Saturday, June 19, 2010

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

IT Crowd season premiere sneak peak

Posted: 19 Jun 2010 01:00 AM PDT

Channel 4 is previewing the first episode of the next season of the awesomely funny nerd sitcom The IT Crowd. I just watched it and howled with laughter -- it's got D&D, comeuppance for sexist pigs, and failed nerd romance. What more could you ask for?

Caveat: Channel 4 has got a ton of BS you have to jump through to watch this. Foreigners will have to find a UK proxy to watch through, and you'll have to register an account (I just used a Disposeamail email).

Series 4 | The IT Crowd | Jen the Fredo



Chris Arkenberg: Thanks and sayonara!

Posted: 18 Jun 2010 02:12 PM PDT

Arkenbuddha-1 I've had a great week here at Boing Boing! It's been fun, educational, and a little bit nerve-wracking. And it's been a great opportunity to promote some of the minds & ideas that are inspiring me. Thanks to the staff for supporting me as a guest blogger, and special thanks to David Pescovitz who is just about as nice a guy as you could imagine.

Here's my own self promotion before I depart: I post all original content semi-regularly on my blog URBEINGRECORDED. I'm very active and trading a lot of sweat equity but I'm technically unemployed. Here's my LinkedIn.

I make music - mostly electronic but across diverse genres. My currently-posted works are at N8UR, including originals and a bunch of remixes. I'm very proud of my Radiohead remix so if Thom or Johnny are reading this (or anyone who knows them), please give it a listen. My most recent published work is an E.P. called Western Rains, embedded below.


<a href="http://n8ur.bandcamp.com/album/western-rains">brahman by Chris23</a>


Also, related, my friend Jamie Wyatt is a great singer & songwriter.


I live in Santa Cruz, Ca. - one of my favorite places in the world. For someone like me who's mostly city-phobic (though I love to travel to mega-cities) I thrive in this idyllic community of redwood mountains, beautiful farms, and some of the best surf in the world. It's a fantastic community fortunate to be both near the SF Bay Area and also geographically insulated from the hustle & bustle. Someday I imagine myself working more closely with the city in some capacity.


So, here are some local Santa Cruz promotions:


Route 1 Farms - Great peeps and regulars at our local Farmer's Markets.
Architect Mark Primack - former city council member, commercial & residential architect with a fondness for concrete and steel, and a great speaker on urban planning & development. Also tender of the Tree Circus.
Jeff Traugott Guitars - simply amazing high-end guitars that I'll never be able to afford. Players include John Mayer & Charlie Hunter.
Santa Cruz Guitar Company - excellent luthiers and slightly more affordable.
O'Neill surf - an iconic global brand, born and raised in Santa Cruz.
The Cinematic Syndicate - local film group doing exceptional work.
NextSpace Co-working & Innovation - great peeps and a great work space designed by Mark Primack. Also just opened a space in SF.
The Santa Cruz Design & Innovation Center - an incubator & promoter of local Santa Cruz design.
Quiddities - design & dev committed to building community communication platforms.
The Tannery Arts Center - "a first-in-the-nation art community that provides a sustainable, accessible and vibrant home for the arts in Santa Cruz County"
UCSC Biomolecular Engineering & Genomics - some of the best in the world.
UCSC Astronomy & Astrophysics - also one of the best in the world.


I could blog all this stuff here for, like, the next month but here are a few of my current video entertainment faves before I go... Nothing too radical or underground - just stuff I love and quote relentlessly:
Sealab 2021
Archer - From the Sealab folks, featuring H. Jon Benjamin (Coach McGurk in Home Movies) and Jessica Walter (Lucille Bluth of Arrested Development).
The Mighty Boosh - I can not get enough!

Thanks so much! I'll leave you all with this clip from The Boosh:

Jim Graham - Racing, tele-working, & battling multinationals

Posted: 18 Jun 2010 01:15 PM PDT

Dingo2222-1 Jim Graham, AKA Ronjon, is Director of Marketing at The Satellite Telework Centers in Santa Cruz County, an avid Burning Man attendee who ran Media Mecca for several years, and Stock Bug class rally racer. He was one of the founders of the Felton Friends of Locally Owned Water (FLOW) movement that successfully re-claimed Felton water rights from the German multinational, RWE.

You were instrumental in your town's successful fight to recover its water rights from a major multinational. What happened with Felton and FLOW?

Our town water system had been privately owned since the late 1800s, but in 2001-2002 it was acquired by American Water, which was then acquired by the German multinational RWE. American Water immediately applied for a 78% rate hike with almost zero public notice. The town banded together to fight back and formed Felton Friends of Locally Owned Water (FLOW). We initially planned to fight the rate hike at the Public Utilities Commission, but quickly realized that it was so weighted in favor of big business that our only option was to take the water system back via eminent domain. We got a measure on the ballot to raise $11 million to buy the system. American Water fought dirty, as it has in other communities around the U.S. We were leaked a copy of their campaign strategy, which included using an ad agency to provide flyers that would go out under a co-opted community group and push polling to intimidate our local county Supervisor. We even had an astroturf group surface one month before the election that basically disappeared the day residents voted by 74.8% to raise the money. We eventually acquired the water system and now FLOW members consult with other community groups around the U.S. who are looking at acquiring their water systems from private utilities.

How long have you lived in Felton? What brought you there?

I've been in Felton since '91. I was born and raised in a small agricultural town, Hollister. After a stint as a reporter in Washington, D.C., I got tired of the snow and humidity and came back. Hollister had grown to something like 30,000 people. Too big! I eventually found a place in Felton and haven't looked back.

It always fascinates me how much energy is spent on online communities. Community to me is talking to someone at the grocery store, sitting in a meeting at the town hall or being involved in a community project. Maybe because I'm older, but the IRL stuff is a lot more interesting. That being said, I'm also mayor of pretty much every business in Felton.

As a co-working entrepreneur, how has the landscape of work changed with respect to location? Tell me a bit about co-working and The Satellite.

Some people are saying we'll all be freelancers within a decade. I don't buy that, but I am seeing a lot of people wanting more flexibility in where and when they work. Co-working facilities are opening everywhere and I think that's great, particularly for independent contractors and some start-ups. Where we're different is that we're going into small towns that surround large metropolitan areas, building professional office space in established commercial districts and renting it to telecommuters, home-based business owners and consultants. Where co-working spaces emphasize collaboration, we find our members do their collaboration with coworkers and clients somewhere else and come to us for the quiet, uninterrupted time they need to get their work done.

Dingogogogo

How did you end up involved in off-road racing? Would you talk a bit about Desert Dingo and your efforts in the Baja 1000?


Back in December 2006, I'd rented "Dust to Glory", a documentary on the 2003 Baja 1000. Ten minutes into it I turned to my wife and said, "I've got to do this." She said, "You don't know anything about cars." And I said, "I don't care." Eleven months later we went off the start line in a '69 VW Beetle. We lasted 144 miles. We were total n00bs.


The thing about the 1000, particularly for us in the Stock Bug class, is it's not about speed, but survival. I cold-called Eric Solorzano, who has 42 Baja wins, including nine Baja 1000s and said "You don't know me from Adam, but I want to race, you're the best at it and I want to meet you." He ended up building our engine and helping us tune the suspension, which is key. Now I'm working on convincing him to retire, because I think it's the only way we can beat him.


The greatest challenge racing Baja is communications. Race radios are pretty much useless unless you've got line-of-sight. Everyone has satellite phones and it can take half an hour or more to get a call through. One of our sponsors, EMS Sky Connect, loans us communications and tracking system called Rugged Text and Track, that allows my wife, sitting in front of several laptops back in California, to track the car and our three chase trucks - and communicate with them - in real time. It came in handy when I broke my leg getting out of the car during the race in 2009.


We were one of two teams (the other being Robby Gordon) using Twitter during the race in 2008. Last year was our first with the satcomm system. This year, I want a UAV.


Two guys on the team have Type 2 diabetes and many of the rest of us, myself included, have a history of the disease in our families. We partnered with the International Diabetes Federation to raise money for their education and awareness programs. We're the official World Diabetes Day race car of the 1000. We also hand out thousands of hero cards that have a photo of the car on the front and the warning signs of diabetes printed on the back in English or Spanish.


We're first in Class in the VORRA series and are racing this coming weekend in Reno. This will be our fourth attempt at the Baja 1000 in November and our goal this year is to finish.


What is your relationship with Burning Man. Are you still a passionate attendee? Do you maintain a Burning Man storage shed?


The joke has always been if you ever want to go camping, borrow gear from a burner because they've got everything and it's only used once a year. My first year was '96 when I got to shoot a fully automatic machine gun and toss homemade hand grenades. I ran Media Mecca for seven years when we'd have 300+ media outlets at the event. Now I head out with a Camelbak and a sleeping bag and mooch off of friends. Sure the event has changed, but I still recommend folks go out at least once. If you want to go to something that never changes, there's always Disneyland. I have tremendous respect for the artists and everyone who volunteers to make it happen each year. I still volunteer on the fringes, but for the most part, I'm your consummate spectator.


So, you live among the redwoods of the Santa Cruz mountains, you fought for Felton's water rights, and yet you seem to deeply enjoy deserts. Is there a common, maybe archetypal thread that connects the two?


Big cities don't do much for me. We live in the redwoods at the end of a potholed dirt road. Our dogs get skunked. I wake up to deer eating my freaking roses. I even saw a chupacabra once. We're within driving distance of the ocean, the mountains and the desert. I never take that for granted for a second. I've been very fortunate in life and when I can, I try to give a little back.


If you had one thing to say to Santa Cruz County, what would it be?


Pffft. No one listens to me :).

Rosebud, the magazine of the "hydroponics lifestyle"

Posted: 18 Jun 2010 11:16 AM PDT

Uploaded Images 2010 6 Rosebud Lightbox Jimdaly Adi Web-1

Adithya Sambamurthy photo


Over at the Bay Citizen, a fantastic new nonprofit news organization in the San Francisco Bay Area, writer Chris Colin tells the story of Rosebud, the "hydroponics lifestyle" magazine that's all about pot culture, sans pot. My old Wired and Business 2.0 colleague James Daly is editor of the print pub, backed by Advanced Nutrients, a big Canadian seller of hydroponics gear. I haven't read it, but if I must judge a book by its cover it looks like Cigar Aficionado for dope dealers. From the Bay Citizen:
Rather than fat bud close-ups, the Bay Area-based magazine (now in its seventh issue) offers travel features, extreme sports, actor profiles, buxom ladies and other airport newsstand staples, as well as a few technical articles on seed selection and better yields...

So what, exactly, is that hydroponics lifestyle?

"They're interested in do-it-yourself things, liberating things, freedom," Alex Leon, Rosebud's associate publisher, says of the demographic. "They want to be challenged, to not be governed by too many boundaries. They might live off the grid, be into the outdoors, have some disposable income."

The company is gambling that they also like to read — at least high-gloss, Maxim-ish literature. ("Charlize Theron is a great anomaly. She's tall (5'9"), blonde, smart, and a real knockout," the June cover interview begins.) In a throwback to the heyday of plush magazines like Look, several pages of each issue are devoted simply to lovely art photos, a fact that nobody ought to tell Gourmet, Portfolio, Domino, Vibe and the hundreds of other titles that have run dry in the last two years.

"We're reaching new readers, and they're happy not to be stereotyped as stoners," Daly says. "We're not putting Cheech and Chong on the cover."

"Rosebud Turns Over a New Leaf"

Bruce Damer - Burning Man, NASA, & artificial life

Posted: 18 Jun 2010 10:38 AM PDT

Brucedamerrrrrr Bruce Damer is a technologist, virtual world pioneer, and computer historian. He is the CEO and founder of The Digital Space Commons, director of the Contact Consortium, and author of the book "Avatars".

I talked with him about Burning Man & Katrina, NASA & near-earth-objects, artificial life & his EvoGrid project, and the legacy of psychedelic visionaries...

At the end of August, 2005, you were at Burning Man in a heavily-outfitted RV. News quickly spread of the Katrina disaster. How did you respond from the middle of the Nevada desert?

At Burning Man in 2005 our camp was among other things, running the webcast and helping maintain the playa wifi network, so we knew about Katrina while other burners were in their glorious offline world. One of our camp-mates, who worked for the Pentagon devising "extreme communications" disaster relief hardware and deploying it in places such as for the Asian Tsunami that year, pointed our dishes skyward and tracked the incoming hurricane via some super high-res satellite. He phoned the Pentagon to order up some blackhawk helicopters to take his crew down to New Orleans to help the citizenry but due to government red tape that order was denied. I said at the time "whew, those scary loud black things buzzing the playa would have caused some serious kind of mass panic about a bust by the Bushies or a belief amongst burners that the UFO invasion had chosen Black Rock as its landing pad".

Instead, our camp took quick action by setting up a Katrina
Information Center and people came in to see the satellite views and
get the latest disturbing info about their neighborhoods. Then the
Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping stopped by and rapidly
organized a Dixie Land band, recruited folk singer Joen Baez who was
there that year, and hosted a phenomenal prayer and concert at the Temple. Andie Grace, Burning Man
Community Manager, state that this concert was the finest moment in
the history of the festival. After collecting tens of thousands of
dollars in water jugs, organizers determined to give this money
directly to stranded residents of the gulf states and New Orleans, who
were gathering in a state of shock at the Katrina Information Center.
Later the spark that was set off at the Katrina Information Center
grew into the Temple to Temple initiative, various Burning Man direct
volunteer relief and Mississippi Delta reconstruction efforts, and
ultimately Burners without Borders. This year a documentary film was
launched on the whole wonderful drama.


I have to say that serving as minor support agents in this Katrina
effort were the finest moments Galen and I ever experienced at Burning
Man. We still have the sign "Bring Jazz, Concert for New Orleans" in
our living room.


Arkenbergbmmmmm


Reverend Billy leading thousands in prayer for New Orleans, at the
Temple, Burning Man 2005.



You've been a NASA contractor and group leader of your own
research and development company for many years. What is the most
interesting project you've worked on with them? How did this work
inform your own life?


Yes indeed, since 1999 I've been leading a team here at DigitalSpace, which does 3D virtual worlds with high powered physics. NASA funded us
for years to develop an open source platform to help them model rovers
on the moon and mars, space station construction, the Hubble Telescope
servicing mission and more. In the most exciting project, a team
approached us in 2007 with a really novel challenge, how to visualize a human crewed mission to a near earth object
(ie: an asteroid). I said to them "yes we can do that but have you
guys thought of how to put the crew down on the surface". They hadn't
and so I offered to lead a design exercise, which resulted in one of
the first actual studies and spacecraft designs for going to another
body in the solar system sine Von Braun and his team conceived of the
Saturn architecture and the Lunar Module in the early 1960s. The study
was controversial so the information was embargoed for a while. I was
given the go ahead to release our part of it, the design of how the
multi-ton spacecraft would dock and "tether" itself to the low-gravity
asteroid surface allowing the crew to exit and explore with handholds
and jet-packs. On July 31, 2007 I did a talk at Industrial Light &
Magic in San Francisco in a room next to where the costume of Darth
Vader stood. I then went on to an official NASA talk in the city where
a real life Darth Vader, NASA Ames Center Director General Pete
Worden, was in attendance. This was the first public release of the
design concept mission. All over the net the image of this mission
concept appeared, from Space.com to AOL, and it appeared on the cover
of Popular Science. This was a high point in my "NASA career" and a
real thrill for an outsider. [See video of the asteroid mission here.] This work has connected me in
in with the whole space exploration and development (those who dream
of colonies) community. I was also given a dose of cold water to sober
up the reality of what is actually possible in sustainable human space
exploration and longer stays. I am now a realist in those terms (a
lunar colony is not even remotely a possibility with our current
technology and approach to this enterprise). So in a real way this
decade working with Space directed me back toward studying evolution
in software, which I had been interested keenly in since about 1982.


Would you describe your current PhD work on evolutionary
computation and artificial life? What do you hope this "EvoGrid"
effort will enable for future researchers and the future of
humanity?


I started my PhD work at the University of Southern California in
1985. At the time I was trying to use computers (a VAX 11/750 on the
ARPANET) to model gazillions of small entities that would reproduce,
adapt and be able to solve problems. The problem I came up with was
the "brilliant pebbles" challenge posed by the old "Star Wars" missile
defense program. Its basically how to build a computer that can
process gazillions of radar returns from a lot of warheads streaming
through space during an all-out nuclear war, and then target those
warheads. I developed what today might be called an "artificial life"
approach to the problem with little software critters that would "eat"
the signals and rapidly work out where everything was going. This
didn't get implemented beyond a demonstration stage and a display of
laser optics setup on a big fat Tektronix color display. Our group got
300K or so from the "Strategic Defense Initiative" about the time I
left the group. Later in the early 1990s my ideas got communicated to
a black-ops program, and supposedly implemented and flown (after one
booster failure) out of Vandenburg Airforce Base to do a rapid fly-by
of a clump of small asteroids. I was told the algorithmic approach
worked like a charm but not permitted to know specific results. Given
the trajectory I calculated that this spacecraft must be one of the
most distant objects in the solar system by now, out with the Voyagers
and Pioneer 10 in the Ooort cloud. I hope the aliens find it before
they pick up on JPL's craft with their linear go-to programming or
else its the giant yellow galactic bulldozers for us!


Back on the PhD track, throughout the 1990s I kept the dream alive of
creating software that could show biology, evolution or at least
something life-like in action. I established Biota.org in 1996 to serve as a
catalyst between the communities of paleontologists, biochemists,
computer scientists, artists and writers thinking about origins of
life, evolution and life as it could be here or elsewhere. I started a
conference series (Digital Biota) that went to the famous Burgess
Shale fossil quarry, and involved many luminary thinkers such as Karl
Sims, Tom Ray, Richard Dawkins, Douglas Adams, Rudy Rucker and Bruce
Sterling. In 2007 a full 20 years after the original USC PhD work I
worked out that not only was computing power probably up to the task
(in my remaining lifetime) of doing the job, but that I was hitting 45
years of age and I better get going. I took a pilgrimage to see
Freeman Dyson about the newly reborn project, which I conceived with
my collaborators as a kind of "origin of artificial life" and Freeman
found it delightful and said "look, I am forty years older than you,
you can get a lot done in forty years".


Thus inspired, our tiny team is powering forward into the extremely
challenging worlds of simulating chemical reality, with the hopes one
day of the larger EvoGrid
simulation showing some interesting signs of artificial biological
emergence, or better still, Darwinian natural selection leading to the
first all-digital artificial life cell, perhaps within my lifetime!
[You can see an animated overview of EvoGrid here.]


How did you get involved with the Timothy Leary
Archives? What is your role and what is the goal of the
organization?


I met Denis Berry, the trustee of Dr. Leary's archives, several years
ago and pledged to help in any way I could to find a home for these
400 boxes of Tim's stuff. Its amazing stuff, perhaps the biggest
collection of counterculture artifacts in the world, including letters
to and from Allen Ginsberg, John Lennon and many more notables of the
time. An effort supported by Brewster Khale of the Internet Archive,
and lead by Lisa Rein, has led to the scanning of all of Tim's books,
movies, rare reel to reel audio, and a start on key documents and
photographs. is now up on the Internet Archive, and the audio is being put out
into the Psychedelic Salon podcast run by Lorenzo Hagerty. This whole effort has provided the world, especially the up and coming younger
generation, a re-introduction to Dr. Timothy Leary way beyond the
typical excoriation and one dimensional villain portrayal by the
media.


How has the psychedelic experience informed your work, your
art, and your life?


As I am a virtual worlds aficionado and I see parallels between the
worlds of the elevated mind and our development of 3D digital spaces
where we clothe ourselves as weird alter-beings known as avatars, and
interact with any number of weird humanoid and non-humanoid entities
such as in-world AIs and other people. Back in 1999 the late Terence McKenna (the mushroom bard) and I engaged in some explorations of virtual worlds, with him experiencing these spaces
for the first time. Our shared commentary about the experience reveals
that trip-spaces and trips into cyberspace may not be that unrelated!
As Terence's archives were destroyed by fire some years ago, I have
been working with a group of dedicated people to bring some of
Terence's thought back to life.

Images Mckennavw


Terence McKenna inside a virtual world, 1999.



You've collected an incredible array of hardware chronicling
the history of personal computing at your DigiBarn Computer Museum project. With that as a background what is the one big techno intervention you
hope to see developed in the next decade or two?


Like all shy and geeky teenagers of the 1970s I had my eye on the
hottest personal computers of the day (Commodore PET 2001 anyone!) and
in the 1980s I had the golden opportunity to work on early innovative
user interfaces with Xerox (who invented the modern concept of
networked personal computers with GUIs, mice at their Xerox PARC
laboratory). So in the late 1990s after having "bought the farm" I
found that I could fill our large barn here with my own collection and
donations from around the world. The DigiBarn Computer Museum now
features the sweep of the history of PCs from the 1960s on up and has
a few big systems (Cray supercomputers) thrown in.


What I see next is a grand convergence between the ever shrinking,
ever more powerful format of the PC, now embodied as a smartphone, the
growth of alter-selves as avatars, social network identities, and the
ubiquity of spatial data in the guise of Google Maps & Street View.
This convergence will pump up the growth of Augmeted Reality (AR) seen
first on your smartphone and then down the road on some kind of
glasses or stylish retinal display. In 10 or 20 years we (or our kids)
will be walking around seeing all kinds of data, images, media,
avatars, game play elements and social networks mapped onto the world
all around us. An inevitable yet frightening vision? A great
description of this future is available in Vernor Vinge's novel, Rainbows End.

First self-replicating mathematical creature

Posted: 18 Jun 2010 01:11 PM PDT


The Game of Life is a cellular automation first devised in 1970 by mathematician John Conway. It's played by setting simple rules and then watching how the cells live, die, interact, and form complex patterns that evolve over time. Last month, Canadian computer programmer Andrew Wade managed to spur the emergence of the game's very first self-replicating mathematical creature. It's named Gemini. From New Scientist:
Gemini's implications extend to the real world. "There's a fascination with the complexity that is coming out of these incredibly simple rules," says Susan Stepney, a computer scientist at the University of York, UK, who ran Gemini inside Life, at New Scientist's behest. "Eventually that leads on to biology, putting simple atoms together to make complex life."

Because Wade's replicator copies itself piece by piece, it is analogous to a photocopier rather than a living cell, she says. But it still has implications for understanding life. "The fact that it's doing it differently from biology is in itself interesting, because it shows there are multiple ways of solving the same problem. It's a very impressive technical achievement."

It's doing it differently from biology, showing there are multiple ways of solving the same problem Stephen Wolfram, famous for championing cellular automata as a replacement for scientific equations, disputes Gemini's relevance to living cells. He says that feeding a program to a universal constructor merely to create a self-replicating creature - Wade's approach, and Von Neumann's original suggestion - is overkill. He points to a much simpler example, a one-dimensional cellular automaton known as "rule 90" that will duplicate any starting line of cells after a certain number of steps.

Rather than contributing to our understanding of life, Wolfram says Wade's discovery could help devise ways to build a molecular-scale computer, starting from tiny components like the cells in Life. "This discovery is helping us understand the world of constructing things from dumb components," he says.

"First replicating creature spawned in life simulator"

UPDATE: Lots of debate in the comments here, and also at New Scientist, about whether this is really as much of a novelty in the Game of Life as the article suggests. It'll be interesting to see how the discussion evolves. Get it? EVOLVES!!! Hahahahah....

Violinist plays Mario soundtrack in real time

Posted: 18 Jun 2010 09:32 AM PDT

In this video, violinist Teppei Okada plays the soundtrack to a real time Mario game live on his instrument. This — as do most creative geeky Japanese videos — was first made popular on Nico Nico Douga. I wonder if he coordinated the moves with the person who's playing the game. Either way, it's pretty impressive.

[via Laughing Squid]



Tiny art museum on the moon?

Posted: 18 Jun 2010 09:20 AM PDT




Moonmmmmmsss-1 A mysterious Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation engineer known only as John F. allegedly snuck a tiny art collection aboard the Apollo 12 lunar module, delivering the first art museum to the moon. According to this episode of PBS's History Detectives, New York artist Forrest "Frosty" Myers worked with Bell Labs scientist Fred Waldhauer to imprint images of art by Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, David Nobros, Robert Chamberlain, Robert Rauschenberg, and Myers himself onto tiny ceramic wafers. Myers claims that one of the art wafers was secretly attached to a leg of the lunar lander, and others were created as souvenirs. To put it in context, this was during the period when the group Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) was pioneering tech-art through collaborations between avant-garde artists like Rauschenberg and John Cage, and creative Bell Labs engineers orchestrated by Billy Kluver. Forty years later, John F.'s identity remains unknown as does the truth about whether one of those wafers ever made it to the lunar surface. Moon Museum (via AOL News)

X-rays of toys

Posted: 18 Jun 2010 07:46 AM PDT


Stuart sez, "This Flickr gallery shows highlights from Scan Toys, an exhibit currently at Buenos Aires Centro Cultural Recoleta. The artists used X-rays to produce these and the resulting images are beautiful, with a hint of social commentary."

Scan Toys 1ºEdición (Thanks, Stuart!)



Kick-ass sysadmin job opening in Toronto

Posted: 18 Jun 2010 07:06 AM PDT

Ken Snider is Boing Boing's insanely talented sysadmin, but his day job is running the infrastructure for Federated Media, the ad-broker that does most of our advertising, as well as the ads for many other large sites around the net. Ken is hiring -- he's looking for another kick-ass, king-hell sysadmin to work with him on the project. If you're in Toronto and want to work for a fabulous boss in a great job, here's your chance!
# My team is a small, focused pack of dedicated and proficient sysadmins who take pride in what we've built, and aren't afraid to voice their disapprovals on technical grounds when needed. I value that passion and dedication to what we build here at FM. You'd need that same passion and drive, but be able to remember that this is a team - everyone gets their input, but we move forward in unison once the decision has been made.

# At the same time, we treat our customers (and that also means the rest of FM) as our #1 priority. Always. You need to be articulate and professional as well as a CLI superstar - understanding that the best network in the world is useless if no one knows how to use it, or it doesn't meet the needs of those who request it in the first place.

# We are very task-oriented. Meeting deadlines and reporting progress to the rest of the company is paramount, and I expect you to be able to work with minimal supervision as you work towards those goals. Know yourself well enough to know your limits, and be humble enough to come to the team when you need help, or when you realize you've bitten off more than you can chew.

Federated Media needs a sysadmin

Canadian copyright astroturf site gives marching orders to its users

Posted: 18 Jun 2010 07:02 AM PDT

Michael Geist sez,
The copyright lobby's BalancedCopyrightforCanada.ca astroturfing site has added a new mandatory requirement for all users that want to participate in the Take Action items. According to a site user, the site now requires users to send a form letter to their relevant Member of Parliament. There are two letter options - one letter for entertainment industry employees and one general letter.

Surprisingly for a site claiming to support creativity and copyright, the letters do not provide users with the opportunity to even use their own words - the form letter cannot be edited. This is particularly striking given the earlier criticism from some of the same groups on a competing form letter service that offered users complete control over the substance of their letter and merely served as a delivery channel.

Notably, the site has already been subject to gaming from non-Canadians as a random search of members turned up at least one U.S. based record company executive with Warner Music.

Copyright Lobby Astroturf Site Adds Mandatory, Uneditable Letter to MPs


Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

CrunchyTech

Blog Archive