::friday, may 31::

Evolution Robotics: Robotics Software Platform and Hardware Kits

Just slap a laptop on this $499 kit, and it'll roll around and do stuff. (How much would a massage attachment be?)

::thursday, may 30::

T-Bone Burnett & the Ya Ya Soundtrack

Ostensibly a review of the soundtrack to the new movie, T-Bone Burnett is the actual subject of this article. One of my favorites pretty much ever, T-Bone has a hell of a history, and deserves even more praise and worship (and needs to make another solo album, dammit!). All hail T-Bone.

This quote, however, is completely uncalled for: "Then again, Burnett is nothing if not tasteful; it appears that his Christian views don't allow for good old-fangled rock & roll vulgarity, and such gentility can get the best of him..." -- this dork needs to do a little more research. There's plenty of ascerbic, worldly language and wisdom in Burnett's music. From Euromad: "I went euro-mad out on the road last fall, between the Roman churches and the German music halls. Were it not for Mr. Gordon, and his fine distillery.... I might have never made it through this euro-misery." That's just one of the more tame examples.

::wednesday, may 29::

Welcome to 517 45th Street

Somebody buy Michael's house.

SFWA Members' Pages A-C

Links to homepages of just about every SF and Fantasy writer you can think of, dead or alive.

Jelly Ink Press: Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen

Kelly also attended the MFA writing program at UNCG, where I studied poetry. I met her on my first visit there. Wish I could've gotten to know her, but she graduated the spring before I started. She did, however, recommend the little old townhouses up the street as an excellent place to live affordably in Greensboro (Latham Park Manor Apartments), which is where we lived for the first two years. Anyway, I should read this book...sounds terrific. (I mean, check out the fabulous people praising it!)

artistic interpetations of literary figures

Various comix artists, from Buscema to Eisner, do their interpretations of literary characters and authors and even places. (Got this link from the very nice weblog of Neil Gaiman.)

::tuesday, may 28::

guimp: world's smallest website

Just go there.

::monday, may 27::

Black Mountain College Project / History

Nice history of Black Mountain College, which from 1933-1957 graduated more culture-shaping geniuses per capita than just about any other place in the country.

About Gargoyles and Grotesques

The guy who carved dozens of the gargoyles for the gorgeous Washington Cathedral has a website.

::sunday, may 26::

TED Conference

Any current TED members who would like to sponsor me and pay my $4000 fee, pop me an email. OK?

::saturday, may 25::

Ryze - business networking community

I finally filled out a page at Ryze. Not sure what Ryze stands for, but it's a very cool concept. It'll be especially interesting when it starts hitting a bigger critical mass, to start using keywords and such to see how people are similar.

::friday, may 24::

Fink - Home

I'm getting to be more and more grateful that people put together this package for Mac OS X. It almost effortlessly installs all the incredibly powerful opensource UNIX tools anyone could want, including python, MySQL, etc. Now time to install my own Wiki on my powerbook!

::wednesday, may 22::

RAILhead Design: Spam Reporter for Entourage

Get easy revenge on spammers by reporting them automagically to the authorities. Requires a Mac with Entourage email client.

Late Summer OSX Jaguar (and chat lient?)

But Jobs did more Monday than just exhort software makers to shift all their development to OS X; he also gave them something to develop for, providing the first public glimpse at the next major update to OS X. Code-named Jaguar and slated for a late summer release, the update will add a built-in instant messenger client, handwriting recognition technology, a new version of Sherlock, and improvements to OS X's Mail and Finder, among other features.

::tuesday, may 21::

Denby & the Clones in the New Yorker

For anyone who missed David Denby's review of Attack of the Clones, here's the semi-perma-link.

::wednesday, may 15::

Folding The $20 Bill

This is highly weird. The twin towers disaster hidden in a 20.

Cory Doctorow's Biography

Been wondering who Cory is and his relation to EL. Turns out the EL question is the least interesting thing about him. This guy has the life I almost wish I'd decided to shoot for in my 20's but turned to the more corporate lifestyle thing. (Well, if you can call MFA in poetry and weird internet jobs 'corporate.')

Ask Raymond Carver

The Onion digs up one of America's greatest fiction writers from the grave and gets him to writing an advice column that sounds an awful lot like a story from Cathedral. Genius.

::monday, may 13::

Get Ready for Yoda

This review contains a ton of spoilers, so I don't recommend it. But it makes my personal theory even more substantiated: We had to endure Jar Jar in order to get to Yoda. That is, Mr. Binks was a dress-rehearsal for making Yoda come to life in this film. And it sounds like it was worth it.

Yoda is one of the stars of this movie. He is in most of this movie, with a fairly active role. He is important to the plot, a key player. He is an action hero and a spiritual leader as the Republic crumbles around him. He is everything I could have hoped for from the character as a fan.

::saturday, may 11::

BLOGSTICKERS™

Bumper blogging.

::tuesday, may 7::

Pimlico Software: DateBk5

The software that makes my Palm (actually a Sony Clie) worthwhile just got better. Buy it and the money goes straight to supporting wildlife conservation and the Gorilla Haven Project in the North Georgia mountains.

::friday, may 3::

TechTV | 'Max Headroom' Is Coming to TechTV

To round out my wistful memories of cyberpunk this week, here's a kicker. Max Headroom is returning. This article has a brief history and links to other MH resources. (Thanks to Gray for the tip.)

All the News That's Fit to Blog

Fast Company raves about the blog revolution. The thing is, I've heard all this before, and yet it remains an insulated cult phenomenon among Internet fanatics. I keep trying to explain the power of this to my coworkers and clients, and some of them nod, some of them stare at me blankly, and almost nobody does anything about it.

Philips sets displays free with 'paintable' LCDs

This is so very cool. It means smaller, cheaper versions of just about everything I lust after. Um...that didn't sound right.

::thursday, may 2::

George Lucas: Galactic Gasbag

This Salon story is getting a lot of press. This writer makes a strong case arguing against Lucas' airheaded attempts to inflate the importance of his space opera. In some ways, who really cares? It's just Star Wars. But in other ways, I'm glad someone is trying to set the record straight: that these tropes of science-fiction didn't come from a confluence of academic and inspired ideas in GL's mind, but from a host of often-forgotten hard-working SF writers from previous generations.

The "true theology" of "Star Wars" was written not by Virgil or Homer (or Joseph Campbell), but Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, Frank Herbert, E.E. "Doc" Smith and a host of other S.F. writers.

Beyond Cyberpunk -- Hypercard Stack

More early-90s nostalgia -- Gareth Branwyn's near-famous Hypercard stack is still being kept in a jar of formaldehyde, still clickable and everything. What the hell is this Japanese site the Mondo 2000 link goes to, though?

Weirdest U2 Interview Ever

Part of the MONDO 2000 archive, referenced in the previous item.

Mondo archive on the well's gopher

If you understand the title of this blog item, you've probably been on the 'net a loooong time. This is a gopher archive (gopher is the proto-web, in a way) of documents housed at the WELL (the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link -- an online community predating public use of the internet, and an incubator for many of the most formative people and ideas behind the history and future of cyberspace) about a little magazine called Mondo 2000, that was one of the weirdest, most fascinating zines put to print in the 90s. Anybody else remember the magazine? I was a fan from issue #1, but only recently found out the in-depth, tell-all history behind the weirdness.

::wednesday, may 1::

Boxes and Arrows: The age of findability

Big geek fun! Quite the conversation going on about Peter Morville's findability article on B&A. Jump in!

Harry Reviews SW2

I wasn't excited at all about Attack of the Clones. But now I am. Just read this and you'll see why.