Some people have fond memories of their first bike or their first record player; I get that warm nostalgic feeling when I think about our family’s first portable computer. My dad purchased an Osborne 1 when I was only a wee little tike, a big monster of a suitcase box that used some mysterious thing [...]
Dave Barry’s weekly column this week, titled Joking around with Oscar and Steve recounts the process of aiding Steve Martin in constructing his award show monologue. After receiving an email from Steve:
Hi Dave, it’s Steve Martin.
I’m hosting the Oscars this year and am trying to put together a team of geniuses to help me write [...]
The Center for Democracy and Technology has completed a controlled experiment in email address acquisition and use in unsolicited commercial emails (UCE). The methodology was simply to post new email addresses in a number of different public locations, and see how much spam each of these addesses receives. Their report, titled “Why Am I Getting [...]
While I’m bogged down with generals preparation, instead of disappearing for two weeks I’ll inundate ya’ll with the best nuggets I come across. Last night I was reading Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition and having the spine-tingling experience of having someone communicate exactly the thoughts I’d been having over the past few weeks (only much [...]
While reading for my generals, I have been taking note of all weblog/diary related material with the intention of posting it eventually. Today I ran across an engaging quote in Yi-Fu Tuan’s paper Significance of Artifact:
Diaries retain a measure of the past in the present. First as a physical object we can see that the [...]
The newest billboard on the interstate circuit is an advertisement for the recent Nissan “sport utility vehicle,” the Murano. Nissan is certainly trying to push some envelope with this car, which one I’m not entirely sure, but most probably the I-hope-to-god-I’m-not-going-to-that-future-futuristic envelope invented by the Pontiac Aztek. And the most striking feature of this ugly [...]
For those of you who made it to SXSW this year, especially them people who I planned on meeting up with or attended my panel, I apologize. I had my shitkickers buffed and my wifi antenna packed, but due to financial constraints, I was unable to make it to Austin; it was quite a sad [...]
I have to say, I have been skeptical about Friendster since I received my first spam many months ago. But when I was invited to join by one of my professors yesterday (given, he’s a social networks researcher), I couldn’t resist the temptation any longer.
Of course I’m drooling over the data set, and worked up [...]
Ali Rahimi, self-proclaimed “Coolest Stud at MIT” claimed his title thanks to a retro-sheik headset design manufactured for his cell phone.
English dork Nick Roope, associated with the B3ta crew claimed rights to this title (or another analogous stud title in England), revealing his prior design, implementation, and publication of old-skool headset.
Embittered with rage and fury, [...]