Steven Johnson 's new weblog. Logged for my own reference.

stevenberlinjohnson.com

Phreaknic pics!!

PhreakNIC 6 Stuff

This is hillarious...

] On many occassions, I've heard someone say, "If you don't
] love the United States of America, then get the hell
] out."
]
] I did.

Canada's 'switch' campaign

Stowbari wrote:
] I got back home from Nashville late last night and now I have
] to tell everyone about it! In case you didn't already know, I
] went to the PhreakNIC hacker convention. There were some great
] talks and plenty of computer stuff to look at, but the best
] part was the people.

Phreaknic was really great. Its so awesome to have so many friends in the same place at the same time. It was quite cool to walk into the con on Saturday morning and see Tron playing silently on the big screen behind someone giving a talk. Mad style points for that, whoever is responsible. There was some drama and theft lameness, but overall I had a blast.

Old-school Memestreams people will note that there are a lot of new users. I gave a talk on the site at the con and passed out 200 buttons. I hope that the new people find the site interesting. Its a little much for the existing community to get a major code update and a large influx of new people at the same time, but hopefully the chaos here will subside in a week or so. I'm very busy, but I will post details about the new features as soon as I can.

RE: 11/4/02 - Back from PhreakNIC

You should see new features everywhere. I was really in a hurry to get this code working before Phreaknic, and I cut a few corners. I'll be uncutting them over the next week. If you find bugs, please tell me.

I will post more about the new feature set on Monday. For now, check stuff out and play with it. Most of it should be self explanetory.

This is why no one ever throws out an Apple ][.

Strongbad is haunted by his old computer...

" This Halloween, Dracula and Frankenstein's monster seem positively cuddly. To inspire some real fear, try dressing up as one of these current and former chief executives. Click on the images for a full-size, printer-friendly color mask. Now that's scary. "

Forbes.com: CEO Halloween Masks

"What do you call the act of covering a house or area in front of a house with toilet paper?"

A vaugely interesting survey of dialect differences. What is really lacking is interpretation. Some are starkly north/south issues. Others are hard to say. Some might be related to particular european groups or particular marketing campaigns. (Freeway??)

I read an interesting article a few years about about class differences in the US impacting dialect. Do you have a living room or a den? Do you do the laundry to do you do washes? I didn't see either of those in this survey.

Dialect Survey Results

"The maker of an implantable human ID chip has launched a national campaign to promote the device, offering $50 discounts to the first 100,000 people who register to get embedded with the microchip. "

An orwellian nightmare that fits in the palm of your hand. No, I mean *IN* the palm of your hand.

Wired News: Implantable Chip, On Sale Now

"The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, passed in 1996, makes it a crime to provide "material support" to any group designated as "terrorist" without regard to whether the support was actually intended to further terrorist activity."

Fight Terrorism Fairly