AKMA’s got a great idea. Take advantage of the Creative Commons license that Larry Lessig put on his new book Free Culture by having a bunch of people each record a chapter of it in audiobook format.
Amazing…I was thinking exactly the same thing today, about both Lessig’s book and Cory Doctorow’s eastern standard tribe.
Not only does this make the book more broadly accessible, but it has the added bonus of being a chance to hear real voices from the bloggers I know and love.
I have no strong preference on chapters, though I suppose the librarian in me likes the idea of Chapter 9 (“Collectors”), and the title of Chapter 11 (“Chimera”) is fabulous!
I nominate my friend Weez, who has a marvelous voice (which she uses as co-host of a local PBS radio show), for the Preface or Intro. Weez, you in?
Whenever I’m overwhelmed with work tasks, I become far more susceptible to the siren call of brain-eating games. I lost more hours than I care to admit to WEBoggle this week. Now I find myself confronted with the ingenious InfocomBots—AIM bots that allow you to play the best of InfoComs classic text adventure games using nothing more than an AIM client. Ack!
My susceptibility to the appeal of these games was probably fueled by my recent sleeplessness and drug-induced fogginess, which in turn resulted from the annoyingly persistent cough I’ve not been able to shake for the past 2+ weeks. I finally went to my doctor Tuesday, and she diagnosed a bronchial inflammation. She put me on prednisone for a few days to reduce the inflammation,and I’m already sleeping better. So perhaps I’ll be able to resist the siren song of online games, and get some actual work done.
All this traveling has left me hopelessly far behind in all the things I need to do, at home and at work. Expect light or no blogging while I try to dig myself out from under this mountainous to-do list.
I wish that life was like a hotel room, and came with one of those nice “do not disturb” signs for the door (not to mention maid service and room service).
Via my friend (and sxsw roommate) Kelly comes this article from The Black Table entitled “The Cult of Diet Coke.”
The list of who’s addicted ranges from REO Speedwagon and Elton John to Donald Trump and the Clintons.
Since my husband and I go through cases of the stuff each month, I’m glad to know we’re not alone in our devotion.
(And, of course, my first contact with Joi Ito was over his Diet Coke post, so it played a significant role in my social networking experience.)
Got home at 1am on Wednesday morning…less than 48 hours later, I’m back in DC.
Tomorrow I’ll spend the day at NSF, evaluating proposals for funding. Home again tomorrow night. I am not cut out for this kind of life.
To make matters worse, I seem to be sharing a hotel floor with dozens of teenagers, here on some kind of school trip. Happily, I’m at the end of the hall, far form the elevator and the vending machines. Perhaps I’ll get a little sleep. Perhaps not. Good thing I brought that cough syrup with codeine.
On a side note, traveling to DC requires one to be bombarded with scary messages. In Pittsburgh, an armed guard checked IDs at the door to the plane, and the captain announced that we would not be able to stand up at all during flight, since by the time we finished our take-off, we’d be 30 minutes from DC, and we’d be required to stay in our seats for that 30 minutes.
On the Metro in from the airport (aside: What was I thinking? It would have been well worth the $10 for the cab to avoid the lengthy wait for trains…), there were several announcements telling passengers to “help avoid what happened in Madrid—if you see a bag on the floor, kindly ask others around you if belongs to them; if not, report it immediately to transit police.”
Makes me glad I live in a relatively obscure city these days.
One of the talks I enjoyed most at sxsw was the keynote by MoveOn.org’s Eli Pariser and Zack Exley. They were articulate, committed, and inspirational.I’m delighted to see that MoveOn has acted quickly to put together an ad based on Rumsfeld’s “Face the Nation” appearance on Sunday. Well worth watching. Send it to a friend.
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