Bookdwarf’s officemate has, as her ringtone, the first few bars of Debaser. Just that shrill opening guitar line. I think this is hilarious. Bookdwarf, because she has to hear it, does not. But MIDI is inherently funny. Just look at Steve’s Punk MIDI Page. Laff riot.
Almost as funny as Nut Poppers. Because, you know, owie.
CT on why upgrading software is bad.
Build your own hi-res LCD projector for WAY less. Want want want.
Rather old article on what Paxil is like, in the style of a consumer-products review. This was reposted recently since Paxil’s manufacturers are facing a lot of arguments about whether it’s helpful or dangerous for children and teens. It got me through high school, I’ll tell you that much.
And since certain French Guys seem to think I’m “militantly gay” I’ll post the requisite gay item: The American Family Association (don’t expect to hear them singing “We are family” though) has been posting web polls about whether the world should have, oh, a gay-oriented TV network. They have tried a number of ways to prevent cheating, but they have found, unsurprisingly, that the majority of Americans, or at least the majority of Internet-poll responders, don’t hate freedom as much as the AFA does. Besides, there’s already a network for (presumably) heterosexual men, and several networks for (presumably) heterosexual religious fundamentalists.
Today at the Museum of Contemporary Photography I saw some really neat images described as “C-Prints.” I imagined this was some sort of fancy process. Nope: any enlargement of a color photo. Some of the other good images turned out to be inkjet printouts. Fancy inkjets to be sure, but inkjets nonetheless.
My grandmother insists that photography isn’t art, and I’m sure she’d hate the digital photomanipulation artists, but I love it, especially the unnatural landscapes that a lot of contemporary artists assemble or find… the supersaturated color of schoolbuses in a flooded parking lot, the stark intensity of a highway interchange, lights blurred from long exposure. It’s as pure a mechanism of conveying emotion and image as, say, drypoint etching, or formal oil painting, or sculpture in bronze.
After the MCP visit, I went to the Art Institute of Chicago and reminded myself why I really really really dislike 18th and 19th century painting, especially French and English. That extends to the 17th century in many cases. I know it’s saying a lot to write off three centuries of art, but dammit, it’s all so overblown and melodramatic and… well… foofy. Rococo, Romanticism… I don’t even like impressionists, although I did see a nice etching by Mary Cassat, which, since it was a study for something else, had a sense of immediacy and focus that her more ‘completed’ works didn’t.
Great article on ByteBot about the latest Nautilus, which seems to actually understand the point of the past year or so of GNOME development:
So rather than posting to the mailing lists, or writing factually incorrect articles, it seems that the time has come to move on from the fact that Nautilus by default, has become spatial. The GNOME Desktop has started breaking down the myth of the “average user” and the “power user” and instead focusing on “good defaults and elegant interface design makes software better for everyone to use, regardless of their level of experience”, and drastic changes like this is only going to push the open source desktop further.
Two rather good articles cribbed from Slashdot: Simson Garfinkel on robot gender, and the NYT on the living-ness of virtual pets.
Of course, when you talk about whether they’re alive, it’s a short hop to souls. Does Rover have a soul? Does Asimo or TiVo? And when someone says “what sort of relationship is it appropriate to have with an automaton?” I think immediately of the episode of Futurama where Fry dates a robot, and the rest of the crew shows him a social hygeine film explaining why dating robots is bad. Also Nat and Rony’s paper on robots and, you know, that thing people do.
People often ask me about the availability of particular pieces of software on Linux. They’ll say, “I have a .DOC file, how can I open that on Linux?” and I’ll say, “OpenOffice.org makes a great word processor for Linux, Windows and OS X!” Or they want to know how to edit photos, or use a web browser, or play music.
But when they say they want to watch DVDs, I have to tell them it’s illegal and they get confused. Maybe you didn’t hear the nerds screaming about it five years ago when the Digital Millenium Copyright Act passed, or when the Motion Picture Association of America arranged to have a 14-year-old Norwegian boy arrested (he was eventually freed after a three-year legal battle that destroyed his father’s business). Maybe you didn’t hear when the Russian cryptographer Dmitri Sklyarov was arrested in Las Vegas, or when the Harvard professors got a letter threatening them with legal action and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines if they published their most recent work.
Well, now you know why it mattered five years ago: you don’t own that DVD. You own a limited license to access the data on it from certain licensed players. You may not use still images. You may not skip to an arbitrary portion of it without watching certain advertisements and notices. You may not make backup copies. You may not transfer it to another medium. You may not edit out the dirty parts if you think your kids would be better off without them
It’s theoretically legal, under fair use rights, to do any of those things. It’s just that constructing an unlicensed player is a crime. You can build an unlicensed player, of course– the key bits are simple enough for any 14-year-old computer whiz with a good knowledge of software compilation and encryption technologies. Not brilliant? You’re SOL.
Write your senator. Give to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Or give up.
Censorship, the nature of ickiness, a great summary of Woodward’s new book, one of the many reasons classrooms don’t have windows these days, the deliberate denial of medical service to people you disagree with politically, the return of Country Joe and the Fish, celebrated 60’s antiwar band, a paper on how the author and publisher are really going to get the reader this time, the end of logic, the end of freedom of thought, the end of wilderness and numerous species, the end of medical research, the end of your life, by way of heart disease, and the end of this post, finally.
Oh wait, this looks like a cool photo app. I’m sure it’ll be misused almost immediately.
Just got in from Germany.
Thoughts: God bless the tiny European car, and the tiny European hotel.
Euro MTV shows a lot of awful American shows, which, when watched while jetlagged, are mesmerising. Some were dubbed, some not. Shannen Doherty has a prank show called “Scare Tactics.” There’s a show called “One Bad Trip” where they send a college kid on spring break, and then help the parents spy on them going buck wild. The parents, predictably, are shocked to find exactly what they are looking for, and the kids are embarrassed. What the hell did you expect to see your daughter do at the bikini contest, Joe from Des Moines? “Bet You Will” is like Bumfights, except with college kids: “For $100 can we duct-tape this meat to you?” “OK!” “For $200 will you drink two bottles of hot sauce?” “OK!” (drinks, vomits, collects cash, continues vomiting).
Additional TV watched, after MTV started showing dubbed-into-German “Cowboy Bebop” shows: Eurosport network show following a dozen or so Olympic contenders. The star Polish women’s power-lifter was amazing. Until you’ve seen a woman with bright-pink cornrowed hair and a spandex singlet clean-and-jerk three hundred kilos, you haven’t truly experienced the glory that is the European Union. I didn’t understand a word of what she said to the reporters, but she was so composed and together, and then won the gold medal in the European lifting championships and cried, and it was just really sweet. Or maybe it was that it was 5 AM by that point.
Also I have totally stocked up on duty-free chocolate.
Timing isn’t everything, but it’s an awful lot of things. Love, for example. Or cooking. Or stoplights. Or blog comments and comment spam. Or capital gains.
Short term capital gains, defined as those made when you hold an asset for one year or less, are taxed at thirty percent. Sell after a year and a day, and you’re taxed at fifteen percent. The trick of course is knowing the value a year and a day later– and of course whether the tax rate will slip out from under you in that time. And if I knew things like that, honey, I would live in a much, much bigger house.
Ages ago, Jakub got himself a new digital camera and was playing with it and took a close-up of his eye. I got the picture and was playing with GIMP and turned it all blue. And now Jakub’s big blue eye is being used in the print brochure for the Edinburgh Festival’s production of The Wonderful World of Dissocia. And Jakub and I got a photo credit!
Makes me feel so important and warm inside.
Secretly Ironic 
