...more recent posts
From Barbelith comes this gem: "I'm sorry, but Jeffrey Zeldman rocks so hard and fast he could vibrate himself through a mountain." Here's the Zeldman piece in question, which Tom calls, "a call to arms, a Manifesto for the true digerati - the people that like to play and create and communicate, rather than the people who consider a "good internet idea" to be selling sportswear (however ineffectively)...."
What about the idea that keeping a weblog (especially if you work in front of a computer all day, and take small random breaks from your work to do a little blogging) is a way for information workers to maintain a sense of self in an otherwise depersonalizing situation (i.e., the long hours many spend doing mundane information processing tasks for their corporate benefactors.) Maybe the small amount of time lost to these personal pursuits is O.K. in the end as it allows workers to always maintain a little loop of their own personality in the background. The weblog is an excuse to see and comment on things that are important to you personally, and you can do this pretty much continuously (espcially, like I said, if you work in front of a computer all day.) I know Alex has commented that this sort of personal project can really make working for someone else bearable (or even just acceptable.) And while people have always done this (like reading on the job when things are slow, or writing a personal letter) the concept of micropublishing your thoughts for others, and the pressure to keep updating your blog, makes the weblog sort of time wasting much more valuable for maintaining a sense of self that is separate from your job. I'll have to work on this idea a little.
It didn't reduce very well, but today's picture is a piece by Paul Laffoley. A bigger version of this picture is here (112kb) I first heard about him at the disinfo conference a few months ago. In my opinion, the most interesting speaker at that strange event. Anyway, I bought a book of his work at that time, and then MB gave me an original for my birthday. I'll try to get a picture of that up. Here's some more info about him. And here's a reproduction of his piece "Geochronmechane: The Time Machine from the Earth." Yes, he has actually designed a time machine, and I don't doubt that it will work. Unfortunately, to test his idea, we'd have to put this huge machine into orbit, and then drill a hole all the way through the earth. I'll guess there will be a little delay before the jury comes back in on that one.
More conflicting info about my next computer. zdnet has a piece about new G3's due this fall from IBM with clockspeeds from 500 - 700 mhz. The article speculates that these will go into the next generation powerbooks which they anticipate sometime in the fall. D'oh. What about the G4e that a different IBM spokesman said we'd see in a portable before the end of the year? I guess that was too good to be true. This new time table seems more reasonable. New G3 powerbooks in the fall. OS X and multi-processor desktop G4's in January, and THEN the G4e powerbook in the spring. Not quite as fast as I'd hoped.
Lars finally responds on the Metallica/Napster imbroglio. I guess it's easy to make fun of Metallica, but I have less and less good feelings for Napster. I wish there was an open standard in place so that the "free information" side wasn't in a position to make a boat load of money off the whole thing. Seems like that sort of ruins the argument. But could a napster clone, without any corporate backing, make it beyond the small percentage of super geeks?