New Year’s Eve party, my house

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On Saturday, January December 31 (how did I screw that one up?), I will be having a New Year’s Eve party at my house in Morris Plains, NJ. The party will begin after dinner around 7pm, and run indefinitely into the morning, as New Year’s Eve parties are wont to do. There will be party games, board games, pinball, music, and plenty of other ways to keep entertained. If you know where my house is, you’re invited. If you don’t know where it is, and you wish to attend, talk to me and I’ll give you directions ^_^

I’d like everyone to wear something slightly odd, unconventional, or unexpected. This is inspired by an interesting article of clothing which I recently received as a gift, and which I intend to wear at the party, but which I have no desire to turn into a full-fledged costume. Weird hats or t-shirts, off-colored sweaters, thrift store items… anything interesting from your wardrobe is welcome.

People are also encouraged to bring any bizarre stocking stuffers that you may have received. I know my grandparents always give me some strange things for Christmas, and I’m sure I’m not the exception. The goal is to have a surfeit of conversation pieces 😉

If you have any suggestions for activities to engage in at a New Year’s party, leave a comment, and I will take it into consideration.

Actually, I think I’ll move to Scuttle

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OK, looks like I spoke a little bit soon… while de.lirio.us seemed like a good choice at the moment, there are a crapload of social bookmarking services to choose from! Barry’s paradox of choice strikes again :-/ Wikipedia links to a review of 19 bookmarking services, which can help you decide what to go with.

I’m setting an ideological filter and only considering open source options. I am also requiring the private bookmarks function, otherwise there’s no point in switching away from de.lirio.us. What does that leave me with? Scuttle, unalog, and Connotea (and of course de.lirio.us). That’s still too many options. Let’s consider which one makes it the easiest to import my bookmarks from del.icio.us. According to the chart, only Scuttle offers this feature. Sold! As soon as del.icio.us gets back up, I’m going to try using Scuttle’s web interface to import my bookmarks. As a bonus, it has a “friends list”-privacy feature, like Livejournal or Flickr, and it has… wait for it… comma-separated tags! That is one of the “features” of del.icio.us that I hate the most, the fact that you can’t have tags made from multiple words unless you mash them together somehow, tags are space-separated. Scuttle is just oh so superior, to both del.icio.us and de.lirio.us. Check out my Scuttle page.

If you’re worried that none of these webservices are trustworthy, I suggest you try Foxylicious, a Firefox extension that lets you back up your del.icio.us bookmarks into your browser. In fact, although this extension makes it easier to leave del.icio.us for another site, it also makes a compelling case for staying with del.icio.us. … No, no looking back! I am departing del.icio.us for the world of open source and privacy, and that’s final.

UPDATE: OK, not everything on Scuttle seems to work quite as reliably as one would hope, most notably my personal RSS feed. This is annoying, but I guess I’ll report the bug and hope someone fixes it. Personally, this experience is becoming a confirmation of Barry Schwartz’s theories. Choice is evil! It makes us unhappy with our current lot in life! Or something…

UPDATE to the UPDATE: I reported the bug on their Sourceforge project forum, and it was instantaneously fixed. Scuttle has a friendly, responsive developer community, which is always a joy to have with an open source project. It gives me the warm fuzzies and makes me want to stick around.

UPDATE^3: The del.icio.us transfer went perfectly! It even turned all the stupid underscores in my del.icio.us tags into spaces, which looks a lot nicer. I’m falling in love all over again.

Del.icio.us has too much downtime, I’m switching to de.lirio.us

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After an outage of multiple days, I’ve gotten sick of waiting for my del.icio.us account to return to normal so that I can post my bookmarks online. Therefore, I have I’ve switched to de.lirio.us, because (1) it’s currently operating, (2) it runs on completely open source software, and (3) it has this nifty “@private tag” feature, which allows you to hide certain bookmarks from the public eye. Del.icio.us lacks all 3 features.

If you know me, feature #2 is key. It means that I could theoretically run my own installation of the same software that runs de.lirio.us. It’s called Rubric, and it is released under the GPL. I’m not sure I have the expertise or server space to install it, but it’s the thought that counts.

The absence of feature #3 means that I’ve been putting my private bookmarks in my browser, where they are inaccessible from other computers and vulnerable to a hard drive crash. My private bookmarks include sites which I don’t want to show up in Google, surprises that I am planning for friends, and links which just aren’t relevant to outsiders (e.g. the directions to where I am going tonight). I’m sure you all have your own uses for private bookmarks…

At any rate, as soon as del.icio.us gets back up I’m going to try to run the Del2Del perl script to import my bookmarks from del.icio.us to de.lirio.us, and reduce my dependency on proprietary software.

On emoticons

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How did we communicate :-P, the tongue-y face emoticon, before there were emoticons? How do you translate 😛 into face-to-face communication, telephone calls, or dead-tree letter writing? Most people don’t stick out their tongue in normal day-to-day conversation, although there are a few people who use it as a common gesture, and probably inspired the emoticon.

There appear to be multiple meanings of :-P:
(1) Sillyness
(2) Disgust
(3) Annoyance

Perhaps that is why I find it difficult to replace this surprisingly complex emoticon. How did I survive without it?

Open Source Mac Software

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For all my fellow Mac addicts out there, I just wanted to point out this site which I contributed to, Open Source Mac: “Free and open-source software is good for you and good for the world. This is the best OS X software that we know of.” Unsurprisingly this sweet little hit-and-run site was produced by those guerilla warriors of the web, Downhill Battle… nobody makes pretty sites as quickly as they do. Consider this a Thanksgiving gift… Windows and Linux users will just have to wait for winter solstice 😉

Find me at JHU on Thursday

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I’ll be speaking at Johns Hopkins this Thursday, Nov 17th, at 5pm, tell your friends at JHU! My wiki-obsessed buddy Asheesh Laroia is kind of running the ACM chapter there, and we stayed up late last night writing a good blurb for my talk. Now I just hope I can measure up to it! Here’s the ad he e-mailed out to the student body:

ACM meeting: Thursday 5PM 11/17/2005 in Shaffer 300. Free food.

“Next time you hear, ‘Don’t touch that dial,’ YOU MAY NOT HAVE A CHOICE”

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Photo credit and exoskeletons

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Flickr Photo

About a week ago, I found out that I had been in the October 17th issue of the Legal Intelligencer, in an article based on my Law Journal TV appearance. When Law Journal TV asked me for photos to use in a press release, I sent them this photo that Fred Benenson, FC @ NYU co-founder and photographer extraordinaire, took of my panel at Yale’s RebLaw conference. I neglected to give poor Fred credit at the time, and so it appears that this photo has been printed in multiple places without his name next to it. My apologies!

Also, I wish there were a way to see when people leave comments on Flickr photos featuring me, even if they’re not in my photostream… I missed this classic comment from 9 months ago that Gavin left:

I’ve become convinced that Nelson’s hoodies are actually a form of exoskeleton, and that he would collapse in a pile of organs if he didn’t wear one.

This reminds me of that old children’s horror story, where there’s this girl who always wears a ribbon around her neck, and when her husband finally removes it, her head falls off…

Attack of the mysterious juicer thing!

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Mysterious juicer thingSeveral days ago, Steven Bhardwaj showed up at my dorm with a strange object that he discovered at a flea market, which he felt compelled to give to me. It appears to be some sort of juicer, perhaps an orange juicer. If I had to hazard a guess at its operation, I think that you slice up an orange, place the slices in the hopper, and squeeze the juice into a cup placed under the funnel. This conclusion is strengthened by vaguely orange-colored stains on the base of the machine. Has anyone seen something like this before, who could confirm my theory?

If you look at the bottom of the object, there is a company logo that reads “ALCOA”, and there is a patent number, “PAT. NO. DES.86217″… only problem is that searching for patent number 86217 on the USPTO website turns up a patent from the 1860s, and it doesn’t appear to have anything to do with a juicer. The plot thickens…

UPDATE: That is because I should have been searching for patent # D86217! The D is important, apparently. If you go there and click on “images” you should be able to see pictures of my gadget!

UPDATE: Other pictures of the object can be found in the Flickr set Mysterious juicer thing.

At any rate, thanks for the juicer thingie Steve 🙂 It’s always nice when old friends stop by… I hadn’t talked to Steve in so long that I didn’t know he had gotten engaged! Unfortunately I can’t find the link now, but his proposal somehow made it onto Chinese TV, since he and his fiancee-to-be were in China at the time… intense. Apparently over in China, arranged marriages are still the norm, especially in rural areas, so an engagement is still something newsworthy, especially since foreigners are frequently newsworthy anyway, it seems.

Very rough draft of a syllabus for a student run class on free culture

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Alright folks, this is wayyy ambitious, but I’m going to try to put together a student-run class for next semester. I’m working on a syllabus to shop around to professors who may be interested in helping me out, and I want to get your opinions on this early (and informal) draft. Please comment! Would you be interested in taking this class? How can it be improved? Remember, there are 13 weeks in the semester, should I try to have 13 lesson plans? UPDATE: There are actually 14 weeks, but it’s good to leave flex time, so 13 plans is fine for now.

=The Free Culture Movement: A Historical, Legal, Political, and Technical Perspective=
(Ok, the title needs work… suggestions?)

Each class will begin with a short lecture by myself (perhaps supplemented or replaced by a guest speaker at times?), and will end with a more participatory group presentation.

Check out the 13 lesson plans…

My photo? Kate’s photo?

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Yesterday’s photo of the day in the Daily Gazette (which I take pictures for) was actually taken by Kate Goertzen using my camera, because I was afraid to go out into the hallway during a game of ASSassins, for fear of someone eliminating me by grabbing my butt.

The question is, who owns the copyright to that picture? The camera operator or the camera owner? My understanding is that the law in this country is that if you ask someone to take a picture of you and your family using your camera, you own the copyright, but I could be wrong. Does that picture in fact belong to me or Kate? Either way, Kate deserves some credit for venturing into the hallway where I feared to tread… thanks Kate!