Oh man, you should check this out. Some guy is selling his ex-wife’s wedding dress. Go on, click on the link and have your dose of American culture for the day.
eBay item 4146756343 (Ends Apr-28-04 15:37:01 PDT) – SIZE 12 WEDDING DRESS/GOWN NO RESERVE
As of this posting, it’s up to $15k. Wow. And don’t I feel proud for contributing to the item’s blogdex rating.
You know, I knew, that, one day, I would write an article about the original Wiki, [Ward’s wiki]:http://c2.com/cgi/wiki . The Wiki is a sort of concept that really flies in the face of technical convention. The term “Wiki” comes from the hawaiian for “quick”, and wikis are really quick. Wikis work by social, not technical convention, and operate because of human goodness, not pareto efficiency or rules or restrictions. It’s absolutely fascinating, and truly wonderful to see what it creates, simply by existing.
Read more »
….and I fall prey to more silly online pseudo-personality quizzes. *shrug*
Has anyone estimated how much productivity is lost taking these quizzes? Probably not as much as spam. Though for me, probably more… Thunderbird has been doing a pretty decent job at filtering.
Okay, so it still feels a little biased towards corporations, but [Sweatshops and Globalization]:http://www.aworldconnected.org/article.php/525.html is still a pretty decent article about “low-wage” factories in third-word/developing countries. It’s pretty persuasive. Still, there’s a really fine line between operating with the market’s real supplies and demands, and being greedy and artificially keeping wages low or lobbying governments for unfair competitive advantages and subsidies. Oh wait, did that sentence make any sense? Better ask someone better versed in international trade and economics.
See also: [A World Connected]:http://www.aworldconnected.org
Hey, it’s another interesting piece from the folks at [Reason]:http://www.reason.com (your regularly scheduled libertarian editorial site) on one person who has [vowed never to pay income taxes again.]:http://www.reason.com/0405/fe.bd.its.shtml
Though I can’t say that I agree with much of the stuff that Reason publishes, they present reasonably researched articles that slant differently than normal media. Nearly all news is slanted one way or another, right? If I absorb the same facts from different slants, I end up a more informed person, don’t I?
(So… I just wrote this long email to someone asking for recommendations on cell phone service, and I figured I should post it here, both for my own reference and in case anyone finds it helpful or has something to add.)
I have a home phone, but rarely use it. It’s for telemarketers to use, and for when I want to call international, since cellphones don’t support the 101nnnn (like 1010-220 or 1010-345) dial-around long distance system.
Anyway, I have Sprint, and it’s okay. Its main benefit is trouble-free coverage, a good plan, and I have other family members with it. I have the “please don’t switch to AT&T” plan, at 36/month for 500 peak, 3000 off-peak, 500 sprint minutes. No home calling area, free domestic long distance. It’s only offered if you ask to cancel service with them.
I would recommend Sprint or Verizon (no preference), since they both have really decent coverage. The others have their own problems, which may or may not apply to you. I hear that Cingular is okay if you’re in SF or in LA, but fairly sucky in other places, like suburbs between SF and San Jose. Cingular may be better now, since they bought AT&T wireless. T-mobile has good plans, but their coverage isn’t very good. Still, if you don’t have a car, maybe you won’t go anywhere where the more spotty providers have deadspots.
Try not to get stuck with a contract greater than a year. But remember that the law says you can cancel any cell phone service and return the phone within 30-days of purchase.
All of them have bad customer service. I’ve had my own bad experiences with Sprint, and my friends have bad experiences with AT&T. I’ve heard of bad experiences with the others.
Actually, the cheapest long distance I’ve found is prepaid: www.onesuite.com . Its only problem is that the call quality would sometimes be bad when calling some overseas destinations. Oh, and your account expires if you don’t recharge it for 6 months (minimum $5 recharge). bigzoo.com has similar rates, but had security problems in the past with leaking credit card numbers, so personally, I can’t trust them.
There’s this really cool [article on SI’s photography workflow]:http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=7-6453-6821 . Geez… I feel like such an amateur now… It used to be, yeah, I’m an amateur photographer… it’s just my hobby. But this article… man… now I feel *really* amateurish.
(found this article on [memex]:http://www.skillbytes.co.uk/memex/ which came up when I was looking for info on stopping spam email. Go figure.)
I saw this animated gif on one of these webboards, and I just couldn’t resist posting it. 😀
Outsourcing is a source of anxiety for several people I know. It’s been a steady trend, and it’s been brought closer to the forefront, because a slow economy pushes for costcutting measures.
On [Reason]:http://www.reason.com. there’s an article by Ted Balaker called [War Against the Machines: Why are protectionists endangering American jobs?]:http://www.reason.com/hod/tb031904.shtml . I’m not sure I buy all of the article, but it’s a good read, and thought-provoking anyway.
Consider:
> Oh, you’re afraid of layoffs? Well, just make yourself more marketable. Oh, you just got out of a master’s program from a top university? Oh, then your company won’t be laying you off– you’re young and you’ve got current skills. What? Your company is laying off people like you? Hmmm… I’m not sure what to do about that…
I think the reality is that even real talent can get laid off. Sometimes a company just can’t afford to pay for the best when they only need some simple work done. Outsourcing and layoffs… I don’t think I’ve resolved the issue for myself yet.
Soon after I learned of the concept of a wiki, I became enamored of the idea of a [using a wiki for my own personal ends.]:http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PersonalWiki The whole concept of [accidental linking]:http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AccidentalLinking and relatively painless and automagically organizing data was just too attractive to resist.
I had a brief fling with Zwiki runing on Zope, and stuck with it for a while, but in the end, it was just too heavyweight to for my needs. It was just too much a hog for my modest system running WindowsME (fine, make fun of me). I never kept up with it. But I have a new idea….
I can use John Wiegley’s EmacsWikiMode on local files. There are several advantages to this approach as compared to Zwiki.
* You can edit pages in a *real* editor, not a friggin’ text box in a browser.
* You can even edit those pages in a crappy editor, like notepad or vi (hahaha), though the view won’t be wikified.
* Local files are viewable without a web browser or web server.
* Local files are easy to sync in a distributed filesystem, or via [rsync,]:http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/ or [unison.]:http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/
* Emacs, and thus EmacsWikiMode runs on a whole lot of platforms. So this means that I can view/edit on whatever platform I happen to be using.
There are some disadvantages:
* no multiuser (that’s okay for me)
* no cool pretty layouts (okay too)
* limited text formatting syntax (this is probably the biggest limitation)
—-
The wiki concept has a lot of derivative ideas. Hey, I wouldn’t have been drawn to TikiText in this MT blog if I wasn’t already familiar with [WikiFormatting]:http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiFormatting and [StructuredText]:http://zwiki.org/StructuredText . (aside: Is there a WikiEngine that uses a TikiText derivative? It’s growing on me…)
