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Posts from the ‘A series of tubes’ Category

Oct 20

Schadenfreude II: The Schadenfreuduning

Oct 10

You and I and George

A number of my officemates were unaware of the perennial classic piece of Americanna, “You and I and George”. Not only was this oversight shocking, but it occurred to me that, like many great works, it is even truer in this difficult American political climate than when it was first penned. Rolf was truly ahead of his time.



Oct 7

Shorter Entirety of American Politics

Overcompensating is one of those sites I could pretty much link daily. Jeffrey Rowland is not only one of my favourite webcartoonists – he is also too mean to die.

However today’s instalment pretty much summarizes the entirety of the US political arena. It is like a fractal – every single element of it is a reduced size copy of the whole.

Sep 24

Wordles!

Rob turned me on to worlde.net, a clever little java application that lets you enter a chunk of plaintext (or an RSS feed) and turns it into a tag cloud image (the more a word is used the bigger it is).

It’s got a tonne of formatting options to play with and is eerily hypnotic. The picture above is the full text of the novel “Eastern Standard Tribe” with the character names removed… I just happened to have it kicking around my hard drive. Good read to boot.

Sep 10

Save the Internet Fundraising Drive

Yes I’m surviving TIFF ’08, thanks for asking. It’s been a great year, but I’m very much looking forward to getting to the weekend and sleeping for several days. More recap later.

I just got a brief e-mail from Timothy Karr, the campaing director of the (excellent) SaveTheInternet.com that they are looking to raise $25,000 today to help them fight Comcast’s appeal of the FCC’s precedent-setting August ruling against Comcast’s network throttling practises.

I’ve written before why network neutrality is so important, especially why I believe that conceptualizing the internet like a utility, not a content channel is fundamentally key for consumers and producers of digital content.

SaveTheInternet.com has been one of the most vocal supporters in fighting some very deep pockets in the US to promote the concept of network neutrality – and given the influence that US policy tends to have globally, I strongly encourage everyone to help support them and spread awareness of their fight.

[ Edit – Some generous soul has also set up a $300,000 fund to match any donations made today – so if you were on the fence about putting your money where your mouth is… now’s your chance to double your impact! ]

Full e-mail after the jump.
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Aug 11

Join the (Ukraine) Army!

Rob, my brother, sent me a link to this recruitment video for the Ukrainian army. Compared to the Canadian (and US) ads I see constantly, I find the candor and lack of pretext refreshing.

Aug 10

1 Comment

Panning for gold in the sewer: Fun with internet critique

Friday’s post about Scott Kurtz’s take on interpreting critical feedback eventually generated a couple very interesting comments.

One thing everyone agreed upon was that that the “signal to noise” ratio for feedback (incorporating all pro/amateur/literary critique/”you suck” e-mail) for any creative work on the Internet is astoundingly low. So the question remains – as a creator of any subjective work on the Internet (comics, films, poetry, bonsai kittens) – how can one filter the responses one gets to get useful information out of the mire? Read more

Jul 30

Pssst… want to buy some unfiltered Chinese Olympic internet access?

In all the recent hooplah about China (gasp) reneging on it’s commitment to provide unfiltered Internet access for Olympic journalists, I’m quite surprised that more media outlets aren’t coming to the plate to publicaly announce that they’ll be circumventing any attempts made at censorship.

I suspect that it will come as a shock to absolutely no one that filtering the internet is almost impossible, and there are a wide range of public and private options to circumvent filtering. As well I know many (I suspect most) major media outlets use VPNs, or other secured on-line platforms to submit their stories… obtaining web content through this “protected corridor” would be trivial.

More interesting to me than the global hand-wringing going on (which gives the impression that the Chinese government has all the power in this equation) would be if more organizations would publicly come out and state that filtering web access based on URL or even content keywords would have absolutely no impact whatsoever on their operations, or their ability to access whatever information they want while in Beijing.

Heck, why isn’t a major news outlet vowing to take a stand and provide their own encrypted internet corridor for any accredited journalist who wants to use it while in Beijing? Then we’d have a story.

Perhaps, as Chris Matyszczyk posited at CNet the real censorship issue doesn’t start with the Chinese government, but with Western press reluctance to rock the boat.

[Edit 07/30/08 – Only hours later it looks like The IOC knew China had no intention of honouring their commitment – and even did a deal with them allowing this. While making the IOC seem unusually feckless, even by IOC standards, it doesn’t change my underlying position. If the media is truly outraged, let’s see them stand up and resolve the situation publically (instead of privately). I have no doubt they’d start getting tossed out of the country left and right, but it would be a lot more interesting to see the IOC try to worm it’s way out of that situation with a “well we’re only concerned about the sports themselves”.]