We’re back. OTE and the entire Dan Rosenbaum family of fine information products was unexpectedly offline from Friday evening until Monday noon. Some sort of switch problem that knocked out the mail and web servers — and apparently a bunch of other machines. The good news is that the outage encouraged me to get away […]
Continue reading... July 5, 2002
QOTD
“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” — Galileo Galilei.
Continue reading... July 5, 2002
Yes, Now Would Be a Good Time, Thanks.
July 3, 2002
Not To Be Used As A How-To Book, Of Course…
Back in the day, the two major wire services (that’d be UPI and the AP, sonny) got together and issued a consolidated style book. They agreed on things like tricky spellings and usage and correct form for datelines. Each service went a little beyond the basics, though. The UPI Stylebook was studded with entries such as: […]
Continue reading... July 2, 2002
I Learned the Truth at 51
Blogspace has been passing around this article by Janis Ian (the songwriter and singer of “Society’s Child” and “At Seventeen”) — a particularly clear exegesis of the recording industry from the viewpoint of an independent musician: I don’t pretend to be an expert on intellectual property law, but I do know one thing. If a […]
Continue reading... July 2, 2002
R.I.P. YIL
As the Editor of NetGuide, I spent a fair amount of time deriding Yahoo! Internet Life. Making fun of its name was easy; making fun of its content was much much harder. And it was no fun at all to look across the battlements and realize that I was competing with Barry Golson, who once edited […]
Continue reading... July 1, 2002
Sssssssh!!!!
From Ernie the Attorney: Can you copyright silence? Some people think so. But, of course, some people are frigging idiots. Oh, good Lord. Me, I read it that someone’s overreacting just a wee tad. A couple of years ago, the April edition of Electronic Musician magazine ran a “review” of a disc of samples of silence, suitable […]
Continue reading... July 1, 2002
Welcome, Semi
My friend Semi, who used to produce an entertaining if erratic e-mail newsletter, has joined the weblog thang. I’d like to think that he was inspired by my sitting in his basement last month, sucking up his bandwidth while writing OTE and trying in vain to hide from controlled bedlam all ’round. Pretty good writer, Semi is. […]
Continue reading... July 1, 2002
Defining an Adequate Education
I don’t usually read the Education section of the Sunday NYTimes, but its lead piece caught my eye this week. In New York State, people have a constitutional right to an education. The question is: How good an education? … the court ruled [last week] that schools were obligated by the state Constitution to do nothing […]
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