SpamSieve

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Since 19/05/2005

Bloody hell. Best thing I did, which was only recently, was kill the catch-all account.

'I've seen things...'

"I'm impatient with stupidity. My people have learned to live without it." - Klaatu, from 'the Day the Earth Stood Still'

Quoted in the Guardian' top ten sci-fi movies.

I swear, I'd just be happy makign this blog a collection of quotes. Most of the time I prefer quotes, because they're usually written by people more eloquent than me.

Hmm. waiting for FCP to render is a pain in the ass.

Sealed with a Diss

"Every word is on target and it's all starting to make sense ... 
I see the light! The more people out of rap that feel the vibe 
The more it seems to burn you! The more you wanna criticize. 
Hide behind your keyboard, it's the only place you'll be lord 
You're looking for reasons to diss, get a life you seem bored ...

You critics are like pestilence ... your opinions are invalid 
You wouldn't have a clue what to do with the talent if you had it! 
When was the last time you stood on a stage and tried to do what we do? 
You can diss till the world ends; you couldn't live what I been through. "

-- Blade & Mark B. (Blade is teh MC, so really its just him).

Great track, but he could be singing about aint-it-cool-news and he'd still be right.

Sentui

The best iPod 'music' viewer I've used. Its free, fast, and intuitive. While not as powerful as PodWorks, its brilliant for my purposes.

www.ssrn.com

Who needs a library when you have the Social Science Research Network? I only recently discovered it this year and its the bomb for research. Most Electronic Journal search engines are ugly, slow and difficult to use. This site only collects recent papers in .pdf - and most of them are frear AND they have a standard 'suggested citation'. I've been reading 'Digital Capital' today, which is published by Harvard Law School, and SSRN so fits the model of the er, whatever model Amazon is. It collects papers from a variety of sources and provides the infrastructure to make them EASILY accessible.

Wow. EBSCOhost can kiss my ass - although, admittedly, what makes it useful is that it has scans (!) of old papers. Lazy correspondence students like me don't have to set foot into libraries and still have excellent research - in fact, I'd suggest that our research tends to be more encyclopaedic than someone who limited themselves to a brick & mortar library.

My legal research paper is on the socio-economics of digital piracy - and look what I found!

Peitz, Martin and Waelbroeck, Patrick, "Piracy of Digital Products: A Critical Review of the Economics Literature" (November 2003). CESifo Working Paper Series No. 1071. http://ssrn.com/abstract=466063

Kick ass - and, most importantly, its recent.

(Oh, and I saw Linklater's Before Sunset (2004) - amazing btw - on Sunday and Somedude(TM)'s Saved! (2004) tonight. Just thought I'd share)

Wow. Tuesdays are good after all.

Trangressing the Boundaries

"But why did I do it? I confess that I'm an unabashed Old Leftist who never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed to help the working class. And I'm a stodgy old scientist who believes, naively, that there exists an external world, that there exist objective truths about that world, and that my job is to discover some of them. (If science were merely a negotiation of social conventions about what is agreed to be ``true'', why would I bother devoting a large fraction of my all-too-short life to it? I don't aspire to be the Emily Post of quantum field theory.3)

But my main concern isn't to defend science from the barbarian hordes of lit crit (we'll survive just fine, thank you). Rather, my concern is explicitly political: to combat a currently fashionable postmodernist/poststructuralist/social-constructivist discourse -- and more generally a penchant for subjectivism -- which is, I believe, inimical to the values and future of the Left." -- Alan D. Sokal

Read the article, its fucking ripper. I've read it many times.

Sunday = Suckday.

Its the 22nd of August. This is bad. This means its nearly September. Which means the year is nearly 3/4s of the way over... and there was so much I wanted to do by the end of hte year and so far I've done about diddly squat much of it.

Soon, I'll be turning 25. This is also bad. I used to have a list of things I wanted to have done by the time I was 21. At 21, I discovered that I hadn't done most of them... so I moved the list to 25. 25 seemed sufficiently far away and adult-like to buy me enough time to complete them all. Sadly, its nearly upon me and I doubt I'll complete any of them by that time. I'm afraid if I then push the list to 30, I'll be approaching my 30th birthday and saying much the same thing. Ergo, I've decided that the list should be 'ASAP' and then mb I'd start getting motivated. Or perhaps I should bend th erules of 'completed by 25' to mean 'completed by the end of being 25'... that makes sense. Then I know I'll at least complete one of my list: finish university.

yay me.