We ourselves are a labor of love. Even our material bodies, the least part of us, are fashioned from living stardust. The same energy that pulses in the hearts of stars pulsates quietly in our own wrists. The same unimaginably creative dynamo spinning out galaxies, spins out in our own thoughts. The Milky Way itself flows through our veins, eddies in our muscles, and spills over in our conscious acts. And not a single particle of this vastness has been found in isolation, somehow separated from the whole. It is all working together, unceasingly in a single multidimensional connectedness. Each human being then is an investment in the future, backed by the entire cosmos.
We bright specks, self-aware god-sparkles, here on our exquisite floating mote in the dazzling sea: can we do less than honor this with our life s work? By means of our labors, we can consciously participate in this vast ongoing act of creation and perfection. The work of creation is still unfinished, because we are born. That we are here at all implies a work to be accomplished, and a love meant to be let loose in a new way. What then shall we turn our hands to?
Read the rest here and read more by Diane Harvey.
Dear Apple Computer,
We, the undersigned, are excited about your new browser release, Safari. However, we feel that the product misses one vital component, namely tabbed browsing.
As your human interface guidelines state, you strive for elegance and simplicity with the design of Aqua applications. We believe that tabbed browsing would not only greatly enhance the usability of Safari, but also help it embrace these guidelines even more by greatly reducing on-screen window clutter.
Also note that several competing Mac browsers, namely Mozilla, Netscape and Chimera already include tabbed browsing, and that the feature has been a hit with users.
We sincerely hope that you choose to include tabbed browsing in refreshed betas of Safari, as well as its final version.
Thanks, and keep thinking differently.
Sincerely,
The Undersigned
Check it out! I'll put up screenshots in a few minutes.
[update]: Heres a screenshot.
[update 2]: And 5 minutes after I saw it, its down.
The RSS feed someone else was providing for Neil Gaiman's Journal hadn't been working in months so I scrapped my own, here it is.
Read it over here.
[We] have no intention of recommending hot new CDs you should play -- we trust you and know that you'll make great decisions about which albums to buy in the future. No, we have our sights locked on the CDs that you already have. We understand that from time to time, people make mistakes and we sincerely want to help excise the guilt of a pretentious, over-hyped, and simply bad music collection from your life. More importantly, we're going to help you turn your purchasing mistakes into cold, hard cash!
In the main, we have not selected easy targets for removal -- we know that you know that the Milli Vanilli album you've got stashed away in a shoebox isn't exactly kosher. Nope, we chose critical darlings and must-have releases from the past and present.
Here's the albums I have and will immediately remove:
There's no chance I'm getting rid of these though, they encompass large amounts of my few good memories from my teenage years :\
Someone else wonders what I think of pirated copies of my work available as free downloads on the net.
Downloading a novel from the net is not something I’d ever likely do myself, but mainly because reading novels on the screen of a PDA is something I might get into only if I were incarcerated, with no alternative. And I’m sufficiently (and with good reason) aware of the book > royalty > author chain to want to feed those authors whose work feeds me creatively. I make it a point to buy the books of writers whose work and presence I value.
As for other people downloading pirated copies, that’s their business. My the business part of my business, currently, is about publishers producing legitimate editions of my work, which they then distribute for sale, a certain predetermined portion of the price returning to me as royalties (against the publisher’s cash advance). [William Gibson]
Scott asked me to post the PHP source code for my William Gibson RSS Feed so here it is, I just wget it from a cron job every 15 minutes so I'm not hitting Gibson's site every time someone requests the feed.
We brought the wine, the bread, and Don’s guitar to George’s house. Don was about a third of the way through his Jesus songs when George started feeling the pain. He reached behind his chair, pulled out Pegasus, and proceeded to take two HUGE hits off that mofo, complete with the classic “hold it… hold it… exhale” drama.
I’ve been in a lot of worship services, and I’ve seen some weird things happen. My own daughter blasted a huge fart during worship once and cracked up the whole church, but I’d never seen anyone whip out a bong right in the middle of communion. No sir, I had not seen that.
I know people are begging for it so I just hacked together a lil php to create an rss feed for William Gibson's Weblog, and here it is!
There is a good overview of the MacWorld Keynotes over at MacMegasite.
Here, you will be able to get an mp3 a day of strange, interesting, illuminating, and otherwise constipating nature.
What If Airlines Sold Paint? I'd probably color my house with crayons :)
This one is for Simon. My Father wrote a quick review of William Gibson's new book Pattern Recognition. Its nice to be friends with someone at the local bookstore, that way you can read tons of novels before they come out ;)
Bloggers want blogging tools to have support for uploading files but the API's don't support it, come on API guys, get to work! *cracks the whip* :)
Just a little piece and some comments over at Kuro5hin titled The Ethics of Linking.
My father just posted a piece called The Drums of War? Or the Bagpipes of Sorrow. An excerpt:
War with Iraq seems closer. I won't make a prediction, because I don't think such an event is certain. What is certain, however, is that the war as proposed, if it happens, will turn out to be a mistake. As is usual with human institutions, especially sitting governments with an agenda, the lessons of history are being ignored, and the Bush Adminstration gives uncontroverted evidence that it lives in fantasies about the world, not realities.
War,by its nature, is an event that cannot be controlled. All kinds of wise heads have their individual predictions, but let us keep in mind that one of the main themes is lack of agreement. This one thinks that will happen, while that one thinks this will happen. Clearly the Administration thinks it can accomplish certain ends by making war, and it relies on the Pentagon for ideas about what is needed in order for the war to be successful.
The thing is that the motive for the war is not real, but is itself imagined. The leader of Iraq is thought to be dangerous and needs to be replaced, and the weapons of mass destruction under his control destroyed or removed. Iraq's potential as an enemy is the reason we make war, not its factual nature as an active enemy. All the thinking / reasoning is based upon our self made images of what Iraq might do in the future that is dangerous, not on what they are doing in the present that is morally horrifying and destructive.
All of this, from the intentions of the Administration to the promises of the Pentagon, are completely in accord with the War in Vietnam, which we lost, and within which a whole generation of our youth were spiritually lost as well.
A while ago argv posted the history of the world in Haiku. Heres an excerpt:
Internet arrives.
You have mail! How did we find
things before Google?The young dot-wealthy
kiss hubris ’bye: bubble bursts.
Can’t cash laughingstocks.A pair of Bushes
are planted at the White House,
make Clinton sandwich.
If you like electronic music, this feed is for you, Discogs is a user created online database of electronic music releases, it currently has 88,101 releases, 63,006 artists and 10,764 labels in its database, and the releases are all cross referenced by artist, remixer, vocalist, and other electronic music related meta data. So now I've created an RSS Feed of the latest additions to the discogs.com database, here.
Lisa Rein has put up a bunch of videos from the launch of the Creative Commons. Including: DJ Spooky, Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig and Jack Valenti plus a bunch of others.
The LazyWeb is a great idea, I really need to start using this myself.
Gollum had a cat. Who knew? [Dave "Novalis" Turner]
