Listening to a podcast of a concert by Art Brut as part of NPR’s Live Concerts series. I didn’t know anything about these folks, but this is a total blast of loud, punk fun. Silly, strange, and definitely bad for your hearing.
A complete hoot, really :-). I’m definitely in favor!
Tags: live concert, Music, podcast, Radio
The wonderful John Peel used to organize the Festive 50 each year, where listeners would vote for their 3 favorite songs of the year, restricted to songs that Peel had actually played on his radio show. The results would be tallied, and he would then play the 50 top vote getters over two consecutive nights in late December. These were some amazingly great shows, and I can’t begin to recount how many of my favorite songs I first heard via his Festive 50 shows.
The folks at Dandelion Radio are trying to continue the tradition, and voting ends tonight, so rush on over there if you’d like your voice to be heard. (They say the voting ends at midnight, but they don’t provide a time zone. I’m gonna assume GMT unless someone out there knows different.)
I’m glad they’re making the effort, and I’m gonna vote, but I must say that I’m not entirely convinced. One of the things that was cool about Peel’s Festive 50 was that it was restricted to things he’s played on his show. Thus it “felt” like him even though the listeners chose the tracks and their order. Here it’s a free-for-all, so I’m not at all sure what it’s gonna sound like. I look forward to listening after Xmas, though.
So, choices, choices…
Getting down to 3 is really hard. And any list I make is likely to be skewed to the first half of 2007 since I haven’t been listening to nearly as much new music since we came to the UK (and left KUMM behind for the year). All that said, and after much agonizing, my choices are gonna be:
Some serious contenders included:
All three of the albums that my top three came from are great, but I think I’d have to choose Tessuti as my fave album of the year, with the other two coming a very, very close second. Angeli’s music has such depth, power, and finesse that I find myself drifting to the language of classical music to describe it, and I mean that in the best possible way. Profound and wonderful stuff.
The albums by Sage Francis and Mavis Staples are also incredibly powerful, if in very different ways to Tessuti. Francis’ work is so full of intelligence and perception that it makes my head spin, and even after many months Sub-Evil and I still love jamming out to almost anything from this album. (He, in fact, argued quite cogently for “Civil Obedience” from this disc, but in the end I had to go with my gut and choose “Going back to rehab”.) Staples’ voice is rich and powerful, projecting all her years of experience as a musician and civil rights activist. An album like this could have sounded like a museum piece, retreading songs that were important decades ago. In her hands, though, these songs are fresh and powerful and relevant. Truly great stuff.
Go enjoy some music, and consider voting if that’s your sort of thing.
Tags: Best of the year, Festive Fifty, John Peel, KUMM, lists, MusicThose crazy kids at KOffice have created a simplified version of their office suite especially geared for kids. A cool feature, though, is that it’s fully interoperable with the “adult” version of the suite, so teachers/parents can open documents created by students/kids and vice versa. Nice.
open… has some nice thoughts on the role of open source in a process like this:
Tags: Education, open source, softwareThese are precisely the kind of innovations that free software makes so easy: hacking together a quick prototype and then polishing it. Let’s hope that other simplified versions follow, since an “Easy” Office would be useful far beyond its original target market, education.
It would also be a nice riposte to never-ending complexification of Microsoft’s own products, which are forced to add more and more obscure features - whether or not users what them - in a desperate attempt to justify yet another paid-for upgrade. Free software is under no such pressure, and can therefore downgrade applications when that might appropriate, as here. Microsoft, by contrast, is trapped by its ratchet-based business model.
The ever enlightening John Naughton is suggesting that TV execs perhaps have their heads in the sand about the changes in how much we watch TV. Sadly, this isn’t terribly surprising, and could no doubt be extended to include almost everyone in the “old school” entertainment industry (RIAA, MPAA).
At the end, however, he has this brilliant bit:
Bill Thompson has a vivid way of expressing this: no child entering primary school this year will ever buy a television set, he predicts.
Wow - doesn’t that just nail it? I shared this with WeatherGirl (who was probably being productive instead of just surfing the net for random crap), and she pointed out that our family may well have purchased our last TV several years ago. We’ll certainly buy video display systems in the future, but probably not TVs in the classic tuner+display form.
Tags: change, future, TV
Yup, crazy as it sounds. Eyetrack has collected some nice user data, which they summarize in “What We Saw When We Looked Through Their Eyes”, which is then reorganized in “Scientific Web Design: 23 Actionable Lessons from Eye-Tracking Studies” over at VirtualHosting.com.
At some point I should go through these with some care and think about how they apply here. I tend to generate pretty cluttered designs - I keep trying cram in the information, and I end up with more Redmond than Google, I’m afraid. Maybe I should rethink that a bit.
Tags: blog, design, HCI, usability, web design
Gotta love cool street names. This is in an area just north of the Colchester City Centre called the Dutch Quarter (see map).
Tags: Colchester, my photography, SabbaticalTechnology publishing magnate Tom O’Reilly apparently gets loads of questions and comments from confused fans of Bill O’Reilly. Awfully nice of him to share some of their more charming idiosyncratic behaviors!
Meanwhile, we get some real humdingers showing how out of touch with reality some of the O’Reilly Factor fans are.
I have read in The Onion newpaper, that Bush has cut off diplomatic relations with Congress. I found this to be unbelievable and I thought it would be illegal! Can you check it out and see if it is true? How can you run a government and not talk to the Congress??
Not only can Bill O’Reilly’s fans not distinguish between a technology publisher and a right wing pundit, they can’t tell that the Onion is a satire! Or else they are just trying to yank his chain. (But someone smart enough to do that would know that oreilly.com is not theoreillyfactor.com.)
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When Republican candidates are reduced to this sort of nonsense, you know there’s trouble afoot. Man, I want a president endorsed by Chuck Norris. And the reference to Huckabee’s hunting experience right after the border protection point was just plain creepy.
Apparently this is the only campaign ad this guy is gonna run.
shudder…
Thanks (I think?) to Marc Andreessen for the pointer.
Tags: Politics, VideoIn a neat confluence of recent posts on both Squeak and book marketing, Squeak by example is being made available as a free PDF or in printed form via lulu.com. Cool.
Big ups to open… for the tip.
Tags: Books, Computing, media distribution, publishing, Squeak
One of the key points in the excellent Lessig TED video mentioned here recently is that our copyright and IP laws are so patently (ho, ho) absurd that we’re creating a generation of infringers. Our kids grow up routinely violating copyright laws. Some do so knowingly, and just dismiss the laws in question as so silly as to be of no consequence. Others veil their transgression in a fog of rationalization and (often willful) misunderstanding of copyright law. And none of it’s good.
Now we have this amazing paper by John Tehranian that makes it clear that this really isn’t just a problem for “the kids” (whatever that meant anyway). We are all up to our necks in this stuff, and it just isn’t pretty. Tehranian estimates that he personally racks up $12.45 million of potential liability every day! And this isn’t due to some crazy P2P spree, this is just living his life. Most of it is extraordinarily common everyday activities like reading e-mail:
In the morning, John checks his email, and, in so doing, begins to tally up the liability. Following common practice, he has set his mail browser to automatically reproduce the text to which he is responding in any email he drafts. Each unauthorized reproduction of someone else’s copyrighted text—their email—represents a separate act of brazen infringement, as does each instance of email forwarding. Within an hour, the twenty reply and forward emails sent by John have exposed him to $3 million in statutory damages.
It would appear that I potentially bankrupted myself and my family this morning, and all I was trying to do was clear our some of my e-mail.
Damn.
There’s also a dark moral here about the dangers of tattoos, but not the one that parents usually wave around when their kids threaten to get inked:
In the late afternoon, John takes his daily swim at the university pool. Before he jumps into the water, he discards his T-shirt, revealing a Captain Caveman tattoo on his right shoulder. Not only did he violate Hanna-Barbera’s copyright when he got the tattoo—after all, it is an unauthorized reproduction of a copyrighted work—he has now engaged in a unauthorized public display of the animated character. More ominously, the Copyright Act allows for the “impounding” and “destruction or other reasonable disposition” of any infringing work. Sporting the tattoo, John has become the infringing work. At best, therefore, he will have to undergo court-mandated laser tattoo removal. At worst, he faces imminent “destruction.”
(Flashbacks to when a few people were tattooing themselves the barcode version of RSA encryption algorithm, thereby turning their bodies into munitions in the eyes of the U.S. government.)
Yeah, things are definitely messed up.
And these are problems of potentially profound consequence. What are the long-term implications of all of us living in a constant state of infringement? What happens when our children grow up assuming that copyright and intellectual property laws are so horribly broken that the best response is to simply ignore them?
But these are not the issues that come up in the presidential debates, or really anywhere outside of a certainly kind of nerdly circle on-line. Worse, there are powerful forces working to entrench and extend the (broken) status quo.
It seems that a little education and some well-placed questions are in order. The idea of copyright has merit and value, but it’s clear that our increasingly narrow sense of what constitues fair use, combined with the repeated extensions of the life of a copyright, have moved us well into the absurd.
Tehranian’s paper (here, in PDF form) has the obligatory blizzard of footnotes, listing all the relevant laws and such. Thanks to M J M for providing the cool photo under a Creative Commons license so I could legally use it here without adding to my no doubt massive potential liability. And big ups to the mighty Bill Tozier for pointing me this direction.
Tags: copyright, Education, ethics, intellectual property, law
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