Today at 12:45pm PST I fly from San Francisco to Newark, and arrive at home in NJ around 10pm.  Interestingly enough, my friend from my hometown, Matt Pagano, is coming in from China on the same day, and he is taking the same flight home with me.  Purely coincidence.  How awesome is that?

On Sunday I will be going to NYC to try to meet up with people.  This means you!

On Monday I will pack.

On Tuesday I return to Swarthmore, to act in the freshman orientation play.  We get like 10 days to rehearse, which is kind of crazy.

And then school bloody starts, and FreeCulture.org kicks some ass!

Nooo! I arrived on Blogger 3 days too late to get my normal username, “skyfaller”. I’ve been here before, I should have registered a long time ago. http://skyfaller.blogspot.com belongs to someone else… I’m going to see if I can talk them into using a different name, has anybody had success in the past in talking someone out of using a username that you’ve been using for a long time? I’ve been calling myself skyfaller for a while now: if you google for that username, practically everyone you turn up will be me, the only other is the person who owns “skyfaller.com”. The most notable instances of me using “skyfaller”:

http://skyfaller.livejournal.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Skyfaller

Certainly the first page of google results is completely me. This new “skyfaller” looks like a nice person, I hope that we can come to an equitable and mutually beneficial solution!

(Cross-posted to my hopefully temporary Blogger page, http://freeculturist.blogspot.com/)

I’ve really been letting my blog slip, and I really regret that. I should have kept a better record of what I’ve been doing with my summer, because a lot of cool stuff has been happening, which I haven’t been documenting. Allow me to attempt a quick recap.

[writing furiously, trying to figure out why I can’t embed a picture in this post properly]

[I fail miserably]

Alright, so I’m tired and I have to go to bed now, it’s 2:30am here in San Fran. I’ll attempt a recap again tomorrow 😛

The Democrats and Republicans only defend your civil liberties when it is convenient to do so. Check out this Reason article, which examines how Ashcroft and Kerry have undergone a peculiar role reversal.  Here’s my favorite quote:

Kerry then expressed his belief that bank customers are entitled to essentially zero privacy. “The technology is already available to monitor all electronic money transfers,” he wrote (emphasis added). “We need the will to make sure it is put in place.”

Uh huh. Is Kerry really that much of a safer bet than Ashcroft? Power corrupts, and once he has the power… ?

For the latest project of FreeCulture.org, the international version of the SCDC, we ask you to join us in excercising your First Amendment rights and celebrating a legal victory for artistic freedom… by taking pictures of Barbie in a blender and sending them to us!

I’ve tried writing down my schedule on my Handspring before, but I didn’t have much reason to stick to it, because nobody could see it but me. So nobody would know if I changed it, or just ignored it completely.

Now that I have a shiny new Mac and a Mac.com account, those days are over.

You can view my calendar in any web browser, although it seems that you can only see it in Eastern Standard Time, which may be confusing to those in different time zones (including me, since I’m in California!)

You can subscribe to my calendar with either iCal or Mozilla Calendar. Mozilla Calendar is becoming quite usable, I suggest checking it out if you’re on Windows or Linux and using Mozilla Suite, Firefox or Thunderbird.  Unsurprisingly the Mac version isn’t receiving much attention since we have iCal already. Mozilla Calendar is based on the open iCal standard, so it’s completely interoperable.  Hooray for open standards!

I now make this pledge to the world: My schedule will be at least 90% accurate from this day forward.  You should be able to look at my schedule and be reasonably certain that I am actually doing the things I claim to be doing at the times that I claim to be doing them.  If after following my schedule for a while, you determine that I have not followed through on this promise, you are to beat me with large sticks or shave my head or do something equally horrendous.  When I am not certain of my schedule, I won’t write anything down, or I will put question marks on the appointments.  So there!

It is now official.   CERT says ditch Internet Explorer for another web browser. Internet Explorer is insecure, and it is no longer being seriously updated, because Microsoft is too busy figuring out how to integrate it with the next release of Windows so that you can NEVER, EVER uninstall it no matter how hard you try. Jobs like fixing bugs or adding new features are simply unimportant when compared to the noble goal of user lock-in.

So what should you use instead of Internet Explorer? Mozilla Firefox Even Microsoft-owned Slate says to use Firefox.

See my review of Firefox on my recommended programs page. It’s kind of outdated, but I’ll work on it soon.

If you have tried Mozilla Firefox and you like it, stick this banner on your blog!

Or get some smaller and less intrusive Firefox buttons for your website.

Can’t get enough of my beautiful voice?  Want to hear me yammer on about Diebold, democracy and free culture for almost an hour?  Then check out my radio spot on RedQuyn’s The Big Picture, on Transitions Radio Network.  The intro is really trippy, but the interview is pretty solid, and I’m slowly cutting down on the “um”s and “y’know?”s.  Maybe I need to go on the “um” patch or get “um” chewing gum or something.

I had the opportunity to speak on a panel at the Knowledge Held Hostage conference at UPenn last Friday, and had a wonderful time!  You can see funny pictures of me in a suit, and you can see an article about the conference which mentions the Diebold case at eSchool News online.  Unfortunately, Swarthmore College doesn’t look very good in the article, because in my 5 minute “speech” I was only able to talk about how Swarthmore wimped out at first, not how they were wonderfully supportive afterwards.  I can’t emphasize enough that all of the people in the administration were behind us 100%, but that they were afraid of Diebold suing the college for copyright infringement.

In case you aren’t aware, a copyright infringement lawsuit is one of the few things that can bankrupt a well-endowed college, because of the absurdly high statutory damages possible in a worst-case scenario.  About the only other kind of lawsuit with this power is a class-action medical lawsuit with hundreds and thousands of claimants.  The college’s reaction was therefore understandable; their first duty is to keep the college running for the sake of the students.  However, I believe that they also have a duty to stand up for democracy and freedom of speech, and I think that they were a bit too risk-averse, as I think it was clear from the beginning that Diebold did not have a case.  Naturally this is even more clear in hindsight.

For those who have forgotten, I will be speaking at the Knowledge Held Hostage conference at UPenn tomorrow.  If you don’t already know, it’s probably too late because I’m on the first panel at like 8:30 😛  But it will rock!

Also, if you missed my spot on the Al Franken show, here’s an Ogg Vorbis audio clip of it. 

Winamp should play Oggs fine in Windows, Mac users probably want the Ogg Vorbis Quicktime component, which should let you play Ogg Vorbis in iTunes.