You May Be Able to Get There From Here - the blog of Steve Pepple

There’s an interesting book by John Zittrain, which can be read from free at the Yale Press site. (It’s incidentally a nicely designed site.) I started reading it today, and I’m looking forward to purchasing a hard copy, which is also nicely packaged.

The author’s premise for the book is quite simple- it asks what the future of Internet will look like. This seems not to be a static prediction, though, but a cautious look at how we have computed on the web, the technologies that will transform the web, and the problems ahead if the web is not reformed :

The PC and Internet were the engines of those innovations, and if they can be saved, they will offer more. As time passes, the brand names on each side will change. But the core battle will remain. It will be fought through information appliances and Web 2.0 platforms like today’s Facebook apps and Google Maps mash-ups. These are not just products but also services, watched and updated according to the constant dictates of their makers and those who can pressure them.

From Art Brodsky in the Huff Post:

Most congressional Republicans oppose the idea of giving consumers freedom on the Internet. They take shelter in their anti-government, anti-regulation rhetoric, preferring to allow Internet freedom to apply to the corporations which own the networks connecting the Internet to consumers, rather than to consumers themselves. There could, of course, be a larger discussion about the meaning of “conservative” and Republican, and whether the two are synonymous.

It’s nice to see comprehensive coverage of this issue on the front page of the Huff Post this week.

I think that I’m in favor of more (Ted Stevens) conservatives making ludicrous claims about the net and net neutrality, because such comments and positions give more publicity to the importance of protecting the rights of all internet users. In other words, democratic candidates will have a reason to fight on these issues because they’ve been aired publicly.

I suppose this post is a confession.

My discontent as a city biker bubbled into an act of violence today.

On my bike ride home this evening, a man nearly hit me on a calm two-lane street while yelling “Fuck you, Faggot.”

This sort of thing often happens. On occasions like this, I’ll often catch an irate driver at an upcoming stop light. This was not the case this evening: I almost caught the man at the next light, but he was a little too fast.

(Not that I would do anything to him at the stop, except give him a look of indignation or maybe an explicit gesture. One time I did scare the shit out of an old lady who had wronged me by knocking on her drivers-side window. At that time, I really like the idea that she had honked and almost run me over with the notion that I was just a biker, an unreal fragment on the road. I’d like to believe that my act of startling her made her think about the real world.)

This evening I did not catch the abuser, but I did see the bar/restaurant that he turned into. (The bar, by the way, is a faux Japanese restaurant, which gives me umbrage apart from the situation.

In a large, tight parking lot at dusk, I knew it would be hard for me to be seen. I waited, parked my bike at an establishment across the street, and then walked over to the guy’s car and slit one of his tires. I also left a note, “please be nice to bikers.” The tone of my note is influenced by my habitually reading of passiveaggresivenotes.com.

I’m normally not one for violence, but I do like exacting karma-tic justice. I hope, though, that I can suppress the joy that I receive from performing this act, because it a joy reaped by violence.

The perfect woman: a mute nymphomaniac whose father owns a brewery.

I just found a really inspiring break down of some productivity applications for Ubuntu at anywired.com.

Win or lose, whatever happens next, Barack Obama is now established as one of those rare, courageous teachers who leads the country onto new ground. He has given us a way to talk about race and our other differences with the clarity and honesty that politics does not normally tolerate. Whether this hurts or helps his presidential prospects is not yet clear, but he has done this for us and it will change the country, whatever the costs to him.

His words should discourage the media frenzy of fear-driven gotcha. His speech in Philadelphia on Tuesday may also make the Clintons re-think their unsubtle exploitation of racial tension. But nobody knows the depth or strength of the commonplace fears streaming through the underground of public feelings. No one can be sure of what people will hear in Obama’s confident embrace, beckoning Americans in all their differences, leaving out no one, to a better understanding of themselves.

I’ve completed my first week with Ubuntu 8.04. My experience has been smooth so far, but I’m looking forward to testing some of the new parts of the this release.

Lawrence Lessig has produced another insightful video on the Obama/Clinton race:

The company I work for made it on to the front page of Slashdot this week, which was a surprising and surreal experience.

So our team just launched a pretty neat site for OpenID. With this launch, we tried to get word around to the blogoshere and broader media. In our efforts, we even joked about the possibility of the site getting picked up on Digg, or somewhere.

Fortunately our server withstood all of the visitors from Slashdot… And now we know how it feels to have the passing, superfluous validation of being above-the-fold on a legendary blog for 20 minutes.

Writer and Novelist Johnathon Lethem was on PRI recently discussing copyright and plagarism.

Awhile back, Lethem wrote are great article in Harpers arguing for the importance of remixing and reusing artistic works. To display the power of reuse, he wrote the article in a mosaic style, reworking the work of hundreds of other writers to produce new ideas.

Wolf Blitzer is the CNN new anchor’s real name, and it is a Jewish name.

Update:

Holy Fuck: Stone Phillips is the Dateline NBC anchor’s real name.

Also, Anderson Cooper really does, among intimate friends, refer to himself as “The Silver Fox” of cable news.

Watching post-debate coverage of the Democratic party in South Carolina, the format/misenscene of the CNN news floor– young, attractive, female reporter; laptop-as-product-placement; HD TV in the background– looks like the set-up of a video blog (see below).

this set-up does look much different than rocketboom and other shows.

This sure seems sinister to me, but perhaps the confluence of alternative media and cable networks cannot be entirely negative. It also may workout that the surface design of these programs has more to do with the influence of the creative people, designers and so forth, who work on these programs. (I have no idea if the big networks relinquish this sort of control.)

Last night, I also noticed, watching the actual debate, how gratuitously CNN uses their logo, branding, and the colors red, white, and blue. The Daily Show, and others, have noted how absurdly often CNN’s Wolf Blitzer (is that his real name), and the other network anchors say that they “have the best political team on television”: the current frequency is twice per minute. Yet, in CNN’s case, the repeated use of their logo is even more outrageous. It looks as though they may also be going for the myspace tiled background look (also see below).

Compare CNN’s logo use with some guy’s cute myspace background.

The ostensible plan here is to make sure that every shot of the candidates contains a CNN logo. Of course there’s always the logo in the right-corner of the scroller, as well. Maybe CNN could get some attention grabbing ideas from the Web’s Worst Backgrounds

I found this at-first-cheesy, interesting interview with Morrissey. I love the myth that he is celibate.

Journalist Michael Pollan has a new book, In Defense of Food.

Pollan’s previous book, the Omnivore’s Dilema, a highly enjoyable and insightful look of the U.S. food system and the philosophy of how we eat. The book moved me to believe in a higher standing for food writing and new journalism. So I can’t wait ot read this new book.

Slate has a review.

Pierre Bayard has compelling argument for discussing books that you’ve never touched in a Guardian Op-Ed.

I have often found myself in the delicate situation of having to express my thoughts on books I haven’t read. Because I teach literature at university level, there is, in fact, no way to avoid commenting on books that I haven’t even opened. It’s true that this is also the case for the majority of my students, but if even one of them has read the text I’m discussing, there is a risk that at any moment my class will be disrupted and I will find myself humiliated.

Bayard does not exactly say one should lie about the books they’ve read, but he does offer that we can no many thing about books unread:

Between a book we’ve read closely and a book we’ve never even heard of, there is a whole range of gradations that deserve our attention. In the case of books we have supposedly read, we must consider just what is meant by reading, a term that can refer to a variety of practices. Conversely, many books that by all appearances we haven’t read exert an influence on us nevertheless, as their reputations spread through society. Reading is not a simple, seamless process; it has fault lines, deficiencies and approximations.

 Fittingly, Bayard has authored How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.