Category: Internet

At least, according to the Federal Election Commission. Which is good news, because it means that FEC rules limiting campaign speech do not apply to blogs. Let’s hear it for some rare good news from the FEC.

So: the Comics Curmudgeon rips regularly on Sunday newspaper feature Slylock Fox (“Kids! Find the 6 differences between these two panels! Help Slylock figure out how Cassandra Cat murdered those girl scouts and turned them into cookies!”)—probably incidentally driving up readership of the strip. Slylock Fox creator Bob Weber returns the favor with a custom-designed t-shirt of Cassandra Cat playing Ursula Andress, to be sold through the Comics Curmudgeon. Very cool.

A ton of links that have stayed open in various browser windows for a few days as I dug out of work in the next few posts:

Let’s start with an oldie but goodie: Lawyer and administration critic Daniel J. Solove investigates the Playmobil Airport Security Screening playset, which is now even further behind because it lacks a 50-gallon trash can for mixing passengers’ potentially hazardous bottles of liquid together.

Bad timing as AT&T tries to convince Congress that net neutrality legislation isn’t necessary: it blocks some lyrics critical of the President during a Pearl Jam webcast from Lollapalooza on Saturday. When pressed to explain, it aid it was the fault of an overzealous “content monitor.”

A what? Folks, I believe that’s called a censor. Call a spade a spade.

As the band says, and the commentator echoes, this is about something much bigger than censoring a band.

A blogging great, Doc Searls, is off the Manila platform, on which this blog is based, and onto WordPress. I have been wanting to make a similar move for a long time, ever since I used WordPress for the Sony Boycott Blog.

One of my readers last year offered to migrate my Manila content to a WordPress blog, and I am definitely thinking that it’s time to take advantage of the offer. If only there were enough hours in the day.

Just to show you that you never know when you’ll follow a reference down the rabbit hole: I was struck by a greeting that one of my German coworkers gave another. Looking it up, I was quickly sucked into a maze of Frisian and Jutish dialects and German comic book characters.

The greeting used is moin, which (Wikipedia says) comes from the Frisian and is commonly used in the eastern Netherlands and Schleswig-Holstein. As with all central European languages, there are cognate greetings in closely related languages, including Old Saxon and Jutish.

The rabbit hole part is the way the greeting likely spread to my coworkers, through the German comic book character Werner, who consistently uses the greeting (apparently when not consuming large amounts of beer). And yes, it all comes back to beer as well: the official website for Werner feature promotes a special sixpack of Werner’s favorite beer, Bölkstoff, including judicial actions by the Guild Brewery of Hanover and corporate takeovers by Inbev.

I’ve been working on a review that is taking longer than expected, hence the quiet (plus of course work). But in the meantime:

• Use an Apple //c (and, one assumes, ][e) as a terminal for Mac OS X.
• Use a mobile phone service to find a restroom. Yes, seriously. It’s called Mizpee. Apparently a hoax, but it’s generating a lot of back and forth on TechCrunch, including allegations that this means “Web 2.0 has jumped the shark.” What’s Web 2.0 about this idea, anyway?

I’d love to do a joke about how Microsoft is striking back at Apple’s Safari by releasing a Mac version of their weak iPhoto clone, but (a) they released it back in April and (b) Expression Media actually looks to have some pro-grade features that might be worth checking out. Maybe.

Speaking of Microsoft, the secret to good WPF applications is design, design, design; and Vertigo Labs is pretty damned good at that. Check out their new Family.Show application. I just wish they would publish their tip list and notes about WPF and Expression Blend in a web-friendly format. I can’t read XAML docs and XPS on my Mac.

On a completely different topic, an interesting article on obsolete instruments in Salon talks about some I’m familiar with (the sackbut and the shawm) and others I’m not (the Stroh violin, which is amplified with a tin horn; the Birotron, which uses 8-track loops; and others).

And when I’m done going back to Tom Waits’s Alice and Blood Money to listen for the Stroh violin, I can apply this hint to stop iTunes from nagging me to sign into the store every time I start the application. Yay!

Speaking of things that make me happy, check out these tips for living life shown subway-sign style.

And speaking of iTunes: I’m walking a line, I’m dreaming of houses in motion. Houses that used to host the Berkman Center. Houses that will block Mass Ave for three days.

And speaking of blocking things: I think that the TSA may have lost sight of the rationale behind the war on moisture.

Salon: The CIA’s favorite form of torture. Sensory deprivation for fun and questionable intelligence. Remember, kids, true love leaves no traces.

CNET: An electric Porsche at MIT. Going for the full electric with a little appreciated consumer grade sports car. Could the Porsche 914 be the next Delorean?

Since the soundtrack it comes from isn’t on iTunes or eMusic yet, I’m keen to hear this tribute to Zidane from Mogwai.

WSJ: Pen Pals: Letters Laud Scooter Libby, Fail to Spare Him. My favorite excerpt is the one from Deborah Tannen, a neighbor of Libby’s, who “described how Mr. Libby once offered to lend her family a tool to fix the problem with a septic drain field and then fixed it himself.” Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and Scooter Libby is from the septic field!

NY Times: In Tennessee, Goats Eat the ‘Vine That Ate the South’. Now who’s going to eat the goats, I’d like to know.

MacOSXHints has a hint on how to create a hidden administrative login in Mac OS X, so that you can have a separate account with root privileges and have it hidden from the user selection list when you log in.

The ITIL blog at Evergreen Systems has its take on ITIL version 3: it has been written in such a way that it may now be easier to make a business case for adopting best practices in IT Service Management.

Great article in New York magazine discussing the profit margins for different industries and businesses in New York, from a meth dealer to Goldman Sachs. My favorites: Samuel Pekoh the Yellow-Cab Driver and Random House, for the insights the article brings on the unique challenges of the businesses each is in.

For once, a major publication says something profoundly right about the relationship between one’s online identity and one’s future prospects. In Real Time in the Wall Street Journal, Jason Fry points out the following:

1. The Net has left regular people grappling with issues of privacy and public lives that only celebrities used to deal with
2. Kids are much more savvy than their parents about the ways in which identity shifts depending on context
3. The older generation—the “series of tubes” folks—will not be around to dictate the ways in which personal information on the web is interpreted and used, at least not forever
4. In the end, it’s about making choices about how you want yourself to appear on the Web, rather than letting other people make those choices for you.

Fry is also right to point out that it’s broader than just Facebook or MySpace; it’s also blogs, Flickr, Twitter, and on and on. And the article presents a nifty example of the culture clash in action: while Fry’s article is sensitive to the finer nuances of online identity, his editors appear less so, since the caption under the embedded video trumpets “Jason Fry shows us some online examples of how personal videos could ruin your chances of landing your next job.” OMG! Better stick your head under a rock now! Teh Internets are going to get you.

Full disclosure: the scattered threads of my online identity are pretty widespread, as my FAQ page shows on its right hand side.

There is one kind of Lego play, the kind I indulged in as a kid (and intermittently since), that consists of making models of things—for me it’s spaceships, but it could be houses, cars, boats, Hogwarts castles, whatever. There is a whole other kind of Lego play, the art of making models that do things. Cars that drive. Robots. Cranes that lift.

None of them are as cool as the Ultimate Lego Chain Gun. Built by master modeler Sebastian Dick, this thing humbles me down to my 1x1s. 64-shot capacity with 11-shot-per-second fire rate, the gun can “carpet a room in rubber” in less than six seconds. You have to see the video to get just how cool this thing is.

And the scary thing is, Sebastian isn’t the only brick munitions maker out there. Check out the Lego Minestorms Aegis missile launcher, which uses a camera for visual targeting of its missiles.

NY Times: Summer Breezes In, Sipping Barbera. Two of my favorite Italian reds, barbera and dolcetto, are mentioned in this article and barberas are reviewed.

BBC: Music site Last.fm bought by CBS. That’ll buy a whole lotta servers. It also puts CBS in an interesting position to mine data about listening habits—interesting, because CBS also relaunched CBS Records last year. Maybe they can do a better job than the current crop of majors at dealing with the realities of the music market.

I enjoy Last.fm but I wish their plug-in for iTunes did a better job of reporting playback data from my iPod, which is now my predominant form of listening. If you look at my profile page you’d think that I only listened to classical music last week, but that’s far from true—that’s only what I listened to at home over iTunes.

Househack of the day: Sliding bookcase-door Ikea style, courtesy Ikea Hacker, complete with part numbers and instructions.

On the cusp of the movie’s 30th anniversary, Wired finds some guy who never saw the movie for the obligatory first impression. Verdict? A pretty funny set of observations, including “Big fat guys who look like bikers can cut it in the Rebel air force.”

Dirk Gently fan podcast, in memory of the late great Douglas Adams.

And of course, LOLPresidents. Oh dear.