i’ve gotten a few more requests for light fluffy pieces, a few more requests for vito bashing tirades. to try to be polite, no.
this is my page. i’m an unemployed homeless person. i get to do what i want with it. this page and the little stuff i have stashed across the north side of chicago is all i have. everything, my whole life. the fact that a virtual space encompasses so much of it rankles me at times (but not the way you’d think). but it’s mine, by the grace of Ben Stoltz who provides the machine and bandwidth this site runs on, and the will of MovableType the content management system i use to publish it (thank you Ben, thank you Ben and Mena Trott). that’s only the tip of the iceberg, actually, since MovableType runs on Perl, and Perl runs in this case on Linux. that’s a huge cast of thousands of volunteers. for the most part unpaid volunteers. then there’s the RSS and Atom components of the site, the free versions of the news aggregators like NetNewsWire Lite or Amphetadesk that use those components, the Kung-Log donationware editor i post from, the Html and XML standards you use when you view it, the Mozilla and Konquerer team who make your browsers, and finally the TCP/IP protocol upon which the Web and the Internet are built. a massive huge unpaid team of volunteers keeping one virtual space alive for one homeless person. it rankles me i have nothing to give back, nothing to offer them other then input and bug reports. i would like someday to be able to give back some real software, make some little contribution. in the meantime i’m a user and an advocate. but it’s still my page. and i’ll still do what i want with it, since it’s primary purpose is to amuse me by educating you, and pissing off the powers that be. this pages only failure is that it isn’t good enough, it doesn’t do a good enough job, i don’t do a good enough job of showing there is more then one way to use a computer, more then one company in the bizniz, more then one narrow minded way to misuse the planet and more then one planet for use to live on.
so in between your griping about rising CTA fares and not getting the present you wanted, think about the hoards of volunteers who make this all possible, and think about the other paths to take, as well as thinking about sending me some dough through paypal at parody66 at yahoo dot com. there are places for you to donate to to support open source projects, as well as shareware versions of the freeware to buy, and even organizations who help the less fortunate then me get computers who take old machines for donation. it doesn’t take much. and if you give a little, you might get a nifty little screed in return. maybe. if i feel like it. or the cats act up again. who knows. stranger things have been known to happen.
like the internet. or the PC revolution, which seems so mundane know, but was such a Big Deal. or cell phones. because all of this, and even my little page, gives you a voice, a virtual printing press, and a means of distribution that was denied you for centuries. even a degenerate pig fondler like Oakey is read by over 2000 people a month (2361 unique visitors as of this post, 24 thousand hits, almost 500 more visits then this time last month, 4 thousand more hits). Oakey knows this, and has had his arm twisted into donating to the Cause, which gives him a voice. but you get more then a voice, you get the content you’ve been denied by the normal distribution channels, the ones that consider you a mindless consumer, an automatic jack or jill in their power trip mill and gasoline to be burned in the engine of commerce. if jerry got off his ass and got a computer, he could get finally get WZRD at home, because Eric is making it stream over the net. Natalie gets her weird EuroTrash net stations, and others share their cd collections. the value is here on the edge, where volunteers and pigfondlers and even homeless people matter.
in a lot of ways this is the golden age…
so drop a tenspot on me, or mac net journal macosxhints or macintouch, buy something from think geek to support slashdot, or just click on a few ads on your website of choice. or buy some shareware. you’ll be able to tell your grandkids or niecephews that you were truely part of it all, way back when. and what does all of this have to do with vito bashing? if you don’t like it, or wnat something else you can go read something else. or make your own vito bashing site.
for now at least…
the internet history in pictures. who says history has to be dry? see Linus naked, see gates and his but boy, see Pruitt after he did it to it.
cnet presents the year in IP law. now if we could only make it all go away…
Mandrake proves their the only commercial Linux distro with ethics, even if they are broke, by presenting their 8 golden rules.
mac rumours: mini iPods and Video iPods (Ben should apply). i’ll take one of each, please.
se…
free recieve only no setup email accountsl, for those annoying sites that require free registration. allows you and anyone else who gueses your “address” to read the follow up email, and provides RSS feeds for the accounts. it doesn’t matter that others have probably picked the same address as you…very cool. “Pick a throwaway address, say: deeznuts@dodgeit.com Give that address out whenever you need to. Check deeznuts from homepage of dodgeit.com. Subscribe to RSS feed to keep an eye on the mailbox. Get it?”
what a concept! inform the populace! it’ll never happen here…
the origami underground. not for the timid. sexual positions, animated paper, dollar bill tricks, paper genitals, you name it. or if your a purist, really amazing origami in japanese
