Skyfaller.space

In case anyone was wondering, there is a god, and His name is Public Safety.

As I posted earlier my bike has been missing, which made me very sad, as it was the bike that was in the NYTimes and it has some sentimental value.  Public Safety thought they had found my bike once before, but was a different bike that happened to be red and also made by Giant.  Today, I got a call from Public Safety that they thought they had found my bike again, and I was bracing myself for another false alarm as we pulled up to PPR.  Then they pointed to a bike leaning on the side of the building, and I recognized the sleek outlines of my oh-so-sexy bike!  The gear-shifters are messed up, but other than that it is in perfect condition!  Even the head and taillights are still attached.

All in all, my faith is restored.

P.S. Wouldn’t it be cool if there were public bikes just lying around whenever you needed one?  Here is some news about that idea: http://www.smartmobs.com/archives/002905.html

Hey, check it out, I’m speaking at the Internet Commons Congress in Washington DC on March 25!  Look at the “schedule”!  I’m on Thursday on the “Digital Democracy” panel.  Tune in to the audio webcast if you can, I’m speaking 10:30-11:30am EST on Thursday.  It’s going to be insanely awesome, and now I actually have an excuse to miss class.  I was fretting over whether it was worth committing academic suicide to go to this conference, but now that I’m speaking, I kind of have to go, my concerns are now… academic!  Ha!  Ha!  Bad Swarthmore pun…

In other news, I successfully found a blind date for my roommate Jerome in the Swarthmore tradition known as “Screw your Roommate”.  Everyone gets a blind date on the same night, and you find your date by recognizing their costume: For instance, I was Red Hat Linux (I had a ginormous construction paper hat), and I was told that my date was another open source mascot (she turned out to be the BSD Daemon, of course).  I thought it was pretty funny that I was playing matchmaker, but I guess it doesn’t really count because I screwed Jerome with my friend Christina from Haverford, who is definitely not single.  Sigh…  Jerome was happy though, and I guess that’s all that matters, and I was glad to see Christina too.  She was supposed to be a character in an opera (supposedly the Ring Cycle), so she had this funky corset on, goodness knows why people have these things in their dorm closets. And Jerome was a mathematical ring (he went around saying, “I’m closed under addition and subtraction!” or something to that effect).  It was a fun night.

Oh, and Vertigogo, Swat’s improv comedy group, did an awesome show!  The best part was the dating game, where each contestant was supposed to represent something different.  Neil was an international organ thief, Joella was a chicken embryo, but the other kid whose name I forgot stole the show as The Meaning of Swarthmore!  And because some people have been filming on campus a lot in the past few days for a Swarthmore propaganda video, some of Vertigogo spent a good part of the show miming the actions of an annoying camera crew 🙂  It rocked, go see their shows if you get a chance!

This was too good not to blog… also from Boing Boing, there is an art gallery of really creepy Photoshopped kids, somewhat reminiscent of IBM’s Linux boy, except more artsy.  Some of them look like they just stepped right out of Ender’s Game… they look like super-intelligent cold-blooded killers.

Incidentally, this also made me think of Steve “the Cyborg Professor” Mann and his “filtered reality”… since he has a videocamera digitally recording everything he sees, he can take what he is seeing and change how it looks in realtime, so that the world he sees becomes living art.  He has some interesting pictures on his site from recordings of sessions like this, but his site seems to be down now, unfortunately. 

Well, it was my birthday yesterday, and I am now, frighteningly enough, a 20-year-old.  I always used to justify my more reckless activities by saying, “I’m a teenager, I’m invincible!”  or justify my sex drive by saying, “I’m a healthy teenage guy!”  Now what will I say?

Incidentally, nobody knew that it was my birthday.  Why is this?  Because I didn’t tell anyone.  Continue reading →

In an essay entitled How I Lost The Big One,  Lessig provides us all with a valuable learning experience from the time when he took Eldred vs. Ashcroft  to the Supreme Court and lost.  Logical arguments are not enough, people have to feel in their guts the importance of Free Culture, otherwise they won’t lift a finger to defend it.  Logical arguments aren’t going to overcome the inertia and power of the monopolies.  We’ve got to aim for people’s hearts.

It is very painful to see our friend and hero Lawrence Lessig flagellating himself, however; I hope that he can leave this behind him, and help us take the fight into the future without carrying this weight upon his shoulders.

Today Luke and I gave a CS lunch talk about Free Culture, and rose_garden took excellent notes on our talk, which resulted in me posting way too much on her livejournal entry about it. Why don’t you join in the discussion and post your thoughts?

I also came across some other cool things, such as Nutch, a project to build an open-source search engine. I think this is VITAL, and I’m shocked that nobody has done it before. The Open Directory Project is wonderful, but we really need an open source search engine to go with it, otherwise we are at the mercy of Google, or even worse maybe Microsoft someday (shudder). I found this while reading up on search engines on technologyreview.com, which has a fantastic article called Search Beyond Google.  This also mentioned Mooter, which tries to break down search results into categories that it refines for you as you continue searching.

Finally, I discovered the Roadmap to Online Music Fun, which is kind of cute, but unfortunately leaves out some efforts like Magnatune, which is the awesomest online music label in existence. I really intend to write up something comparing all of the online music services, but I need to do homework first…

So I just saw the best ending to a movie EVER!  It was the ending to Dead or Alive, “A full-gore gangster story! Takashi Miike is the Japanese Tarantino…only much faster” -Jeffrey M. Anderson, San Francisco Examiner.  I don’t actually recommend this movie, because the rest of it was largely a waste of time, but the ending more than made up for it!  Which doesn’t mean that I’ll ever watch it again…

Read on for spoilers

If you have seen my bike, please contact me! I believe that it was stolen somewhere between 11PM and 2AM this morning from in front of McCabe Library. I was flyering for the SCDC movie tonight with Luke, and when I went back to get my bike, it was gone! Either somebody took it or I left it some other place that I don’t remember. So please, keep your eye out for a red bike with a black squishy seat, with a white LED headlight and a red LED taillight. This is the bike that was in the NY Times. The headlight has changed since that picture was taken, to a small tubular headlight, but it is otherwise exactly the same. The brand name is “Giant”, and it has a silver cord-thing for a bike lock.

OK, this decision is BS, see it for yourself.  There’s no way this will survive appeal.

Defying U.S. Supreme Court, Kansas Court Upholds 17-Year Prison Sentence of Bisexual Teenager

Hey folks, we still haven’t found a drummer for the band (if you know a drummer in or around Swarthmore please get them to contact us!), so this is extremely premature, but what do you think of these band names? I would like to get some sort of temporary band name at least so I can name the band webpage, but I don’t know if I’ve found anything useable yet.

Please leave a comment saying why you voted the way you did!
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