Online drugs without a prescription reviews - No Prescription? No Problem

Dec 4, ’03 11:39 PM

Alex’s post on Amazon wish-lists as performance art reminded me of a project I did a few years ago for a seminar taught by Cornell’s Geri Gay on Computer Mediated Communication. I’d been meaning to put this online for a while, so here it is…

The project was an analysis of the ways that people were using the public space of Amazon product reviews as a performance space, riffing off of books and each other (in particular on pages selling Bil Keane’s Family Circus collections). If nothing else, the sheer volume of the reviews is impressive, and some of them are quite funny…

Comments (0)

More badass cool courses I’d like to teach…

Dec 2, ’03 8:09 PM

Analog, Digital, and Open Source Rhetorics

Spectacular Technoscience: Images and the Theatre of Scientific Change

CyberCulture for Fun and Profit

Technical Writing for Webbed Spaces

So, pretty much anything Richard Doyle is teaching…

Comments (0)

Back in Ithaca for a few days…

Dec 1, ’03 2:31 AM

Short version of the past week:

Baltimore, Federal Hill; Inner Harbor lights at night; sitting on the cannon; sleep at my sister’s place; sister’s boyfriend made breakfast; Cheese Day; friends; Conan the Barbarian; I’m named Cheese King; dinner with Jenny, Kev and Colleen; hanging at Dave’s place; sleep at parents’ house; lunch at Hard Times with Russ et al; losing a few racquetball games; haggling over dinner; dinner (crabcakes…mmm!); sleep; canceled breakfast with grandparents; flight to Cleveland; dinner; Dean learned “Mahi-Mahi”; lost mittens; sleep; hanging out; setting up a webcam; Love, Actually; sleep; cooking; painfully cute kids; reading; blur of Thanksgiving food; sleep; leftovers; more painfully cute kids; more setting up a webcam; dinner with Jenny’s friends; sleep; finally got the webcam to work; flight back east; drive from BWI to Brooklyn; sleep; get back to writing; dinner with Kev; drive to Ithaca.

And now, to sleep…

Comments (0)

Via the Onion

Nov 28, ’03 10:22 PM

Comments (0)

So, my identity’s been stolen…

Nov 21, ’03 3:49 PM

…got a phone call from a private investigator yesterday that someone used my social secutiry number to cash a bad check at a Winn-Dixie in Alabama back in 2000. Even worse, apparently, someone else has been passing off my SSN as theirs since 1994.

Just spent an hour on the phoen with credit bureaus and the FTC’s ID Theft Hotline, so it looks like I’ve done everything I cna right now. Doesn’t look like there’s been any real damage to my personal accounts, though we’ll see what my credit reports turn up when I get them in the mail next week.

Weirdness…

Comments (0)

Lessons learned from two days in Ithaca…

Nov 20, ’03 11:00 PM

I’d always thought of Ithaca as untouched by the rampant spread of franchised stores (or, at the very least, I thought the town would be able to hold them at bay on the periphery of town, where the strip of fast food stores is). One of the quirky things about the town is that there’s nothing to be found in the genre of mid-range American food; no T.G.I. Fridays, no Bennigans, no Ruby Tuesday’s. So I take a bus in Tuesday, and one of the first things I see is a new building going up in a parking lot near the uber-grocery store. I ask one of the construction guys what he’s building, and he points to a sign overhead that reads “A new Chili’s, coming soon!”
It’s not a McDonalds on the commons or anything, but it still doesn’t feel quite right.
Ithaca is a lot more tiring when you’re walking everywhere.
The sheer tedium of flipping through a decade’s worth of Playboy in search of articles on VCRs and videotapes is much more bearable than the vaguely queasy feeling you get when you flip through 5 years of Hustler looking for the same.
The librarians who pull materials from the Cornell Human Sexuality Collection are total pros – nobody batted an eyelash when I asked them to pull every issue of Hustler they had before 1985. Now, the person sitting next to me in the reading room, however, seemed a bit flustered by all the porn scattered on the table in front of me.
I miss my friends in Ithaca – it’d been too long since I’d been immersed in the community, both in and out of the S&TS department. There are lots of great people up there that I don’t know as well as I’d like to, and there are old friends who I wish I could see more often. It’ll be great to be teaching a class at Cornell next semester, since I’ll be in town for a few days (at least) every week, but after that, it’ll be even harder to say goodbye to Ithaca for real.
Ron Kline is a fantastic advisor. He’s supportive, constructive, and just an all around good person. Plus he’s smart as all hell, and can help you figure out how to say what you’re trying to say in no time flat.

Comments (1)

Punkin’ Chunkin’…

Nov 17, ’03 6:47 PM

Speaking of holiday events, I didn’t make it to Punkin’ Chunkin’ this year, but I’m happy to see that a new record was set of 4434 feet. That’s right, someone built a cannon to shoot a pumpkin more than 8/10′s of a mile…

Comments (0)

Unsilent Night…

Nov 17, ’03 6:44 PM

I heard about Unsilent Night years ago, and have been wanting to go…I think this year I’ll actually make it!

Every year since 1992 I’ve presented Unsilent Night, an outdoor ambient music piece for an INFINITE number of boom box tape players. It’s like a Christmas carolling party except that we don’t sing, but rather carry boom boxes, each playing a separate tape which is part of the piece. In effect, we become a city block long stereo system!

In 2003 the piece will happen on Saturday December 13th. We will meet at the Arch in Washington Square at 6:45 pm, begin at 7 pm and proceed eastward to Tompkins Square Park, where the piece will end around 8 o’clock.

It would be really cool if you could join us and bring a boom box. The more tapes we run, the bigger and more amazing the sound will be. This past Christmas we had 50 boomboxes and over 200 people total, it was really spectacular… If you’d like to do it, please email me at boombox@mindspring.com so I will know how many tapes to make. If you’d like to do it but don’t have a boombox, I have several dozen and you can reserve one…and if you want to come and just listen, that’s cool, too. Help us make a BIG (and joyful) noise.

If you live outside of New York and would like to arrange a performance in your area, email to the above address for details. Unsilent Night has now been presented in Tallahassee, San Diego, Vancouver, B.C. and Berlin, Germany. On Friday December 19 2003 it will have its second annual Philadelphia performance.

Who’s in with me?

Comments (0)

Redboxes to shut down…

Nov 17, ’03 1:15 AM

So, it looks like the return of the automat ain’t gonna happen after all:

WASHINGTON – Residents of the city’s trendy Adams Morgan neighborhood will have to buy their toilet paper, shaving cream and middle-of-the-night sandwiches elsewhere now that McDonald’s has shut its 24-hour streetside vending machine, which the company had heralded as the convenience store of the future.

A tarp covered the minivan-size machine Wednesday, and a sign thanked customers for their business. Only the DVD rental service remained active, charging $2.97 for a three-night rental. McDonald’s was also closing three other area machines. Most were outside McDonald’s restaurants.

The 24-hour kiosks, operating under the name “Redbox,” dispensed a wide variety of convenience foods and groceries, including milk, eggs, bread, detergent, shaving cream, paper towels, bandages and sandwiches.They took credit cards and cash and featured an ATM machine with a 25-cent surcharge.

I interviewed the guy who ran the DVD part of these earlier this year – he’s had a hell of a history in video, running a chain of stores north of San Francisco since the early 1980′s, getting involved with Netflix in its early days, then helping out with the Redbox project. Interestingly, he was championing video rental vending machines in the early 1980′s, and he’s still got one of the prototypes tucked away at one of his stores…

(Woo-hoo! 100th entry! Does this mean I’m ready for syndication yet?)

Comments (1)

Demotivators…

Nov 14, ’03 5:44 PM

Wow…these are great. Really really great. Just go see for yourself.

(My favorite is “goals“)

Comments (1)

‹Older posts

Newer posts›