Categories
Digital Culture

So very cool

From BoingBoing, I so want one of these. I don’t even wear a watch, but I’d make an exception for any one of these:

radiation watchCyberpunk watchPIMP watch

From TokyoFlash, home of incredibly cool watches from Japan. Who knew such watches even existed? For reference, $1US = roughly 100 Yen….so you’re looking at from just over $100 to nearly $200 depending. That’s nuts, but they are beautiful.

Categories
Music

Noticed something odd while listening to Metallica

So I was riding in to work, listening to a little Metallica, and noticed that James stole lyrics from himself in order to write the theme to their latest album, St. Anger. I give you:

Lyrics from Damage, Inc., off the album Master of Puppets (1986)

Fuck it all and fucking no regrets
Never happy ending on these dark sets

Lyrics from St. Anger, off the album St. Anger (2003)

Fuck it all and fuckin’ no regrets
I hit the lights on these dark sets

Have no idea why I only just noticed that. Or even why it is particularly interesting. 🙂

Categories
Digital Culture Legal Issues Personal

Exciting news

As of last night, I’m officially a moderator for Ourmedia.org, the new collaboration between the Internet Archive, Bryght, Creative Commons, Socialtext, and TuCows (among possible others). I’ll be helping them identify copyright/fair use issues in uploaded content, and contact users and such regarding those issues.

I don’t know if I can adequately express my excitement at helping out with such an ambitious project! With an advisory board composed of the biggest names in digital IP and online culture (Lessig, B0yle, Kahle, Rheingold, Gillmor, Searls) this is going to be huge.

I’ll blog more as I find out more about my role.

Categories
Media Music

Crazy music video resource

Found this on my trek around the intarweb today…an absolutely insane resource for 622 different music videos. I’m especially fond of the Perfect Circle video for Counting Bodies Like Sheep.

Categories
Digital Culture

Eating the ice cream…

Had a really interesting weekend, with more play than work. Friday was poetry night with the Spanish Club at Sewanee, where Betsy read some wonderful stuff by latino/chicano/puertoriqueno/ poets, while I read a couple of pieces from Jorge Luis Borges. Borges is a person that doesn’t get enough credit in the library world (other than the ubiquitous quote in all libraries “I have always imagined that heaven is a type of library”). He invented the an idealized, infinite library (The Library of Babel) that has been a very influential metaphor in literary circles. In addition, of course, he was a librarian at the National Library of Argentina.

The title of the entry is from one of his poems, where he opines “I’ll eat more ice cream, and less beans” in thinking on how he would change his life. This weekend was, as I said, all about ice cream.

Saturday we had drinks with friends Andrea and Will, and then more snacks and discussion with Ruth, Jason, and Nicky. Sunday we spent the afternoon on Tim’s Ford lake at Angela and Paul’s house, with an international crowd of Spaniards, Canadians, Columbians, and Americans. With cava flowing, amazing food, and perfect weather…well, it was the first of what I’m hoping is many wonderful spring days.

Categories
Digital Culture

More Tarheel Celebration pics

More pics from the madness on Franklin Street, this time from Fred.

And even MORE pics. I’m especially fond of this one (you crazy kids!). Via Justinsomnia.

EDIT: and yet even more pics. I love all of these! Makes me wish that I was still at SILS so that I could have taken part in the celebration.

Categories
Personal

Wanna listen to me ramble for 1 1/2 hours?

Here’s my post from the MTSU IT Conference blog, announcing the audio download of my blog presentation. Listen at your own risk.

*******
I’ve normalized the audio of my blog presentation at MTSU, and uploaded it as an MP3, available here (WARNING: ~ 40 Meg MP3). It’s still too big for an MP3 (the OGG is only 17 megs) but I’m not sure what I should do to optimize it. Couple of quick notes on the audio:

After listening to it again, looks like some of the numbers I came up with were a bit off, and I thought I should correct them here:

  • Actual number of articles in wikipedia: 518000, which turns out to be just about 6 times the amount in Britannica, not 5 as I claimed.
  • Technorati lists, at the time of the presentation, 7.8 million blogs. I rounded up to 8 million during the talk…no harm there, I think.
  • I claimed that there were more than 45 languages represented in the Wikipedia. While technically correct, the number of active languages is over 90.

More corrections if I find them. Also available in Ogg Vorbis, for those that prefer that format.

EDIT: One of the blogs & wikis attendees used the blog that we created during the presentation to take notes on the presentation itself. How very meta!!

Creative Commons License
This audio is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Categories
Personal

Testing new look

I ask for your patience…I’ve been looking for a 3-column layout that I liked for awhile now, and I’m partial to this Journalized-Blue template. Going to take some work customizing it, but we’ll see how it goes.

EDIT: So…any thoughts? I’m going to be tweaking the colors for a bit, I think…not sure if I want to go back to the brighter orange/crimson look from long ago, or stick with the muted black/blue look I’ve got now. Reasons I changed:

  • I had been manually dealing with my links, and wanted to swap to the native WP link handler.
  • Wanted a mini-blog area where I could do Justin-like Neatlinks.
  • Wanted a better integration of Pages links.
  • 3 Columns gives me more room for experimenting with sidebar tools.
  • Can isolate metablog content, and link content in seperate bars.

Things I’d like: anyone out there know how I can get the content div to automagically size images to fit? Any thoughts on the new look? Better? Worse? Should I go back?

Categories
Library Issues

Color me surprised

Walt Crawford has a blog! Welcome to the blogosphere, Walt…I’ve been a reader of Cites & Insights for some time now, and (like many, many others, evidently) asked you at one point about why you weren’t blogging. Now that you are, I look forward to adding you to my daily reading list.

Categories
Digital Culture

Pics of the Champs

Paul Jones puts up some pictures from the Tarheels return to the Dean Dome after the win.

More on the aftermath of the win, found at Is That Legal and Greenespace.

Wish we were there!