February 2004
10 posts
3 tags
A Content-Provided World
I live in a content-provided world. TiVo faithfully records all my shows. The comic book store reserves all the titles I read. My newsreader checks the websites I like. LiveJournal collects my friends. I never have to go out and find anything. Information arrives in prescribed doses, pretending that the world is built to deliver media tailored to my tastes.
But the danger of having the whole...
3 tags
Marie Ely
I never knew my paternal grandmother. She died at age 32 when my dad was five. A few years ago he started going through and collecting her poetry. She had always wanted to become a published author, but only got one small work out before the leukemia set in. For my dad, reading her poetry has been a way to get to meet the mother he never had a chance to get to know.
Over the past few months I’ve...
1 tag
How Far Above or Below the Mason Dixon Line Is... →
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The Meaning of Jesus’ Suffering: What Mel Missed
My dad sent me an interesting article today that discusses the most important difference between The Passion of the Christ and the Gospel: the Gospel glosses over all the suffering. While Passion will probably do a great job at depicting how terrible a thing to die on a cross would be, the Gospels themselves don’t focus on it. It wasn’t until many years later that Christian rhetoric centered on...
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It says a lot about a certain segment of Americans that people are worried a movie about Jesus, the figure of forgiveness, might provoke hate towards Jews, a group that had already been persecuted for thousands of years before His crucifixion. Apparently dying on a cross just wasn’t enough.
2 tags
Tuesday’s Slate article, Kerried Away – The myth and math of Kerry’s electability, discusses the problem of electing a candidate based on his perceived electability. It says:
How did Kerry win? By racking up a 4-to-1 advantage
over Dean among voters who chose their candidate because “he
can defeat George W. Bush in November.” Among voters who
chose their candidate because...
3 tags
The Mozilla people released version 0.8 of Phoenix Firebird Firefox today. I know I’ve ranted about web browsers before, but to quickly summarize why you should be using Firefox instead of Internet Explorer: pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing, Built-in Search, no major security flaws that let people steal your bank passwords, and standards compliance. True, two of those are features of the Google...
2 tags
Attribution Etiquette
Simon Willison beat me to a point my mind had filed away when I read the same Wired article this morning: attribution is good etiquette. Nothing complicated there, just if you write about an idea or post a link to something, also include a link to where you found the idea. It helps propagate ideas by letting people trace conversations, gives credit to the person who gave you the idea, and helps...
4 tags
Coca-Cola has always been, to my tastes, far superior to Pepsi-Cola. True, Pepsi has a hipper, music-oriented image, so I understand why Apple partnered up with it to give away free songs, but it’s just too damn sweet. When I went to the dentist two weeks ago, my hygenist said that my teeth looked great. And while I don’t like Pepsi nearly as much as Coke, if I’m going to spend my dollar on a...
2 tags
Smart Bookmarks
So here’s what happened: I had this post all thought out in my head about how whenever you bookmark a page your web browser should automatically check to see if that page has an RSS or Atom feed so that you’d only have to visit bookmarked pages if you knew they’d been updated. Then I found that OmniWeb 5 is already going to do that, and it comes out tomorrow. So while The Omni Group’s genius was a...