Pinging stuff I care about.
I was browsing children’s books at B&N today and I came across The Clown of God by Tomi dePaola. I remembered reading it many years ago and it making me cry. It still works.
I thought of getting it for my kids, but I don’t think they’re quite old enough yet for a bedtime story where the main character dies at the end, and their father bawls his eyes out every time he reads it.
But someday.
Apparently when I coughed up the $$$ for FreedomLink access at Barnes & Noble, I also was signing up for wireless access at about a dozen McDonalds in the area.
Free Diet Coke refills. Burgers. Wireless Internet.
The end of civilization is at hand.
citizen engineers,
each week i do a series of how-tos here and there about getting more out of the technology we all have, the content we all create and the ways we can use them, share them and learn from them.
now i need your help, you see, lots of record companies like emi, disney and many others are sending cease and desist letters when people take music they listen to and mash it up for their own pleasure, not selling this music, just mixing it, just listening it to they way they want to and creating new works.
awhile ago, dj danger mouse mashed up the beatles’ “white album” with jay-zee’s “black album” and called the result the “grey album.”
anyone who hosted the files, or even “wanted to” was threatened with legal action, now disney wants sent a cease and desist to waxy.org for just linking to the kleptones – a night at the hip hopera – mash ups using music from queen and ton of other sources.
the solution to end this madness?
more mash ups. millions of them. a digital, creative protest.
this is where you come in, i’m going start a how-to series on making your own mash ups, so if you make these, please drop a note on how you do it, what software you use and all that.
let’s unleash a flood of millions of mash ups. with podcasting really taking off, p2p networks, mp3 players everywhere and the nature of music always wanting to be sample, mixed and heard it’ll be hard to stop everyone turning on, tuning in and mashing up.
Gosh, was I ahead of the curve or what?
What the heck was I thinking when I wrote this, nearly a year ago? Geez… talk about attitude.
$result =~ s/^(d+).*/$1/; # get the number of deleted records
# TJG 8/9/01: From syntax check:
# "1 better written as $1"
# EJH 12/30/2003: FYI,
# syntax check is full of it.
# 1 is The Right Thing.
Even worse, I was wrong.
Lucky they kept me on I guess.
In Volusia County, Florida, in 2000, Lana Hires, a county employee involved in elections, gained some notoriety when her named turned up in a memo to Diebold, asking them for advice on how to explain the fact that their machines had recorded “-16,022” votes for Gore when a recount was demanded. Diebold’s advice, and the story they stuck to, was that it was a “bad disk.” This would never have been discovered if Gore had conceded rather than demanding a recount; those negative 16,022 votes for Gore would be part of the permanent record.
This year the Black Box Voting team showed up in Volusia County personally when the county refused to comply with Freedom of Information Requests for voting record tapes. They were presented with a record tape but noticed it was specially printed up for them the day before and not signed by anyone. They found this, well, how to put it, curious. Expecially with Volusia County’s history. They demanded the real tapes and were stonewalled and threatened.
They went through a garbage bag they found outside, destined for the shredder. and found the real tapes.
Lo and behold, there were discrepancies between the real tapes and the ones they were given, especially in African-American voting districts.
Lo and behold, the discrepancies favored Mr. Bush.
They’re demanding a hand recount.
Bev Harris is going to turn out to be one of the people who saved Democracy in America, I suspect.