Category: Digital Culture

Very funny “You know you live in Chapel Hill when...” post.

Interesting case out of Florida…the band Hell on Earth is interested in having someone commit suicide live onstage while they are performing, and a terminally ill patient has agreed to do so. Evidently, the State has a problem with this.

Story from Rolling Stone

I have so many problems with this, I can't even begin to list them all.

The University of Florida has began using a program called Icarus to discover students on campus using their computers as servers, and requiring them to stop. This is supposedly to prevent P2P abuse and limit copyright violations. The problem is, of course, that it also prevents ANY FREAKING USE OF THE COMPUTER AS A SERVER. You can play games on a LAN, you can't do an enormous number of useful and educational things with your computer. The burden of proof is up to the student to show that his use of the system is non-violating…this just strikes me as a priori censorship…no one is going to TRY if they know they're going to be dragged before the school and forced to defend themselves. So no more P2P downloading songs you already own (NOT a copyright violation), or using P2P to grab large files (linux distributions, etc…). Stupid, stupid, stupid….

Full story at Wired News.

I’m just testing some new blog software…WordPress, an offshoot of B2. We’ll see how this goes for a bit, with some tweaking. I like Userland, but this has some advantages, esp the fact that I can access it from anywhere, rather than just from my laptop.

So, unless I get Tiki working, and it just blows me out of the water, I will switch over to WordPress.

Photos are up from our trip this past weekend. No captions yet, but that's mainly because we took SO MANY FREAKING PICTURES. Over the course of basically 3 days, we took 185 pictures or so…go, go digital camera!

A quick review: lots of friends, beautiful campus, wacky old sanitarium, karaoke party, wonderful dinner and lots of fun.

Bets at the OU marker	The oldest building at Ohio University.	The main green at Ohio University	Bets and Tim

Some quick shots from our weekend trip to our previous Master's institution, Ohio University. Had a great time, although I had forgotten how much I loved the place.

Did you ever wonder where you might find Pinup girls on the internet? How about Zombies? How about both?

Zombie Pinups wins my vote for best internet art project of the day.

Well….Check her out! It's a Betsy in the Gazette!

Very cool: from BoingBoing
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Neal Stephenson launches a Wiki to explain his new novel
Inpsired by Quicksilver, his giant doorstop of a new novel, Neal Stephenson has put up a wiki where his readers can collaboratively annotate the ideas in the book:
My own view of the Metaweb is pretty straightforward: I don't think that the Internet, as it currently exists, does a very good job of explaining things to people. It is great for selling stuff, distributing news and dirty pictures, and a few other things. But when you need to get a good explanation of something, whether it is a scientific principle, a bit of gardening advice, or how to change a tire, you have to sift through a vast number of pages to find the one that gives you the explanation that is right for you. Generally this is not a problem with the explanations themselves. On the contrary, it seems as though a lot of people like to explain things on the Internet, and some of them are quite good at it. The problem lies in how these explanations are organized.

We have been looking for a way to get an explanation system seeded for a long time, and it occurred to us that a set of annotations to my book might be one way to get it started. At first, the explanations here will be strongly tied to characters and situations in QUICKSILVER and so may be of only limited interest to those who have not read the book. However, with a few clicks we might move on to more general explanations. For example, Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle appear as characters in QUICKSILVER, and so early on we might see annotations concerning specific things that they are shown doing in the book. But later these might link to explanations of Boyle's Law. Such an explanation need not refer to QUICKSILVER in any way, and so it could be useful to, say, a high school student who has never heard of me or my book but who needs to understand Boyle's Law and why it is important.

It's late, and I should be working on my bibliography for my assignment due tomorrow in INLS 180. Instead, I'm going to blog about Jean's post about being excited about technology. Here are the moments when I remember being wow'd by technology in some way:

1. In 1993, when a friend and I figured out how to get Mosiac running on the university system at Morehead State University. It involved a lot of kludging with setup in UNIX, and we weren't even sure why we were bothering until we saw our first webpage with images. Then we understood.

2. In 1991, when I started at Morehead, and got my first email account on Bitnet. I had to send mail through a gateway to get to other systems (like the Internet). It was still amazing.

3. In 1992 or so, when I discovered Usenet, and the amazing things that you can find out if you have the capability of asking several million people all at once.

4. In 1997 or '98, when we managed to get DSL in our apartment. Like Einstein told us, things really ARE different at high speeds.

5. When I came to SILS in 2002 and discovered 802.11b. It took me a week to see it in action, and immediately run out and buy a wireless router. When you combine speed with ubiquity, it's like having your own personal god on the couch with you answering your every desire.