Karen is going to be at Newark Airport for a 6-hour layover on her flight home from Denmark tomorrow, from about noon to 6pm. Is there anything cool in Newark that we should do during that time? Or is Newark just a hellhole that people should try to avoid spending time in?
Come see me speak at UPenn on Monday night
You should especially come to this talk because UPenn’s free culture club is kind of short on members, which is odd given that most of the freshmen at UPenn supposedly read the book Free Culture as their freshman reading project. Help us get Penn Free Culture off the ground!
Vanishing
I have a job to do, namely finishing my final course work so that I can finish graduating from Swarthmore. This job has been dragging out far too long, partially due to mental and physical health issues that I’ve been working through, partially due to distractions such as the internet. It cannot drag on any longer. I am going to vanish from the face of the earth from now until I have finished the bulk of my work, so that I can dedicate 100% of my time to that. Please do not attempt to contact me. Hopefully I will return soon, ready to put in more time on old commitments and start up new projects.
P.S. If you’re wondering, my previous experiment with going offline was only partially successful, which is to say that it was a failure. I signed off IM and IRC, but I continued checking e-mail and blogs. This will be a more complete disappearance. My apologies.
Really, I don’t wear the same hoodie all the time
Brian sent me this comic today:
For the record, I’d just like to state that I have 3 or 4 favorite hoodies now! I have two orange Billabong ones, my black straight edge hoodie, and the blue one I wear the CC t-shirt over. And they all get washed whenever they, um, need washing.
Going offline for a week
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.
You may not want to see this…
… but internet memes are made to be warped beyond all recognition 🙂
Which webhost is the best?
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.
Best keyboard shortcut ever!
While browsing through the comments on this 43 Folders post about a bare-bones no-distractions text editor, I discovered a keyboard shortcut in Mac OS X that inverts all of the colors on your screen! Just hit control-option-command-8. Mostly white screens really suck in dark rooms, so I’m digging the ability to turn everything mostly black at night. And having everything look like a photographic negative is pretty awesome as well 🙂 Unfortunately, taking a screenshot doesn’t capture the effect, although I suppose I could just take a normal screenshot and invert the colors in a graphics editor so that you could see it 🙂
Apparently there’s a similar shortcut for Windows XP, “left-shift, left-alt, print screen”, which allows you to switch into a high-contrast mode (also accessible and configurable via the control panel)? I wouldn’t know, I don’t have Windows XP, but if you do you could try that.
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 🙂
Live free or die
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.