Clogging the blogotubes…

Well this is the first post in a while…it’s been a hectic two weeks (or more), but the good news is that I got to see Rage Against the Machine at Rock the Bells in NYC. I also have a new kitten in the apartment, Butterscotch (”Butters”). I’ll post some photos with him soon, and also some of Mister Fuji (why not?). In the meantime, here’s a cover from WWN, which will cease publication soon…

Also, here’s the paper I worked my ass of on [PDF], if anyone’s interested. It’s just plain © copyright Sean O’Brien, please ask for my permisson before using it or posting it anywhere (since I’d like to polish it up a bit beforehand). The WWN cover above is copyright American Media Inc.

I discovered this comic strip about an hour ago, and it’s pretty good.

When I used silhouettes in my strip, I didn’t think people really liked it but this guy seems to pull it off. Almost makes me want to start making comics again, but I’m a serious professional and grad student and so on yadda yadda.

This is what I do when I’m way behind on everything and the weekend’s almost here, and it’s almost midnight. That, and read about baby mammoths and walking robots…

This one goes out to all the Nader’s Raiders. Here’s to hoping he runs again in ‘08.

I swear, I’ll have that DN! sticker done tonight, and some more verbose posts (for those of you who don’t get to hear me talk, at length, every day). Class is going well, and I’ve begun a paper about “emerging technologies” that I hope will be taken seriously (I’m taking it very seriously while writing it). Oh, and Groklaw had a good post about Microsoft and GPLv3 yesterday.

…the image is from Wikimedia Commons, see its page there for info on the Creative Commons license.

Getting work done and feeling good about it…until I have anything polished enough to post, I only have a techie joke story. For the Commodore 64 fans out there, this is the place to be.

Well tonight I’m staying in for a night of reading…for an idea of what I’m reading about see this PDF: Theories of Human Development

…and that’s the tip of the iceberg…

I just stumbled upon a really fun script that a guy named Ian McKellar put together. Check out this blog in LOL style!

If I can get a copy of it, I might customize it for this blog, but for now the cats are awesome enough.

Back to work; trying to get my projects wrapped up nicely so I can think about classes. I’m hoping nothing goes wrong with our online forms (”Form Portal”) while I’m out, but the system’s been stable since the last ImageNow upgrade so it should be fine. By the way, I’m going to release the “Form Portal” under the GPLv3 in two weeks…I want to make sure the package is nice and neat and the licensing info is clear rather than just dumping it into the tubes.

Also: does anyone else have a problem with human workers being compared to ants this way? And here I thought swarms were a bittorrent thing…

Heading out for 4th of July festivities.  Having trouble with that DN! bumper sticker; drawing the Statue of Liberty isn’t all that easy (especially her face), even though Inkscape is pretty nice. So another missed deadline that I made for myself.  Oh well…

Here’s some food for thought on this year’s patriotic bonanza:

In the 1740s the Iroquois wearied of dealing with several often bickering English colonies and suggested that the colonies form a union similar to the league. In 1754 Benjamin Franklin, who had spent much time among the Iroquois observing their deliberations, pleaded with colonial leaders to consider the Albany Plan of Union: “It would be a strange thing if six nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a scheme for such a union and be able to execute it in such a manner as that it has subsisted ages and appears insoluble; and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies.”

The colonies rejected the plan. But it was a forerunner of the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. Both the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention referred openly to Iroquois ideas and imagery. In 1775 Congress formulated a speech to the Iroquois, signed by John Hancock, that quoted Iroquois advice from 1744. “The Six Nations are a wise people,” Congress wrote, “let us harken to their council and teach our children to follow it.”

That and other good historical chunks here.  Let’s not forget that it isn’t “Independence Day” for everyone…

This week is my last week of work before intensive classes, so I’m scrambling to finish projects at the F’aid and tighten up whatever I can so nothing breaks while I’m “out” (i.e. across campus).

I’ve got a lot of work to do on this blog; I only tweaked the template slightly but I’d like to make it fit my style a bit better. Also, my DN! bumper sticker is close to finished…if I have time it’ll be up tonight in SVG and PNG format.

Oh and this one goes out to all the Vistaheads…