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July 30, 2003
Indentifying the Bast
Couple of months ago I took pictures of my friend's Egyptian Cat statue... they're called Basts. Well my friend has one, and I took pictures of it so that it could be identified. Well... it turns out that it is a unique piece, made for Emperor Hadrian, probably for his friends to put in their temples in Rome. And the ROM is going to be using my photos for lecturing... Neat."
Posted by jason at 08:36 AM
July 28, 2003
The Encyclopedia of Community
Not that I've seen it, or MY contribution on Blogs that I made, but SAGE Publications' Encyclopedia of Community is out. Here's a brief note of praise for it. "With every passing minute, it becomes more and more apparent that our world is one community. The Encyclopedia of Community serves as recognition of this trend and as a needed resource. The four-volume set not only explains the emerging buzz words of community such as 'social capital' or 'civic engagement' but also tells many stories of community institutions that work, such as public libraries." --Sarah Ann Long, Past President, (1999-2000) American Library Association"
Posted by jason at 11:39 AM
Toronto Water Works....
Check out my friend Dennis' article in the National Post Wizard of the works: Toronto's Depression-era art deco water plant is the legacy of an extraordinary public servant. It is such an amazing building, at least from the outside. I remember peering in the window late at night, when I used to live in the area. Dennis used to lecture for me, when I was teaching Environmental Studies, and this year I'll be lecturing for him this fall in his Vic1 program at UofT."
Posted by jason at 08:20 AM
At yuka's command...
Yuka demands that I blog this 400k GIF image of penguin humour. No penguins were hurt during the uploading of this animated GIF."
Posted by jason at 07:24 AM
July 27, 2003
Back from Bala
Just back from Bala and Midland. Visited dad, and we stayed in the guest house on a beach on Georgan Bay. One of the best views in the world. The guest house has a tiny loft with a bed upstairs. Downstairs is a single room with a bar, pinball machine, kitchen counter, dishwasher, toaster oven, fridge, and a bathroom. Oh, and a large pool table taking up almost all the space. There are no chairs. Just a couple of bar stools. Yuka learned how to play 8ball, and beat me twice. Wish I'd been able to do that when I started playing."
Posted by jason at 10:26 AM
July 24, 2003
Blogging at UofT
Hossein Derakhshan emailed me about his project: University of Toronto Blogs. If you're here, check it out."
Posted by jason at 08:12 AM
Off to Bala's Museum...
Yuka and I are going to visit Jack and Linda Hutton who run Bala's Museum for a day of Lucy Maud Montgomery activities."
Posted by jason at 08:01 AM
July 23, 2003
Hanging out with the Hacktavistas
Jasjit, Julia and I went to see Ron Deibert and KAT at the CitizenLab today, for a tour and chat about what we were all doing. Questions abound. But it is so nice to run into new questions, than bored old answers. And they seem to be working toward developing some amazingly cool tools."
Posted by jason at 05:54 PM
McLuhan Party Saturday
[I sort of help out with the byDesign eLab, and got this in the email. I can't make it, but some of you might. If so, say hi to everyone for me.] Saturday July 26: Come to a McLuhan BBQ. The McLuhan Program and the McLuhan global research network invite you to the third annual Coach House Renaissance festival, and a BBQ to celebrate McLuhan's birthday ( born July 21, 1911). Among the events planned are a web launch of the oral history project by Museum Studies grad student Dave Harkness, and the re launch for
Posted by jason at 04:07 PM
Jobs Jobs Jobs...
Still marginally unemployed, but there are some interesting things to share. My teaching of the brand new course KMD1002W has been confirmed, finally. This is at KMDI of course. I'm tentatively titleing the course ""Critical Issues in Knowledge Media Design."" Also, pending funding approval, it looks like I'll have another course in the same constellation, with a focus on Learning. No more details so as to not jinx it. And finally, I'll be doing a one month guest spot at Victoria University's VIC1 program in November... teaching critical thinking skills through the works of Lucy Maud Montgomery and Lewis Caroll. We're hoping to focus the class on the resources available at the osborne collection. Nice feeling... part-time employed."
Posted by jason at 08:13 AM
July 22, 2003
blog toys
Playing with Netomat, that I found on Joi Ito's blog. It is a java based tool for making multimedia thingies for the net."
Posted by jason at 07:14 PM
Looking for old blogs
Looking around on a server, I found my earliest surviving month blogging March 2001. Nothing special about it, except that I was using GreyMatter at the time, and that all my earlier stuff is gone. Snifff..."
Posted by jason at 06:17 PM
The angels want to wear my fluevogs.
Yuka and I went out for a jaunt today for a late lunch at LaHacienda where Amy works. On the way, we passed Fluevog's where they're having their semi-annual sale! I got a pair of each of these shoes at 50% off. and
Fluevogs are great. I have nine pairs so far... all of which I got on sale. And the first pair, which are about 6+ years old are still serviceable."
Posted by jason at 05:27 PM
Big time shopping...
Did a big shop yesterday. A BIG shop. Picked up Dad's new 17"" iMac. Have it locked away in my office to be set up. Also an iPod and a DV cam for sMom. Said iPod is set up swimmingly now. And a new printer for them. Just have to drive it up and set it up. And run away... before I try to keep some of it. It will be so nice to get dad away from his Dell. I talked his company from getting rid of Macs and switching to Dell's over a decade ago. And it was the right thing to do, as they had a silly mixed Mac/PC network, and their biz was really PC focussed. That's how I got my first Mac. It was a left over after the conversion process. But he doesn't work in the office. And people at the office don't know how to or won't support it. And thought I bought it for him and set it up, I refuse to support PCs. And all he does is complain, because it is not like DOS. So, now with a shiny new 17"" iMac, he still doesn't get DOS, and will probably complain, but at least I can fix it."
Posted by jason at 08:49 AM
July 20, 2003
Cyborg and Community revisited...
Mere days after getting Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments published in Surveillance and Society, Steve tells me that someone wants to publish an expanded version in a book. It never rains..."
Posted by jason at 10:18 PM
More Sweet Blood
Met with Elza Kephart, co-writer/director of Sweet Blood, which is in development. I now get to be a creative consultant, or some such nice slot for my CV. Elza and I had a great 2.5 hour chat about her script, and I got to learn alot about the process, and give her some ideas for the next draft. It is great to know that the skills of evaluating student work is transfirable to film script development. Eliza's in town for six months to attend the Canadian Film Centre. And Jessica X sat by pacifically watching process, and skipping out to do some shopping in Kensington Market while we chatted."
Posted by jason at 08:03 PM
CyberCream
MOOtrix: COWS Ice Cream - Prince Edward Island I have a selection of COWS Icream Tshirts, but not this one, yet."
Posted by jason at 09:58 AM
July 19, 2003
'Foucault and Panopticism Revisited'
Surveillance & Society Foucault Issue is up! It is the one with the article that I did with Barry Wellman and Steve Mann, that I've mentioned here a billion times."
Posted by jason at 12:59 PM
July 18, 2003
Vampire Movies
Had dinner at the Rivoli with Jessica X, the producer for a vampire movie called Sweet Blood. Salmon and I met Jessica down at SXSW in Austin last spring, and she fired off a copy of the script for me to comment, so that we could talk about it with the writer/director Elza. Unfortunately Elza was stuck on the train in from Montreal, though I got a moment to chat with her by cell phone as the train was going through Kingston. Hopefully we're all going to meet up on Sunday to chat. Good dinner at the Rivoli too!"
Posted by jason at 10:58 PM
July 16, 2003
Anti-War Playing Cards
Posted by jason at 08:29 AM
July 15, 2003
Recycling tech...
Amy's the diva of old-school. So very retro. The music is all vinyl. Analog synthesizers everywhere. And an old PPC 601 computer missing a foot. Just the home for all my old scsi hardware that doesn't work for me any more:
32 + 8 meg sims 2megs of vram 2gig scsi harddrive microtec E6 scsi scannerI've never had much luck with anything scsi. Once my scsi printer blew, and erased both my harddrives, holding 2 copies of a $170k education project. Something was always going wrong with scsi, even when I learned all about everything scsi, as far as jumper settings on circuit boards and all that. Amy, on the other hand, is a retro diva, keeping the old ways alive. Every cable fit. Every connection happy. Computer > 2gig drive > scanner > zip all in one happy chain. And it worked! All at once. Purring like a third kitten (the other two were lounging on various bits of hardware). There are all kinds of people on the planet, and I'm never going to be successful with anything retro. I'm just glad someone is... who can give a good home to my old scsi stuff...."
Posted by jason at 12:56 PM
"Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, July 14, 2003:PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption"
PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption (Alertbox) If you don't know who Jakob is, you should take the time to find out. Even if you don't like him, he shouldn't be ignored."
Posted by jason at 11:04 AM
July 13, 2003
Gender and Programming...
I was editing a contribution for the International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments and I sent the following along at the end of my comments.
Rather than trying to get girls interested in what may in fact be a male-privileging programming language, why not consider developing a programming language that is gender neutral or a female-privileging programming language.I'm not sure what I think of what I said there. I'll have to mull it over for a while."
Posted by jason at 02:54 PM
Entertaining Weekend...
Yuka, with some help from me, cooked vegetarian Japanese food last night for ourselves, JuliaD and Amy (who has no web presence). The hard bit was veggie gyoza, which we've never made. Yuka choose to add shitake mushrooms, and I voted for Nasu (Eggplant), in place of the meat. Worked out amazingly. First of all I couldn't tell it didn't have meat, and secondly, you didn't care. It was an interesting evening, not having seen Amy since probably november, and Amy/Julia D never having met. We'd expected Pazuzu and Simsim, but they were no shows through no fault of their own. Tonight is Za night with the Romanovska family."
Posted by jason at 01:20 PM
Dangers of Gaming... and a new book...
I'm thinking of starting to study gaming... so Yuka found this for me, knowing I might be interested. The first sentence is neato. Wired News: Secrets of Dungeons and Dreamers Richard Garriott can't speak with you today, the publicist's e-mail read. The man who created Ultima Online, the first commercially successful online role-playing game, was on the way to the hospital -- having just bashed himself in the head with a two-by-four while working on his medieval castle."
Posted by jason at 01:00 PM
July 12, 2003
Harry Potter and the Childish Adult
[I was sent this. Not sure where it came from, but I find it really interesting. I'm less up tight about HP than I was in the past, mostly due to the efforts of Rochelle, and a couple of books I read ON HP. Anyone know where it comes from?] Harry Potter and the Childish Adult July 7, 2003 By A.S. BYATT LONDON What is the secret of the explosive and worldwide success of the Harry Potter books? Why do they satisfy children and - a much harder question - why do so many adults read them? I think part of the answer to the first question is that they are written from inside a child's-eye view, with a sure instinct for childish psychology. But then how do we answer the second question? Surely one precludes the other. Harry Potter and the Childish Adult July 7, 2003 By A.S. BYATT LONDON What is the secret of the explosive and worldwide success of the Harry Potter books? Why do they satisfy children and - a much harder question - why do so many adults read them? I think part of the answer to the first question is that they are written from inside a child's-eye view, with a sure instinct for childish psychology. But then how do we answer the second question? Surely one precludes the other. The easy question first. Freud described what he called the ""family romance,"" in which a young child, dissatisfied with its ordinary home and parents, invents a fairy tale in which it is secretly of noble origin, and may even be marked out as a hero who is destined to save the world. In J. K. Rowling's books, Harry is the orphaned child of wizards who were murdered trying to save his life. He lives, for unconvincingly explained reasons, with his aunt and uncle, the truly dreadful Dursleys, who represent, I believe, his real ""real"" family, and are depicted with a relentless, gleeful, overdone venom. The Dursleys are his true enemy. When he arrives at wizarding school, he moves into a world where everyone, good and evil, recognizes his importance, and tries either to protect or destroy him. The family romance is a latency-period fantasy, belonging to the drowsy years between 7 and adolescence. In ""Order of the Phoenix,"" Harry, now 15, is meant to be adolescent. He spends a lot of the book becoming excessively angry with his protectors and tormentors alike. He discovers that his late (and ""real"") father was not a perfect magical role model, but someone who went in for fits of nasty playground bullying. He also discovers that his mind is linked to the evil Lord Voldemort, thereby making him responsible in some measure for acts of violence his nemesis commits. In psychoanalytic terms, having projected his childish rage onto the caricature Dursleys, and retained his innocent goodness, Harry now experiences that rage as capable of spilling outward, imperiling his friends. But does this mean Harry is growing up? Not really. The perspective is still child's-eye. There are no insights that reflect someone on the verge of adulthood. Harry's first date with a female wizard is unbelievably limp, filled with an 8-year-old's conversational maneuvers. Auden and Tolkien wrote about the skills of inventing ""secondary worlds."" Ms. Rowling's world is a secondary secondary world, made up of intelligently patchworked derivative motifs from all sorts of children's literature - from the jolly hockey-sticks school story to Roald Dahl, from ""Star Wars"" to Diana Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper. Toni Morrison pointed out that clichôs endure because they represent truths. Derivative narrative clichôs work with children because they are comfortingly recognizable and immediately available to the child's own power of fantasizing. The important thing about this particular secondary world is that it is symbiotic with the real modern world. Magic, in myth and fairy tales, is about contacts with the inhuman - trees and creatures, unseen forces. Most fairy story writers hate and fear machines. Ms. Rowling's wizards shun them and use magic instead, but their world is a caricature of the real world and has trains, hospitals, newspapers and competitive sport. Much of the real evil in the later books is caused by newspaper gossip columnists who make Harry into a dubious celebrity, which is the modern word for the chosen hero. Most of the rest of the evil (apart from Voldemort) is caused by bureaucratic interference in educational affairs. Ms. Rowling's magic world has no place for the numinous. It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip. Its values, and everything in it, are, as Gatsby said of his own world when the light had gone out of his dream, ""only personal."" Nobody is trying to save or destroy anything beyond Harry Potter and his friends and family. So, yes, the attraction for children can be explained by the powerful working of the fantasy of escape and empowerment, combined with the fact that the stories are comfortable, funny, just frightening enough. They comfort against childhood fears as Georgette Heyer once comforted us against the truths of the relations between men and women, her detective stories domesticating and blanket-wrapping death. These are good books of their kind. But why would grown-up men and women become obsessed by jokey latency fantasies? Comfort, I think, is part of the reason. Childhood reading remains potent for most of us. In a recent BBC survey of the top 100 ""best reads,"" more than a quarter were children's books. We like to regress. I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful. But in the case of the great children's writers of the recent past, there was a compensating seriousness. There was - and is - a real sense of mystery, powerful forces, dangerous creatures in dark forests. Susan Cooper's teenage wizard discovers his magic powers and discovers simultaneously that he is in a cosmic battle between good and evil forces. Every bush and cloud glitters with secret significance. Alan Garner peoples real landscapes with malign, inhuman elvish beings that hunt humans. Reading writers like these, we feel we are being put back in touch with earlier parts of our culture, when supernatural and inhuman creatures - from whom we thought we learned our sense of good and evil - inhabited a world we did not feel we controlled. If we regress, we regress to a lost sense of significance we mourn for. Ursula K. Le Guin's wizards inhabit an anthropologically coherent world where magic really does act as a force. Ms. Rowling's magic wood has nothing in common with these lost worlds. It is small, and on the school grounds, and dangerous only because she says it is. In this regard, it is magic for our time. Ms. Rowling, I think, speaks to an adult generation that hasn't known, and doesn't care about, mystery. They are inhabitants of urban jungles, not of the real wild. They don't have the skills to tell ersatz magic from the real thing, for as children they daily invested the ersatz with what imagination they had. Similarly, some of Ms. Rowling's adult readers are simply reverting to the child they were when they read the Billy Bunter books, or invested Enid Blyton's pasteboard kids with their own childish desires and hopes. A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children. Sadly, being taught literature often destroys the life of the books. But in the days before dumbing down and cultural studies no one reviewed Enid Blyton or Georgette Heyer - as they do not now review the great Terry Pratchett, whose wit is metaphysical, who creates an energetic and lively secondary world, who has a multifarious genius for strong parody as opposed to derivative manipulation of past motifs, who deals with death with startling originality. Who writes amazing sentences. It is the substitution of celebrity for heroism that has fed this phenomenon. And it is the leveling effect of cultural studies, which are as interested in hype and popularity as they are in literary merit, which they don't really believe exists. It's fine to compare the Bront‘s with bodice-rippers. It's become respectable to read and discuss what Roland Barthes called ""consumable"" books. There is nothing wrong with this, but it has little to do with the shiver of awe we feel looking through Keats's ""magic casements, opening on the foam/Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn."" A.S. Byatt is author, most recently, of the novel ""A Whistling Woman."""
Posted by jason at 03:52 PM
July 11, 2003
Blast from last October.
This post from last October is still the most commented post I've made. Even today it was updated... it's about Shii's Song: Strange but it caught some fans. Strange. Eh?"
Posted by jason at 05:56 PM
the Harrow: poetry
I'm just finishing up my tenure as Poetry Editor for The Harrow, ready to pass on the torch and am cleaning up the dozen or so submissions outstanding. The Harrow: Poetry Table of Contents 2003"
Posted by jason at 09:03 AM
July 10, 2003
Dracula & Anne continued
In case you thought I was crazy for thinking that there's a relationship between Dracula and Anne of Green Gables, look at what's going on at the Charlottetown Centre: I saw this just today, having sent in my LMM conference proposal a couple of days ago."
Posted by jason at 11:58 PM
OCAD: The Ugly Building Story
Yuka noticed some d00ds hanging outside our apartment... on the 10th floor level. Ontario College of Art and Design hasn't been able to articulate any conceptual or theoretical rationale for this structure, aside from what I can only guess is the desire to be 'world crass' and to have uglier buildings than UofT. They win. I give it full marks for desire, but failing grades on ability to express design theory and the Jane Jacob's prize for the most community insensitive structure. But that's just me."
Posted by jason at 09:15 AM
Anne of the Undead
Just sent off a conference proposal to the next Lucy Maud Montgomery shindig in PEI next June called From the Virtual to the Real: The Construction of Landscape in Anne of Green Gables and Dracula. Sometimes you just have to tell things like they are. But the proposal is here for your delectation > It is not difficult to see L.M. Montgomery and Bram Stoker as contemporaries, writing Victorian fiction at the dawn of the 20th century. These two writers also share a common bond that is rarely matched by other writers in any period. What they wrote about was imaginative fiction that would become created in the real world long after they had written their works. Both authors constructed fictional topologies based on real places: Montgomery created Green Gables and the community of Avonlea, and Stoker created Dracula's Castle in Romania's Borgo Pass. Several recent critics (Janice Fiamengo, James De Jonge, Patsy Aspasia Kotsopoulos, et al.) have discussed the process that led to Montgomery's selective reproduction of late-19th-century Prince Edward Island landscape for her fiction. In a forthcoming book chapter about virtual spaces, Benjamin Lefebvre argues that this reinvented landscape becomes a sort of simulacrum (to use Baudrillard's term), free of temporal restraints and therefore suitable for national and international consumption; it is in this way, Lefebvre suggests, that Montgomery's imagined community has proven so easily malleable in adaptations by the Disney Corporation that international tourists have been known to find Sullivan's recreated Avonlea (in Uxbridge, Ontario) more ""authentic"" than the ""real"" geographic space of Prince Edward Island. This thinking also extends to Anne's World, constructed in Hokkaido, Japan in the late 1990s. Stoker's work has yet to receive this kind of scholarly inquiry, but this may change with the interest in the proposed Dracula Theme Park, recently slated for Sighisoara, Romania. Espen Aarseth notes in his discussion of the labyrinth that virtual space predates the development of computers and the Internet by centuries. Both Montgomery and Stoker's works have grown into worlds unto themselves that have expanded beyond the confines of the linear narrative text and that have morphed into labyrinthine worlds that are explored as much as read. And the exploration of these worlds has resulted in pressure from readers for the creation of physical spaces that they can experience firsthand. Despite drawing heavily from her personal experience, Montgomery's work is primarily one of her own imagination. As result of this imaginative text, however, governmental and tourist organizations have had to scramble to (re)create Green Gables and impose Montgomery's vision on already existing topographical features of the area. Stoker, on the other hand, drew from his own imagination and the gothic literary tradition, and worked from published accounts of Transylvannia, such as Emily Gerard's ""Transylvanian Superstitions"" (1885), in the creation of Dracula's castle in the Borgo Pass (Borgo Prund in Romanian), and the Golden Crone hotel at Bistritza (Bistrita). He went so far as to invent foods such as robber steak, all of which are ficticious constructions. The hotel now exists in downtown Bistrita, as does robber steak. And what was the dirt forest track through the Borgo Prund has been transformed over the past 25 years into a major highway leading up to the Castle Dracula Hotel. Furthermore, this forested area is now a blossoming community of farmers and cottagers, complete with church and nunnery. In both cases, the author's imagination has returned to haunt, cryptically as Derrida conceptualizes it, the landscapes what were in themselves the inspiration for the fiction. This paper will explore how these two authors' adapted existing landscapes into imaginary fictional constructs, and how the popularity of these fictions, in turn, resulted in real places being transformed to conform with the fiction. References Aarseth, Espen. (1997) Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: John Hopkins. Baudrillard, Jean (1988) ""Simulacra and Simulations."" In Selected Writings. Mark Poster, ed. Stanford: Stanford. Pp. 166-184. Castricano, Jodey (2001) Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida's Ghost Writing. Montreal: McGill De Jonge, James (2002 )""Through the Eyes of Memory: L.M. Montgomery's Cavendish."" Making Avonlea: L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture. Ed. Irene Gammel. Toronto: U of Toronto P. Pp. 252-67. Fiamengo, Janice (2002) ""Toward a Theory of the Popular Landscape in Anne of Green Gables."" Making Avonlea: L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture. Ed. Irene Gammel. Toronto: U of Toronto P. Pp. 225-37. Foucault, Michel. (1980) ""Questions on Geography."" In Power/Knowledge. Colin Gordon, ed. New York: Pantheon. Pp. 63-77 Gerard, Emily. (1885) ""Transylvanian Superstitions"" Kotsopoulos, Patsy Aspasia (2002) ""Avonlea as Main Street USA? Genre, Adaptation, and the Making of a Borderless Romance."" Essays on Canadian Writing 76:170-94. Lefebvre, Benjamin. (Forthcoming) ""Virtual Avonlea."" In The International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments. Joel Weiss, Jason Nolan, Peter Trifonas eds. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Montgomery, Lucy Maud (1992) Anne of Green Gables . Toronto: McClelland. Orig. Boston: Page, 1908. Miller, Elizabeth (2000) Dracula: Sense and Nonsense. Wescliff-on-sea: Desert Island Books. Nolan, J., Lawrence, J. & Kajihara, Y. (1999). úMontgomeryˆs Island in the Net: Metaphor and Community on the Kindred Spirits E-mail List."" Canadian Children's Literature. 91, 24:3-4. Nolan, J. (2002). úText as Horror: Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derridaˆs Ghost Writing.î Journal of Dracula Studies. No. 4. Rubio, Mary, and Elizabeth Waterston. (1985) The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery: Volume I: 1889-1910 . Toronto: Oxford. Rubio, Mary, and Elizabeth Waterston. (1987) The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery: Volume II: 1910-1921 . Toronto: Oxford. Stoker, Bram. (1998) Dracula Unearthed. Annotated and Edited by Clive Leatherdale. Wescliff-on-sea: Desert Island Books. Zizek, Slavoj (1997) The Plauge of Fantasies. London: Verso."
Posted by jason at 08:09 AM
July 08, 2003
Mom...
In honour of my birthday, I give you a picture of mom... who is kayaking in georgan bay somewhere... and my niece. "
Posted by jason at 10:02 PM
July 07, 2003
7-Jul
The best of all possible days. Happy birthday to me! Spending the day getting into the major summer workload... that is figuring out how many book chapters and papers and conference proposals I have to write between now and September. That should take all day to do that and work out a plan. Actually a great way to start a new year... figuring out what to do with the first big chunk of it.
Posted by jason at 10:05 AM
July 05, 2003
Rochelle and the Mac Family... and Saturday Dinner
I forgot to post this last week when She was back yesterday for a comedy of errors, of which she was but an innocent. Due to a communication error, I got word from Yuka, that Rochelle's old iBook was fixed, and that she could take the bus in from Guelph to pick it up. And that her iPod was ready. So she hopped on the bus. Then I found out that her iBook had NOT been fixed, and that it needed a new logic board and CD-rom. Too late to call Rochelle and warn her... the bus had left the station. [time passes] Rochelle takes the news, on her arrival, in stride, and we waltz up to get the iPod, cool thing that it is. When we get to the UofT computer store, Joe the repair d00d, tells us that he, and or his assistant, has fixed it, and it doesn't need anything. So we get to wait around for an hour while he installs a new OS and all the firmware updates... and we wend our way home. Oh, I noticed just now that I DID upload this image, or one close. Too bad. It is worth seeing again."
Posted by jason at 12:17 PM
July 04, 2003
Blogs have First Ammendment Rights... in the US
I got this from Chika (in Japanese), via
Posted by jason at 10:47 AM
July 02, 2003
Japan: Gaiax trademarks BLOG
Joi Ito notes that a Japanese company is trying to trademark the word blog, in Japan. Scary. Though he notes that stranger things have happened, even if this doesn't float."
Posted by jason at 11:59 PM
Still here...
I'd mentioned to some folks that I might drop off the face of the earth July 1, if I didn't have an academic job. Well, I still don't have full time work, but I do have *just* enough teaching for next year to keep my finger in the pie. I just wonder why I bother at all... though I have my enthusiasm back in full swing, and am working away on various and sundry projects."
Posted by jason at 11:50 PM