I went to the Met Opera in the Park event last night in Central Park. The opera was Gounod’s Faust. The weather was too cold to stay for the entire opera, but I made it through the first three acts.
One thing that was both bad and nice about watching the opera in Central [...]

Richard Rorty died yesterday. I had the privilege of seeing him debate Dualism at Stanford, and since then he has been one of my favorite philosophers. That said, I always struggled to completely grasp the consequences of the philosophical framework in which he worked.
To grossly oversimplify Rorty’s thoughts on linguistic meaning, he believed [...]

I attended day one of the Games for Social Change conference today. It was an interesting mix of gamers, developers, non-profits reps, and public policy advocates. I personally self-identify in the “gamer” category. There were a lot of highlights that I should tackle in future posts, but there was one presentation that really [...]

I dug out a classic this week. An old album by DJ Spooky called Riddim Warfame.
Riddim Warfare is a mashup from well-before anyone used the term mashup to describe this work. At the time of the release, it was self-described as “illbient”, but it was best known as a DJ mix, [...]

Update: Looks like this post is subject to experimental problems… just disregard it, but I’ll leave it up so people can try it out on their own files if they’d like.
Original Post: Ars Technica (and The Unofficial Apple Blog) found the Apple’s “DRM-Free” files contained the AppleID of the user that purchased them. That’s [...]

…for 9 hours today. Dreamhost sucks. I’m sure “five-nines” of uptime is shot for the year. Bleh…

Alex Iskold wrote an excellent piece on the evolution of communication last week at Read/Write Web. He lists a series of interesting juxtapositions of means of communication. For example, he sees Email as a faster and compact evolution of snail mail, and blogs an evolution from newspapers. Makes sense, and it’s quite [...]