Daydream Lab: Internet

“Early Christians transformed the world by thinking different and living different, not by complaining about everybody else’s morals.”

—Alan Wilson

“‘You are destroying yourself,’ he cried. ‘You have the inclination to be alone and to dream and you are afraid of dreams. You want to be like others in town here. You hear them talk and you try to imitate them.’”

—Sherwood Anderson

“On earth we are wayfarers, always on the go. This means that we have to keep on moving forward. Therefore be always unhappy about what you are if you want to reach what you are not.”

—St. Augustine

“In the third month they began to pile up the heaps, and finished them in the seventh month.”

—2 Chronicles 31:7 (ESV)

“There would so much less laughter in the world if evil people stopped talking.”

—MadPriest

“Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry…”

—Ecclesiastes 8:15

“Did they teach you how to question when you were at the school? Did the factory help you grow? were you the maker or the tool?”

—Ewan MacColl

“Happiness happens when you are not thinking about it, when you are inhabiting your body comfortably…when you feel at peace with yourself and the world. When we live overprotective, overstimulated lives we expect more all the time, we find it hard to be unself-conscious and just do what we do; we overanalyse.”

—Rowan Williams

“You can never win a war against terror as long as there are conditions in the world that make people desperate—poverty, disease, ignorance, et cetera….I think people are beginning to realize that you can’t have pockets of prosperity in one part of the world and huge deserts of poverty and deprivation and think that you can have a stable and secure world.”

—Desmond Tutu

“The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.”

—Edward Abbey

Contact Me

Elsewhere in my Brain

Jesus for Sale:
Random stuff on eBay that just happens to look vaguely like Jesus.
Right/Wrong:
Just what the Internet needs—Another amateur bible blog.
The Agenda:
Word of Mouth in Print

Archive by category

Archive by date

I can has tings man was not ment to no?

Just calm the hell down, ok? (12 February 2008)

On yet another disruption in Blackberry service:

“Everyone’s in crisis because they’re all picking away at their BlackBerrys and nothing’s happening,” [Canadian MP Garth] Turner said. “It’s almost like cutting the phone cables or a total collapse in telegraph lines a century ago. It just isolates people in a way that’s quite phenomenal.”

So you can’t get your mobile e-mail one day. Deal with it.

Mating season for large IT firms (12 February 2008)

Microsoft isn’t happy with Yahoo’s decision to spurn its $44.6 billion takeover bid, but the software maker is going to let Yahoo! live with the consequences a while before applying added pressure.

Microsoft said as much, however politely, on Feb. 11 when it called the offer, extended on Jan. 31, “full and fair.” The remarks came in response to Yahoo’s earlier statement that Microsoft’s bid “substantially undervalues” the company. The interchange is part of a delicate dance that, while cordial now, could soon turn hostile. “The process is following a reasonably well-known mating ritual,” says Joseph Grundfest, a Stanford Law School professor and former commissioner of the Securities & Exchange Commission.

I finished the Internet. The ending’s kind of a let-down.

Economies of massive scale (1 February 2008)

“Microsoft (MSFT) launched an unwelcome takeover bid for Yahoo (YHOO). Microsoft said Feb. 1 it will pay $44.6 billion, or $31 a share, for Yahoo. The offer represents a 62% premium over Yahoo’s closing share price Jan. 31.”

My web host can beat up your web host.

WoW now bigger than Austria (24 January 2008)

World of Warcraft now has 10 million players, more than the population of most of the world’s countries.

The Wikipedia Effect

I know I’m not alone in experiencing the Wikipedia Effect—I’ve read about it before, though I can’t remember where (Although A.A. Giles has written about a more general problem here).

Rhythm is Gonna Get You (6 October 2007)

iTunes is a bigger bargain than I realized: Twenty-four songs for $23.76? On Gnutella, that’ll cost you $222,000 plus legal fees.

iPhones to be free by end of the year. (7 September 2007)

“A drop of $200 after just 66 days means that the iPhone decreased roughly $3.03 a day in retail value between launch and yesterday’s announcement.”

Surprisingly lacking in depth (6 September 2007)

So says Nate Anderson , writing for Ars Technica, of the U.S. Department of Justice’s filing with the FCC, in which the Department argues against Net Neutrality.

Another reason not to trust Wikipedia (18 August 2007)

Computers on the CIA and FBI networks have been used to edit Wikipedia entries on the Iraq war, Guantanamo Bay, and others.

Welcome to the new Afghanistan (15 August 2007)

New York’s police commissioner has released a report warning of the dangers of Internet-borne Islamic extremism: “It is the de facto training ground. It’s an area of concern.”

Dreadfully preponderant than civil (6 August 2007)

Language Log on spam, and the, um, unusual English it often contains.

Eternal Second Life (31 July 2007)

Catholics are now being asked to save the poor, backwards souls of Second Life.

Also, Tom Waits is a role model for Catholics.

"The world's poorest two billion people desperately need healthcare, not laptops" (23 July 2007)

So guess which one they’re getting.

The world’s largest laptop manufacturer, Quanta, will soon begin production of a $100 laptop, to be used for education in the Third World.

(My title here was borrowed from Bill Gates.)

What good is Unicode if you can't abuse it? (20 July 2007)

Flip out.

Upgrading

Well, that was anticlimactic.

Interested in chatting to pretty girl?

I keep getting this message, from different fake names and email addresses (Apparently it’s short enough, and uses general enough words that GMail’s spam filter can’t learn to recognize it consistently):

Death of Internet imminent (17 June 2007)

omg liek teh sky is falling!!!!!!11!

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