I’m sure that some of your internet-addled friends on Livejournal have said something like this at one point or another, including me, but I need some time away from the internet and I’m taking it this week. Karen is off traveling Europe without her laptop, so I don’t feel the urge to sign on and talk to her, and maybe I can take this opportunity to practice not reading webcomics and obsessively checking my RSS feeds. It will also prevent me from doing things like working on the FreeCulture.org website, but I think the rest of the mailing lists that are down can wait to get back up until the weekend, unless someone else can get them up. Hopefully I can get some things done that don’t require the internet.

I may check my e-mail occasionally, but I probably won’t respond until sometime this weekend. If you have anything really important to say, call me. My apologies for any inconvenience this may cause… it’s something I just really need to do.

… but internet memes are made to be warped beyond all recognition 🙂

Click here for a horribly mutated internet meme…

A couple of websites I am responsible for are considering moving to new webhosts. Currently the top candidate is DreamHost, but before we do anything, I want your feedback. What is the best webhost out there? Is DreamHost in fact any good? My top priority is getting maximum uptime, but everything else is important too, of course.

I know you can’t compare apples and oranges, but perhaps we *can* compare apple juice and orange juice!

There is one problem: most people have never had good, fresh-squeezed orange juice or apple juice, and it’s not really fair to compare inferior examples of the two. I personally try to have some fresh-squeezed orange juice every day, but juicing citrus is easier / less messy than squishing apples, and I didn’t have a Champion-style general-purpose juicer at college, while I did have a citrus juicer. The result is that I have better memories of good fresh orange juice, and I am prejudiced against apple juice.

At any rate, regardless of your ability to fairly judge the best examples of the two opponents, I would like you to give me your opinion about these two immortal enemies 🙂

I know this story was on Slashdot (Bruce Schneier Blasts Politicians, Media), so some of you have seen it already, but I decided to reproduce it in its entirety because it reflects perfectly my own feelings on the subject.

What ever happened to “We have nothing to fear but fear itself?” I think that the people who support giving the government ever-increasing power to invade our privacy and control our lives in the name of the war on terror are the worst kind of cowards. Terrorists can kill us, but they can’t make us give up our liberty and our way of life, only we can surrender that.

My personal favorite example showed up on BoingBoing a couple of months ago (US bans sale of chemicals to hobbyists without $1K license)… After all of the work we put into getting people enthusiastic and educated about science during the Cold War, are we going to prevent people from learning chemistry in the name of the war on terror? As a fireworks hobbyist who likes to use chemicals to make pretty things, I find the increasingly absurd restrictions on chemicals to be personally threatening.

Bruce Schneier on what the terrorists want…

After reading this article on how your e-mail inbox says a lot about you, I went and deleted over a thousand messages from my inbox.

This leaves me with only about 2500 messages to go. *sigh*

If you know what Jabber is, and use a multi-IM client like Gaim or Adium, you should check out LJ Talk (see also the post on lj_dev)… basically Livejournal is providing a Jabber server which automatically populates your Jabber buddy list with your LJ friends. They’re working on their own client, and you will be able to talk to anybody else who is using Jabber, e.g. Gtalk, Project Gizmo, etc. I’m on LJ Talk right now, and I’m posting this through the LJ bot (Frank)… you can IM him saying “post:” and it will post it to your Livejournal for you. I don’t know why you would ever use that, but hey, if you want to post from your IM client, now you can.

Perhaps I shouldn’t get excited over new web 2.0 services, since as Asheesh points out they’re proprietary and you have no control over them. That said, if you’re using web services like Flickr, it’s good to have accounts on competing services so that if they suddenly turn evil for some reason you can switch to someone else without too much trouble.

In that spirit, I’m trying out this Flickr clone, Zooomr, which is apparently giving out pro accounts to people who blog about it in an attempt to boost their userbase. I guess it worked for me ^_^

One thing that’s cool about Zooomr is that you don’t even need to sign up to get a free account… if you have a Livejournal account or a Google account, you already have a sign-in for Zooomr. I wish more services would use OpenID or something like it (I’m told OpenID has its flaws), it’s fun and easy ^_^

UPDATE (August 17, 2011): Five years later, none of my images on Zooomr are loading, including the one in this post, and the site looks rather ugly and abandoned. The problem with playing with trendy new web 2.0 services is that if they are a fad and you actually rely on them, you may be left out in the cold.

Brian, Karen and I have started a band called Wrong Side of Dawn, and we’re looking for people to play bass and drums. If you know anybody who plays those instruments and lives near Swarthmore, PA or North Brunswick, NJ (where Brian lives), please let us know!

You can listen to our demo tape on the website, which we hope to turn into a professionally recorded album by the end of the summer. Let us know what you think of the demo!