Dave Kellam

Check out the Freedom Timeline over at the Whitehouse for Kidz. Here’s an explanation:

What is the Freedom Timeline?
The American Response to Terrorism is being fought in many ways. You may be hearing new words on television and at school such as intelligence, diplomacy and humanitarian relief. These words have served as markers on America’s timeline of freedom over many years.

Dave Grohl can add New York Times critic to his ever expanding list, titled, “Stuff I’ve Done.” His writing style and musical opinions seem to verge on normal, it’s crazy! There’s also a bit at the end that says his current project is under the name Probot and is a collaboration with 11 heavy-metal singers. Eleven is a nice round number.

Want to buy a ready-to-go house made from shipping containers? Quik house is your answer. Seems a lot like The Fifth Element to me.

From an article on Lawrence Lessig (co-founder of Creative Commons) and intellectual property extremism:

Silicon Valley needs to step up and protect the open traditions that have helped build the high-technology industry or run the risk of being dominated by “IP extremists” whose restrictions on the use of intellectual property (IP) would stifle innovation, Stanford Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig told an audience of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, lawyers, and venture capitalists at the Open Source Business Conference here Tuesday.

He also mention’s America’s pirate past:

In reality, Lessig said, the U.S. has long held a balanced approach to intellectual property. Until 1891, for example, the United States did not observe international copyright laws, and until 1976, the vast majority of intellectual property created in the U.S. was not protected by copyright, he said. “We were born a pirate nation,” he said.

A large corporation has also seen the comedy value in squirrels that drink. Bear witness to the Guinness drinking squirrel (via Alanah), he was a good friend of the Stella drinking squirrel who is no longer with us.

Did a quick redesign over the last day or so, just altered the header graphic and tweaked the font colours and css a bit. Doesn’t take too much time to change some numbers in a few different text documents. It’s still an easy way to kill a couple hours and avoid doing productive work. There might be a few glitches around.

I was taking a look at Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music (via Freeman or Eve) and the geek in me shone through bright and clear. First off, it’s a good way to learn about different types of electronic music and genres, if you don’t know much about it (like me, so for all I know it may be a bad example). Then the geek part says, “Man, those are some good examples of network graphs”. Computer science rules my brain.

Yeah, I like network graphs. And I like interface design and looking at how people actually interact with computers. I just don’t see myself as a particularly stellar coder. I can do it, but I just don’t envision myself creating anything that’s mathematically innovative — which seems to be the typical outlook (at least at Queen’s anyway). Let other people code, I’ll tweak it and make it work for me. I mess around with html, php, css, and some other letters for this site on a regular basis, but I’ve never really seen that as writing code. It may very well be. There’s a weird kind of elitism playing against scripting and markup languages, something like literary journal novels versus scifi or trash romance.

David Crosby got busted for gun posession and pot:

The veteran rocker had checked out of the hotel after the Manhattan show, but left behind a piece of luggage, police said. A hotel worker found the luggage Friday and went through it looking for identification and discovered the marijuana, gun and knives and called authorities, police said.

He left his gun, knives and marijauna bag at the hotel? It’s one of those bags you normally want to keep good track of. It’s also just funny that he had a guns, knives and marijuana bag.

“Yo Leon. Toss me the knife, gun, pot bag.” It sounds funny in my head.

An article on Walter Cronkite. Two excerpts:

— Jimmy Carter was the smartest president Cronkite met, and the only one who bothered to actually read the lengthy bills passed by Congress. “He knew so much about everything and was not timid about telling you about it.”

— Our arrogant stand in nearly all our diplomatic approaches to the rest of the world with this administration has been such as to deeply embarrass the United States,” declared Cronkite. His sarcasm was quietly withering.

Nowadays, most people seem to remember Jimmy Carter as the bumbling idiot who builds houses.

I got an interesting email from the administrators of my website:

To: dave@eightface.com
Subject: Warning about your e-mail account.
From: administration@eightface.com

Dear user of e-mail server “Eightface.com”,

We warn you about some attacks on your e-mail account. Your computer may
contain viruses, in order to keep your computer and e-mail account safe,
please, follow the instructions.

Please, read the attach for further details.

For security purposes the attached file is password protected. Password is “47518”.

Kind regards,
The Eightface.com team

Apparently, my administrators have taken time out of their busy day administering my site to inform may that some clever monkey may be sending me viruses.

I’ve spent most of the last day or two plugging away at my presentation for the final project. I have Go-Moku on the brain, it is oozing out. That is all.