DIMINISHED THOUGHT

Greetings! I'm back on the road for the summer and this will be used for a travel blog until August. Currently I'm in beautiful Charleston, South Carolina, I will be in Little Rock, Arkansas next, then I'll travel through Korea, teach and wander through China and finally taking a road trip throughout the southwest on my way to Los Angeles. I'll try to keep updates here so that everyone can track my progress.

Where am I today?



Like I said I'm in Charleston. Currently Charleston is having a fine arts festival called Piccolo Spoleto. Now don't get me wrong, I appreciate the arts but I do have a hard time enjoying classical music. I'm more of a jazz sort of guy. My mother dragged me to a concert of Bach Conciertos for the cello. It was "good" I guess. We also saw a tango performance...Yippee. On another note we did go deep sea (see the pic).

Labels: Charelston, Travel

I'll admit it. I ride a bicycle and I wear a helmet. What could be more dorky? A year ago one of my students saw me riding and rather bluntly told me, "You're never going to get a girl like that". So why do I do it?

This PhD student in UW had his HEAD run over by a delivery truck. His helmet saved him. Buy one, wear one. It's worth it.

Labels: bike, helmet

Ok my suspicions have been confirmed....For those out of the loop, Tuesday experienced a minor user revolt on the news site Digg where users submit stories that are then voted to the front page by other users. Someone published the processing key for HD-DVD and Digg took it down after being threatened with legal action. Soon hundreds to thousands of users bombarded the front page of the site with stories referencing the key and Digg's censorship. An online smart mob was born that took advantage of the medium to make their voice heard in protest. This has even made it into the mainstream media.

It should be noted that this is not a new development. The processing key has been available on the internet to the public for quite sometime and that I published it on my blog in February. When you run a Google image search using the actual key as the search term my site banner is the fourth result, hence the abnormally high traffic. I guess I should start preparing myself to be sued by the MPAA.

Labels: DRM DVD, emergence, HD-DVD Processing Key, smart mob

500 hits? So for whatever reason one of my postings has attracted quite a bit of attention over the past few days. I've gone from about four hits a day (I mean nobody really reads this thing) to around five hundred since Tuesday. All of the hits have been going to a post regarding the Nine Inch Nails Year Zero ARG. I would be grateful to anyone that would leave a comment or send me an email and let me know what's going on. I have my suspicions but I would like to see them confirmed.

Labels: ARG, Community, strange, viral, year zero