April 2003

It used to be, when you walked into a New York bar, all you could really smell in the place was the cigarette smoke hanging in the air. Now, you get the bar’s real smell, and trust me when I say that’s not pretty. The bar I was in last night had a subtle odor that was a mix of stale beer and staler puke.
Thanks, Mayor Bloomberg, for a more fragrant New York.

Federal judge Stephen Wilson ruled Friday that P2P networks Grokster and Streamcast cannot be held responsible for the actions of their users. Wilson wrote:

Grokster and Streamcast are not significantly different from companies that sell home video recorders or copy machines, both of which can be and are used to infringe copyrights.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) represented Streamcast in the case.

[links: New York Times; CNET; Wired News; Lessig's commentary; EFF; PDF of decision]

The Honda Cog commercial, in QuickTime [4.9MB], courtesy ext|circ. Dan Hon also discusses a free DVD of the commercial, available in the UK, with extras on the making of the advert. (Hmmmm. If the DVD’s not region-encoded, it should be playable in the U.S.)
 

the fight for semantics. Jon Udell’s got a nice piece about the emergingly Semantic Blog. One part he missed was the emergence of CC licenses as part of the semantic blog space. Movabletype and Userland now both incorporate CC license options. The technique we’ve used with html has been questioned, but we are pushing hard to get RDF out there…. [Lessig Blog]

I haven’t read these documents yet, but I did some Semantic Web work in my master’s program, and it fascinates me. Once the Radio implementation of the CC license rolls out (if it hasn’t already), I’ll look into putting it in my site. Cool stuff.

I was just looking out the front window, spying on the neighbors with my roommate’s binoculars, when I saw a man and a woman walking up to the flea market across the street. The man pushed a stroller with a baby girl inside, and they walked with a young boy on inline skates.
What caught my eye was the man–my height, build, and coloring, with black plastic-rimmed glasses and a shaved head. He looked so much like me–barring that he’s fully clean-shaven, both pate and chin–that I’m sure even my mom would be fooled.
He wore a blue-denim jacket and carried a pink diaper bag with a teddy bear on it. Not only would I never wear blue denim above the waistline, I’d pick a more stylin’ diaper bag to sling over my shoulder. It’s like some weird, domesticated, parallel-universe version of me. I spied on his wife a while to make sure the parallel-me has good taste and, unfortunately, he kinda doesn’t.
I’m much better at pickin’ the cuties than he is.

Here’s an interesting experiment; Cory Doctorow writes:

Unwirer: an online, real-time exhibitionist sf story collaboration. Charlie Stross (who’s up for the Hugo, Neb and BSFA awards this year!) and I are collaborating on our third story together, working title “Unwirer.” And we’re doing it online.
We’ve set up a Movable Type blog for the collaboration. You can read along as we write, rewrite and discuss the story as we work our way through it. I think this might be a net-first — an act of auctorial exhibitionism that no one has ever attempted before.
…
We’re going to be updating the site daily, more or less, and we hope to have the story done in about a month.

peeps at the library! [via librarian.net]

Pope Opens Easter Mass With a Call for Peace. As tens of thousands of people jammed rain-soaked St. Peter’s Square, Pope John Paul II began Easter Sunday mass with a call to the faithful to work tirelessly for peace. By The Associated Press. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]

Oh, uh, yeah. I guess it is Easter. Since I don’t celebrate, I lose track. Happy Easter, if you’re a Christ person. Also, happy Passover. And, uh, to the rest of you…happy nothing.

Not only am I linked at the blog LibraryStuff, but the owner Steven M. Cohen, has me in his RSS feed as well. Thanks, Steven! I appreciate that.
Also, I found out, by accident, where my posts when I put them in categories. This means I’ll start going through my Web log, categorizing everything, and eventually linking to the categories pages, so it’s easy to click a link and find all posts in a certain category. As I mentioned earlier, this’ll make it easy to find, say, New York stories.