The Invisible Library

I’ve been a huge fan of Apple computers for several years now. This is not really news to my friends, family and regular readers. However, I was a bit annoyed after I read this bit of news, that the new version of iTunes (4.7) deliberately blocks an app designed to download music files from your iPod to your computer.

I gotta say, Mr Jobbs, this new little innovation sucks. I understand you’re under pressure from the draconian fobs in the Music Industry to incorporate DRM safeguards into your software that gives them the impression that they can control what music we listen to and where. But you’re smarter than that, Steve. You know that no matter what software widgets you come up with, we’ll find ways around it. But that you’d deliberately try to stiff your loyal users in favor of feeding pipe-dreams to corporate stooges who neither understand nor care about their customers is pretty shitty.

Lately, Elvira and I have come to realise that we’ve reached a software plateau with our respective macs. Her iMac and my Powerbook have ample speed and storage and all the software we need, in versions that we like, and do exactly what we want them to. So we’ve decided that we’re no longer going to upgrade our software. We’ll stick with iTunes 4.6, OS 10.3 and keep our iPods at their current versions. Thanks, Mr Jobbs but no thanks. We’ll keep our money and our slightly outdated software and look for Open Source alternatives when we absolutely need to upgrade something.

Eventually, in a few years, our hardware will become incompatible, obsolete or damaged and we’ll be forced to upgrade. Which means that we’ll probably buy second hand hardware and switch all our OS to Linux, which, I’ve recently discovered, has a version that runs on Mac hardware. Plus, that penguin is just a lot cuter than some silly old apple with a bit out of it.

Hat tip to Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing for the link.

Tomorrow night is the Night of the Veil, when the worlds of the living and the dead overlap and the spirits of our ancestors return. Celebrated throughout the world in various cultures, under various names, this night is the time for inward reflection, to stare into the bonfire and dance and dream. Or, a night to dress up in a funny suit and eat lots of candy, your choice. Tonight, some friends and I are celebrating a tad early. We’re going out to a Goth Club to celebrate. I’m dressing up like the Devil.

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about Halloween, the Mexican Day of the Dead and the original Pagan celebration, Samhain.

Don’t forget to leave something out for the Wee Folk.

Almost Saturday. I tried to load this picture earlier, but Blogger was being persnickity. But all’s well that ends well.

BBC:

Scientists have discovered a new and tiny species of human that lived in Indonesia at the same time our own ancestors were colonising the world.

The new species - dubbed “the Hobbit” due to its small size - lived on Flores island until at least 12,000 years ago.

The fact that little people feature in the legends of modern Flores islanders suggests we might have to take tales of Leprechauns and Yeti more seriously.

Details of the sensational find are described in the journal Nature.

The discovery has been hailed as one of the most significant of its type in decades.

[…]

[H. floresiensis] shared its island with a golden retriever-sized rat, giant tortoises and huge lizards - including Komodo dragons - and a pony-sized dwarf elephant called Stegodon which the “hobbits” probably hunted.

[…]

Yet there are hints H. floresiensis could have lived on much later than this. The myths say Ebu Gogo were alive when Dutch explorers arrived a few hundred years ago and the very last legend featuring the mythical creatures dates to 100 years ago.

But Henry Gee, senior editor at Nature magazine, goes further. He speculates that species like H.floresiensis might still exist, somewhere in the unexplored tropical forest of Indonesia.

[…]

Because the remains are relatively recent and not fossilised, scientists are even hopeful they might yield DNA, which could provide an entirely new perspective on the evolution of the human lineage.

More about the Hobbit here.

If some DNA can be retrieved from this find, than we will gain a greater understanding of our evolution and human orgins in general, which is great. That it comes with the knowledge that we shared our recent past with tiny men who hunted pygmy elephants and battled komodo dragons is just plain cool.

Via Jessa at Bookslut, we have Dispatches from a Public Librarian. In this dispatch, Josh, who is a Library page, is interviewed. It’s funny if you’ve ever worked in a bookstore (the super polished, ultra shiny mega corporate type, not the fun, musty dark independent kind) or, of course, in a library.

It’s also funny if you go to Library School, because Public Librarians are the bottom of the proverbial Totem Pole. They’re harassed, generally shit upon and the most embattled and embittered of all librarians. And they like it that way. That they are also the archetypal librarian, the image everyone conjures up when they think of the word Librarian with a face and a name, is an important detail, something that ultimately, all us librarians, even the male Academic/Art Reference librarians who work in IT have to confront. But it’s funny! Ha ha.

Newly added to my Amazon Wishlist: Planet Simpson: How A Cartoon Masterpiece Defined a Generation by Chris Turner. here’s a review at the Globe and Mail.

At last, I can tell you where I am, and the reason I’m here. Friday, I departed from Maryland for San Antonio to meet my wife and in-laws and visit with my sister in law, who is home for two weeks R&R from Iraq. The reason for all the secrecy is that we were staging an elaborate surprise for my mother and father in law, involving sister Naomi’s friend, Jeff telling my in laws he wanted to introduce them to his new fiance and then having Naomi walk in, followed shortly thereafter by my wife and I and her older brother and his wife, all of who had flown in just for the occasion. The surprise went well, if a bit befuddled at times by the impossibility of a given flight to land on time, my sister in laws inability to remember the proper names of restaurants and the general confusion of trying to organise a large scale surprise among nine people in four states and a foreign war.

So that’s what all the secrecy was about, a very good cause.

Now I just have to try and convince my Texas in-laws that voting for Bush is a horrible, horrible idea and that Kerry isn’t really all that bad. Then, I’ll single handedly end world hunger and find a cure for cancer, by Tuesday, when I fly back.

I’m going on a super secret mission this weekend, to a place with no internet access. I can’t say where, but it’s certainly not to Texas to spray paint Liberal slogans on the barn doors of the Bush Ranch, and demand Halloween candy from the President. I honestly don’t know where you got such a crazy notion. Nope.

Hunter S. Thompson has a betting man’s eye and a steel pole running through his soul. It works like an antenna, giving him an uncanny knack for gaging political presure systems. And he’s backing Kerry with winner’s odds:

Immediately after the first debate ended I called Muhammad Ali at his home in Michigan, but whoever answered said the champ was laughing so hard that he couldn’t come to the phone. “The debate really cracked him up,” he chuckled. “The champ loves a good ass-whuppin’. He says Bush looked so scared to fight, he finally just quit and laid down.”

Ali has seen that look before. Almost three months to the day after John Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, the “Louisville Lip” — then Cassius Clay — made a permanent enemy of every “boxing expert” in the Western world by beating World Heavyweight Champion Sonny Liston so badly that he refused to come out of his corner for the seventh round.

This year’s first presidential debate was such a disaster for George Bush that his handlers had to be crazy to let him get in the ring with John Kerry again. Yet Karl Rove let it happen, and we can only wonder why. But there is no doubt that the president has lost his nerve, and his career in the White House is finished. NO MAS.

I haven’t felt this confident in months.

I have a mid-term hangover, so original content is going to have to wait until tomorrow. In the meantime, there is a really entertaining Q and A with Neal Stephenson over at Slashdot. And if you’re looking for something more meaty and slightly scary, Teresa Nielsen Hayden has an analysis of George W. Bush that will give you the blind staggers.