[ via The Sideshow ] I’d love to cut down on the politics, but this is in my backyard. You may have read a sob story claiming that the Cupertino School District banned the Declaration of Independence. It didn’t. What it did do was order a teacher to stop using a pile of biased and [...]
Aloha from Kihei once again. Joss Whedon will call into parties at 2pm Pacific. The Silicon Valley party will be at the home of my friends Charles and Judith from 1 to 5pm. Again, mahalo for your interest and enthusiasm. The party has been picked up by Ain’t it Cool News as well. Amusing to [...]
Last Friday was the Geek Dinner in Mountain View. Andy Freeman, Cynthia Gonsalves, myself, Vivian and Bill Lazar, and Dan Lyke (who came all the way down from the North Freakin’ Bay) enjoyed a lovely meal at Cafe Yulong. Dan’s suggesting another South Bay get together, so if you know of another group-friendly place, let [...]
Potlatch Fourteen: March 4-6 in San Francisco. The book of honor is P.K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. Here’s a member of the committee on why Potlatch differs from your garden variety SF convention: And if you’ve ever been to the kind of large SF con whose programming made you wonder, “What happened to panels about, [...]
A note of thanks to Jim Whitehead and his students (including Elias Sinderson) at UCSC for their work on Hypertext 04. I learned a lot at the conference, and the sessions where the literary hypertext and gearheads intermeshed were mind-expanding, like David Kolb’s paper on what happens to rhetoric when you’re simultaneously creating a conventional [...]
Waiting for Doug Engelbart’s keynote at HT04, the organizers play a video of his 1968 hypertext browser demonstration. Amazing stuff.
There’s a staggering amount of money spent on transport projects in the Bay Area, and I’ve been reading Bay Area Transportation News on Yahoo! Groups to keep up. It’s where I learned about the fight over the Transbay Terminal and a developer (and supporter of SF Mayor Gavin Newsom) who’s managing to hold up the [...]
Matt Webb asked about public transit between San Francisco and Santa Cruz for Hypertext 04. Bay Area transit suffers from balkanization (and there’s a mountain range in the way.) You’ll take four segments on three systems to get from SFO to UC Santa Cruz. There’s a BART link from SFO to the Caltrain station in [...]
It’s been awhile since Jeremy Zawodny organized a Geek Dinner. Bill Lazar suggested throwing one in Mountain View before the end of Summer. You’re invited to join Bill and I at Cafe Yulong, on Dana Street between Hope and Castro, at 7pm on Friday, August 13th (yeah, yeah, we’re not tridecaphobic.) To RSVP, send a [...]
At the 1993 WorldCon in San Francisco, the program booked Harlan Ellison (at that time, the last angry middle aged man) into a tiny room for a reading. The room filled, and there were plenty of angry fans. Eleven years later at WWDC, the session on Dashboard was booked into a large room, just not [...]
Thanks to Buzz at SciFiHiFi for putting the blogger dinner together. It was great to meet the developers of SubEthaEdit, VoodooPad, and Anthracite. Unfortunately, we didn’t get the Pope Room at Beppo de Bupa.
At last, a week late, my notes. Bruce Sterling does not worry about a Vingean Singularity that renders humankind a powerless annoyance to transcendent artificial intelligences. Instead he worries about plain old human-driven technological change and nasty WMDs. Cynthia and I drove up to the City to hear Bruce Sterling’s lecture for the Long Now [...]
The Mercury News reviews my favorite Sushi place in the Valley. It’s four blocks from my office (and five minutes from Cynthia’s new gig.) if you’re visiting and want to meet up for dinner, I’d recommend Kitsho.
There’s a video making the rounds of a bunch of MIT kids who wrote a command line program to order pizza. This is not a new thing. Back when Adobe Systems was in Mountain View, the engineers wrote burrito a command line program which created a Postscript file describing a burrito and faxed it to [...]
The Mermen are one of my favorite bands, playing heavy instrumental surf influenced by psychedelica and Sonic Youth. They are best heard live. And the band supports tapers. So you can find plenty of their live shows at the Internet Archive. You’ll need a tool such as Shorten to convert the audio to WAV format.