Bloggle

A decade of coffee, commentary & inscrutable icons.

January 18, 2012
by deCadmus
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The Best Time to Stop Censorship is Before it Starts

Freedom of speech is fundamental to the American experience and a bedrock of our way of life. So why is Congress so eager to do away with it?

Two bills — SOPA, and PIPA — both purport to shore up copyright law and end online piracy. They were written by content industry lobbyists with no input from the technology industry. As a result, as written they would place overly broad powers in the hands of content owners — those same content owners have already proved to be unworthy of the more basic trusts afforded them with the DMCA. More, these bills meddle with the fabric of the Internet — with DNS, with linking and embedding of content, with Fair Use.

Free, unabridged speech and the robust exchange of ideas on the Internet has become central to my every day life: my work experience, my ability to write, to create, to share neat stuff I’ve found online with friends, family and wide-ranging communities of interest. It’s become ever more important to how we get our news, and shapes our political process. Inhibiting speech in the pursuit of commercial interests is wrong. Congress shall make no law abridging the rights of free speech… no matter how much the lobbyists pay them.

October 6, 2011
by deCadmus
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“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

— Steve Jobs, 2005 Commencement, Stanford University

October 5, 2011
by deCadmus
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Perhaps it’s my Internet Attention Disorder showing, but lately I despair of links that lead to The Atlantic. It would seem their essayists have little more to say than writers anywhere else, and yet they possess so many more words with which to say it.

September 28, 2011
by deCadmus
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“I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house. So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

jim-henson

September 24, 2011
by deCadmus
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Happy Birthday, Jim Henson

On the event of what would have been his 75th birthday I had intended to write a tribute to Jim Henson and the profound and imaginative contributions he’s made in places you know, and places you might never suspect… and then I found this piece by Bridget McGovern at Tor.com and realized she’d already done it, and better and more comprehensively than I’d have been able to do.

… even if I try to stick to my absolute favorites, the sheer number of favorite Henson-inspired characters and moments (some touching, some hilarious, some just goofy and bizarre and wonderful) are far too numerous to list. To be completely serious for a moment, there’s no way of knowing what Henson might have done over the course of the last two decades if he’d had the opportunity, but when I think of all the lives he’s touched, all the people he’s inspired and entertained, and the fact that he managed to always do what he loved and left the world a better place for it, all I can think is how lucky we were to have Jim Henson in our lives.

I sure miss that guy.

End-of-Smiking

September 22, 2011
by deCadmus
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How I learned to stop smoking and love the bacon.

Three years ago this week I gave up cigarettes. I’d smoked for twenty-six years, so quitting was a pretty momentous event, and a challenge. Modern chemistry helped: I had pretty good luck with the drug Chantix — it only made me a little bit moody — but it rendered smoking a cigarette about as pleasurable as smoking a carrot. That was just the help I needed.

I’m told I should expect that I’ve added six months to my lifeline, so far. And quitting has saved me about ten thousand bucks for the 25,000 cigarettes I haven’t smoked. I’ve been able to up my fitness level in very spiffy ways: I’m running, bicycling and rowing my way to still better health, and I can do that because I can breathe.

There’s been a heap of other benefits, too. I like the fact that I no longer stink like a stale ashtray, I don’t need to invent reasons to take breaks in meetings, and I don’t get anxious if I’m running low on cigarettes. That sucked. A lot.

After three years, I feel pretty confident in saying cigarettes don’t own me any more. Now bacon… that’s another matter.

September 22, 2011
by deCadmus
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I have reached the conviction that the abolition of the death penalty is desirable. Reasons: 1) Irreparability in the event of an error of justice, 2) Detrimental moral influence of the execution procedure on those who, whether directly or indirectly, have to do with the procedure.

—  Albert Einstein