Just discovered this guy at Bad News Hughes. His latest post showed up on BoingBoing, but everything on the site is hilarious. The guys has a great writing style…I laughed out loud reading some of his stuff.
Check it out.
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Month: January 2004
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Interesting blogmeme
From Justin, an interesting new meme: where have you been in the US?
Lived in: KY, OH, MD, NC
Family in: GA, SC, TN
Vacationed/conferenced in: TN, WV, LA, CA, TX, IN, FL, VA
Interesting to see the geographic focusing of my travels.
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Interesting new blog toy
The Laszlo Soundblox seems like it might be an interesting toy for broadband bloggers…effectively just an embedded MP3 player, it allows people visiting your site to choose from things that you’ve uploaded and play them from a WinAmp or ITunes like system on your page. It’s also Open Source, using the Apache Open Source License.
Good example of the use for this thing over on John Perry Barlow’s blog, where you can listen to a couple of his talks on the Public Domain and Fair Use.
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Crawlathon
This weekend for me is the Carter Caves Crawlathon. I worked at Carter Caves in Olive Hill, KY, all the way through college as a summer job. The first year I was a busboy, mainly because the park manager was less than appreciative of hiring me (I played the political card, which in KY at the time was the only way to get a state job). The next 4 years, however, I worked as a cave guide/naturalist on the park, doing interpretive work both above and under the ground.
It was the best job ever. I got paid to do what people then paid to do. I spent 5-7 hours a day underground, leading tourists around and talking to them about the history of the area, the caves, the animals and even the rocks. It’s reminiscent of the reference desk…you’re the expert, and people come to you for the answers.
I’m nothing if not a sucker for a power trip. 🙂
According to this story from the AP.
And on that note: happy new year, everyone!
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Sudden Realization
After looking over these last two posts, I’ve realized that perhaps using my blog as a tool for getting a job…..probably not gonna happen.
🙂
Eh…if they can’t take a joke, do I really wanna work there? And if I’m gonna have to censor myself online…I’m not sure it’s worth any job.
What do you guys think?
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State of the Union Address
Wow. All I can say…wow. When did we completely forget that whole “Church/State” thing, George? As if his stance on same-sex marriage wasn’t Paleolithic in nature, his attempt to get “faith based initiatives” is just insane.
I cannot express how frightening it is to me to have a President that panders to religion to the degree that W has. Then again, I’m an atheistic zealot, so of course I’d feel that way.
But I can’t wait until we outgrow this whole “religious” thing in our thinking as humans.
Current intellectual property law is making, it seems to me now, what philsophers might call a category mistake, and here in libraries we might simply call misclassification. This sort of thing happens all the time in the history of science…it appears as if something should be classified one way, either because of explanatory power or just raw appearance. Lower organisms were thought to arise via abiogenesis, the sun moves around the earth, diseases are caused by an imbalance of humours in the body. It also happens in law…legal history is full of examples where classifications turned out to be simply wrong (primarily when it comes to women and minorities).
The reason that I make the science link is that often it is technology that allows the category error to be rectified. The microscope allowed abiogenesis to be proven false, the telescope to show that the shifting of the stars couldn’t be explained by the Earth being the center of the universe.
Broadband and ubiquitous computing, combined with the digital supply chain, will force a reexamination of copyright in much the same way that Pasteur forced a reexamination of the theory of disease. Before broadband and affordable personal computers, the supply chain of intellectual property had analog pieces…books, VHS tapes, the film at a theater. By the “digitization” of the supply chain, I mean that the chain via which media and other intellectual property is distributed is “broken” of its analog history…there is a step in which the property becomes digital, at which point our current tools (high speed networks and personal computers) tell us that what was once “property” cannot really be considered that way anymore. It’s like a microscope focusing for the first time on the eggs of the larva in leaf litter…the mystery of life is taken away from the inorganic, and moved into the realm of the biological. Computers are telling us that “intellectual property” may need this same shift to occur, that we need to take the focus off of “property” and find another label more fitting the object.
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Quick answer to Eli
Have been having a spirited discussion over on Confessions of a Mad Librarian with Eli Edwards, one of the more interesting people that I met at ALA Midwinter.
So, in answer to her latest question (and to drag some of the traffic onto my blog via trackback): Absolutely, I support Lessig and Eldred (and Creative Commons). These sorts of alternatives not only increase the public awareness of the overall absurdity of current copyright law, but give those who are already aware means of bypassing the lockdown completely. This blog (and all of my academic work here at UNC that is web-based) has been given an appropriate use license, and I go to great lengths to convince others that it is the right thing to do.
Now, that being said: I am well aware that Creative Commons and other licensing schemes of their ilk (GNU, OGL) rely on the power of the US Copyright law to function. This is an irony of which I am not ignorant. 🙂 I think that the fairest implementation of a limit on copyright terms may be Lessig’s suggestion of trivial economic subscription, by asking copyright holders that are interested in maintaining their copyright to pay $1 a year to hold it.
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Great quote…
From Daniel Dennett, author of Consciousness Explained and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea on libraries and scholarship.
“A scholar is a library’s way of making another library.”