I mentioned this talk last week, and I did go to it. Lessig is a fantastic public speaker. Organized and cogent. While watching his talk, I was reminded that I’d read somewhere that if you want to see Powerpoint used appropriately, go to a Lessig talk. And it’s so, so true. He takes what Tufte […]
Accelerating Change Conference
Official conference site I think I’m going to sign up to go to this conference on Accelerating Change at Stanford in early November. It’s only $350 if I sign up before September 30, and $300 if I take advantage of the discount listed here. Looks like it could be pretty interesting – some potentially interesting […]
Extreme Democracy at Future Salon
I went to the Future Salon on Extreme Democracy last week. Some really interesting stuff was discussed. The Future Salon weblog has a full description with links, so I’ll just add my couple thoughts. I really really like what Zack Rosen is doing over at CivicSpace. By making it easier for grass roots groups to […]
Updating the look
I finally decided to learn about this new-fangled CSS thing where I can have a separate column down the left with information and stuff. That’s right, I’m finally updating my HTML to, say, 1995 standards. And as long as I was at it, I decided to go to blosxom’s website, and see if I could […]
Political links
Links links links. Yes, I know I try to keep this blog to original content (or at least original to me) (I’ve got several longer pieces I’ve been mulling over that haven’t quite come together yet), but occasionally a set of links comes in that I want to share. Extreme Democracy Future Salon I’ll probably […]
Autistic management software
I was talking to a friend today who’s turning into a manager, and using Microsoft Project to lay out schedules and the like. And I was horrified, given my aversion to such things. But he pointed out that it was handy for him to be able to point at his schedule and say he couldn’t […]
Political training with Democracy for America
Democracy for America is the political action committee started by supporters of Howard Dean to represent “the Democratic wing of the Democratic party”. I happened to hear of a training course they were doing on political campaigns in conjunction with 21st Century Democrats. Given my recent interest in politics, I was curious, so I signed […]
Travels in Hyperreality, by Umberto Eco
Amazon link I picked this up at the library, because I really liked Foucault’s Pendulum and the snippet I read of the title essay intrigued me. The book is a set of essays by Eco, obviously. Eco is a well known semioticist, where semiotics is the study of signs. These essays were written for a […]
Ultimate frisbee video
The college national championships of ultimate frisbee were televised this year on the College Sports TV network. Unfortunately, that’s not one I get – I think it’s on deep cable someplace, or maybe only satellite. But they kindly have decided to post the video to several of the games online (they are archived down the […]
Self promotion
In the spirit of Paul Graham, I’m going to start this entry with a question that re-occurred to me a couple days ago: What is the right balance of self promotion to do? I was sitting in a project update meeting and noted the difference in how much detail people put into their various updates. […]