Category: Digital Culture

Then consider helping out the Wikipedia. As the organizer posted in a letter, they are short of operating expenses for a new server, and since it’s a free (as in beer AND freedom) service, those of us that use it might be convinced to pony up a few bucks for the priviledge.

Well…we’re T-minus 5 hours or so ’til 2004, which sounds weird to me. 2004 seems like some bizarre future-year, where we jet around in flying cars wearing silver jumpsuits.

But…it’s here, and we’re minus the flying car (Except for the Skycar, which I want) and the jumpsuit (thankfully, those went out in the ’70s).

Hope everyone has a great New Years, and stays safe. Looking forward to seeing everyone back in Chapel Thrill.

Finding an envelope in a Civil War era book sealed by the author.

Scary = determining that the envelope contains smallpox scabs from vaccinations.

…is our very own Paul Jones. He’s asked what he wishes would happen, and what he thinks will really happen, in tech in 2004. He’s in the same article as Tim O’Reilly, Howard Rheingold, and Nuala O’Connor Kelly (chief privacy officer for the Office of Homeland Security)….color me impressed!

Congrats, Paul!

Originally seen on Lessig’s Blog, here’s a useful utility that will be overwhelmed with illegal stuff in about 2 days:

Dropload
A place that you can drop a file, and the site sends an email to the recipient of the file and he/she can then pick it up. 50 Meg limit, no child porn or copyright violations, please.

…Jackson!

It’s a back massager, more accurately a Thera-Cane. It’s the most oddly designed massager EVER, and seems nearly useless in my experimenting with it, but served itself well as a white elephant gift!

..via email. In doing some basic bibliographic work for my upcoming Master’s Paper, I discoverd that Larry Lessig has a new book coming out in late March that is concerned with my topic. Deciding that I had little to lose, I dropped him an email outlining what I’m working on, and asking if it were possible to see any of the work before publication.

I just got an email back from him asking for my address so that he could send me a pre-press of it. 🙂 It’s geeky, but I’m thrilled!

Here is a brilliant analysis of the top 5 geek social fallacies. The author (Michael Suileabhain-Wilson) shows a certain amount of deep understanding of geek mental activities and cause-effect relations vis a vis social interactions. Very astute stuff.

So…who thinks they are a carrier of some of these characteristics? I am definitely a GSF3, and have been guilty of GSF1 at times.

I sent this out last semester in an email to the SILS community, but here it is for anyone who forgot. Starting in January, Zipcar will be available on campus.
——-
UNC faculty, staff, students (over 21 years old), and Departments can join Zipcar for only $20/year. Even better, we’ll give you $20 in driving credit for your first month of membership.

That’s a really bad version of me, via Mr. Picasso Head. Check it out…very, very cool use of flash. So smooth, it’s like butter.

Like a big stick of buttah.