Year: 2004

Seb adding to my reading load

This, of course, is the essential danger of blogging and aggregators. You learn over time to trust someone’s judgment by following their blog. Then they add to your already overfull reading list with these kinds of recommendations. On the other hand, isn’t it better to fill whatever reading time you have with material that domes so highly recommended?

A few of my favorite visionaries. Some are diamonds in the rough, their signal often mistaken for noise; others are so unassuming that people hardly notice them. Others yet are just beginning to gather momentum on issues whose importance will probably have become blindingly obvious a few years from now. All of them envision big changes, and the glimpses I’ve had into their unusual minds have convinced me that they are onto something important, so I keep an eye out.

[Seb’s Open Research]

Bill O’Reilly trying to bury his Fresh Air interview

Sounds like a plan to me. The 21st century is not going to be kind to control freaks or their lawyers.

Bill O’Reilly trying to bury his Fresh Air interview. Terry Gross conducted an extraordinary interview with notorious demagogue Bill O’Reilly on her Fresh Air last October (listen here). Now, O’Reilly is withholding permission for NPR to relicence portions of the program. Please tell all your friends about this interview and get them to listen to it, so that O’Reilly’s plan to bury the interview backfires and this becomes the definitive O’Reilly interview of all time. Link [Boing Boing]

Dave Pollard on Blog Functionality

Dave Pollard has put together his cut at what blogging tools ought to be able to do from an average user perspective. While Dave is anything but an average blogger, this is an interesting line of thought.

Everyone has their own specifications for what they’d like blogs to do. Advanced users, comfortable with the technology and able to tweak their blogs to do some amazing (and some silly) things, are quickly leaving the rest of us behind, and there are millions of others who took a quick try at blogging, threw up their hands, and gave up.

This article is an attempt to create a scorecard of what blogs can and cannot presently do, and what they should be able to do. The objective is to spec out a blogging tool that is better (more useful), faster and simpler, at next to no cost. [How to Save the World]

Guide to buying a high-definition TV

My 15-year old has started some heavy lobbying for HDTV to enhance his sports viewing habits. It isn’t likely to happen anytime soon, even though I did offer to match him dollar for dollar for anything he managed to earn. I’m still inclined to think that we’re still a bit early in the technology adoption cycle, but now I have some initial reference material to add to the pile.

Guide to buying a high-definition TV.

ExtremeTech has a handy guide to buying a high-definition TV that makes at least little bit of sense out of the increasingly byzantine world of HDTV, digital TV, and flat-panel displays.

[Engadget]

Charles Stross’s Singularity Sky – 50 book challenge

Singularity Sky
Stross, Charles
Singularity Sky is one of the nominees for this year’s Hugo Award for best science fiction novel. While it was a good read, I don’t think it is quite up to that caliber. Definitely worth your time if you are a science fiction fan. It explores a couple of different themes in interesting ways, although they don’t quite all hang together. On one hand, it’s a story of the collision between stagnant culture and a post-Singularity information culture. That sets up a bunch of neat ideas worth thinking about. On the other hand, there’s also a sort of love-story between two agents behind enemy lines thing going on. These two major threads connect loosely, but not as well as you’d like. Overall, Stross is a very inventive mind and I’ll be looking for his other work as it comes to market. In the meantime, I’ve started reading his blog, Charlie’s Diary, which is equally stimulating

Elizabeth Moon’s Trading in Danger – 50 Book Challenge

Trading in Danger
Moon, Elizabeth
I’m a fan of Elizabeth Moon’s writing for no logical reason I can discern. Trading in Danger is an interesting mix of military and mercantile science fiction. It moves along at a good clip, although the heroine tends to be obtusely stupid at various points to string out her troubles. It does have some good passages on stepping into new leadership positions. Not one of Moon’s better efforts.

Drowning in a Sea of Surety

Wise words from Burningbird.

Drowning in a Sea of Surety. I think that we should designate one day per week to be Humility Day. Or perhaps Day of Doubt or Insecurity Day. Each weblog we visit, the owner–myself included–pontificates on all the wrongs and evils of the day. Expressing opinions is a good thing, but lately it seems that even the most thoughtful weblog writers are screaming their words out, pages covered with the spit of their emotional outbursts, saturated with surety. Not just in politics: I’m finding the same level of surety in technology and tool usage, even which operating system we use. It’s as if none of us can tolerate even the slightest possibility of doubt in our choices. We can’t just talk about how nice our TiBooks are–we … [Burningbird]