Category: Digital Culture

I just discovered this a few days ago, but Audible has downloadable files of the Library of Congress Digital Future series. If you have a music player that supports audible, these are free downloads! I listened to Lessig today, and have Brewster Kahle on tap for my monday drive to work. Tons of good info here, and again…it’s free.

I must have this shirt.

Edit: Boooo..why is my animated gif not animating?

Edit^2: ahhhh…thanks guys. Browser issue, not gif issue.

For those of you that have been long-time readers (all 3 of you) of this blog, you’ve seen it go through three major restructurings, mainly having to do with my search for software that I liked. I started on Blogger, then moved to Radio Userland, and finally ended up at the nirvana that is WordPress 1.5. I had long ago imported my Blogger posts, but didn’t realize until today that there was a way (albeit clumsy) to import my Userland posts as well (or import any RSS entries, really).

And thus, a 6 month hole in the archives is filled!

Previously May 2003 – November 2003, my period of experimenting with Radio, had just been lost. But using the rss import abilities of WordPress I’ve got them in the right places. The import is very rough…there are no titles, and the presentation is quite poor (take a look and see what I mean). But at least the content is there, and I can work on making them pretty as I need. I’m just happy that they are there, and searchable.

With those old posts imported, WordPress tells me that this will be my 637th post. Crazy when you think about it that way.

Ultimate Gamer!! GM says drop 2d10, aanndd… you roll 86% !

What, are you a first generation gamer? Did you own the brown box?! Whatever you do in your spare time, gaming seems to be your job. Either you looked up the answers or you’re the best of the best, the type that makes other gamers strive to know more. Just don’t let the knowledge overwhelm the newbies, it tends to push them from the hobby. We all bow before you. You are the living nat 20, congradulations. I’m going to flee the scene now 😉

Link: The Real Gamers use Dice Test

Interesting stuff coming from the CampusEAI Consortium, where a group of Internet2 campuses are putting together a webcast student oriented video channel. You can see the stream here, if you are on an Internet2 pipeline.

This raises all sorts of interesting intellectual property questions. I can’t seem to find a copyright notice on the page in question, and my quick searches through the site didn’t help much either. I’m curious as to who owns the rights to the content…the organization? The students that produce it? The schools? It’s an interesting question which will only come to the forefront when something happens to the content that someone involved doesn’t like…the stream is captured and remixed, the audio content is stripped and podcast, or there is the appearance on screen of media that is copyrighted and clearances haven’t been given.

I find the labyrinth of this stuff fascinating, in a “animal eating its own young” kind of way. There is going to be an implosion of rights vs content sometime very soon.

Looking back at birthday’s past, I find a rather maudlin note from 2003 and a happier note from 2004. Pics from 2004 as well in the Gallery.

This is actually one of my favorite things about blogging, is the ability to look back over the years and see where I was, what I was interested in, and what was going on in the world.

That said, this year is very good. I’ve got opportunities in front of me, and a satisfying life here with Betsy in TN. The external world sometimes presses in upon us, but left to our own devices the two of us are doing wonderfully. I can’t really ask for more.

A man was beheaded in a frenzied and prolonged axe attack in a London street today.

The axeman, smartly-dressed and in his thirties, felled his victim with one blow and then struck repeatedly “as if he was chopping wood”.

When asked why he had done it, he told officers: “It’s complicated. It’s private.”

Officers didn’t report on the bizarre electrical storm that surely followed the beheading.

One of the wierder sections of Betsy’s contract with The University of the South is that as a tenure track professor she has a right to a plot in the University Cemetery. It’s a very old cemetery for this part of the country, with gravesites dating to before the Civil War. The photo is one of the plot markers that dot the ground among the graves.