This is not a tag line!
memeblogging
A Musical Baton
May 19th
I had seen this meme popping up all over my NetNewsWire subscriptions. I wasn’t quite expecting to be asked to participate but Daniel J. Wilson passed me the baton so here goes! 
Total volume of music files on my computer
41.82 GB (8,840 tracks) at home, 19.27 GB at work. There’s some overlap though. And, actually, if anyone knows of a good tool to reconcile several iTunes libraries, I’d be real happy to hear about it! 
The last CD I bought
Last time I bought physical CDs, I bought a bunch of them at once:
- Blueberry Boat by The Fiery Furnaces
- No Roots by Faithless
- Uh Huh Her by PJ Harvey
- Yoshimi Battles The PInk Robots by The Flaming Lips
- Tragic Kingdom by No Doubt
- Remedy by Basement Jaxx
- Rooty by Basement Jaxx
- Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco
The last album (all media included) I bought was Geogadddi by Boards of Canada on the iTunes Music Store, which I bought tonight.
Song playing right now
“Music Is Math” from the album Geogaddi by Boards of Canada
Five songs I listen to a lot, or mean a lot to me
So difficult to choose only five songs and it’s a little late so it’ll have to be five songs that I like and no explanations, in more or less random order…
- “Signal to Noise” by Peter Gabriel on the album Up
- “J’ai Poussé Trop Vite (Version Inédite)” by Eiffel on the album Le Quart d’Heure des Ahuris (Bonus)
- “I’m Amazed” by Frank Black on the album Frank Black Francis
- “Agenda Suicide” by The Faint on the album Danse Macabre
- “Reanimator” by Amon Tobin on the album Permutation
Five people to whom I’m passing this baton
As Eric Blair said in his passing of the baton, some people in my life really need to get a blog!
200 things
Nov 2nd
200 Things (inspired by a Backup Brain entry)
Things I’ve done are in bold. This had been on my to-post list for a while…
- Bought everyone in the pub a drink
- Swam with wild dolphins
- Climbed a mountain(Grande Rochette, La Plagne, French Alps, though I started pretty high up already…)
- Taken a Ferrari for a test drive
- Been inside the Great Pyramid
- Held a tarantula
- Taken a candlelit bath with someone
- Said “I love you” and meant it
- Hugged a tree
- Done a striptease
- Bungee jumped
- Visited Paris(it’s kind of hard not to when you grew up a mere 10 km away from it)
NetNewsWire and MarsEdit
Sep 22nd
Ranchero has finally released public beta versions of NetNewsWire 2.0 and their new blog editor, MarsEdit. I have been using both for a while now: the software I used to post that I couldn’t mention in my Meme Propagation Test post was in fact MarsEdit! Of course, this post is also posted via MarsEdit.
While both softwares are still in beta, they’ve become essential to my daily routine. The built-in browser in NetNewsWire and its ability to remember tabs from session to session makes it worth it by itself and resulted in me not using Safari for news reading anymore. I used to open my “to-read” articles in Safari tabs. Big problem though: if I had to reboot or Safari crashed for some reason, I would loose all my queued articles or have to hunt them in the browser history. Not anymore! The flip side is that I currently have 55 open tabs in NetNewsWire with article begging me to read them! My problem is that I open tabs way faster than I can close them.
Of course, there are a lot more new features than just an embedded browser. Plus, there is more to come (not everything has been announced yet)! Give them a spin, you won’t regret it.
Here from the album Moffou by Salif Keita
More on Bush
Sep 14th
Election time goes ever closer. Rational Bloggers (though arguably one could qualify them of bloggers with a liberal/democrat/environmentalist bias) try to cut through the media machinery that seems geared towards belittling Kerry’s character and try to show Bush’s in a truer light.
Daniel Wilson points us to a letter to the NYT editor which equates Bush to a PowerPoint person. Tufte argues, in a Wired editorial, that the standard PowerPoint presentation elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch, that its pushy style seeks to set up a speaker’s dominance over the audience… Seems almost like a description of Bush’s attitude to me!
Elsewhere, at the Gadflyer to be precise (via Backup Brain, twice), more points are made that despite his tough, resolute attitude, Bush is not much more than a coward and flip-flopper.
One might argue that, since the USA are considered the most powerful and influential country in the world, foreign countries should have a say as to who the next US president should be because of the potential impact his/her administration could have on their own societies. That would be, of course, an intolerable interference in the American internal affairs. Yet, Philippe Martin in “The world against Bush” points us to an interesting study:
The French newspaper Libération writes:
Georges W. Bush is lucky that the election of the world’s leader is reserved to a small part of its population: Americans. If the whole world could vote, John Kerry would be assured of a crushing victory.Liberation based its article on a study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) from Maryland’s University, that was released on last Wednesday. It says:
In 30 out of 35 countries polled, from all regions of the world, a majority or plurality would prefer to see John Kerry win the US presidential election—especially traditional US allies. The only countries where President Bush was preferred were the Philippines, Nigeria, and Poland. India and Thailand were divided. On average, Kerry was favored by more than a two-to-one margin—46% to 20% (weighted for variations in population, the ratio was not significantly different).
See the full report on PIPA’s site.
BTW, the study doesn’t mention it, but I’m sure that Bin Laden and his fans would vote Bush too. No one else would play their game as well as he does!
I have posted about the last point, I don’t think there’s much doubt about this either…
Backup Brain points us (again) to a Gadflyer article about Al Gore’s analysis of Bush’s character: “W stands for weak”. The analysis itself is taken from a New Yorkerprofile of the former Vice-President, in which Tipper Gore also said: What did you expect? I live with the man who invented the Internet
when asked about the couple’s matching Apple laptops. I know it has nothing to do with politics but this is my weblog and I cannot resist a little bit of Apple propaganda. Returning to Bush, his weakness is not surprising considering the guy doesn’t even know where his heart is (via DasGenie: !Scrap)… More from the Gadflyer about using the Republicans’ own tactics against them in a good example of framing the discourse towards getting Kerry elected. And with this, I shall refrain from posting about politics for a while.
Girls (idiotech Remix) from the album Always Outsiders Never Outdone by Prodigyremixed.com
Missile balloons!
Sep 9th
Microsize Boy from the album The Attraction to All things Uncertain by tweaker
Linguistics and its application to politics
Aug 30th
In a society dominated by talking points, it’s about time the Democrats take greater control over the language that they (and their opponents) use to debate issues. According to George Lakoff, conservatives have framed the debate and the Democrats by a smart use of language and investments in getting their message across and widely propagated thus advancing their agenda much more efficiently than Democrats do (or at least used to). Very interesting article. Be sure to read the follow-up article posted recently in UC Berkeley NewsCenter. Take also a look at the Rockridge Institute website for more information.
More on the same subject by Aaron Swartz who provides an example of how Republicans framed the debate in the 2000 elections. Seems like Lakoff’s book is going to end up in my “to-read” queue…
Satellites from the album Satellites by Tundra
Tricks of the Trade
Aug 25th
I’m a pack rat for bits of information I will probably never use. So obviously, I find posts like
Tricks of the Trade over at The Morning News totally essential!
Backfire The Chaff from the album Staggering Statistics by The Staggering Statistics
Knowledge management via bookmarks [part 1]
Aug 21st
Motivation
As noted in a previous entry, writing a bookmark manager had been on my mind for a while. I haven’t had time to really sit and write down what I was planning on doing. The idea itself wasn’t very clear to start with and the existence of online bookmark managers (del.icio.us, spurl, hyperlinkomatic, I’m probably missing others…) doing more or less what I thought about doing didn’t really make me feel the need to press forward with this endeavor.
Recently, however, posts on the subject have appeared in weblogs that I read. First, it was Buzz Andersen announcing that he just released a beta version of a Cocoa del.icio.us client, Cocoal.icio.us. Then, Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch posted about what a better bookmarking system could be like. These two posts provided the one-two punch that woke me up from my dogmatic slumber, er, complacency. Ahem, too much Kant reading in my previous life I’m afraid…
Anyway… This post is the first part of a two-part article meant to provide a place for me to put down some ideas on the topic of bookmarks from a knowledge management perspective. My purpose is to sort out my ideas and see wether it is worth it for me to spend some of my free time writing a bookmark manager. To this end, in this first part, I will look at the state of the art for bookmark management by providing an overview of what I think the key issues are and possible solutions to these issues. Part 2 will elaborate on desiderata for a knowledge management tool based on bookmarks and will extend the topic into the realms of social networks and what, if anything, they can contribute to an ideal solution.
This post will certainly be updated as time goes. This is but a first attempt at organizing my ideas so please bear with me as I try to work this out.
