The Observer | Business | The genius of blogging What's happening now is that Google has realised that the conversations being conducted by members of the weblogging community has become an important body of content. Acquiring Blogger moves the search...
February 2003 Archives
U.S. Diplomat's Letter of Resignation
In the new York Times (free registration). The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests. Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the...
Thick water film in space
Saturday Morning Science: Elastic Water on the ISS I wish I could play with this!...
"Computer, play me some Bob, please!"
macosxhints - A script to use voice recognition with iTunes Oh joy! If only this was possible with the iPod....
Bye-bye
CNN.com - Pioneer 10 falls silent after nearly 31 years - Feb. 25, 2003 Off it goes, deeper into the night....
Memorisation
Very interesting. It seems that *somebody* at the University of Alberta refuses to memorise my URL... This person, let's call him "N", rather remember that he can find me in a Google or Yahoo Search if he queries for my...
Telepathic cybernetics
(requires Wi-Fi and/or Bluetooth "wetware" antennas and the whole inexistent smogashbord of hardware-to-brain, software-to-mind technologies... let us dream...) Lying in bed. Close your eyes... and think: # access mind/dream engine/luciddreaming/gui-interface # access local wireless network # open IPSec VPN tunnel...
Speaking of Nobel...
Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Ignoble peace prize Given the fact that previous nominees include Adolf Hitler and Henry Kissinger, can anyone take the Nobel Peace Prize seriously, asks Paul HamilosWhich word connects Bono, the European Union, Jacques Chirac...
Massey Lectures
CBC Radio | Ideas | Massey Lectures Chronology of the Massey Lecture Series, started in 1961. Features such names as Northrop Frye, Martin Luther King, George Steiner, Carlos Fuentes, Noam Chomsky, John Ralston Saul and Robert Fulford....
Important to note
My good friend N posted this comment on a previous entry of mine and I felt it important to repost it here as an entry of its own. Thank you Naz. Take this test:Here's a list of the countries that...
Stigmergy
By Joe Gregono at "BitWorking.org": The World-Wide Web is the first stimeric communication medium for humans./.../In order for an environment to support stigmeric communciation the messages must be readable by everyone./.../In order for an environment to support sitgmery everyone has...
Collective writing
Are we all not just writing in the same big book? Are we all not just contributing to one large account of our lives, our thoughts, ideas and dreams? Are we not writing our own history? Who really are the...
Indigo
A quick stop at the patisserie across the street afforded me one again a brief conversation with an old friend. A former english professor from college, whom I never had as a classroom teacher but with whom I'd spent some...
"This tape collection gets bigger by the minute..."
Interesting summary of the economics of a hypothetical rock band, as broken down by a journalist at the NY Daily News. [update] Another money breakdown Now, read what some "with it" people inside the recording industry have to say about...
Snow day
I don't know how much fell but it hasn't stopped since last night. Shoveling this out will take upwards of a half an hour, at least. It'll wait till tomorrow: from experience I know that the snowplows will come...
Mediocrity in art, and curators.
Mark Federman, again, commenting on some ideas by Steve Mann about mediocrity in the arts: Steve says:Many traditional curators love mediocre artists, because they provide an intellectually blank canvas upon which they can paint their curatorial and philosophical discourses. Especially...
Emergent Democracy (repost)
Round one, first pitch lobbed by Joichi Ito (repost) Ok I just read the whole thing. I strongly urge all of you, no matter what your interests are, to read this. It not only discusses the possible effects of "weblogging"...
Peace ralley photos
From around the world. Of all of them, the Antarctica one I find is particularily touching....
Switch!
Ok, switched to MT tonight. Bear with the look until I can squeeze some time to change me templates... :)...
Oh Zoë!
v.0.4 This gets better with every release! Now incorporates an RSS aggregator, supports the Blogger and MetWeblog APIs, AND SpamAssassin!!! Where are you taking us Mr. Szwarc?! :D...
When you start seeking patterns...
Artistic Sign Language Yes, sometimes, just sometimes, patterns arise that DO have meaning. Consider another "cultural" pattern: How many recent Hollywood films have you seen in the past 2 years that had the phrase "the war has begun" pronounced (solemnly)...
Comment to mikel
After watching the news shows Hello Michael! 100% agreed. Here's what I am wondering as well: Since most of the political world agrees that Saddam must go (for whatever reasons), then why dear God do they need to bomb the...
Signs of dissent...
Some excellent protest slogans spotted in front of the UN last Saturday (Feb 15th). To whit: "Somewhere in Texas a village is missing its idiot." "Stop Mad Cowboy Disease!" Rage on!...
Edi
Remembering Well sort of. I can't believe I forgot until now... almost midnight and passed the date. My father passed away today four years ago after a heart attack put him in a coma for 3 days. He was a...
Braaaaiiiins
Brainwave Receivers, Multimodal Information management.In Switzerland, scientists at the Dalle Molle Institute for Perceptual Artificial Intelligence (IDIAP) have developed a new technology which can roughly tell what a person is thinking about....
E-Commerce/Bricks-and-mortar
The U.S. electronics megachain "Circuit City" has a brilliant feature in it's online store. It allows you to pick physical store locations near you and, as you browse around the site and look at products, it will tell you if...
Vannevar
The record of the race [dive into mark] Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex...
Charlie Clements, MD: A Report from Iraq
Bombing the Starving, Sick & Homeless Mark Federman, of the McLuhan Program at U of T, commented as follows:His Report from Iraq is both heart-wrenching and serves as a dire warning to the Western World about the Reversal effects we...
Logging and annotating what one's reading
'PR'-otaku: Logging and annotating William Gibson's 'Pattern Recognition' (Joe Clark: fawny.org) This is interesting mainly because I started taking notes of books I read on a Wiki site I have. But looking at this makes me thing we need a...
Eery views
"Look Paintings" Been following Steven Mann's doings for a while. Awesome stuff. Are you ready to be a cyborg? You most likely already are....
one man, one year, one world
V A G A B O N D I N G >Vagabonding.com Something to add to my list of things I must do....
Way-out thinking
Thinking about future technologies, and how they could be made real today, i find it's important to follow a "way-out" process and then scale it back to the realm of the near-term possible and the presently possible. For example: a...
A startling realisation
I've always known this inherently of course, which is always the case I suppose. It has however just popped full center in my awareness: I am too physically lazy to write. Be it code or other stuff, I, without fail,...
Telepathy: the ultimate social disease.
It's 5:00. Do you know what your Google results are? (Google Weblog) Internet search engine Google is changing what we can find out about one another - and raising questions about whether we should. Among many other VERY interesting parts...
Sad but funny.
The Axis of Weasels - France, Belgium, and Germany This poor sod is a shining example of how it can be sad that "survival of the fittest" doesn't seem to apply to humans all that much anymore. However there is...
Apple's Keynote XML File Format (APXL Schema)
About the Keynote XML File Format (APXL Schema) This Technical Note contains the schema describing the XML file format used by Keynote documents (refered to here and in later documents simply as "APXL" -- Apple Presentation XmL). It is intended...
Patiently awaiting summer
Advent of fall Photo Gallery by Christopher DeWolf It is a strange feeling to go though someone's photogallery and see one's neighborhood....
Cars
Oh me oh my... My first car was an '83 Subaru GL (2 door sedan). I loved it. I killed it. I was so stupid. Last fall, parked across the street from my appartment, lo and behold, an '83 Subaru...
Did you know?
Lorem Ipsum - All the facts & Lipsum generator"Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit..." "There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply...
Not just Iraq
The current Republican White House of George Dubya isn't just being stupid about Iraq. Of course this is nothing surprising really, considering. Take a look at this insanity: "US Isolated at Population Conference over Its Anti-Abortion Stand" "US Anti-Abortion Stand...
I-rey!
Mi iPod be a natty congo mon! Both me iPod and me iTunes seem to have a predilection for Bob Marley. The Pod currently has about 4Gigs of various MP3's on it, 400megs of which is Marley. In shuffle mode,...
SxSW
Shall I drive? I must thank the plankers for this outstanding opportunity by sharing with me their good fortune. I'm going to SxSW! Yay!...
Dell Dude In Pot Bust
Dude, you're getting locked up. Isn't this sort of like busting Capone on tax evasion charges? This kid should be locked up for life for perpetuating the miserly of millions of people by inciting them to buy Wintel computers!...
OPML to scetch out HTML document structures
Mr. Winer, in telling us about the work on some new templates he's doing for some site or another, gives us this: an OPML outline of the html structure of the template. Brilliant. He just made the cost of OmniOutliner...
PowerPoint of view
Colin Powell used PowerPoint in his presentation at the United Nations security council on Wednesday. Was it the ubiquitous business tool's finest, or most ignominious hour, asks Ben Rooney...
Foyle's War
I guess you could say I'm a bit of a World War II buff. Nothing too in-depth, mind you: I don't know any dates by heart or any such thing. It's mainly due to the fact that when the kids...
Index vs. Categorisation
The Fishbowl: Filesystem sacrilege This of course would be the extreme opposite of where we are now with filesystem management. I believe the best solution, as always, lies in-between. (merci Karl, pour le lien)...
Remember....
There's plenty of shit to be pissed off at in the world. But if you fear it as well, you'll never change it....
Silly goose
While at the faubourgh Ste-Catherine yesterday afternoon, I bought some ham. Or so I thought. After paying for the "ham", I walked over to the SAQ ("Société des Alcools de Québec" - government body that sells all booze here) to...
Oh dammit all to...
"the sound of bells... halted by sunlight" tomato preview (Quicktime 6 required) These guys blow me away. Dammit. To hell with web... I wanna do video. Argh. Tomato is one of the UK's top design firms. They rock. They rule....
Patron saint of the Intermanet
CNN.com - Bishops seek saint for Internet - Feb. 1, 2003 Hehehe, I especially like how Mark Federman nominates McLuhan......
Pey-ew
I decided to actually get to work on time today. So I stumbled out of the house, half asleep. I picked my clothes, half asleep. Half asleep, I thought I could wear this t-shirt one... more... day. Wrong. Thankfully, I...
Potholes?
No sir. These are not potholes; these are tire shredders. The radical warm up and rain of the last few days has caused severe frost heaves and asphalt decay. It doesn't help that Quebec's road-makers seemingly have NO know-how when...
Sellout post
I thought of a bunch of interesting things to post this weekend and never did. Now they are gone. Obliterated by a staff dinner and party last night. I don't know how I got home last night, or when... or...
Tell it like it is, yeah!
Embrace file-sharing, or die "A record executive and his son make a formal case for freely downloading music. The gist: 50 million Americans can't be wrong."...
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