Aside

As a Christmas gift to everyone, tonight I put up some photos from West Africa on Flickr and finally finished Episode 3 of The Wanderlust Geek Podcast

So Eston Bond spotted one of my articles on the website of an Australian graphic designer. From our AIM chat from this morning: Eston Bond (10:48:06 AM): he posted to a design forum I frequent FarivarCJ (10:48:40 AM): random Eston Bond (10:48:44 AM): yeah Eston Bond (10:48:50 AM): I was like whoa, that’s kinda crazy Eston Bond (10:49:14 AM): I told him about it, and he said “Really? There was a selection of about 4 texts that a lecturer gave…

Kevin Maney’s Predictions for 2006 (USA Today): This piece is just plain bad on so many levels. Here goes. “Cellphone cameras will actually become useful.” Wrong. First, I disagree with the premise that people want a camera on their phone. Yes, you can do it and have it and take pictures of your friends so that their photo comes up when they call you, but really how many of us were dying to have a camera on the phone? The…

Pitchfork’s Interview with The New Pornographers: Pitchfork: Will Dan be playing any instruments, or only singing with you? Newman: I think he’s just going to be singing because he’s going to be doing his Destroyer set, and I think he’d rather just come up and do his thing with a pint glass in one hand. I didn’t want to burden him with too much. I also thought that it was conceivable that by the time our set hits, he might…

Big ups to my Columbia buddy Benjamin Harvey, a reporter for the Associated Press, who is doing an excellent job of covering the trial of Turkey’s best novelist, Orhan Pamuk. By BENJAMIN HARVEY Associated Press Writer © 2005 The Associated Press ISTANBUL, Turkey — Turkey’s foremost novelist goes on trial Friday in Istanbul in a free-speech case that has divided the nation, embarrassed its liberals and cast a pall over its dream of joining the European Union. For Europeans who…

Wired News: by Cyrus Farivar This summer, Hugh McGuire was searching for free audio books online from his home in Montreal. He didn’t find very much. So McGuire launched LibriVox by recruiting amateur readers to create audio files of works of literature. The project now includes almost two dozen complete works, including Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Jack London’s The Call of the Wild and other classic novels and poems. At the current rate of recording, McGuire says he expects…

From the genius of my good buddy David Boyk: And for today’s nugget of political genius, I’m going to start with a question. Who do we not need in this country? Answer: Assholes. Another question: who says those retarded slogans like “love it or leave it?” Again, assholes. Final question: how can we combine these two facts? My solution: ostracism. Whenever government employees break the public trust, they should have 72 hours before they’re deported. That amount of time should…

Macworld: By Cyrus Farivar Around the Macworld offices, we don’t need a calendar to tell us when we’re getting close to the end of the year. All we have to do is take a look around at all the Eddy Award statues waiting to be doled out to the makers of the best Mac hardware and software of the past 12 months. It’s that time of year once again, as we’re devoting this week to unveiling the winners of our…

I am proud to announce that my piece on The World will be airing probably within the next week on NPR stations across the country, and of course, online. I’ll post more as soon as I know more. Tracking at the KQED studios with Clark Boyd on an ISDN line was fun — I hope this is the first of many! And also, I’m thrilled to announce that I’m going to be doing a piece for The Economist! (Big thanks…

Has anyone heard of this? Apparently this was the Webster’s Dictionary “Word of the Year”. A quick Google search reveals this NPR Weekend Edition story as its number one hit.