Scratching The Itch

It’s been said before, but a person’s first foray into free culture of any type is often to scratch an itch. For me, my first Wikipedia edit was undoing vandalism on the Hernando de Soto Polar page conflating him with the conquistador of the same name—replacing his actual birth date with 1500-something, etc. It’s somewhat […]

Every Pop Song On the Radio

I discovered a bit from Clay Shirky, talking about how television was the way post-griminess industrial society chose to cope with free time. Included was the bit that enough time is wasted watching television to produce all of Wikipedia 2000 times over.

Credit Where Due

Thank you to the Sci-Fi Channel (and/or whoever ends up owning them) for getting it and letting me download BSG off your website in a flash thing. Also, Scott Ian is the motherfuckin’ man, though I think Baltar is very clearly supposed to be a Factured Fairlytales version of Jesus (the beard was the givaway, […]

Insomnia

I’m currently suffering from putting my insomnia to good use (so far I’ve installed Tracks), so I’ll take the time to post some random thoughts: I was bitten by April Fools twice today. The second time because I was too exhausted to remember that it was April Fools. A life without hope is not wasted […]

Style and Substance

Point Counter-point

Fixing the Internets

Stealing fromA mashup of Sadly, No! and Slashdot…

Rethinking Moderation

So Slipshod Slashdot has a story up on a Chinese cryptographer who found a shortcut through the SHA-1 scheme two years ago. While I’m not a cryptographer, it appears to be easier to forge messages or crack hashed passwords which use the SHA-1 algorithm. Unfortunately, even reading the comments at +5 puts the number of […]

Slide

Cool little shot of backing up a DVD in Ubuntu via Thoggen.

Backdated

“It’s not enough that you sell your waking life for minimum wage, but they get your dreams for free” Monday night, I had my first C# dream. I later dreamed I ran into an old friend of mine from High School, who I haven’t thought of recently. Charcoal grey and white tiling, just passing her […]

Finding Spivak

I recently IM’d someone who sounded interesting on an unnamed quiz/dating site, and was pleasantly surprised to find someone who made me feel dumb. Not that feeling dumb is good, just that it’s easier to see the next plateau when there’s someone there waving at you. Unfortunately, reaching that plateau involves tracking down a particular […]

Schadenfreude

I watched a clip of Condoleeza Rice on Meet The Press yesterday, and though the video was pretty bad, the tone of voice certainly sounded like she was on the verge of tears while she rattled off a string of excuses—ranging from “inherent powers of the commander in chief” to “can’t wait to get a […]

You say "MSM", I say "Corporate Press"

A few days ago, I watched a clip from an episode of The Propagandist on CNN (the actual title is something archetypally boring, of course: “Live From“), I see them suggesting that Wikipedia begin “screening” it’s contributors and paying fact-checkers, lest the Government Do It For Them. It was like I was in a time […]