Acts of Volition

Just as I was feeling good about humanity, I visit the CBC Streaming Audio page only to see this message:  •  “Due to rights issues around the Live 8 concert, CBC.ca will stop streaming all CBC Radio One signals at 1 p.m. ET on Saturday, July 2. The streaming will resume sometime after 4 a.m. ET … read more »

Every once and a while I get an insight into just how extraordinary much of the technology we take for granted actually is.  •  This Saturday morning in my living room in a small city in the northeastern tip of North America, I was walking around with my little laptop. The speakers on the laptop …

Inspired by Dick Cheney’s youthful enthusiasm about the “war” in Iraq, I’ve written a brief synopsis for a musical about Iraq.  •  Act 1: Liberation  •  Heavy on trumpets, flags, and narrated by a plucky young “embedded” reporter in a khaki reporter vest.  •  “Reporter: “Back to you…”  •  Trumpets …

Having looked at music formats and instant messaging protocols, this final installment of a short series on open formats covers what may be the most ubiquitous of digital file formats: office documents. Spreadsheets, presentations, desktop databases, and the common text document hold most of the …

I wrote last week about the catch-22 of open audio formats. Online music isn’t the only domain in which open formats are emerging, nor is it the most significant. The world of instant messaging (IM) is another case where open protocols have emerged to compete with their proprietary predecessors …

We’re all familiar with the MP3 file format. As far as most people are concerned, the format implies free music. The software required to play MP3 files is usually free as well. That said, neither of these things necessarily follow from use of the MP3 format.  •  What most people don’t realize is …

Matt Round writes on his weblog about how strange it is that many wedding photographers retain ownership of negatives (or high-res originals, in the case of digital photography) and charge clients for additional prints. Indeed.  •  The photographer who’ll be documenting my upcoming nuptials …

Thomas Friedman has published an editorial in the New York Times Magazine entitled It’s a Flat World, After All. While the article lays on the technology utopia cheese a little thick (wireless internet will save us all, etc.), he hits on a critical point: the political and economic dominance of …

A minor epiphany this weekend, courtesy of my friend Peter Rukavina and a post on his weblog about cowboys. Peter writes:  •  “It’s how the web changes how we think about the world that interests me.  •  I think that some of the ways the Internet is organized (decentralized, ubiquitous, anarchic …