digital detritus

Folks have started to talk about and organize around the fact that brother Santorum wants to silence the national weather service.

Tim O’Reilly has a great entry in his blog about this and the EFF have started a campaign to get folks to contact their senators.

For those folks just tuning in, here’s the short version:

Seems Santorum is having his strings pulled by the folks at places like AccuWeather. So he’s sponsored a bill that would have the data that the national weather service makes available taken off line. Because, he claims, it competes unfairly with commercial weather services.

Brother Santorum, you are a tool.

Talk about things that make you think. This post from Sonny made me think about the two things that I really care about. Open source and social change. In fact, open source falls under the heading of social change, although there are probably open source advocates who might not like that I do think it is true.

We still have a lot of work to do to make the world a safe and good place for everyone to live in. Things are not yet equal for all, and that’s what we need to work to.

Open source does work to move the world towards a more egalatarian place. The world runs, to a fairly major extent, runs on information. The tools of information are software. Open source software exposes the tools to scrutiny by everyone, which is a good thing. But social change doesn’t begin and end with open source.

Social change work comes in all shapes, sizes and colors. And a lot of that work is a lot easier with the right software. So here’s the rub, the right software isn’t always open source. Sometimes the best option is commercial, proprietary, software. Sometimes it’s the only option.

So what’s a hard working, social change wanting geek supposed to do?

This is the kind of thing that just plain rocks my world. Thanks to the folks over at BoingBoing (once again) I now know about these two kick-ass remixes of George “occupier and thief” W.

Seems some folks have remixed the words of W. so that it sounds like he is singing a medly of Imagine and A Walk on the Wildside and someone else has remixed the words of the shrub over the top of Don’t Tread on Me by Metallica.

You can find all this and more at the DIYmedia.net site.

This story is really about what went on when I first shaved my head.

I was at work late on a Friday night and I’d been thinking about shaving my head for a couple of days. So I decided to do it. Step one, find some clippers.

You wouldn’t think that finding clippers to shave your head would be all that tough. But at 8pm on a Friday in downtown Boston it’s not all that easy. After walking about 15 blocks and looking high and low. I finally found a beard trimmer at the local CVS and I figured, what the hell. So armed with a battery operated beard trimmer, a Mach 3 razor and some shaving cream I went back to my office.

Back in my office I lined up a couple of trash cans to catch the hair as I shaved it off. For those of you who haven’t tried to shave your own head, it can take a while with small under powered beard trimmer. I got most of the hair off of my head with the clippers but to really get that smooth finish I had to shave the stubble.

Now I’m a big fan of being comfortable so I’d taken off my shoes and socks. And, of course, I didn’t want any hair down my shirt so I’d stripped to the waist as well. With razor and shaving cream in hand I headed to the mens room to finish the job.

I got my head all lathered up and started to shave. Fellas this is one hell of a sensation. about half way through my head it occured to me that I didn’t have my keys in my pocket and the door to my office had locked behind me.

Ok, so here’s the image. I’m only wearing pants, I’ve got a head covered in shaving cream, it’s late on a Friday night and I’m locked out of my office. Oh, and it was March.

So, I finished shaving my head, cleaned myself up as well as I could and headed out to see if I could find someone to let me in to my office. Of course, there’s no one else in the building. So, I found a phone, called the university police and asked to be let back into my office. They said they would have a locksmith meet me at my office.

On my way back to my office I ran across the janitor in the building. I tried to explain to him (I only speak english, he didn’t at all) that I needed to get back into my office. After a few minutes of pantomime I gave up and went back to wait for the locksmith.

As I’m heading down the stairs to my office I run into the locksmith on his way up to find me. He did a double take when he saw me.

“Don’t even ask” I said.

“Did this have something to do with the game tonight” he asked.

“I only wish it was that easy” I replied.

He let me back into my office. I retrieved my keys, shoes, shirt and coat and headed home.

That is the story of how I shaved my head.

I’m sure I’m going to upset some folks with what I am about to say but, I’ve never been a huge fan of Bruce Springsteen. Before any fans of the boss read this and start checking prices on tar and feathers let me say that it’s not that I don’t like his stuff. It’s just that I never really listened to it, I guess I never got around to really checking him out.

[cpg_thumb:3,2]Lately I’ve been collecting the gear that I need for some projects that I’m working on. One of the things that I have bought is a portable tape (cassette) deck for recording. I was able to get my hands on a Marantz PMD-430. It’s a pretty cool, I know it’s old-school but I like it and I’ve always wanted one. I was able to get it for a good price on ebay.

When I got the tape deck I found an unlabled tape in it. I sent mail to the guy who sold it to me but he didn’t want the tape so I finally sat down and listened to what was on it. From what I can hear it sounds like it might be either, some kind of mix tape that someone put together or some kind of live recording of Bruce Springsteen. It’s all Springsteen and some of the songs segue from one to the next without stopping. But then I don’t hear any crowd noise and there’s no chatter with the audience like I would expect from a live performance.

Anyway, what I’ve discovered is that I really like what I hear. I’m sure this means that I have to give up what little punk rock street cred that I might have had.

Thanks to this post at BoingBoing I now know about the nature illustrations of Ernst Haeckel . The fun part is that I was able to download this PDF (~300MB) and I’ve been pulling images out of it ever since. The rotating images that you see in the upper lefthand corner of the blog are from that book.

Here are thumbnails from the pictures that have caught my eye so far.

Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing points out the fantastic photography of Rick Lieder.

This is the kind of thing I love. Seems that Rick will hang out in his backyard with his camera and a macro lens waiting for the bugs to strike the right pose. This stuff is great.

Head over and take a look, it’s worth your time.

Stringer a freelance journalist, who is paid for each piece of published or broadcast work, rather than receiving a regular salary. (From the Wikipedia entry for stringer)

I’ve been thinking lately about the idea of bloggers and others as news sources. There was a time when newspapers and radio networks had stringers all over the world feeding them stories. This was how we knew what was going on and it worked well. Stringers were good reporters and they knew the areas that they were in. But that doesn’t work as well as it used to, because it’s expensive to fly people around the world and get them to where the stories are.

So I was thinking the other day, what if we used bloggers and podcasters from around the world as stringers. The benefit here is that there are already folks producing news worthy content just about everywhere in the world. People are reading blogs about the war in Iraq, written by people there everyday. Then the tsunami hit it was bloggers that got more news out faster than any of the major news sources. All that needs to happen is that we need to collect, organize and sort the incoming information so folks can find what they are looking for.

There are already a number of folks doing this kind of blog aggregation: BoingBoing, Synaptic Junction and Alternet Peek. And we now have keyword based searching thanks to the fine folks at Tecnorati. But even all of this doesn’t complete the picture.

The reason that newspapers like the New York Times were such important voices was that not only did they collect information from around the world they also edited it for content and then categorized it so that folks could find it. But how do we do that with blogs and podcasts? You could spend lots of time googling for things that you wanted to read, but then you have to wade through lots of garbage to find the good bits. What we need are editors.

What we can do now that we couldn’t do before is automate some of the categorizing of information. Since we can include meta data with things like podcasts and blog entries can have categories and tags assigned to them, we can sort with that. If we add on top of that some people to preview at least some of the content to make sure that it is what it says it is and tweak the categories we could have a fairly good news service.

Anyway, this is just an idea. I’d love to know of anyone doing this kind of work. Or what folks think about the idea.

Implementation is left as an exercise for the reader.