Frogs and Ravens

This Could Be Permanent If We Don't Act

via www.digitaltrends.com

 

(Yes, my blog's been quiescent; that is, however, a different state than permanently shut down. More on the legislation in question at the link, above.)

YouTube Afternoon

The sound of a young French girl waving an old floppy disc:  wubble-wubble-wubble.  What is it?  Une CD?

Computer Scheduling Bleg

Here's my problem:  I want my computer to turn on and off its wireless internet by itself, according to a schedule I set.  So it can go online at 9am, say, and will turn off at 10pm.  Do any of you know of such a program, available for the Mac?

(I already have Freedom, but the problems with it are (a) I have to enable it myself, and (b) it's by duration, not by clock time.)

Suggestions for good Googling phrases for finding such a thing would also be appreciated; my Google-fu is feeling challenged.

Compensation

Watching the news about the Gulf oozing out, day after day, knowing that as a driver living in this modern industrial economy I am complicit in the effects, I have decided to do something.

I've seen calls for boycotting BP, and while I understand the impulse, I have been unable to understand exactly how that would work.  Yes, it would show displeasure, but it wouldn't solve the problem.  It would reduce money in BP's profit sheet, but it makes astonishing amounts on a global scale, and right now it needs that money to pay out fines and help fix the situation.  It would hurt local stations, which are already struggling; eventually, yes, they will need to find new ways of making a living, but right now seems ill-timed for that hardship.  Plus, if I don't buy from BP, I must still buy from some other petrochemical giant who is just as complicit as BP in this world of exploitation and regulations-dodging. 

Like many people, "choosing" to go without petroleum in the form of an automobile fuel source isn't a practical option for me; I do avoid driving for the most part, but sometimes it can't be helped.  And it doesn't even touch on the myriad of ways that I consume, indirectly, petroleum products such as plastics, energy, etc.

So my response is this:

For every tankful of gas I purchase, I will donate an equivalent or greater amount to an organization working on the clean-up, or promoting alternative energy, or encouraging us to wean ourselves off of petroleum, or which encourages public transit.  I think of it as a tax on my use of petroleum as a driver, and if I had more money I'd consider adding my other uses to the calculation. 

If this idea appeals to you, I encourage you to spread the word around.

Deserving Does Not Equal Getting

I wrote the comment below the fold on a post at academHack about the Brian Croxall paper that's been stirring up conversations among the MLA and digital humanities crowd, and I've decided to develop some of the ideas in it here.  (If you have no idea what I'm talking about, feel free to ignore.)

I have found myself swinging between being interested in the larger conversation about the role of the digital humanities within the larger world of scholarship, and feeling irritated by the directions of the conversation.  It's a bit awkward to say this, since I have several friends who are active in the digital humanities community, but I do get a bit tired of the combination of "this is a total game-changer" rhetoric coupled with "the establishment doesn't appreciate us" complaints.  I think, for me, that this irritation comes mostly out of the undertone many (not all!) of such scholars that IF ONLY their work was recognized as genuine scholarship, and IF ONLY older, more conservative academics understood what digital humanities entailed, and IF ONLY enough attention was brought to the issue... then all scholars working in digital humanities will get tenure-track jobs or their equivalent.

And I just don't see this.  

Wi-Fi Detector Shirt

via www.thinkgeek.com

It's a shirt that lights up to show the signal strength of nearby wi-fi!

Twitter Made Me Do It

A post in which I rant about lazy jeremiads against technology.

Books, Bookstores, and Kindle

(Based on a comment originally posted on Lance's blog, in response to this post.)

In our current city, there are five bookstores.  There is the small used bookshop with the former historian who will talk your ear off about local gossip.  There is the tiny Walden Books in the out-of-the-way mall.  Two college bookstores offer an unpredictable selection of texts and local authors and pop culture.  Downtown there is a bookstore/coffeeshop that mostly specializes in magazines which is the place everyone buys the New York Times on Sunday, and where posters for events around town inevitably get posted. All of them are quite small; each is a single room, except for the used bookstore, which is two tiny rooms.

Facebook Blinked

So last night I tried logging into Facebook and got a "down for site maintenance" notice.  A half hour later, the Terms of Service had been reverted back to the September 23rd version.  Basically, Facebook blinked.  It has also bought itself some breathing room while it tries to figure out how to cover its butt without outraging its customers.

I'm glad of the retraction, but Facebook needs to do a lot more to restore my trust at this point.

There are two issues that are not being addressed in the various communications Schmidt and Zuckerberg have made in the immediate aftermath, and they are exactly the ones that disturbed me the most about the whole thing.

The Great Facebook Rights Grab of 2009

Like increasing numbers of people in this day and age, I have an account on Facebook.  I also have accounts at LibraryThing, Zenfolio, Redbubble, Etsy, Artfire, Twitter, MySpace, Ravelry and probably a few I've forgotten.  I also have at least 6 email accounts, a web page, and three online stores.  Then there's the two blogs I have here on Typepad.  If I had a video camera, I'd probably be adding to YouTube or Vimeo.

In short, I'm a wired woman, very much enmeshed in what the cognescenti like to call "Web 2.0."

As a result of this, and of my years blogging, I've become very much interested in the ways that various online service providers communicate with their clients and the sorts of problems that ensue when they fail to navigate this new environment successfully.  (Etsy offers an often astonishing example of what happen when communication breaks down.  See Unofficial Etsy News and EtsyBitch for discussions of this and links.)

I've also become increasingly protective of my content; the days when I believed wholeheartedly in the idea that all knowledge should be free has been replaced by the conviction that while knowledge should be spread widely and generously, the people who make the effort to produce it deserve recompense for their efforts.  That is, the trade-off of my generosity in this regard is me making enough to eat and pay rent and insurance.  I'm willing to share low-res images with the world at large, here and on my other blog and on flickr, but it's an act of temporary generosity on my part, not an abandonment of my interest in the content.  If I decide to pull those images, both TypePad and Flickr (and its parent company, Yahoo), agree, as per their Terms of Service, that any license I may have granted them in order to use their sites ends.  The licenses they require are also reasonable, related primarily to me giving them permission to show that content to people who visit my sites. 

It used to be that this was the case for Facebook as well.  Their TOS was a bit more demanding - they wanted a much more extensive license to use our stuff - but, like most such network providers out there, they included a clause that basically said, if you take your stuff off the site, or cancel your account, our right to use it ends. 

They have changed that.