Paul Graham has an interesting essay up about the Acceleration of Addictiveness, in which he argues that our ability to refine and improve things through technology is leaving us increasingly susceptible to addictions, many of which develop too quickly for cultural norms to temper: As far as I know there's…

Today a colleague of mine used an abbreviation online that I needed to look up.  I never was able to locate it, but while I searched, I found this one: ly - love you I wondered aloud on twitter that I'd never encountered this, and this thought caused me to…

It's summer and with the change in weather, I'm going to take a holiday from much of my work on web media and audio/visual code for Mozilla.  I'll still be working on the audio data api patch, but the rest of my work I'm going to put on ice…

Much of my time writing on this blog is spent advocating for the open web, and the potential it brings for distributed, global, collaboration.  I don't believe in this any less, despite the critique that follows. At the same time that I am passionately involved in the creation of the…

I've been amazed this year at the amount of Canola planted in the fields in our county. I'm used to seeing a lot of soy beans, corn, and winter wheat. But the shock of Canola visually, a bright, beautiful, electric yellow, never ceases to give me pause. And this year…

One of the things I look for is the Great Horned Owl. When I was a small child I saw my first. It had been killed (by a car as I recall) and my uncle, a taxidermist, was going to stuff it. He brought my brothers and I to see…

I spent a good chunk of today on youtube with my audio friends, trying to find some demo music for something big we're cooking up.  When it was done I had 50 tabs with cool music, and I'd be remiss if I didn't assign some of it to you for…

"Dad, do you know the Odyssey?" I do. "How do you know it?" I've read it in English many times, and fought with it in Greek, too. "Tell me something about it." I leave you in Browning's hands for a more complete account of…

Last Thursday, David Agnew (President of Seneca) and Gary Goodyear (federal Minister of State (Science and Technology)) announced that Seneca college had received one of 12 NSERC grants.  The grant is specifically targeted to Seneca's Centre for Development of Open Technology, to help us grow our involvement in open source,…

The other night Luke and I were out for coffee, and our conversation, as it always does, turned to teaching, reading, and thinking.  He was telling me a story about a friend of his, who is struggling through the life of the junior academic.  "I don't have time to…