Aku Aku

Create Like It's 1790

Lawrence Lessig' s keynote at OSCON 2002 last week prodcued a nice catch phrase: "Create like it's 1790" ...and now he's even got a nice gif for it.

Mr. Lessig is ceasing his speaking tour schedule to fight the good fight in Washington D.C.. He's leading the team of lawyers in the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act trial. After that he'll be concentrating on his new project the Creative Commons.

The 1790 thing refers to Lessig's statement about the state of copyright laws in 1790, which allowed a wonderful amount of freedom to artists at the time.

Summer Movies

A run down on some recent films I've seen:

• Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys: Fantastic, more real than real, And a great soundtrack.
  
• Wave Twisters: Like Heavy Metal for Hip Hop. I want this DVD!
  

Don't ask me why I've seen so much fluff crap lately. I have no excuse:

• Austin Powers: Goldmember: There are parts where my head hurt because I'd been laughing too long.
• Mr. Deeds: This is the least funny comedy in the history of comedies.
• Reign of Fire: Acting good, Special Effects good. Story baaaaaaaaad.

J C Morris

So here's an article on the company that scammed me out of $2,400 for a new Mac: [Link]. The reporter failed to mention that they've done this exact same thing before (MedNetPlus, a former company owned by the same person which supposedly went out of business the same way). Also failed to mention that J.C. Morris advertised a post-9/11 charity raising sale, where some percentage of sales was to go to a September 11th Relief Fund ..yet no one has been able to verify any money actually went to a fund. This is a violation of a federal law, you'd think they'd take it seriously...

ILYA

Caught a cool new band in San Diego last night: ILYA. They are a 6 or 7 piece ensemble that I would describe as a bit Bjork and a bit Massive Attack. There should be a CD coming out soon, and I got on their mailing list in hopes they make it up to San Francisco sometime.

OSCON 2002

So I didn't blog much during OSCON 2002. Mostly because my punk-bitch wi-fi driver sucked. Maybe I'll type up some stuff later, for posterity....

WiFi in San Diego

So I just checked into the San Diego Downtown International Youth Hostel
(I'm in town for the O'Reilly 2002 Open Source Convention) and decided to test out
my laptop wifi card ...sure enough I got a dhcp server; Free Internet!

I can already tell this week is going to be geek heaven.

Minor Vermin

Someone on on the dive-bar mailing list sent a link to a SF City database that lists the health code history for every restaurant in the city. I whipped up this perl script to capture the data from the city website, so now I have a list of every bar and restaurant in The City (with links to their health code history).

My favorite bar seems to have had minor problems with vermin. I'm not surprised, I remember having to fight off a burly cockroach there one time.

Julia Arrested

Julia "Butterfly" Hill has just been arrested down in Ecuador where she was supporting the Ecuadorian people who were protesting ecological damage that has occurred and will occur due to an oil pipeline construction project in the Amazon rainforest.

Upon arrival, the delegation was refused entrance to the meeting at which time the crowd peacefully began to protest their exclusion. Shortly thereafter the arrests were made. In some cases, police acted violently kicking community representatives, and dragging them by the hair to throw them against vehicles.

I met Julia last year at Burning Man when she stayed with my camp. I was very impressed with her wisdom, personality and beauty (inside and out) and I hope she is being treated well. I'll head down myself to help bust her out if she isn't.

[Link]

Eat

My friend Chuko missed a connection in Tokyo on her way here from Singapore and picked up a cool Japanese magazine called Eat. It's Bi-lingual and has that Wallpaper-ish feel to it.

Some items:

• Ninja Askasaka - A dark mysterious ninja-themed restaurant. The first challenge is to find the black door unmarked in a black wall.
  
• Makoto Aida - A contemporary artist, check out this gem:
  
  
  
  
  (You just have to click to enlarge)
  

And I don't know if this is something for engrish.com but the top position listed in the inside titles (where it lists editors, directors, writers, etc (what is the proper name of that section?)) page is "Dictator - Ayako Chujo" ..which I find quite funny. I wonder how the interns fare there?

Square Pegs in Tough Times

Ran across an art project called Square Pegs. It's a bit intersting to see how 9/11 altered the flow of the daily art....

[Link] (click "last week" too)