brian boyer

for the uninitiated, sound opinions is a fantastic weekly radio program, billed as the world’s only rock and roll talk show. jim derogatis and greg kot are music critics at the chicago sun-times, and tribune, respectively.

on this saturday’s program they interviewed a fellow i’m a huge fan of, lawrence lessig. he’s a stanford law professor, copyright guru, and founder of a fantastic project determined to update copyright law for the information age, creative commons.

among other great stuff, they treat us with a montage of versions of the song “in the pines”, an explanation of how current copyright law stifles creativity, and my favorite quote “the fact is, it’s not that our kids are deeply immoral, it’s that the law renders their behavior illegal in a way that does not make sense in the 21st century.”

link to Sound Opinions Footnotes

link to podcast info.

this is freaking ridiculous… from boing boing:
Two students at our school, the University of Michigan, dressed up as Pac-Man and the Ghost respectively, ran through the UGLi (the Undergraduate Library) and the Fishbowl (a huge computer lab on Central campus) during finals week. Pac-Man screams in horror as the Ghost chases him yelling “Waka Waka Waka.” This video has spread like wildfire on our campus, and killed the original hosting site’s bandwidth.

Link to *.mov

listen to, and love, nerd porn auteur:
www.ernestcline.com/spokenword

fantastic comedic spoken word - his other stuff is awesome as well

read a very interesting essay by paul graham the other day in joel spolsky’s new collection of great software writing. it’s about great hackers. (for those of you not in the know, hacker is a term of endearment for a great programmer.)

it’s a great essay on hackers and hacking, but i took a particular bit from the essay to heart from a totally different angle. the bit:

“The problem is, if you’re not a hacker, you can’t tell who the good hackers are. A similar problem explains why American cars are so ugly. I call it the design paradox. You might think that you could make your products beautiful just by hiring a great designer to design them. But if you yourself don’t have good taste, how are you going to recognize a good designer? By definition you can’t tell from his portfolio. And you can’t go by the awards he’s won or the jobs he’s had, because in design, as in most fields, those tend to be driven by fashion and schmoozing, with actual ability a distant third. There’s no way around it: you can’t manage a process intended to produce beautiful things without knowing what beautiful is. American cars are ugly because American car companies are run by people with bad taste.

Many people in this country think of taste as something elusive, or even frivolous. It is neither. To drive design, a manager must be the most demanding user of a company’s products. And if you have really good taste, you can, as Steve Jobs does, make satisfying you the kind of problem that good people like to work on.”

now, i know full well that i am not a great hacker. i’m a pretty good programmer, at best. similarly, i am not a great writer, artist, cook, music critic, political wonk, or design geek. but i am pretty good at these things. i am definitely a jack of all trades, and a master of none. but this essay made me think about what i am good at… i do have pretty good taste. if i don’t know about something, i am good at absorbing all the available information (acquiring the taste), and making an informed decision.

why was this such a profound moment? because i’ve always been pretty down about the jack of all trades thing. but what i figured out the other day is that i am quite capable at having good taste. this puts me in a unique position… i could probably hire the great designer (not the guy who designed the aztek). and i know full well that i can hire great developers, i’ve been doing that job for months.

i want to start a company. i want to get some great minds together and produce something awesome. i might not be able to think of the best new product on my own, but i’m sure that i could get together the people who could. and i’m pretty sure that i could tell which idea is great, and which is a dud.

so, who wants in? want to open a great restaurant, give away the next killer app, build a better voting system, or start a publishing house? let’s talk.

so, rollyo lets you create a custom search engine, based on a set of sites that you find applicable. totally neato!

just set one up for ceramic art, check it out!

The Time Traveler Convention - May 7, 2005

from the site:
Technically, you would only need one time traveler convention. Time travelers from all eras could meet at a specific place at a specific time, and they could make as many repeat visits as they wanted. We are hosting the first and only Time Traveler Convention at MIT in one week, and WE NEED YOUR HELP!

Great idea, I’d love to help! What should I do?

Write the details down on a piece of acid-free paper, and slip them into obscure books in academic libraries! Carve them into a clay tablet! If you write for a newspaper, insert a few details about the convention! Tell your friends, so that word of the convention will be preserved in our oral history! A note: Time travel is a hard problem, and it may not be invented until long after MIT has faded into oblivion. Thus, we ask that you include the latitude/longitude information when you publicize the convention.

i freaking love this. i’ll be making clay tablets to help publicize this to future civilizations. i’ll post pics of the tablets when they’re done. any ideas on where to put them?

www.paulrademacher.com/housing

so this genius wrote a little web page that merges craigslist for sale/rent housing listings with google maps. it’s freaking ridiculous!

i love the internets.

Free Press : Community Internet

so, there are lots of rotten sons of bitches that are backing legislation to prevent municipalities from providing free internet access.

this makes me furious. just like states rights, municipal rights are essential to maintain. AND, municipal broadband is just about the only thing we can do do to ensure that those on the other side of the digital divide can survive in the 21st century!

bad bad verizon, sprint, comcast, and bellsouth! rotten legislators, putting corporate greed before the benefit of the people!

gaaaaarrrghhh!!!

Mozilla Update :: Extensions — More Info: JustBlogIt

fellow bloggers:

install this extention to Firefox, and go crazy!

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