I’m sitting in my dorm at Dartmouth. My east coast journey has come to an end. Overall, it was a huge success, and even exceeded my expectations. I met up with a lot of cool free culture people and overall just spent lots of time in the company of good friends.
Thank you to:
- *Spencer for letting me crash at Harvard
- *The Berkman Center for Hosting the awesome Gender and Tech mini-conference
- *Sam for letting me crash at Boston College
- *The Free Software Foundation for hosting LibrePlanet
- *Mako and Mika for hosting nightly get-togethers at The Acetarium during LibrePlanet, and for letting me crash Sunday night
- *HelloSilo people, including Seth, Tim, Rachel, Alex, and others, as well as Asheesh for hanging out with me and for being thought-provoking and hilarious.
- *Barry, for letting me crash and showing me a good time in NYC.
- *Free Culture @ NYU, especially Parker and Wesley, for letting me crash your meeting and hang out.
- *Elizabeth Stark for letting me crash your class at Yale.
- *Yale Information Society Project for letting me crash your fellows meeting.
- *The Purple Crayon at Yale for letting me play with you and for putting up with my horrible horrible improvised song
- *Adi Mark and Swati, and all the other awesome people that I met and hung out with at Yale. You guys are intelligent and funny and awesome.
I’m sure there are others that I’ve missed. Let me know and I’ll add you. The success of this trip has been a product of many many deliciously excellent parts which would not have been possible without the generosity and hospitality of so many friends.
(photo credit: thomashawk on flickr)
Over the next 1.5 weeks, i’m going to be backpacking around the east coast. I’ll be going to a couple conferences, meeting with some friends, checking out a couple museums, and walking a lot of city streets.
I have a google doc with my itinerary (mostly short notes now, will flesh out more later). If I’ll be in the same place as you and you want to meet up, give me a call or shoot me an email.
I’m going to be microblogging my adventures, as well as (macro?)blogging most days. I microblog on identica, and my identica feed gets cross-posted to my twitter account.
So follow along, won’t you?
March 17th, 2009 in
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Some time last week, I found myself forced to use an obnoxious scanner that emailed individual scans to me as PDFs. I had to re-enter my email address on the impossible touch-screen keyboard for each page, and when I was done I had 7 emails in my inbox.
I needed to re-assemble these 1-page PDFs into a 7-page one. A quick google search led me to this page. But I’ll spare you the unnecessary list of non-solutions (as well as the hentai Site Traffic Strip-O-Meter). The real gem on that page is this linux command:
gs -q -sPAPERSIZE=letter -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=out.pdf in1.pdf in2.pdf in3.pdf
simply “cd” into the dir with all the pdfs that you want to string together, replace in1.pdf in2.pdf in3.pdf with the names of your pdf images, and voila! out.pdf is your new SuperPDF. The Eurasia of PDFs.
(This is the first time that I’ve posted a nerdy linuxey howto. This may or may not become a trend. But don’t get scared–the main focus of this blog will continue to be my crappy creations and stupid ideas.)
March 7th, 2009 in
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Relationships look funny on Facebook by esagor, on Flick
I’ve developed the habit of compulsively opening new tabs in firefox and going to facebook.com when i’m bored or looking for a break. It’s gotten pretty bad. When I’m bored in real life, i actually say to myself, in my head “ctrl+t, facebook.” Literally.
This is a crutch that I lean on when I have a particularly painfully large amount of work (read: schoolwork) that needs to get done. When I’m pulling a most-of-the-nighter to write a paper of finish a lab assignment I keep track of up-to-the-minute updates to my friends’ status’ (and the albums they are being tagged in, the notes they are commenting on, the videos they are uploading, etc etc). When I’m actually having fun or doing something interesting, I’m blissfully unaware of the fact that Jane-who-I-met-once-at-this-party-several-years-ago-but-still-stalk-on-facebook is “no longer listed as single” (I’m not bitter) (Jane isn’t a real person) (really, she’s not) (don’t make fun of me).
This habit of alt-tabbing to give myself a brief break and release some stress is probably a habit that should be kicked altogether, but for now I’m going to focus on replacing it with something more productive: feed-reading. I’ll skim some headlines, read a few short blog posts, and catch up on webcomics. I’ll also follow my friend feeds on twitter and identica.
Wait, isn’t that just like looking at your news feed on facebook?
Well, kind of. Except that my identica and twitter feeds are full of thoughts and news from some more interesting people (lots of big players in the Free Culture movement). It’s more newsworthy, or at least more interesting and valuable to me. Jane isn’t on twitter telling me about how happy she is with her stupid boyfriend (not bitter) (she doesn’t even exist) (I don’t want to talk about it).
February 6th, 2009 in
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is full of stuff right now. Daily updates on hold until further notice.
Give me a hug if you see me. I probably need it.
February 2nd, 2009 in
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(11:21:26 PM) gameguy43: the internet is all about thinking you’re more important than you actually are
(see also TIME person of the year 2006)
January 25th, 2009 in
quickie |
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Adi wrote about how he should take more photos because snow is beautiful. I agree.
I wanted to talk about something that I’ve been noticing a lot recently that I’ve wanted to photograph. I suspect that between the lack of light and my poor photography skills, I would probably fail to capture what I see. Perhaps a written description is better.
When I’m walking by the green late at night, I’m always struck by the way that the light from the street lamps hits the trees. The lamps aren’t very tall, so the light comes at the trees somewhat horizontally. The trees and the little mounds of snow around their bases are illuminated against the blackness of the rest of the green. They’re like perfectly isolated subjects in a photograph. The untouched, clean color and Seussical form of the snow makes a nice contrast with the harsher angles and dirtier colors of the trees. With the cool, still, sterile air and the focused, isolated lighting, I feel like I’m in a museum looking at a winter diorama with a single snowy tree. Someone must have stolen the wax cave man.
There’s something about horizontal lighting. I noticed this a couple years ago while I was riding a train in northern Italy. The sun was low in the sky. We were traveling through countryside. It was flat and grassy. But it was beautiful. I couldn’t stop staring at the grass. There was just so much dimension. So much contrast. Maybe it also had to do with the oranges in the light of the setting sun.
I sometimes wonder how much more beautiful these small things would be if I weren’t red-green colorblind.
January 22nd, 2009 in
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Cole talked about filling notebooks with your stupid ideas. I want to talk about filling the interwebs with your stupid ideas.
Cole talks about indirectly influencing the creation of artwork. Nowhere other than the internet can average-Jane write about her stupid ideas and potentially have millions of people reading them. But this is not just an issue of numbers, it’s mostly an issue of permanence. The stupid poems that I wrote late at night as a final project for English last year could have just sat on my hard drive until they accidentally got deleted or corrupted. But now they are online, and furthermore there’s a big fat Creative Commons license slapped on them. Perhaps someone somewhere eventually will find them inspiring or interesting. Maybe they’ll want to share them with their friends or incorporate them into some other creative work. Or maybe my poems will be interesting to some historian several hundred years from now as they try to understand some aspect of the world that I lived in when I wrote them. Or maybe they will never be of any use to anyone ever. Well, that would have been the case had I simply left them on my hard drive. What have I got to lose?
Creative works are pieces of culture. Culture is a terrible thing to waste.
what if wikipedia gave special permissions to certain groups (tenured professors at universities, probably) who are experts in the fields that certain wikipedia pages relate to
here’s the idea: those with an expertise in a certain discipline (tenured professors for the most part. probably. at least initially) are identified and given special permissions for wikipedia pages that relate to their discipline. In addition to making normal edits, they can add a “stamp of approval” to a specific version of an article. Basically, they take the article in whole and look at it the same way that they look at the articles that they peer-review for journals in their field (i’ve been told that most professors do this for free?). They make any edits that they feel need to be made to secure the factual integrity of the article, then they attach the stamp. As soon as someone else, without special “scholarly” permissions makes an edit to the page, the new version doesn’t have the stamp.
But wikipedia keeps the stamped version, so if a student or professor wants to cite a wikipedia article as a source, or if someone just thinks that everyone on the internet is stupid, they can click a link to see the “scholarly” version of the article (probably a few revisions old, perhaps less up-to-date, but certainly spam-free and factually accurate). the people with “scholar” permissions for an article check the revisions on that article and either approve all of them (bringing the thumbs-up to the latest version) or they just take the article as a whole again and peer-review it from scratch. The “scholarly” version of an article will be more recent if more academics are actively reviewing. Also, perhaps it takes two “thumbs-up”s in order for an article to be promoted to “scholarly”
this would be an additional layer added to wikipedia, with no effect on the actual public articles. the scholarly version of an article is accessible, but the “normal” one is the first one that the user sees. on the “normal” article, edits made by scholars can be freely changed by non-scholars. scholars don’t “trump” non-scholars (though admins do). The only difference is that in addition to making edits, scholars can add the stamp of approval, or thumbs-up.
i’ve bounced this idea off a few people. one concern that was raised was the overhead involved in finding and confirming the identities of these scholars. certainly this would involve a non-negligible amount of work. the question of how to confirm that people on the internet are who they say they are is a bit of a toughey, but people have been working on this for years and come up with some reasonable solutions. tonyb suggested that this might inform the solution? Further, there’s the question of how to confirm that people have the degrees that they say they do. I think the answer to this one is easy: let their affiliates do that for us. If MIT says that professor X has degree Y from institution Z, take their word for it. Once in awhile they’ll be wrong, but we couldn’t hope to do better ourselves. But the concern with overhead of wikipedia employees (or lack thereof) is a legitimate one. also, it’s possible that this idea is contrary enough to wikipedia’s mission and goals that it should really be a service that is outsource. Luckily, wikipedia’s database of articles is available for free, and so is it’s software (the great majority of it, anyway). So the coordination of scholars could be done elsewhere and the scholarly versions of article stored somewhere else. With the help of a simple firefox extension, the integration with wikipedia could still be very tight.
and that is my crazy idea. it’s very likely that someone has already come up with this idea. maybe someone has tried to implement it? drop me a line if you know of someone else whose playing with this stupid idea.
excuse me for the lack of proofreading. i’m going to go to sleep now, and hopefully i will edit this tomorrow.
for now, please enjoy this poorly worded stupid idea!
the spontaneity of the right-hand turn
the alertness not unrelated to a lack of sleep
the shoes left in the car
the cautious yet eager walk down the street and down the slippery ramp
the half-buttoned shirt with rolled-up sleeves
the way the wind was just subtle enough
the way the loose clumps of sand release their tension under my feet
the crispness of the air
the beautiful, clean, intimate fog
the middle-aged couple out taking their first walk of the year
the fisherman whose rod runs parallel to the horizon
the seagulls springing into the air as a young girl runs by
the purple of my hands
the cold metal of my camera
the chill of my damp hair
not numbing
beautifully penetrating and cleansing
the quiet and isolation
the introspection and reflection
the promises and the initiative
the beautiful, clean, intimate fog
