----------------------------------------------------------------------
Boing Boing Blog
----------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| 1. |
My collection reviewed in NYTimes. My short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More, is reviewed in today's NYTimes Sunday Magazine!
[It's] a bracing collection of short stories by a Canadian writer whose influences range from Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker to Donald Barthelme and Roald Dahl.
As knowledgeable about computers as he is about flea markets, Doctorow uses science fiction as a kind of cultural WD-40, loosening hinges and dissolving adhesions to peer into some of society's unlighted corners. His best known story, ''Craphound,'' tells of a competitive friendship between two junk collectors, one human and one alien; what it says about the uses of the past is no more mysterious than the prices paid for a vintage Coke bottle or an early Barbie doll. Not every attempt to wrest truth from cliche works -- but you won't want to miss Doctorow's satiric glance at co-opted dissent among the grade-school set or the insidious horror of his updated Pinocchio tale.
Link |
| 2. |
Homeland Security deports fiancee of Homeland Security staffer. Dan Hughes sez,
This just hit the wire about
my brother, who works *for* Homeland Security, and his fiancée who was
incarcerated on Yom Kippur last week *by* Homeland Security. The story broke on
the front page this morning.
Beate (Bay - ah - tah), Trevor's fiancée, was returning to the US from Germany.
She had interviewed with career diplomats at the American Embassy just weeks
before and was granted a 6-month visa. Nevertheless, when she landed in Atlanta
she was interrogated for six hours, led away in handcuffs with criminals,
booked into the Atlanta prison system (finger prints, mug shots and a group
cell) and the next day was placed in solitary confinement in a white room with
nothing save a toilet. She was left without food for 20+ hours and finally
deported to Germany. The whole time being told that she was not a criminal, nor
suspected of any crime!
Link
(Thanks, Dan!) |
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Yahoo! News - Technology
----------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| 3. |
Video Editing Made Simpler, Not Easy (washingtonpost.com). washingtonpost.com - Working with home movies on your computer, once a task of staggering expense and complexity, is reaching the point of actual usefulness -- just in time to save our degrading collections of fragile videotape. The combination of increasingly fast computer processors, increasingly roomy hard drives and increasingly cheap DVD- and CD-recorder drives makes it feasible to edit a tape library down to more watchable versions and then save the result on more permanent DVDs or video CDs (a lower-quality, cheaper way to store video). |
| 4. |
Recycling Word Power - from Aristotle to Zapata (Reuters). Reuters - At a loss for words? "Don't have a
cow!" Quote somebody. From Bart Simpson to Bartlett's, famous
quips and familiar quotations speak volumes on the Internet. |
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Slashdot
----------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| 5. |
The Step-By-Step DIY Approach To The X PRIZE |
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Internet/Network Security
----------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| 6. |
Book Review: Mike Meyers' Certification Passport- Security+. The Mike Meyers' series of certification preparation books are some of the best on the market. This one, by Trevor Kay, will help refresh your memory and draw your focus to key areas that you may need to reinforce to... |
Sunday, October 12, 2003
In keeping with the live-from-Barcelona Matrix thread (, a commissioned portrait, Anim(e)atrix style, of the photographically elusive Wachowski Brothers -- by Canadian illustrator Kenn Brown. He explains: "Try googling them.. you wont find much - we were lucky to get a very small pic taken at the Wired offices to base this illustration on. The cityscape behind them is based on thier hometown of Chicago and was inspired by the Japanese anime classic Metropolis - (Metropolis was brought to the screen by anime legends Katsuhiro Otomo (of "Akira" fame) and Rintaro who once worked with Tezuka on the anime TV series Astro Boy)... you if you look closely you might recognize a few of the buildings. The windows echo the cascading effect of the famous matrix code." 
