Michael Boyle — Page 61

Derek Powazek went to

March 19, 2006 by Michael Boyle

Derek Powazek went to

SXSW Interactive again this year and has posted a great summary of a panel session called “The Future of Darknets”: SXSW to MPAA: STFU. The panel featured a representative of the MPAA, among others. Also check out the links to the MP3 of the session and some video clips. Powazek didn’t just write a summary, though, he added important commentary as well. One quote:

Artists (and I include myself in that word) need to rise up and tell these people to go get stuffed. We can decide when a mashup is perfectly fine with us. We can decide to embrace file traders to build awareness of our work. We don’t need you anymore. You’re just holding us back.

From Blork:

March 17, 2006 by Michael Boyle

From Blork:

Square St. Louis Story. Square St. Louis is one of the most wonderful places in Montreal. For about 6 years I lived quite literally around the corner from the park, and so I passed a lot of time there. The mix of people – dowagers in black, punks, homeless, mothers with children, students, skateboarders – always made for some great street theater.

New from Amazon

March 14, 2006 by Michael Boyle

New from Amazon

Web Services today: Amazon S3 – Simple Storage Service. Large-scale, addressable online storage for anyone, supported by an API that allows programs to access and integrate the data. At a killer price: $0.15/Gb/Mo storage plus $0.20/Gb for transfer. Michael Arrington has more in Techcrunch.

I tweaked the design

March 12, 2006 by Michael Boyle

I tweaked the design

around here in the past couple of days. I migrated the whole layout to use (close to) standard Movable Type templates, and in so doing made a few other subtle changes. In so doing I was able to (finally) migrate my old and neglected Words page to the current design. It had been stuck for some time in a previous generation.

Design note: the p:first-child selector is critical for me to keep my strange “Title-as-beginning-of-post” approach. Tech note: I still haven’t been able to get the freaking MT search going. I used to use an external service but I’d prefer not to continue. But the Search is down as the cgi doesn’t seem to load. Strange.

On Wednesdays I teach

March 9, 2006 by Michael Boyle

On Wednesdays I teach

my class at McGill, commuting all the way from Ottawa to do so. One of the habits I have gotten into is to drive down early in the afternoon (class starts at 6) and spend the afternoon at Laika. This gives me the opportunity to have a real meal before class (hence avoiding junk food later in the evening), but it also (and more importantly, really) allows me to spend some time in one of my favourite spots. And, pretty much every week, that means I get to meet and/or spend time with another interesting Montrealer involved in pushing the net in important directions.

Yesterday I had just finished lunch and a coffee when Mike popped by and introduced me to Hugh McGuire, who is the founder of LibriVox, a project devoted to recording chapters of public-domain literature, providing an important spoken-word archive of timeless material on the Internet.