All posts in September 2007

Liz and Dorothea point toward this right-on xkcd comic, and Michelle and Shelley appear in O’Reilly’s Women In Tech site. Michelle’s essay concerns technology changing worlds; Shelley’s leans on her readers to recognize the scope and implications of the gender imbalance in world of tech. What they think matters, and what they’re talking about matters,…

OK, Michael wants to know “the last five songs I bought on iTunes,” which I will willfully redirect to “the last five songs I bought online.” Since I buy from lots of different online music vendors, restricting my answers to iTunes would I’ll also count only one song from the Music From the Court of…

Evidently you can’t use Gift Certificates for MP3 downloads at Amazon. That’s a minor nuisance for us — we buy enough books, etc., that it will easily even out. Still, a minor nuisance is still a nuisance. Michael followed up on yesterday’s experience by noting Greetings, An update on my Amazon downloader experience. I ended…

Having blogged about the new Amazon MP3 store without actually, you know, kinda using it, I felt a pang of accountability to check it out. It took a while to find a recording that interested me enough to select it — the selection is still spotty, and it didn’t include some of my test-case obscurities…

You may recall that I have a particular devotion to St Peter of Verona, a/k/a Peter Martyr, as well as to holy cards in general; last week, I bid on and obtained (at a very reasonable price) a holy card in my favorite style depicting Peter Martyr. Now, this image departs from the “cleaver in…

Wild cheering, enthusiastic encomia, heartfelt best wishes, and prayers for all concerned: as of Saturday, Sage and Steve have a new baby daughter*! Woo-hoo! * And Checkers has a possible nemesis, possible boon companion, possible rival for attention, but definite precious, beloved family member-in-need-of-ferocious canine guarding.

After several foregone-conclusion warm-up bouts against stiffs and glass-jawed losers, iTunes finally faces a contender. iTunes has the advantages of a vast established user base, integration with the music-playing application, integration with iPods, and various Apple intangibles. Amazon brings its own user base, higher-quality music files, lower prices, and no DRM. I haven’t bought anything…

Does anyone actually like them? They’re always the last kind left in any array I observe. Yesterday the Center hosted two groups to whom it served donut holes (I decline to use the commercial name for them), and this morning the leftovers were set out with the coffee: all cinnamon.

I’m pretty jaundiced about internet memes, so when I started seeing ed-tech bloggers rhapsodize about a lecture by someone named Randy Pausch, I skipped ahead; yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. But at a certain point I figured there might indeed be something to it, so I went over to YouTube to watch. In this case, the…

For those with case-hardened steel eardrums, DaveX at startlingmoniker has mashed up an example of ways the RIAA suggests polluting peer-to-peer filesharing networks. He started with Britney Spears’s new single “Gimme More” (the one she torpedoed weekend before last on the Video Music Awards show), then interwove it with — hey, that’s me! DaveX used…

Last Week, David Isenberg posted a graphical clue to what the Big Providers’ dream of the internet would be like: get yer basic internet for $29.95 a month, with free access to AOL, Disney, Go.com, msn, and so on. For $39 a month, you can use Google, Wikipedia, and Yahoo! If you want to blog…

Pippa and Margaret and I rolled up to Maine for the weekend — more specifically, for Saturday — to celebrate Margaret’s mother’s birthday. Pat didn’t want a big party, so it was just family: Pat and Dick, the Princeton/Evanston delegation, and Jeanne and Gail. But Jeanne and Margaret had prepared an album of greetings from…