Ooooo… Fancy new look. Well, not all that fancy, but different at least. Some of the Archive links aren’t working for one reason or another, I’ll play with them when I get home tonight or tomorrow morning (how many of you all visit the archives anyway?) but here’s the new layout. The only major change beyond the whole look is that links will not open in a new window unless you tell them to, including the ones along the side. Yea!!!

Please let me know what you think.

Check out The Francis Brothers Films. These guys used to run an indy comic anthology and have put that on hiatus while they focus on making movies. Quite cool.

And while we’re checking out mega-indie films, might as well check out Random Foo Pictures and Infiniti Productions. I’m jealous as hell and really need to get me a digital camcorder.

Freaky Secrets of the Presidency

Beatdown Productions

Have I linked to boobytrap.org before? I think I have. Oh well, either way, thanks to Jish for either reminding me or throwing me that way.

Dan Bern was awesome last night. Third time I’ve caught him live and the second time I caught him at Ashland Coffee & Tea which is a damn good venue, very quaint and personal. It was the first time I’ve seen him solo though. The other times he’s had his band with him and I thought he only went solo on the west coast, but, lucky us, he was solo here, and what a show. Lots of stuff I’d never heard, and I’ve dug up a lot of his stuff.

Was he better solo? Well, that depends. He’s great with the band, don’t get me wrong. They get a different sound and feel. But he seems more free solo. And I can understand that as a musician myself who’s played in a band a bit. If you’re in a band you got other guys to deal with if you screw up or want to talk or do your own thing, whereas if you’re solo, screw it, it’s all you, baby, and you can mess up as much as you want and talk all the time, it’s more personal, rougher, better overall and I think it suits Dan’s style best.

That’s not to say he sucks with the band, they’re great, but he’s a stronger show solo, IMO.

If you haven’t heard of Dan Bern before, you’re missing out. The guy’s prolific as hell and a great musician. Folksy, acoustic stuff with a hint of blues time to time (all good music is blues at heart) with excellent lyrics that make the song. If you’ve heard anything he’s done, it’s probably Tiger Woods (the first words you hear in the song are “I’ve got big balls” so you know it’s good). I highly recomend you go out and buy all his CDs, but if you have to limit yourself to one, well, I’d be hard pressed to say which one’s the strongest, but, hell, grab “Fifty Eggs”, the CD with Tiger Woods and his first “big” album. It’s produced by Ani Defranco (sp?) and is probably the most produced of his albums, but it’s a great introduction and some of his best work is on there. Follow that up with anything else he’s put out, it’s all great.

Wanna taste before you buy? You can find his stuff on any of the file sharing programs, or check out the Dan Bern Radio Network over at Live 365. But, please, go buy his stuff, support the guy, he’s excellent.

Check out his official webpage for tour dates, news and other info.

Comic Stuff Yeah, I’m a geek.

Dramatic arrest at strip bar nets police their Green Goblin (Kingtson Whig Standard)

Belleville police say they have arrested the ?Green Goblin,? the man police believe sent more than 100 envelopes containing cat feces and human urine to doctors, fast food businesses and media outlets in Belleville.

The dramatic arrest came on Sunday night, after a man called police from a pay phone at the Boo Club, a Belleville strip club. Identifying himself as the Green Goblin, he began to mock police.

Critical Mass: I Am Sick of Comic Geeks! (Chris Partin - Comixtreme)

The one truth that the past two years have revealed to me is that Comicbook Geeks are the most annoying people on Earth. Now I am not talking the average fan or know-it-all. No , these are a special breed of people. They bombard us in Comicbook shops, college campuses, and Internet message boards with the overinflated opinions they have. Everyone out there knows who I am talking about. They are the people who dominate a discussion until the facts start to unravel their opinions.

One of these people was at a yard sale my Dad had recently. I throw out comics that I accumulate as I by three for a buck deals to get an issue I want. This guy was all ready to talk about what was hot and what was not. He was bragging about the books he had and what they were worth. When I started discussing the new titles out on the market and the changes to the industry, the guy got flummoxed. It hit me that this guy was the flesh and blood version of people on message boards I belong to.

Snap Your Desk

I didn’t know that God Hates America.

Songfight.com posts a title, people make songs for that title, the songs are posted on this page, people decide which they like best, and vote for th favorite.

Kevin Smith’s The Flying Car

“Copy-proof” CDs foiled by a marker

Technology buffs have cracked music publishing giant Sony Music’s elaborate disc copy-protection technology with a decidedly low-tech method: scribbling around the rim of a disk with a felt-tip marker.

Internet newsgroups have been circulating news of the discovery for the past week, and in typical newsgroup style, users have pilloried Sony for deploying ?hi-tech? copy protection that can be defeated by paying a visit to a stationery store.

“I wonder what type of copy protection will come next?” one posting on alt.music.prince read. “Maybe they’ll ban markers.”

Kazaa, Morpheus legal case collapsing

A legal fight that has pitted file-swapping software companies Kazaa BV and StreamCast Networks against big record labels and movie studios is collapsing as the small companies run out of funds.

Netherlands-based Kazaa BV, which created the file-swapping technology underlying Kazaa, Grokster and earlier versions of Morpheus, is conceding defeat–although its founders already appear to have started another near-identical company. Meanwhile, StreamCast is losing a high-powered attorney with a winning track record against the music companies in court.

The disintegration of the companies’ legal case will have little immediate affect on the popular Kazaa and Morpheus file-trading networks themselves. But it appears the second generation of high-profile peer-to-peer companies may be going the way of Napster, crushed by litigation too expensive for start-ups to fight.

Anybody Really Know What Time Is?

According to fundamental laws of physics, time is just another coordinate — hash marks along a line with scarcely a preferred direction or flow.

Yet the mind perceives time as an irreversible stream, moving from past to future, experienced in the present. Manipulating time may make for good science fiction, but it’s hardly conceivable to those unfortunates who don’t have a Tardis or an H.G. Wells’ secret recipe.

How can science bridge the gaping gulf between these two versions of time?

Proposed royalty rates for Net music broadcasts rejected

The Librarian of Congress has rejected proposed royalty rates that would have charged Internet broadcasters based on each Web user that listens in. Librarian James H. Billington will issue a final decision setting the new rates by June 20, the U.S. Copyright Office said Tuesday.

The Copyright Office ruled in December 2000 that organizations distributing music and other radio content over the Internet must pay additional fees to record companies that hold song copyrights.

In February, an arbitration panel proposed rates based on each person who is receiving a broadcast sent online. The rates range from .07 of a penny per song for a radio broadcast to .14 of a penny for all other copyrighted audio sent on the Internet.

Fractalus

Condoms Make Gals into Mood Swingers

Holy prophylactics! Women who have unprotected sex frequently are less likely to be depressed than those who do not, a new study claims.

Researchers at New York University say it’s due to mood-changing chemicals that are transferred from the man.

Apparently, semen contains hormones and other chemicals that enter a woman’s bloodstream and may act like an antidepressant.

More and more like “Weekly World News” every damn day.

The Scourge of Arial

Arial is everywhere. If you don’t know what it is, you don’t use a modern personal computer. Arial is a font that is familiar to anyone who uses Microsoft products, whether on a PC or a Mac. It has spread like a virus through the typographic landscape and illustrates the pervasiveness of Microsoft’s influence in the world.

Factual Error Found on the Internet

The Information Age was dealt a stunning blow Monday, when a factual error was discovered on the Internet. The error was found on TedsUltimateBradyBunch.com, a Brady Bunch fan site that incorrectly listed the show’s debut year as 1968, not 1969.

Caryn Wisniewski, a Pueblo, CO, legal secretary and diehard Brady Bunch fan, came across the mistake while searching for information about the show’s first-season cast.

“When I first saw 1968 on the web page, I thought, ‘Wow, apparently, all those Brady Bunch books I’ve read listing 1969 as the show’s first year were wrong,’” Wisniewski told reporters at a press conference. “But even though I obviously trusted the Internet, I was still kind of puzzled. So I checked other Brady Bunch fan sites, and all of them said 1969. After a while, it slowly began to sink in that the World Wide Web might be tainted with unreliable information.”

Time to blog on

Investigating the world of weblogs: at a Silicon Valley conference, new technology left old-style reporters so far behind that they retired to the bar

Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News puts it in a nutshell: “This is my guiding principle in journalism. My readers know more than I do, and that’s great!”

“This is liberating,” says Gillmor, speaking at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference, which last week saw hundreds of the world’s top technologists, hackers and alpha-geeks converge on Silicon Valley to discuss the future of internet based technologies. A strange place to discuss journalism, perhaps, but for Gillmor - long Silicon Valley’s most respected columnist - a perfect venue to introduce what he calls “Journalism 3.0″.

Journalism, he says, is being revolutionised by the latest technology. We have gone, he claims, from Old Media, through New Media, to We Media: “The idea of using the power and the knowledge and the energy of people at the edges.”

The ease and power of the personal publishing tools developed by the very technologists Gillmor was addressing is transforming journalism. The newspaper is being usurped by the blog. A blog, short for weblog, is hard to define, but easy to recognise. It is a form of personal online diary, which is usually set out in reverse chronological order - newest at the top - and which points you to other things on the net. What once was used for teenage journals has now, however, been co-opted by specialist reporters who can reach massive audiences almost for free.

And, if you’re interested, Netscape 7 is now availble to crash your computer in ways Netscape 6 couldn’t even dream of! Sorry. NS7 might actually be pretty good, who knows…

test yourself at fontlover.com!

Chris Matthews has a weblog.

I’ll post stuff in a wee bit, got a bunch of work to catch up on since I wasn’t here the last two days, but I will be back on the blog shortly. Coming up: Dan Bern’s show last night and more.

The White Stripes kick major ass. If you have the means I highly suggest you get off your duff and go buy White Blood Cells. Awesome album.

Know what else kicks ass? Well, not what, but who. Zoe kicks ass. I’m speaking to her online right as I type this. I haven’t spoken with her in forever, this is great. And I’m not just saying that. Really. Don’t look at me like that.

Tuesday Things Two

1. What do you wish you could have the credit for inventing?

The computer, because that’s an easy non answer and would have made me rich. I’ll think of a better answer later. How about that, I make these questions up and can’t even answer them.

2. What’s that over there?

That’s David. His mom’s hot.

3. If you could go back and do it all over again, what would you do differently?

Go to college.

4. When you were young, what did you want to be when you grow up?

A postal worker. Then I thought cop. Then doctor. Then lawyer. Now I just want to be a grown up.

5. What is your greatest achievement?

Not dying yet.

Stephen Jay Gould dies of cancer

Stephen Jay Gould, one of the world’s best-known scientists and a witty, prolific author who influenced the national debate on evolution and science standards in schools, died Monday. He was 60.

Gould died of cancer at his home in New York City, according to his assistant, Stephanie Schur.

Gould, a Harvard University professor, joined the faculty in 1967 as a professor of geology. He advanced to associate professor in 1971 and to professor in 1973.

Gould was a best-selling author who was enamored of the mysteries of evolution. He was known for his engaging, often witty style evident in his collections of essays, which included “Ever Since Darwin”, “The Panda’s Thumb”, and “The Mismeasure of Man,” a study of intelligence testing and winner of the National Book Critics Award in 1982.

I hate each and every one of you who would denegrate this movie…which is a lot of you. I have a lot of hate to give, it’s the only thing that keeps me from drowning in it.

Jeremy needs to chill out a wee bit and realize that the Star Wars franchise really isn’t all that good. *ducks*

Why is J’s Notes #3 on the list when one searches Google for “Israeli Sluts”?

News by the People, for the People

Online communities with their own publishing tools and networks are redefining news in the 21st Century

Marcia Barton does not consider herself a journalist by any stretch of the definition.

The retired Seattle community college instructor “publishes” an environment and politics newsletter featuring commentary and links to stories around the Web — especially those that highlight the follies of the Bush administration. She sends it out almost daily to about a dozen friends.

“I don’t think of it as journalism as much as nagging them with alternative points of view,” says Barton, who draws from BBC, The Guardian, The Nation, Democrats.com and Commondreams.org, among others.

Writing in 3-D in my blog

Last weekend I began to blog and I have been blogging ever since. I may in fact be overblogging, but it just feels so good.

Blogging is the act of writing a Weblog, or blog. Weblogs are personal journals published over the Internet with software so simple I can use it. You write something in plain English (or Spanish, or whatever is plain to you) on your computer and click on a button and bam, your work is posted on the Web. No coding, no site administration, none of the hurdles that made a lie of the old promise of a personal Web site for everyone.

Bush’s critics backing off on Sept. 11 clues

The idea that a savvier marshaling of intelligence might have helped avert the Sept. 11 attacks by four hijacked airplanes, which cost about 3,000 lives, has brought the sharpest criticism of administration conduct since September. A bitter public partisanship, largely forsworn by the political parties since the attacks, has suddenly returned to Washington.

But by Sunday, much of the criticism - and not just from Democrats - appeared to be settling at a level lower than the White House, concentrated on the FBI and CIA and on communication failures that President George W. Bush and those agencies have moved to address.

“I never, ever, ever thought that anybody, including the president, did anything up to 9/11 other than their best,” Representative Dick Gephardt, the House Democratic leader, said on Fox-TV. “The question is, how do we do better?” Cheney offended many Democrats on Thursday by urging them not to “seek political advantage by making incendiary suggestions” that might aid U.S. enemies. The suggestion that the president could have prevented the attacks, Cheney said Sunday, with barely concealed anger, “strikes me as beyond the pale.”

Nintendo gives GameCube a markdown

Nintendo on Monday raised the stakes in the fierce game machine price war by cutting the cost of its GameCube console by nearly $50.

Effective Tuesday, the machine will sell for $149.95.

Nintendo’s move comes after price cuts were made last week by rivals Microsoft and Sony. Their machines, Xbox and PlayStation 2, respectively, were cut to $199. Nintendo said at the time that it had no plans to cut prices.

The price cuts by the three also come against the backdrop of this week’s Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles.

“It’s simple, really: Nintendo is committed to offering our players the best games and the best price,” Peter MacDougall, a Nintendo of America marketing executive, said in a statement. “We were the first manufacturer to reach the $199 price level, and now we’re leading the industry to $149.”

Paid content comes to Kazaa

Paid content will invade the Kazaa file-swapping network Monday in a major commercial test of a service that until now has lured millions of people with free music, video and other digital files.

Along with finding search results that point to unfettered MP3s, Kazaa users will begin to see links to songs for sale from record labels and advertisements linked to keyword searches.

The move is fraught with controversy as it is the first application of Altnet, a service from Kazaa partner Brilliant Digital Entertainment that came to light amid a Web privacy storm last month. Some Kazaa users reacted with outrage when they discovered that bits of Altnet had been quietly installed on their computers with the potential to turn their machines into drones at the beck of a little-known company whose ambitions were unknown.

Kazaa’s File-Sharing Swap

There’s a new, secure file-trading system in town, but because of its controversial ties with another rogue network, its future is in doubt.

Brilliant Digital, the company that delivers advertisements through the Kazaa file-trading network, launched its own Altnet sharing system on Monday. For a price, encryped files distributed by the entertainment industry itself will be placed at the top of Kazaa’s search engine.

Right now, Kazaa users will only see secure content from EMI’s 2KSounds music label and video game maker Infogrames, making it unlikely anyone will even notice Altnet’s launch. That’s hardly the point for CEO Kevin Bermeister, who hopes to use this as a test to convince the entertainment industry that peer-to-peer distribution can work.

Help Build the Web of Knowledge

Altruistic programmers and word-nerds with an urge to connect the historical dots are needed to help build a website that will blend the best of old and new technology.

“Knowledge Web” is the pet project of James Burke, an Oxford-educated historian whose fascination with technology resulted in Connections, a television series that explored the strange links between technological breakthroughs and historical events.

Knowledge Web (K-Web) is intended to be the visual and virtual extension of almost three decades of Burke’s attempts to show how all knowledge is somehow connected to all other knowledge.

The not-for-profit site is being built by about 100 volunteers from around the world, but more helping hands are needed.

Monday Mission 2.20

1. When was the last time you went out with a true love of yours? What did you two do that made it so special?

We went out yesterday for her birthday stuff. Well, not really went out, just ran around and did stuff for a really belated b-day present. Otherwise, it’s been since our anniversary and we went out to a nice dinner. Good times.

2. Which far-away friend would you most like to see again?

My pal Mike Downey. He’s a good guy and, well, not too far away, only in Kansas, but I don’t chill with the bastard nearly enough anymore. *sniff*

3. Any high or low points about this past weekend? What went on?

Didn’t do much, really. Helped my brother move a few things on Saturday and then went to some vegan store with Jenn on Sunday and let her blow money on hippy stuff for her birthday.

4. I’ve been thinking about getting a buzz-cut for the summer, a big change for me. Have you ever made any drastic changes to your appearance?

I shaved my head a year and a half ago. That’s probably the biggest change, and I want to do it again. Just not sure if it’s “professional” looking.

5. How long do you think a couple should date before they get married? Or if you are married, do you think you should have waited longer to get hitched?

Eh, however long until they’re comfortable. I mean, there are some people who can get married after two years and others who should never get married no matter how long they date. Just varies. Me, I’m not ready to marry Jenn even though we’ve been dating over two years. Forever is forever, married or not.

6. I just found out my long-time friend does not like Star Wars (!) and has only seen the original 1977 movie! Have you ever discovered anything new or shocking about a long-time friend you thought you knew everything about?

Hmmm…. not that I can think of, not off the top of my head, at least, not that I’m willing to post to the world.

7. Well we had a nice picnic and saw the sunset, but now it’s dark and I think we should liven things up. Let’s call some of your friends and go out. Who do you want to invite and where should we all go?

I invite anyone who’s free and we just go to a bar and drink beer and maybe shoot some pool. I’m such a party animal.

BONUS: Why can’t ya be good to me?

Because I don’t like you.