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I was feeling pretty worn out earlier, getting into my old pattern of panic and weariness about my thesis. Dinner cheered me up, not just because it was at a pleasant Cuban place with pictures of Che all over the walls, but also because there were thoughts flying around the place about conferences and different work happening and so on. There's a conference on in 2008 on civil society with a pirates them, which I'm pretty excited about. I'm a bit uncomfortable submitting an abstract (in 2008) given that I know the organisers. I'm sure there are all kinds of ways that's accounted for, but just for fun I might try to send it via a 'flag of convenience' country or something. It'll make me giggle, anyway, given the theme.
I've been reading Cory Doctorow's Someone comes to town, someone leaves town, and it's really stirring me up. I finished Eastern Standard Tribe a day or two ago, and it was good but not nearly as wonderful as this one. It's not devoid of menace, but at the same time reading it keeps giving me this feeling that everything's going to be alright... and I don't mean just within the universe of the book, I mean in my life. I hope the ending doesn't change the way I feel. I wish I could explain more fully what I mean by this. I guess it opens up the field of possibilities, or reminds me of them.
So, reading it got me fired up about a project that I've vaguely been thinking about for a while now, a blog around Books I Have Known, which has no clear purpose in my mind, really. Over the last few weeks I've read a few good books by George Foy, and one of the Spanish Civil War by Beevor (more on that later, hopefully), and Singer of Souls by Adam Stemple (which had its moments but ended disappointingly), and a few other bits and pieces of academic or semi-academic work that I want to investigate further and write about. I started looking into setting it up, wandering over to Blogger by default, and got stalled at the point at which you have to agree to Google's terms of service, which ask you to agree to your information being turned over to the US (or another) government if they use the proper legal channels, something which makes me a bit nervous in light of the "anti-terrorist" legislation being passed around the place, and probably partly inspired by Google's Scale of Evil still bouncing around my head.
So then I got sidetracked looking for a not-Google and more ideologically consonant (with me) blog site, and couldn't find one, although I guess livejournal is closer to that. Except that I associated lj with more journally than bloggy stuff. And then thought, 'well, maybe asking google to find me this is the wrong approach', and started looking for a not-google search engine to excite me, (this discussion covered a few issues involved), and in the end didn't end up setting up a blog at all.
Also got sidetracked a couple of times at the cDc website, and looking at dumpster diving stuff, and so on.
My next bit of excitement - possibly time to replace the batteries of my motherboard, if advice from the ubuntu forums is correct. Admittedly, despite having read the very helpful and bearably-snarky guide to asking smart questions (which I think applies to more than just technical questions), I still need a bit more practice at making my problems clear.
Hmm. I really should go to bed now.
I've been reading Cory Doctorow's Someone comes to town, someone leaves town, and it's really stirring me up. I finished Eastern Standard Tribe a day or two ago, and it was good but not nearly as wonderful as this one. It's not devoid of menace, but at the same time reading it keeps giving me this feeling that everything's going to be alright... and I don't mean just within the universe of the book, I mean in my life. I hope the ending doesn't change the way I feel. I wish I could explain more fully what I mean by this. I guess it opens up the field of possibilities, or reminds me of them.
So, reading it got me fired up about a project that I've vaguely been thinking about for a while now, a blog around Books I Have Known, which has no clear purpose in my mind, really. Over the last few weeks I've read a few good books by George Foy, and one of the Spanish Civil War by Beevor (more on that later, hopefully), and Singer of Souls by Adam Stemple (which had its moments but ended disappointingly), and a few other bits and pieces of academic or semi-academic work that I want to investigate further and write about. I started looking into setting it up, wandering over to Blogger by default, and got stalled at the point at which you have to agree to Google's terms of service, which ask you to agree to your information being turned over to the US (or another) government if they use the proper legal channels, something which makes me a bit nervous in light of the "anti-terrorist" legislation being passed around the place, and probably partly inspired by Google's Scale of Evil still bouncing around my head.
So then I got sidetracked looking for a not-Google and more ideologically consonant (with me) blog site, and couldn't find one, although I guess livejournal is closer to that. Except that I associated lj with more journally than bloggy stuff. And then thought, 'well, maybe asking google to find me this is the wrong approach', and started looking for a not-google search engine to excite me, (this discussion covered a few issues involved), and in the end didn't end up setting up a blog at all.
Also got sidetracked a couple of times at the cDc website, and looking at dumpster diving stuff, and so on.
My next bit of excitement - possibly time to replace the batteries of my motherboard, if advice from the ubuntu forums is correct. Admittedly, despite having read the very helpful and bearably-snarky guide to asking smart questions (which I think applies to more than just technical questions), I still need a bit more practice at making my problems clear.
Hmm. I really should go to bed now.