Posts

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Two-Headed Turtle

Quite amazing piece of video collage / editing from the Guerrilla News Network in this piece S-11 Redux : Surfing the Apocalypse, somewhere between art and politics. Hits hard. Did me, anyway, especially the “Deliverance” bits.

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Two-headed turtle found in Florida — ” …. said the two-headed creature likely is a natural occurrence, not caused by chemicals or any other outside influence.”

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Dan Gilmor writes 10 choices that were critical to the Net’s success for the Mercury News, an excellent primer not so much on the history of the Internet, as on the decisions that were or were not made that allowed networks to proliferate at the right places, be reigned in at the right places, and to multiply everywhere else.

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Attended Andrew’s opening at Richmond Art Center, purchased one of his pieces, a dark + green upward slurping thick acryclic piece, to be delivered in November. Party at their house afterwards. Babies everywhere, except for ours and Gina’s, which haven’t popped out yet.

Music: William Parker – Hunk Pappa Blues

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Wait for Yoko To Call

Read a piece today over lunch about a Yoko Ono exhibit in SF. During installation of the piece, Yoko saw a white phone for the museum guards. She put up a sign over the phone: “Wait for Yoko to call,” making it part of the exhibit. When the show opened, a visitor grabbed the phone when a guard wasn’t looking and called his own cell with it, so the number came up on his display. Now he had the #.
Continue reading “Wait for Yoko To Call”

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Human Lighter Than Cat

UN Secretary General Kofi Anan has warned the United States not to act alone against Iraq. Bush is apparently unphased by the warning. How can a serious, official warning from the rest of the world mean nothing to us? Are we really so righteous? Do we know something the rest of the world doesn’t know? Is war entirely about politics now? It’s as if war isn’t even taken seriously by the world’s most powerful leader, like it’s a trifle to be played with for rhetorical purposes. I’m so afraid we’re heading for WWIII, right on the brink of Appleseed’s birth.

Speaking of which, when we first learned Amy was pregnant, back in January, we calculated that the birth could end up being very close to Sept. 11. We hoped it wouldn’t come on that day (yes, superstitious), and were glad to have gotten through yesterday’s tickertape without her going into labor.

Amy reminded me today that the kid will weigh around 7-8 pounds. Our cats weigh 11 and 15 pounds respectively. A human smaller (much smaller) than a cat. Can you get to that?

Music: A Certain Ratio – Loss

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Primitive Tech

Archaeologists have discovered what appears to be one of the first 404s created by humans:

View image

(OK, I admit I’m a bit enthralled by MT’s image upload feature – it even creates all the HTML embed or javascript pop-up code for you – no more passing through BBEdit, no more FTP… most excellent).

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Importing LiveJournal Entries to Movable Type

Amanita.net offers a LiveJournal to MovableType import/export script. I honestly didn’t think I’d be able to make the jump with all my old content intact. Unfortunately it required a bunch of perl modules I didn’t have. Started compiling those, only to find that one required the expat lib, which refused to compile. Realized I hadn’t upgraded to Jaguar’s devtools – that brought the compiler back, and I did get expat compiled, but the perl module dance took another hour. Anyway, finally got it all happening, and the script worked perfectly.

Amazingly, Amanita offers to do the conversion for you if you can’t make it happen. Send them a batch of zipped LJ XML files and you get back a zipped pack of MT backup files to import. People who rock are so cool.

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LHPO

The Large Hot Pipe Organ is the world’s only MIDI controlled, propane powered explosion organ. The LHPO’s pyro-acoustic explodo-rhythmations will throbbatize your earholes and dance-ify your booty and make you realize what “Industrial Music REALLY means! .”

Get one of the MP3s playing and look through the picture galleries, or watch one of the movies. When is this coming to my town?

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iCal, AmphetaDesk

Fairly impressed with the first release of iCal, but disappointed that you can’t publish to a single calendar from more than one location. I would have expected a calendar to be attached to a single .mac account – instead it’s attached to the computer you’re on. That means you have to, say, publish your work calendar from work and subscribe to it from home, and vice versa. Amy and I are both publishing our own calendars and subscribing to each other’s even though we’d rather just have a shared calendar (you can’t edit a subscribed calendar). This is a possible disappointment for landwater, who I want to move off phpWebCal and onto iCal. I would expect Apple to figure out that this is badly designed for groups soon.

Now setting up for the next big J-School webcast, this time a week long panel on Food and the Environment. Will take place while I’m probably out for paternity leave, so teaching students to run the whole thing. This time will be using Apple’s free broadcast software under OS X, rather than the pricier stuff we used under OS 9 last time around.

I’m becoming addicted to AmphetaDesk, but am open to suggestions on better RSS aggregators (besides Radio).

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Sherlock Lies

Why does Sherlock include a button called “Yellow Pages” when this component actually functions like a white pages? If you type in “diaper,” it will find all diaper services in your area with “diaper” in their names, but none that don’t. In other words, it searches by business name, not by business category.

Pill earrings for that special laaaa-deeeee….

Oh lord, those kittens (turn it up!)

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Green Hillbillies

Funny, I never figured out as a kid that Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies were inside out mirror images of each other — rich folks move in with the country hicks, country hicks move to the posh hillsides. And how did I finally figure it out? From reading in the paper today that two new reality shows this season are going to make those two shows “real.” Save us.