In the wake of the news, I thought I’d knock off a quick note to Dave Winer, Steve Gillmor and the rest of the pundits and technorati.
Google is not a platform.
Google is a brand.
Google is an advertising company.
Google is a search engine.
Google is a whole slew of M$ windows peripheral software.
Flash is not a platform.
Flash is a brand.
Flash is an advertising delivering mechanism.
Flash is a DRM (Digital Restriction Mechanism, used to control how you use the media you buy).
Web 2.0 is the Internet, and always has been, but thats a story for another day…
I won’t even tell you what NASA is these days.
Thank you all for your time, now back to the Art Walk preparations already in progress.
This weekend please come feed the artists:
The 35th annual Pilsen Artists Open House!
Featuring “Seven Monkeys and a Camera,” the second annual retrospective by The Pilsen Photo Group.
Kickoff reception friday 9-10pm, 12pm-7pm Saturday-Sunday.
See the artists in their natural environment. Thrill to their bohemian lifestyle (“bohemian lifestyle” is a 20th century expression meaning abject poverty characterized by ramen eating and garbage picking). Swill their cheap wine, eat their ratty hors d’oeuvres, laugh at their rickety furniture wince at their choice of music and above all, comment to your partner that you could do so much with their space. No, wait, I meant-BUY THE DAMN ART!
(also be sure to check out all the other galleries and artists who will be opening their studios, garrets, and exhibition spaces to you. Please consider making a donation to support the artists: three buck chuck and velveeta cubes cost a hell of lot more then ramen. FFEJWORLD will be of the air until monday in celebration of the event…)
Sometimes I think I’m out of my mind. Like when it’s 3am and I have this overwhelming desire to post on where to get OS X G4 and G5 optimized Firefox builds. Like when I realize I’m running two separate Mozilla browsers at the same time with twenty plus tabs open in each (Firefox and Camino). Like when I realize that better then 3/4 of the people who read this will have no idea what I’m talking about.
If you care such things, get the builds from ElFurbe’s page. Optimized Camino builds by krmathis are still here. Remember, these are nightly builds, and may be buggy.
I read about Photon, an iPhoto plugin for bloging on MacDevCenter. So I had to try it. It’s easy, it works. Damn, I might have to start using iPhoto now.
Continue reading ’swollen head’
Karey, Ben, and Tucker haven’t moved yet, but the FFEJWORLD server has. This accounted for the downtime earlier today. Congratulations again to Karey and Ben on the new place, now get your own bad selves into it!
UPDATED:
A Chicago Tribune article (free registration required, use bugmenot.com) on the EPA bending over for the corporations and preventing you from knowing how polluted your neighborhood is, mentions PERRO. The Republican notion of smaller government: making your world more toxic, keeping you from knowing how bad things are, making it easy for someone to make you sick and profit from your illness.
The article is worth reading. It’s almost as if someone at the Trib lit a fire under the NewsModels and told them to report for real. It ends with a list of major polluters. It fails in drawing a link between the pollution and public health costs, especially in the poorer areas like Pilsen. The list of major polluters is nice, but who they made campaign contributions to, and how much over the past 8 years who be better. And no one smacks down the EPA spokesdroid for not having online filing, the way they have the online database. (Note to Lazyweb: someone should tie the EPA database into a Google Map overlay, it’ll make it easier for the poor dears to analyse the data…)
“We spend so much time receiving forms and entering the data that we don’t have enough time to analyze it,” Kimberly Nelson, the EPA’s assistant administrator for environmental information, said in an interview.
[SNIP]
“Now it’s companies first and communities last,” said Sean Moulton, a policy analyst with OMB Watch, a Washington-based advocacy group. “I can’t really believe they want to do this.”
[SNIP]
When residents in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood wanted to know if metallic-tasting smoke churning through the streets was dangerous, they turned to the EPA’s database for answers.
What they found while scrolling through the list of polluters alarmed them: The H. Kramer and Co. smelter at 21st and Throop Streets is the largest source of airborne lead in the Chicago area.
Organized into a small but tenacious group, the plant’s neighbors started badgering elected officials and environmental regulators, prompting a state investigation that found high levels of lead in several backyards.
Continue reading ‘Chicago Tribune article on EPA’
Ok, for those who just entered the blog, Harlan Ellison is the greatest living writer in the english language, at least according to me. We’ll leave aside what he writes for now, since I’ve forgotten if it’s Speculative Fiction or if he’s a Fantasist this week. (But he did invent Gonzo journalism before Hunter Thompson, with his work on teen gangs in Brooklyn back in the 50’s) Mr. Ellison is the Angry Young Man of SF, even now in his old age. He also has a reputation for being difficult, something which he denies.
The guys from Penny Arcade shared being Guest of Honor at Foolscap with him, and recount the savaging on their website, you’ll have to scroll down, it’s told in a sequence of posts back and forth between Gabe and Tycho. It’s very funny in it’s own sad and twisted way. “But You Started It!” Indeed:
We’re talking about a person that a couple total assholes find rude.
Just for the record, Ellison isn’t 4 feet tall, (and his official stats were always called into question by Isaac Asimov in their cutting contests), and while he may of shrank from age I doubt he’s shrunk over a foot. Had a fight broken out between the PA guys and HE it would have been messy; HE has a rep as a very tenacious and dirty fighter. The “little fuck” story has also been attributed to the late Randall Garrett, the most common Convention spawned Harlan Ellison put down story is as follows:
A: “That kid reminds me of a young Harlan Ellison…”
B: “Not another one! let’s kill him now!”
Most of the versions I’ve heard attribute the B roll to Asimov, but again, it’s apocryphal Convention legend, and probably never happened.
Published by ffej September 26, 2005
in Blog.
UPDATED:
I’m going to be very busy with getting ready for the Art Walk, then performing the actual Art Walk. Ben and Karey (and Tucker) are moving this weekend-congratulations! Expect some downtime for the site this week/end and the following week, as the server is disconnected and moved, and then the usual hassle of getting internet service at the new house (the SBC/Covad/Speakeasy tango, only it’s played at 1/32 waltz time).
i may be posting on my del.ico.us link list.
Brian and Annie report in from Paris:
David Blum reminded me in email about Michael Robertson’s VOIP projects, Gizmo and SIPhone, alternatives to Skype. Robertson is the dot com millionaire who cashed in on MP3.com, and founded Lindows (now Linspire) which he recently left to concentrate on VOIP and the attempt to recreate his success, MyMp3Tunes.com. Here’s a post where he talks up Google Talk, citing their goal of interoperability and use of open standards (more on this in a later post). Her’e an interview with him from Engadget.
Gizmo runs on OS X, M$ windows and Linux. I just downloaded it and will update this post with a report on it later. SIPhone is the over arching technology and service that lets these VOIP phones work:
SIPphone is a SIP service. We combine all the elements necessary to provide a simple, super-inexpensive and high quality experience.
We work with the hardware manufacturers, the various service providers and even government agencies to make sure you have a positive experience. When you open your SIP adapter box, you can start making and receiving free calls.
What do I need to use SIPphone?
* Either a SIPphone adapter or download our free softphone.
* A broadband connection to the Internet
* To make free in-network (SIP to SIP) calls, both sides of the call must have a SIPphone adapter or softphone.
* To make super inexpensive calls to any of the billions of non-SIPphone (PSTN) world, you will need SIP minutes.
* To receive calls on your SIPphone from non-SIPphone (PSTN) phones, you need at least one Virtual Number
