They’ve released version 2.0 of the fine and mighty WordPress software that drives our blogs! When I get a free minute I’ll have to explore upgrading … and fixing the CAPTCHA … and catching up on old posts … and …
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And we have yet another search engine entering the fray. Looks like some bright bulbs decided to combine social tagging a la del.icio.us, Flickr, and CiteULike with the joys of Google. And thus was born Wink, which just opened as a beta site. (They also have a development blog with more history, etc.)
It seems like a nice enough idea, but it’s not clear to me why people are going to invest the time and energy necessary to make it work. Social tagging and recommender systems like this live or die on the willingness of a significant number of people to invest at least a little in the building and maintenance of the tags. Given how damnedly useful Google is in its unadorned state, I just don’t see a high percentage of users making that investment. Some probably will, but my money says that it won’t be enough to take off.
That said, they did point me at GRIN (GReat Images in NASA), which is a pretty darn cool collection. So we’ll all have to wait and see…
My grades are in (huzzah!) and it’s snowing gently.
Grading always takes me too long, and I always put too much of it off later than I should and blah and blah and blah. To be perfectly honest I’m not very good at being a responsible adult.
But it’s done now and it’s quite beautiful outside with a light snow falling in night. I think that some sleep is in order, and then a little time off before getting back into course prep, lab admin, and research…
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Working through some grading on my American Roots Music FYS class, I stumbled across this wonderful bio of the early blues giant Charlie Patton by the great comics artist R. Crumb.
Some digging suggests this is taken from from R. Crumb draws the blues, which I’ve dashed off and added to my wish list :-).
Currently listening to: More of the vast Screamin’ and hollerin’ the blues: The worlds of Charley Patton. Very cool stuff…
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Oh, I bet this is gonna be fun! The good people at ccMixter.org (related to CreativeCommons.org) are sponsoring a cool contest:
This is a contest for artists to mix audio tracks under 4 minutes which use provided voice samples from Ben Franzen and Kembrew McLeod’s forthcoming film, “Copyright Criminals.” Samples from the film include voiceovers from De La Soul, DJ Qbert, members of Public Enemy, Matmos, Coldcut, members of Negativland, and others. The best overall winner will be included prominently in the film and the top 11 other entries are to be included on a companion CD.
There’s some great source material to work with; if you haven’t checked out the 10+ minute preview of the film, I definitely recommend it. Personally, I love this line from Harry Allen (of Public Enemy fame):
I’ve never, I’ve never really heard a completely original music idea by anyone…
The way he repeats the first two words has a neat rhythm to it and lots of potential as a loop element, and you gotta love the sentiment…
You’ve got until the end of February, so get busy!
Currently listening to: The excellent “The battle” from Lady Sovereign’s Vertically challenged EP. This is an amazing display of ultra-high-speed UK grime spitting; the skill of it just blows me away. Yup, this is another fine Xmas prezzie, this time from Sub-Evil Boy - rock on!
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As I was wandering the web avoiding grading doing some course prep for Arne and my course next semester on “Open Source vs. Proprietary Techonology: The Economics of Networks and Innovation” (a title only an academic could love!) I ran across a link on del.icio.us to a nice on-line collection of arabic calligraphy by Mouneer Al-Shaarani.
I figured WeatherGirl would want to check it out since she’s really into art based (sometimes quite loosely) on text and text-like figures. This calligraphy is nice, then, because it really shows the broad possibilities in (arabic) calligraphy ranging from very “traditional” to extremely abstract. Neat stuff.
Currently listening to: The way-nifty John Peel: A tribute 2 CD set that WeatherGirl’s mum gave me for Xmas. Any collection with both Lonnie Donegan and Captain Beefheart just has to be a lot of fun!
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Richard M. Smith has a nifty (if risky) idea for finding out if Big Brother is reading your e-mail as it wends its merry way through the back alleys of the IntarWeb. The basic trick is to set up some new e-mail addresses, where one is inside the U.S. and one is outside the U.S., and then send e-mail between them that’s (a) likely to gain the (probably unwelcome) attention of the Feds and (b) contains a URL that said snoopers are going to want to follow. Create that URL on some web site where you have admin access, make sure it’s not accessible anywhere else, and the keep an eye on the access logs. If someone visits, it’s presumably because they’ve been reading your naughty e-mails.
It’s a pretty clever scheme and would probably work, but I can’t imagine actually doing it. Do I really need Dick Cheney’s buds coming ’round at teatime for a chat? I’m thinking my time would be better spent working for a change in the current paranoid political climate in the U.S. than tinkering around with this sort of stuff and inadvertently getting strip searched on my way to Germany as a result.
Props to Boing Boing via del.icio.us for the link.
Currently listening to: The amazing 7 CD + massive amounts of cool text Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton that my folks got me for Christmas. This is a truly monster piece of musicology - the kind of thing that ought to be on our coffee table if (a) we had one and (b) the cats wouldn’t sleep on it (or worse).
No tag for this post.It’s over.
It is what it is,
and not what it could
should
might
be.
The stores are (hopefully) closed
quiet,
empty,
and even Amazon and FedEx can’t save you now.
There’s only the snow outside,
a hot cup of tea inside,
a pair of goofy cats,
and the two of you,
who have given me as fine a year
as anyone could hope for.
Thanks.
No tag for this post.Here’s wishing everyone (and especially our dogged and faithful readers) a happy holidays however you choose to celebrate them. (We choose to eat too much, but that’s just us.)
Thanks for helping make our first year of individual blogging a lot of fun, and for being patient as we stumble about in the maze of possibilities that is the Modern IntarWeb Thing!
I’m sorry, but we’ve gone and done something silly: Sub-Evil Boy and I made our first podcast.
This is pretty rough and goofy stuff, so waste the bandwidth at your own peril. This episode features the two of us totally butchering a fine pair Christmas carols (I’m particularly amused by what we did with “Deck the halls” at the very end), and a perhaps slightly over-long “news” report on the demise of Godzilla followed by a discussion of the great short the classic short Bambi meets Godzilla (I got the names reversed in our discussion).
I have no idea if we’ll ever do another one of these again. It was way too amusing, but I could hardly describe the results as high art. It was also somewhat time consuming which made it easier to pull off on Christmas eve than during the chaos of “real life”. I’m also not entirely sure that WeatherGirl will continue to allow us to remain in the house if we continue to produce these insults to human intelligence, but we’ll have to wait and see :-).
If you really want to suffer you can use stuff our RSS feed link into a Podcast capable thingy like iTunes and get automatic updates. Sorry about that. Really.
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