Sarah Davies

I signed up for a new experiment this summer at NTEN called office hours. Basically, I agree to spend an hour in a chat room once a week to answer whatever technology questions folks can throw at me. Right now it’s only open to NTEN members, but I think they may be opening it up to the general public soon.

This morning I got a little package from the fantastic Holly Ross. It’s a crappy picture, but the package had a super nice card, a bunch of NTEN swag, and chocolate (breakfast of champions). Thanks NTEN!!

If you’re not getting Harper’s Weekly Review in your inbox each Tuesday, you should be. Here are some gems from today’s:

Obama … claimed victory before a crowd of almost 20,000 people in St. Paul, Minnesota, knocking knuckles with his wife, Michelle, in a gesture known as “dap.” “It thrilled a lot of black folks,” said author Ta-Nehisi Coates. “He wears his cultural blackness all over the place. Barack is like Black Folks 2.0.”

After reading that amusing quote, I googled Ta-Nehisi Coates, and it turns out he’s got a pretty funny blog.

And regarding the McCain speech:

Pundits were surprised by McCain’s clumsy rhetoric, by his lack of teleprompter skills, and by the fact that he stood in front of an ugly green backdrop. “Content better than delivery,” said Karl Rove. “John McCain,” said Mort Kondracke of “Roll Call,” “sounded old.” A messenger delivered a handwritten note from McCain to Obama’s Chicago offices inviting the Democratic presidential nominee to a series of Goldwater-Kennedy-style debates. Bill Burton, an aide to Obama, told the messenger, “You know, you could have just emailed this.”

That’s a pretty decent summary of how I feel dealing with old people in the tech field sometimes…

For the third year in a row, the consumption of oranges in Britain declined because people were too busy to peel the rind off the fruit.

Hmm… I’ve felt that way too.

More than two dozen vandals who hosted a party inside Robert Frost’s former home were ordered to take a class on his poetry, taught by Frost’s biographer. “This is where Frost is relevant,” Jay Parini said to the class, speaking about Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.” “You come to a path in the woods where you can say, ‘Shall I go to this party and get drunk out of my mind?’ Everything in life is choices.”

It’s like Harper’s is reading my mind!

Haley, an eight-year-old Indiana girl who had emergency surgery after eating more than 10 magnets and 20 steel balls, said she swallowed the pieces because they “looked like candy.” Her parents said they were confused about how she could have done such thing because “she gets A’s and B’s.” Scientists located the part of the brain responsible for understanding sarcasm.

I don’t know about you, but those two pieces of news seem well paired to me.

Also in the realm of comical lefty news reviews, did you know there’s a free podcast of Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me? I’m saving them up on my ipod for long car trips this summer. My six-year-old is going to hate me…

Correction: Said six-year-old would like it to be known that she is six and a half.

She finally gave up! I just watched the speech. She was saying all the right words, but she looked like someone had just told her she couldn’t have a pony.

I thought it was odd that she brought up “universal” healthcare for “every American” twice. That’s one of the few policies where she and Obama differed last time I checked. Obama’s healthcare plan is voluntary, so healthy Americans don’t have to join. Clinton’s would have forced those healthy Americans to join the plan to subsidize those with large healthcare bills. I actually prefered Clinton’s plan to Obama’s, because I’m a dirty socialist because those healthy Americans are merely subsidizing their future selves after an accident or the toll of old age, that’s hardly too big a burden, particularly when spread so wide. But it’s strange that she called on Obama to continue that fight, when he’s not fighting it in the first place.

One of the reasons I like Barack Obama is that he has class and grace. He does not engage in ad hominem attacks or accuse his adversaries of opposing him merely because they are biased. Clinton’s vision of the glass ceiling with eighteen million cracks in it was telling me, and all of my Obama-voting ilk that we are too shallow to have voted her down because of her policies and her style of campaign. I have heard Barack Obama say many times that he does not consider the nomination to be a fight for the presidency, but an opportunity for the American people to hear the policies debated and choose the policies they agree with. That’s change I can believe in.

Being the hopeless Free Software groupie that I am, I was checking out Benjamin Mako Hill’s (fairly) recent blog endeavor Revealing Errors, which mentioned Seth Schoen, whom I met while visiting EFF last summer. I checked them both out on Wikipedia, and in following random links, as I am wont to do, I ran across the rather hilarious audio recording of Richard Stallman singing to implore hackers to join the Free Software Movement!

While I don’t disagree with the philosophical premise of the lyrics, I do think that it makes RMS’ hippie reputation somewhat justified. I’m tempted to write up some free software songs of my own and start up a youtube channel, if only to restore our good name!