August 2008
10 posts
Go say hi to Little Jack →
“This obsession with “street-cred” reaches its apex of absurdity as hipsters have...”
– Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters via Ludditerobot
Procrastination is the sweetest when you have the most to do. And I have a lot to do.
Tumblr import
I imported a bunch of posts from my Wordpress blog, including the comments. Some of the titles look messed up (spaces missing, etc.) but I can’t be bothered to go through and fix them just yet.
All good things in time.
“[W]hen Mr. Bush visited Tbilisi in 2005, the authorities estimated that 150,000...”
– The New York Times reported this nausea-inducing moment in today’s edition.
Now, they can take yourlaptop
According to the Washington Post, US Federal Agents may now detain your laptop at the border for an indefinite period of time, and — get this — without any reasonable cause whatsoever:
The policies state that officers may “detain” laptops “for a reasonable period of time” to “review and analyze information.” This may take place “absent...
Obama playing the race card
Everyone seems to have their knickers in a twist over the fact that Barack Obama pointed out that he doesn’t look like the old white dudes on US currency. Shockingly, this simple observation, having come from the mouth of a politician like Obama, is actually true (and painfully obvious).
Despite the obviousness of what is essentially a non-problematic statement, the McCain camp accuses...
not gonna use it, but nice to know&.
Jenna and I were out walking the other day, just prior to our run, talking as we always do, and getting yanked about by the dogs. As is the case of late, our conversation turned to a discussion of moving out of rural America.
“You know, we really didn’t get to the Adirondacks much,” Jenna lamented.
“Yeah, I know. We really should have made a point of going there more....
July 2008
4 posts
Things really are this bad
With 70% of people saying that more government programs should help those who are struggling, is it any surprise that we’re seeing a rise in crimes of material desperation such as these?
With a Surge in Iron and Steel Prices, Thieves Are Stealing Metal Manhole Covers - NYTimes.com:
“PHILADELPHIA — Francis McConnell is a field supervisor for the Philadelphia Water Department, but...
Spelling Fail
Spelling Fail
Obama Courting Evangelicals Once Loyal to Bush
Obama Courting Evangelicals Once Loyal to Bush - NYTimes.com:
“Between now and November, the Obama forces are planning as many as 1,000 house parties and dozens of Christian rock concerts, gatherings of religious leaders, campus visits and telephone conference calls to bring together voters of all ages motivated by their faith to engage in politics. It is the most intensive effort yet by a...
June 2008
5 posts
AT&T Whistleblower: Spy Bill Creates...
AT&T Whistleblower: Spy Bill Creates ‘Infrastructure for a Police State’:
“Congress has made the FISA law a dead letter—such a law is useless if the president can break it with impunity. Thus the Democrats have surreptitiously repudiated the main reform of the post-Watergate era and adopted Nixon’s line: ‘When the president does it that means that it is not...
Real Change? For real?
Obama is a candidate who is for “real change,” as long as that “real change” isn’t really change.
To wit:
Obama’s Campaign Tightens Control of Image and Access: “At a rally for Senator Barack Obama in Detroit on Monday, two Muslim women said they were prohibited from sitting behind the candidate because they were wearing head scarves and campaign volunteers...
Gross Foods?
The other day, we were at the supermarket going through our normal checkout line routine. Said routine consists of us rolling up to the checkout with a cart full of fresh produce, including things like kale, avocados, mangoes, okra, ginger, Brussel sprouts, bell peppers, and garlic, and the checkout person looking at us like we birthed an alien baby right there in the grocery store. Picking up an...
to be !tter serv
Yesterday, I had to call Sirius to deactivate an old unit and reactivate a new one. Despite their stupid voice activated menu system that had no option for what I wanted — am I the only person that prefers to press numbers rather than talk to a computer? — it went pretty well. Once I got through to an actual human, there were no problems, and everything worked as expected. My radio was...
most-used OS X apps in my dock
Knowing that at least a few of you readers out there are Mac users, I thought I’d share a few of my most-used Mac apps. I’d be curious to hear your favorites, too, either in the comments, or on your own blogs. (Of course, I forego the obvious applications here, like Safari, iTunes, and the like…)
To start, let’s dig into where I spend most of my time on a computer: on the...
March 2008
6 posts
links for 2008-03-16
weird burglary
Oddly descriptive and a bit too honest
links for 2008-03-15
Xyzzy Product Page
my favorite pw generator. always useful.
Crowdsource a cover, rip off designers?
Update: As he commented here, Jonathan Fields has dropped the contest mentioned below so as to avoid the appearance of exploitation. I applaud him for that move, and apologize if my post implied that his intentions were less than honest. He’s clearly a stand-up guy who intends to do the right thing by creative-types.
Today, I saw this status update over on Twitter, and was intrigued...
links for 2008-03-04
Best of VIM Tips, gVIM’s Key Features zzapper
%s/^\(.*\)\n\1$/\1/ was useful tonight for me….
How I Get Things Done (my productivity setup)
Like most of you, I’m busy. I not only have the normal crapload of work stuff to juggle, but also a few books at various stages of completion, my outreach/activism stuff, and an everyday life to live with its own demands. I also get a lot of email, spread across a variety of accounts. Like just about every other geek on the planet, I read and was fascinated by David Allen’s GTD...
There Will be Boredom
I’m going to step out on a limb, against the intelligentsia, against the cinephiles, against just about everyone I’ve talked to, and speak the unspeakable: There Will be Blood was dull. That’s right. I said it. Dull. Hell, let’s go even further: TWBB is turd of a film. Though there’s some excellent acting here, the whole affair is basically a self-indulgent romp of...
February 2008
7 posts
mistakenly on&
Somehow, I ended up on some other Torres family mailing list. I now get emails addressed to “Santiago, Jorge, Ray, JESSE, Lillian, Eddy, Dora, Ben, MARY, Rachel, Ernesto, Aurora, Rafael, mera, Bobby, Eliseo, Joe, Rolando, Rolando, Leo/Liz, Raul, Nacho, Vince.” I got the schedule for the MR AMIGO association event (whatever that is) and some other thing about a Sombrero Festival....
links for 2008-02-17
You want the blocks?
best.craigslist.ad.evar.
(tags: funny)
“I am the zomby woof, I’m that creature all the ladies ‘been...”
– frank zappa
emmytoast
Oh, also&.
In advance of our work on the 2nd edition of Vegan Freak: Being Vegan in a Non-Vegan World, Jenna and I decided to resurrect our old blog, veganfreaks.org. After about a year of neglect, we decided that we should get back into the swing of posting over there.
You’ll notice that we’ve disabled comments; we found that every time we posted something, we spent more time responding to...
iphone: Emmy&
iphone: Emmy…: Our dog, ever hopeful for a piece of maple-cashew-butter toast.
links for 2008-02-03
Truth or Terrorism? The Real Story Behind Five Years of High Alerts : Rolling Stone
January 2008
4 posts
podcast this, my fresh prince
Every morning, I wake up to our local NPR affiliate, North Country Public Radio. I’m generally not a huge fan of NCPR’s local coverage, mostly because I find it mind-numbingly dull. Having grown up in Philadelphia, no news seems complete to me without a discussion of the previous night’s murders; however, NCPR does a fine job pushing through the rest of NPR’s content from...
National Endowment for the Arts Announces New...
Chief finding in the study: people aren’t reading like they used to. The biggest declines come with the younger readers, with Americans aged 15-24 spending just 7 minutes daily reading, on average. Related to this decline are piss-poor results for reading scores. According to the report, “reading scores for 12th-grade readers fell significantly from 1992 to 2005, with the sharpest declines...
links for 2008-01-15
YouTube - Banned from Buffet two guys talk to Jimmy Kimmel about it
links for 2008-01-11
AT&T and Other ISPs May Be Getting Ready to Filter - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog
Encrypted connections FTW.
December 2007
3 posts
links for 2007-12-31
The BEAST: America’s Best Fiend: 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2007
On Lou Dobbs: “Obvious, intensifying xenophobia and distrust of the yellow and brown races, possibly exacerbated by Mexican wife.”
Putting Vegan Freak on Amazons Kindle (or, this...
Much hype and even more hand-wringing has been thrust in the direction of Amazon’s new ebook reader, the Kindle. In case you’ve been too busy blowing money on holiday shopping to know, the Kindle is a kind of ugly, 80s-looking little device that uses an ink-based technology to provide what many see as a more readable medium than conventional electronic screens. This idea is not...
links for 2007-12-03
On Oink, and the dinosaurs of the music industry
excellent analysis
November 2007
2 posts
Vegan Freak, 2nd. ed.
Vegan Freak has been successful beyond our expectations, and it has clearly been a useful book for a lot of people. We get email often from people telling us that the book was instrumental in getting them to go or stay vegan. And to be honest, that’s what we wrote the book for. So in that regard, it is working as we’d hoped, and we’ve certainly sold far more than the 1000 copies...
in print
Just got my copies of Making A Killing. Looks pretty good if I do say so myself ;)
October 2007
5 posts
links for 2007-10-22
The Marble of Doom
the thing i hate the most about the mac.
(tags: mac)
links for 2007-10-15
The Grand List of Overused Science Fiction Cliches
heh
(tags: writing)
Needless Quotation Marks
I don’t often come to these pages to rant about the inanities of grammar and punctuation,If there’s one thing I generally dislike about those with whom I share a profession, it is the ability to make a big deal out of nothing. but lately, one thing has been desperately annoying me, so I must share. It irritates me so singularly and perfectly, and yet, it is everywhere. Of what do I...
links for 2007-10-14
Lawsuit: ICE drugging detainees set for deportation - CNN.com
Being drugged against your will? Land of the free….
NaNoWriMo
Somehow, stupidly, I’ve decided to take a plunge at National Novel Writing Month this coming November. Why? Because I have a million things to do. Because I’m chairing two national job search committees at work, and that’s not taking enough of my free time. Because I’m co-editing another book on nanotechnology at the same time. Because I’m an idiot with a penchant for...
September 2007
8 posts
Love Me, Love My Tofu
It isn’t often that anything that I’m involved with is described as “fairy-tale” (though I do dig ponies and rainbows — like, a lot). Yet, a very kind writer from Newsweek used just that word in a recent web feature to describe the “vegan romance” I share with Jenna. And really, out of everything else in my life, that’s about the only thing that ever...
links for 2007-09-26
How to play/convert FLAC files in iTunes « earpick
this is really useful if you want to get FLAC going with iTunes
(tags: itunes)
These songs&.
are completely different, but they always cheer me up.
Making A Killing Book Site
I just worked up the first draft of the site for my forthcoming book Making A Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights. Check it out over at http://www.makingakillingbook.com. Right now, the site contains some generous advance praise from several quarters,In jest, Ryan from vegblog.org sent me this advance praise: “Making a Killing” is a heartwarming tale of “L’il...