There. I said it.
Earth day sucks. It’s harmful.
It provides a cop-out, marketing-based, feel good way for people and companies to feel good about half-assed lame excuses for making a real sustainable difference.
Every day should be earth day. This one-day-per-year stuff is garbage. This “oh! what did you do for earth day?” feel good crap doesn’t help. Frack off. Every fracking day is earth day. What did you do for EVERY OTHER DAY OF THE YEAR earth day?
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Walking through campus this morning, I witnessed a red faced, agitated young man. He was ripping posters off of a poster board, and shredding them in his hands. I looked a little closer - wondering what he was doing. He was being quite selective in the posters he was ripping - they all appeared to have been informational posters about “new atheism”. I saw him rip two of the posters. I didn’t see the information on the posters, aside from the title, but a quick Google turned up this web page describing the movement. Obviously, it must be suppressed.
I should probably clarify a couple of things about what I was trying to say about social networks as sharecropping activities.
First, I am not trying to suggest that hosted services are inherently bad - I think it’s great that services like WordPress.com and Edublogs are available - and they are not sharecropping. Hosted services can be great - they let people easily post their content, and a well designed and managed hosted service doesn’t infringe on a person’s digital identity, nor on their ownership of the content they publish.
Read MoreStephen ran a cool line of command line goodness to crunch out a list of the most commonly run commands he runs in Terminal.
The code he ran is:
% history|awk '{print $2}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -rn|head
Hey, that’s pretty cool. Crunches through the shell history, spits out a list of commands, groups them by uniqueness and sorts them by number of occurrences.
I ran it on the 3 systems I use most often:
Read MoreHeather posted something this morning that’s had me thinking about this pretty much all day.
Occasionally, Tim Bray talks about “sharecropping” as related to the world of open source vs. proprietary software and APIs.
What‘s a Sharecropper?· I found a good definition at InterAction Design:
“A farmer who works a farm owned by someone else. The owner provides the land, seed, and tools exchange for part of the crops and goods produced on the farm.”
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You can tell it’s springtime in Calgary when you wake up to this:
Time for another episode, this time on basic workflow - importing a few photos, deleting the crap, and processing the one(s) that don’t get nuked. This time, the dogs were quiet, and The Boy™ decided not to make an appearance. I might schedule him for a later episode…
Episode 2: Basic Workflow weighs in at 12.1 MB, and clocks in at 10:27. Or, if you want a full HD version, use the second link.
Read MoreSounds cool, but is the 90 second limit real?
Flickr’s official stance on the time limit is this:
Video on Flickr grew out of the idea of “long photos” and as such, we’ve implemented what might seem like an arbitrary limit of playing back the first 90 seconds of a video. 90 seconds?
We’re not trying to limit your artistic freedom, we’re trying something new. Everyone has endured that wedding video, where even the bride will fast-forward to the “good bit.” In fact, even Tara at FlickrHQ hasn’t made it past the first 90 seconds of her own wedding video.
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There’s a big “Bike to Work Day” in Calgary on Friday, April 11. The University of Calgary is running a special event on campus as well. It’s pretty safe to say I’ll be biking to work that day (and every other day as well ;-) ) and am looking forward to seeing how many people get into it.
On campus, they’re going to set up greeting/refreshment stations (with prizes!) on all major entrances, and there’s a workshop being put on by the bike club at the Mac Hall loading dock to show basic bike maintenance.
Read MoreTake 30 minutes and watch Al Gore’s presentation at TED 2008. It’s an update to his first one, and is simultaneously more depressing because of the sheer scale of new data, and much more uplifting when framing the response as a call for higher consciousness to break out of our current democratic crises that are allowing the climate crisis to take place.
Read MoreI’ve been struggling with what feels like a Twitter addiction for awhile now.
On the one hand, I love and value, even need the sense of community and connectedness that Twitter enables. I feel almost viscerally connected to the core group of people whom I consider my close friends, as well as those who are merely acquaintances and even strangers.
On the other hand, the constant sense of connectedness and the endless stream of updates became a source of discomfort - I couldn’t turn away. I couldn’t turn it off. I was constantly “checking in” to see if anything new and interesting had been posted.
Read MoreI tried to go offline from Twitter all day yesterday.
I failed. Miserably. Wound up posting all kinds of stuff.
I hate that I feel so compelled to constantly “check in” - just in case someone posted something.
I hate that I couldn’t just stop, as I said I would.
It’s not like any critical information came through the pipe. It’s not like I found out anything, except that a few of my friends have similar twittercrack habits.
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