembering out loud
Yesterday, in an email thread about podcastercon (which will be in my old home town of Chapel Hill, NC), I responded to a suggestion that West Coast Hippie Culture influenced open source software. Dave was also on the same thread and wrote back "post that shit." So here goes:
True to some degree. It's not just coincidental, though, that Dave Winer and I are both East Coast guys, originally. New York, in fact. Nor that I spent 20-some years in North Carolina.
Open Source's origins are, I think, much more East Coast than West. Eric Raymond is a Libertarian from Pennsylvania. Bruce Perens is from somewhere back there. Linus us from Scandanavia. Richard M. Stallman is from Brooklyn. Unix culture came out of Boston, originally. Bill Joy and BSD came from Berkeley, of course. Although Bill calls himself a "hockey player" from Flint. Sun Micrososystems was founded by two Michigan hockey players: Bill and Scott McNealy. BSD has a thread that goes to Apple and OS X, which are definitely West Coast. Doug Englebart is a West Coaster, but grew up in the Midwest. And let's remember that most of the founding culture of the West Coast is rancher/farmer/miner/banker, not hippie. That subculture got a lot of press, and it mattered, but it was never close to a majority.
The fact is, most conferences happen out here, where Silicon Valley is the center of things. But if you look at where SV came from, it was a bunch of chain-smoking, white-shirted, horn-rimmed Hard Scientists of the Old School. These were the guys who founded Fairchild and HP. Not hippies from across the Bay in Berkeley. Remember that Stanford is the least hippie-ish of all the Ivy wannabes, and by definition the opposite of Berkeley: private, conservative, Republican. Home of the Hoover Institution. Think tank for All That Is Right. As well as a constant supplier of EEs for SV.
I'm sure others will offer corrections (RMS, of course, will disavow association with "open source," but his influence on the whole movement is undeniable). But anyway, there ya go.
Recovery
On January 20, 2003, Lawrence Lessig wrote, Doc has a brilliant and absolutely correct diagnosis at the American Open Technology Consortium website about how we lost in Eldred. The link in that quote went to aotc.info, a site that no longer exists. Ever since aotc.info went down, I've regretted losing that one post.
This was especially so yesterday, when I wrote Web 2.0, Free Markets and Free Culture, at IT Garage. While writing it I wished I could point back to whatever-it-was that Prof. Lessig found so agreeable. All I could remember was that it had to do with metaphor, also a main subject of yesterday's post.
Then, when I woke up at 4am, about 15 minutes ago, I thought: Duh! Archive.org and its Wayback Machine! Of course! So I checked, and found that much of aotc.info was backed up there. After digging around, I found the post in question.
So, a big thanks Archive.org for doing its outstanding work.