Christo v. Somerville

Christo: Redefining familiar public space, involving even reluctant people in art.
Somerville: Redefining familiar private space, involving reluctant feline in “art”.

Christo’s Gates viewing time: 16 days
Somerville Gates viewing time: Until the cleaning lady comes.

Apple's orginal founder on Apple's secrecy flounder

Apple is charging ahead in its muzzling lawsuit to get ThinkSecret to give up its sources. It’s also chasing after a Canadian student who did a bad thing and released a version of OSX via BitTorrent, which is, we can all agree, not very nice.

But at least one of their compatriots wants to help mount a defense: the mighty Woz.

Company co-founder Steve Wozniak has posted to a blog that he thinks Apple should back off and is putting up $1,000 in the student’s defense. Apple is seeking damages that would “ruin the defendants.” Woz thinks that’s going too far.

On returning and finding that the world is upside down

Having just returned from a 2-week vacation in Europe, I find that the world has gotten extremely weird — or more precisely it was already weird, it’s just gotten weirder.

Consider Jason Kottke’s announcement that he’s now nothing but a blogger. A professional blogger. I would find this entirely apros pos except that I have no idea what he does. Is commenting on everything a career choice? Can I also quit my job and sit alone in my apartment and write whatever crap pops into my head whether I have any credentials to be commenting on it or not and be paid for that by a public clammoring for more Lance? Is there a public doing that? Has Jason latched onto something dramatic and impossible and will it actually work for him like it works for Matt?

I note that Matt is a Kottketributor so maybe it’s all a huge round-robin where micropayments from ads on one blog site support another non-ad site that’s contributing/limiting to the overall web noise factor by providing a link filter to link to/from other blogs, or something like that. I’m still too jet-lagged to make sense of it all.