stevendkrause.com

I’m getting ready to get out of the house to play golf today (oh, the burdens I must carry), but I stumbled across this, TalkShoe, which promises to be a community podcasting system.  And it looks like it is one that can work with a cell phone, which would be very cool.  I’m rethinking of ways to revamp 328 with different web 2.0 -type technologies, and this seems like it might be a good one.

Via boing-boing, I read this story about how the (morning?) news anchors of the Las Vegas Fox network have fake/plastic cups of McDonalds chilled coffee sitting in front of them. My initial thoughts were of course: it’s on Fox, and it’s in Vegas. It all adds up.

And then, just following a couple more links, I stumbled across this, Dickipedia: A Wiki of Dicks. Pretty good junior high humor. Here’s the opening paragraphs on the entry about Simon Cowell:

Simon Phillip Cowell (born 7 October 1959) is a British record executive, television producer, “author,” celebrity talent judge, and a dick.

Through the creation of television programs such as American Idol, Pop Idol, and Britain’s Got Talent, he has managed to force both his abrasive personality and the abrasive personalities of a number of mediocre “artists” into homes across the world. Uniquely, while many celebrities became popular despite being dicks, Cowell became a celebrity because he is a dick.

It isn’t a “real” wiki in that you can’t just edit anything, but it still provided me with almost five minutes of entertainment, and what more can we ask from this communication network?

According to Wikipedia, Steven Krause is “the vocalist of the US hardcore band From Behind The Pictures Eyes. Well known for his time spent in the Detroit industrial/metal act Inflextion and industrial/hardcore juggernaut, Too Many Gods, Steven Krause is one of the more famed local Detroit musicians of the early 21st century.”  But that’s not me.

This looks pretty cool: Adeona, which is a free and open source security software for tracking a laptop. Follow the link for the full explanation of the software, but besides the fact that the price is very right, this is my favorite feature: “The Mac OS X version also has an option to capture pictures of the laptop user or thief using the built-in iSight camera and the freeware tool isightcapture.” So you can take a picture of the thief. That is almost cool enough for me to see if I can get a laptop stolen and then track the bad guy.

Almost.

Like I said, I haven’t tried this yet and it does look like it might be a half-step beyond the abilities of some basic users, but it looks very promising.

I’m sitting here in Sweetwaters with Will (he too likes working/playing/hanging about in coffee shops once in a while), and there’s this just out of college kid sitting a few tables away.  So far, he’s made about 40 cell phone calls to various people on some kind of list to get them to come to a rally to support Barrack Obama.  It’s a free country I know and I too have been on the cell phone in here recently, but jeesh, if you going to do nothing but talk on the phone for an hour and a half, can you go someplace else?  And here I thought Obama had fistfuls of cash.

There goes call #41.

About a month ago, I wrote/posted about a site called one hundred push ups, which is a six week training plan for being able to do 100 pushups at one time.   Just thought I’d post to let folks know and to keep myself honest (my friend Bill’s advice) on my progress so far.  Well, I just managed to crank my way through the end of week 3, which was tough because there’s a big jump between week 2 and week 3.

I must say that even with my fairly half-assed approach to this, it does feel like I’m getting some good quality exercise here.  When I started back in late June or so, I don’t think I got to five; just now, I managed to complete 20 without my arms falling off. Sure, there’s strength training here, but I think that a part of it is technique and form.

Anyway, it’s a quick little exercise routine; thumbs up.

It’s been quite the arty week around here in Ypsi-Arbor. Annette and Will and I took in a bit of the annual Ann Arbor Art Fairs on Thursday, and on Saturday night, we went to that Ypsilanti upstart, the Shadow Art Fair. To be fair to the folks in that quaint festival in Ann Arbor, they had some automatic negatives compared to the most excellent festival in Ypsilanti, some beyond their control. The Ann Arbor Art Fair was both steaming hot and outdoors, while the Shadow Art Fair was both temperate and indoors at the Corner Brewery. The Ann Arbor Art Fair is kind of pain in the butt with all of the crowds, getting there in the first place, etc. While the Shadow Art Fair was crowded, it wasn’t near as mob-oriented as the Ann Arbor Art Fair. And while the Ann Arbor Art Fair offered bottled water, the Shadow Art Fair featured beer– well, not free, but since it was indoors and at what amounts to a large bar, easily available.

But the biggest difference between the two events was that the Shadow Art Fair was both very cool and actually affordable. The Ann Arbor Art Fair is about art as a product, a commodity. That means simple things on a stick, on paintings or prints to put above a couch, or “conversation pieces” that go in wealthy peoples’ homes. The Shadow Art Fair is about the process of art, about the making and experience, about DIY. And, I don’t know, the Shadow Art Fair just had a lot more coolness to it.

A couple of short videos to show what I mean. First, here’s Will picking out an intestine button from a large monster (for the cost of $1):

And then there’s this video of folks answering the artistic question of what’s inside the Ypsilanti Water Tower:

I assume he didn’t recognize me (why would he?), but I saw Mark Maynard peddling his wares. I was tempted by a Drew Barrymore poster he made (one of several Drew Barrymore tributes), but I passed. Instead, I ended up with a lovely Ypsilanti t-shirt and very groovy Shadow Art Fair poster, both products of those talented VG Kids. It’s hard to explain, but the poster I bought features an alternate version of the Shadow Art Fair poster on one side and part of a printing of a poster for Twangfest in St. Louis, MO. And Annette and Will both bought some cool woodprints that are liable to show up in our dining room soon.

Anyway, an exciting and arty week for all. But if you can only pick one art festival to attend next year, make it the Shadow Art Fair, please.

Via Inside Higher Ed, I came across this article, “It’s All Geek to Me,” which is a review of the book Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software by Christopher M. Kelty. Of course, the book has a web site right here. Not only is the book available free online there; Kelty has also set up a section of the site called “modulate.” Kelty describes this section like this:

As such, “Modulations” is a project, concurrent with the book, but not necessarily based on it, which is intended to explore the questions raised there, but in other works, with and by other scholars, a network of researchers and projects on free and open source software, on “recursive publics,” on publics and public sphere theory generally, and on new projects and problems confronted by Free Software and its practices…

Sounds like a blog to me.

In any event, definitely a book to include to review for English 516 and maybe one to look at myself.

This is kind of old news (April 2008), but it was in my email (which I am sorting through) and it’d be good reading for English 516: “When Young Teachers Go Wild on the Web: Public Profiles Raise Questions of Propriety and Privacy.” Basically, it’s about teachers who have sort of questionable Facebook profiles. Besides some amusing examples, I like the fact that many of the teachers in this article were unaware that their Facebook profiles were as public as they are. Just goes to show you that the teachers can sometimes be just as– um, not smart– as the students.

Tip o’ the hat to Nick Carbone for posting this to WPA-L.

One of the side effects of doing research on blogs and probably anything Internets-related is that it’s really easy to get distracted. For example, my “research” somehow brought me to this:

Perhaps I ought to take a break and mow the lawn….