By the way, if you feel like your community is tiny, navel-gazing, and obsessed with petty bickering - remember that you're not alone. I was reminded of this by an SF Chronicle article about wine bloggers. The main subject of the article runs a blog called "Hosemaster of Wine," which is a great title.

The takeaway point for me: "Hecklers don't ( Read more... )

Recently I've been reading a lot of Nathan Bowers. It's interesting, opinionated work that makes me look at things I'd been looking through. His most recent post is Don't Ship Broken, which isn't an in-depth post, but it's relevant to me right now. I've been working with Windows XP a lot in school. Part of this is because I'm on my way to the ( Read more... )

I am very unhappy that this appears in one of my textbooks:The column headings in the table are not as clear as they need to be, but I've written them as they are written in the motherboard documentation so you can learn to understand this kind of cryptic documentation.

Dear Jean Andrews: You are so very much Doing It Wrong. I hate your textbook ( Read more... )

Nothing quite like sorting through a job-lot of media artifacts to drive home the truth of Sturgeon's Law. Who here remembers, just for example, Extreme Ops? The Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius movie? Something's Gotta Give? I was happier not knowing that most of these movies existed. I was also happier not thinking about Dreamworks. As bad as ( Read more... )

I did a fair bit of reading last weekend.

Crooked Little Vein: Got about 50 pages in. It's very Warren Ellisy, but has two major flaws. One is that, like Desperation Jones, it has the distinct flavor of "hey I found a cool thing in my research and I want to write about it!" It's gratuitously scuzzy and grimy and filthy. In Transmetropolitan, ( Read more... )

I'd played card games before, both Hoyle-approved and Garfield-spawned, so when I saw their cards on the cafeteria table, I knew enough to walk up and ask - "what's that?"
"It's called Legend of the Five Rings. Ask Mateo, he likes to explain it to people."
This was in December 2003 in a noisy room at the community college. Mateo did explain, at ( Read more... )

Dr. Alex Halavais recently released a book, Search Engine Society, and is teaching a course on the same topic this year. He's also broadcasting half-hour talks that accompany his course: this is one of them.


The rest of the series so far.Most of the content is strictly audio, so that makes for a good radio-like stream of information. I want to ( Read more... )

Part of what I like about NPR is that snippets of it help to keep my brain in gear. Today:

The "six word story" meme is back! The National Constitution Center ran a contest based on it - over now, but the entries are available. A couple of cute ones: "invest in civic energy: it's renewable" and "Fellow Americans, meet our new dog." ( Read more... )

Just two nights ago I had a fairly pleasant evening at the Langton Labs. Lunging into social situations like that is something I should do more often, on balance. I found out about the get-together via circuit_four, who's a friend of raxvulpine and her pal eredien, who are in turn acquainted with baxil. So there was a basis for acquaintance, but precious little. I had a pretty ( Read more... )

Recently,
( Read more... )