[Most Recent Entries] [Calendar View] [Friends View]
Below are the most recent 25 friends' journal entries.
| Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 | ||
|
flemco |
6:42p | |
|
liberal [ telemann ] |
7:35p | Sotomayor answers versus Alito and Roberts Judiciary Committee Republicans asserted today that Judge Sonia Sotomayor has not been complete and clear in her views on particular issues. Judge Sotomayor has been clear and forthcoming in her answers to wide-ranging questions from all senators. She has been more responsive than any nominee in recent memory. In this video, Senator Jeff Sessions claims Judges Roberts and Alito were more clear. Examples of their non-answers follow. |
|
hopeforyou |
4:03p | Stop the swine flu parties! Okay, I've heard about these again, from ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} curvature now, and I just want to rant about it:STOP THE SWINE FLU PARTIES! It appears some people out there believe exposing themselves and their children to someone with the swine flu at this stage in the game will lead to their acquiring a mild version of the flu. It'd be lovely if that were true, but it ISN'T. You have no idea how an individual is going to respond to the flu virus once exposed to it, even in its current form. And the "current" form is subject to mutation as it passes along. People with underlying conditions such as COPD, asthma, and heart conditions have gotten a more severe version of the flu. Completely healthy people have ALSO gotten a more severe version of the flu. People from BOTH groups HAVE DIED. So seriously: STOP THE SWINE FLU PARTIES. I think now is the time to seriously consider spending some more time at home, in A/C (or in NZ and other places -- in front of a fireplace) and play some WoW or other networked video games, take up telecommuting more, shame your coughing coworker and/or manager into going home asafp, make sure you have direct deposit set up, and have groceries delivered to your door. Okay, maaaaybe that's a little unreasonable... Except for someone like me, who might consider it. Failing that, wash your hands frequently, avoid touching your face unless you just washed your hands, keep to yourself on public transit, eat a healthy diet, and get adequate sleep every night. Influenza is not something to mess with in general, whether it is Swine Flu or the garden-variety seasonal one. /rant off |
|
cat_macros [ charged_chaos ] |
7:00p | |
|
warren_ellis |
4:01p | Shipping Broken As a coda to the previous post, Jamais Cascio notes how the touchscreen generation interacts with a Kindle:
I did exactly the same thing the first time I handled one, funnily enough. I’m not iPhone-entrained, I’m Palm-entrained… (Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.) |
|
cat_macros [ fusiontastic ] |
4:16p | |
|
warren_ellis |
2:29p | A Sony Walkman, By God My poor ancient Archos Jukebox FM Receiver is old and suffering now, and is being retired from the field and given pride of place as desktop storage. Which put me in the market for a new mp3 player. Amazingly, I find myself once again in possession of a Sony Walkman.
Of all the things to once again possess. I’ve just written something for The Wire music magazine about personal soundtracks, and the Sony Walkman is what started it. I don’t think, holding my original tape-playing Walkman in my hands, it even occurred to me that such a thing could or should hold a library of music and a day’s worth of TV shows. When I showed this tiny, heavy thing to Lili, I’m wondering now if she was thinking, "yeah, it plays music, but what else does it do?" She didn’t ask, but, knowing her, I wonder if that was going through her head. Whether that’s what goes through the heads of her Western generation, the third (?) internet generation. Where’s the controller? What else does it do? Having only had the thing a few hours, I fat-fingered the slightly awkward mp3 slider bar while playing her a piece of music on it, watching her fingers twitching. A one-second slip, and she was in there, "give me that, old man," tapping the touchscreen (that she’s never used before). She’s the generation that listens to music on YouTube — and I was about to comment that she’s of the generation entirely used to overcompressed music, until I realised that I grew up listening to toppy medium-wave radio, where people specifically recorded for its quirks. Bass almost completely disappears in pop music until 1988, when it becomes a club and rave experience again. The Associates rigged an entire drum kit with nothing but snares so the sound popped on radio. The only real difference between YouTube and BBC Radio 1 is that she gets to search and choose exactly what she wants to listen to, circling outwards to associated links to find similar and new things. Control. Clay Shirky’s line about how anything that ships without a mouse is broken — that’s her generation. (I still think he was just one foot behind the time — I understand he was working from an anecdote, but I can’t help thinking the word he should have used is "touchscreen.") I found Lili crosslegged on her bed earlier, her guitar in her hands, earbuds in, watching something on her open laptop. I suspect it was either a guitar lesson, some tabs she’s been looking for, or listening to Theory Of A Dead Man and trying to detune her guitar to C-sharp to capture their tone. That’s how she treats the laptop — what else does it do? And the very conjuring of all those elements in the first line illustrates that her generation do not live with their heads in a laptop or a DS Lite or whatever. Less so, even, than the previous generation. It’s a fully integrated part of their lives, a Swiss army knife for the world. What else does it do? If I tell her I have a YouTube app on the Sony Walkman I’ll never get the bloody thing back. (I’m sure I was going to write about something else, but then I got off on a ramble. Oh well. File it under Brainjuice and move on.) (Did I mention Lili won a Young Engineers award last week? She came home today with some weird mathematics award I don’t quite understand. I’m slightly afraid she’s going to operate on me in the night and I’ll wake up as a cyborg slave.) (Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.) |
|
cat_macros [ meggypeggy1 ] |
8:55p | |
|
russia_love [ pozandtiv ] |
10:47p | |
|
ru_modelism [ midagemodelist ] |
11:23p | |
|
bonniegrrl |
12:20p | |
|
bonniegrrl |
12:10p | |
|
hopeforyou |
12:07p | Hey, curvature...How are things shaking? You okay down there? I'm concerned either the swine flu or the quakes are going to prove troubling. |
|
flemco |
1:08p | |
|
jwz |
11:04a | |
|
haineux |
10:38a | |
| softerworldfeed | 10:17a | |
| freshair | 11:12a | A Treasure Trove From A Harmonica Master Walter Jacobs, aka "Little Walter," was a harmonica virtuoso whose life was consumed by blues music. A new five-disc Hip-O Select re-release of Walter's complete recordings for the record label Chess is on shelves now. |
|
learn_russian [ anima_maxima ] |
12:06p | Getting a haircut! So right now I'm enjoying St. Petersburg very much, but my hair is getting shaggy in an intolerable way. I speak Russian pretty well, but haircut lingo is beyond me and I can't find much in my books. I'm looking to say the following: I use a flat-iron on my hair. I have an angled bob. It's longer in front and shorter in back. Can you please reshape the back of my hair? Thank you in advance! :) |
|
flemco |
11:56a | |
| brendan_nyhan | 12:25p | More on how TPM has moved downmarket A few weeks ago, I commented on the move downmarket by Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo, a formerly excellent blog* that increasingly panders to its liberal audience with outrageous language, faux mind-reading, unsupported factual claims, and salacious details of conservative scandals. The example I focused on was the wall-to-wall coverage of John Ensign's affair, including (bizarrely) a slideshow of the house owned by Ensign's staffers. Since then, the pattern of over-the-top Ensign coverage has continued, culminating in a post by TPM founder Josh Marshall pondering the relative emasculation of Ensign and his accuser: There's a lot of salacious back and forth today about the Ensign scandal. But beneath the tabloid headlines there's a critical question that needs to be asked: Truly, no one but a media economist could have predicted back in 2000 or 2001 that Josh Marshall -- a wonky political journalist with graduate training in history -- would be writing posts about how "emasculating" it is for someone be "paid a hundred grand by the guy who screwed your wife." There's no better illustration of the power of commercial incentives to shape media content. *At times, TPM is still an excellent news source, but the substantive blogging on which it made its reputation is now the exception rather than the rule. Most of the time I'd characterize its content as something akin to talk radio for liberals. (Disclosure: In 2000, I worked on the campaign of Ensign's opponent, Ed Bernstein.) |
|
hopeforyou |
9:35a | Livejournal PSA/As Message Board It's been a few days since I last posted to LJ, and I've got a backlog of entries to write. That said, I need to say a few time-sensitive items here: 1) I'm at iceblink's and we are having internet connectivity issues. They've gone through 3 modems in 6 months here, 2 of which were swapped out in the past 3 weeks. Still, internet access has been erratic and down for hours at a time. If I don't seem to be chatty or responding to your email right away, there's a reason. =( Sorry. We are looking into the problem, or rather Comcast is supposed to -- and maybe the solution is switching from Comcast to something else. 2) I have emailed and tried to chat with the following people while I'm in South Bay. I'm only down here through as early as late Saturday afternoon, so if you want to hang out, NOW is the time to contact me: Edit/update: 11:40 am p3acheskokoro43, something is in the worksgypsyjack and deliciousdeestef_tmIf I don't respond to email or chat (use YIM, NOT AIM - my AIM account is defunct) -- please call my cellphone or send an SMS/text msg through the livejournal interface: http://www.livejournal.com/tools/textme Thank you! |
| brendan_nyhan | 11:42a | Sarah Palin in Runner's World!? I know politicians love soft news coverage, but |
|
flemco |
10:52a | |
|
cat_macros [ beautifulwolf ] |
8:50a | |
del.icio.us 
digg 
facebook 
reddit 
stumbleupon 