Uneventful Saturday, thus far. Hoping to go see Daredevil this evening, but don’t have firm plans yet. Been working on homepage and rescuing all of my old web projects (like the wedding page I did, as well as the HIVEMIND website for my Raw Deal group).
Also working on a project for classes on anonymity on the web….checking how good certain anonymity products are.
So I’ve decided to gather a bunch of the web stuff I’ve done over the last bunch of years and link them all together from my homepage.
To that end: www.unc.edu/~griffey/
I’ll be slowly putting everything together over the weekend…we’ll see how quickly it comes together.
I listened to some news reports today about people buying up all the plastic sheeting and duct tape in stores because some governement official suggested that they would be useful if there was a bio-terrorist attack. The theory is that you would seal the windows and such in your house to keep the bad stuff from getting in.
Are you kidding me?
Of the possible bio-agents, I can’t think of a single one that would reliably be stopped by silly attempts like this. Not to even START on the likelyhood of the average person doing a good job of sealing the entire house…all the vents (including the plumbing vents on the roof? the bathroom vents?)…it’s just silly fear-mongering.
*sigh*
I’ve mostly stopped watching the news due to stuff like this. This was on the radio…guess I’m gonna have to just read the paper from now on…
I can’t BELIEVE that the American people are falling for the propoganda of the current administration….how quickly we are doped by the media feeding us FUD.
Have we already forgotten all the problems with Bush and company? Cheney still hasn’t come clean about his role with the energy conglomerates, we’ve got a war machine that seems to be COMPLETELY IGNORING the guy that everyone in America WANTS dead (bin Laden) and instead we just blindly are supporting a war that, as far as I can tell, seems to be just an attempt to finish what his father didn’t.
We’ve got an ACKNOWLEDGED psychopath running North Korea, who we KNOW has nuclear capabilities…and we’re ignoring him.
Anyone who claims this isn’t about oil and some fucked up American empire that Bush is trying to build is just fooling themselves.
And I blaim the media for most of the problems…not a single major TV news agency has hit the air with a story contrary to that they are being fed by the government. It’s just unbelievable.
This is one of the few times I’ve been ashamed to be an American.
A little note about the title of my blog: it’s from the newest book by William Gibson. The book itself deals with branding and the saturation of symbols that we all just look past if we notice at all. The main character has an allergy of sorts to brand iconography…the Nike swoosh, golden arches….these marketing devices literall make her ill. Really a clever book thus far…very different from some of his other works. It’s more “near” than “future”….but the title jumped out at me. That’s what I think most intelligent people are trained to do…see patterns where others don’t. It’s something that I’m going to work on improving and formulating a bit more as the blog goes on.
Two very good quotes from Samuel Clemens….
Whenever a copyright law is to be made or altered, then the idiots assemble.
– Mark Twain’s Notebook, 1902-1903
Only one thing is impossible for God: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.
– Mark Twain’s Notebook, 1902-1903
Something I think about randomly: because of the current information fear climate (RIAA, MPAA, DMCA, PATRIOT and all the other combinations of letters we are barraged with on a near-daily basis now) will we learn to question every exchange of information with this question:
Is this legal?
Springboard for this thought today: when I learned that my wife was showing a film to her university class, my very first question was “does that count as a “public” showing?”
It’s a sad thing that I even really needed to think that at all, much less for me to assume that there might be something wrong with educational use of an info source.
So…a little about me:
I’m a current Master’s student in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. My academic interests have to do with privacy, information ownership and digital rights, copyright and copyleft, the future of information sharing, structure, and availability. My background is in philosophy, and it shows in some of my interests.
Outside of academia, I’m a computer nut, and a gamer. My primary gaming outlet is as a playtester for the game Raw Deal, a collectible card game from Comic Images based on the World Wrestling Entertainment brand of professional wreslting. I’ve been watching pro wrestling since I was 7 years old, and aside from the silly storylines at times, really appreciate the athleticism and skill it takes.
Those are my rough interests, which I’m sure I’ll flesh out as this blog grows over time.
Done with the presentation by esr. Very interesting stuff, especially the discussion of how to influence business to migrate to open source alternatives. Mainly concerned with appealing to Fear, Greed, and Ambition (here’s why you want to do this, here’s why you make more money doing this, and here’s why it will make you more important to the company, in short).
Good stuff all around. Heading off now to play Raw Deal (more on that later).
After having dinner with Eric Raymond and then having him speak in our class, I’m on my way to his public presentation. Should be interesting…not sure where I come down on the free/open debate. I’m guessing we’ll have more of a chance to discuss it as the semester rolls on.