rants.org

I’m on a lot of conference calls lately. Sometimes the participants don’t all know each other, so we’d like to start by going around the table introducing ourselves. The only problem is, there is no table. Furthermore, there’s often no person who has a list of all the current participants, and even if someone did, [...]

I’ve mentioned before that you’re basically not a complete human being if you haven’t seen Will Franken perform (what I didn’t mention is that you’re also not a complete human being if you have seen him perform, but this time the incompleteness is a result of seeing him, because he’s simply that great — so let your [...]

Go see Jessica Ferris’s “Missing” in San Francisco on July 10th. Stop thinking — there is no decision to make. Just do it. Buy tickets. Tell your friends. Then show up. It’s that easy. I saw Jessica perform in San Francisco a few years ago and it was mesmerizing. And that was for a show that she [...]

These two quotes from the June 10th New York Times beg for juxtaposition: The first is from the article about the oldest leather shoe ever discovered: …an Armenian doctoral student, Diana Zardaryan, noticed a small pit of weeds. Reaching down, she touched two sheep horns, then an upside-down broken bowl. Under that was what felt [...]

Saw another legitimate email bounced as spam today: This message was created automatically by mail delivery software. A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed: myfriend@myfriendsdomain.com (generated from myfriend@domain-on-shared-server.org) SMTP error from remote mail server after RCPT TO:<myfriend@myfriendsdomain.com>: [...]

[Reblogged from my post at Talking Points Memo.] Bob Ostertag has a short but lancing piece in the Huff Post today about how the New York Times got astroturfed by an organization calling itself the “Gulf of Mexico Foundation”. The NYT describes them as a “conservation group” when the evidence is that they are, essentially, [...]

For folks in the SF Bay Area: I’m at speaking at WordCamp San Francisco this Saturday at 10:30am: Bodysurfing the Blogosphere: How an Audience-Distributed Film Won Big. It’s an in-depth look at how audience distribution worked for Nina Paley’s freely-licensed film Sita Sings the Blues. The rest of the WordCamp speaker schedule looks great too: [...]

This is going to be a short one, but I can’t go to bed without sharing the news: PUBPAT (the Public Patent Foundation) and the ACLU have just won a major victory for scientific freedom: the US District Court for the Southern District of New York has ruled in favor of their argument that patents [...]

I meant to post this sooner — my birthday was a month ago — but I just got busy. Anyway, these two wonderful objects came in the mail right on my birthday… The first was a gift from Jim Blandy: It’s a Lichtenberg Figure, that is to say, lightning captured in a solid medium. Whoa. They use a linear [...]

I meant to post this sooner, but the time when I took the photo was really busy because Winnie was moving in (!). While we were moving stuff from her apartment, we encountered a Snow Citizen: Ah, Williamsburg. Whatever else you can say about it, it definitely has production values! (Well, except when it comes [...]