Friday, September 17, 2004

Adventures in CD shopping

Visited (the Belconnen branch of) Revolution CD at lunchtime today, to kill time and assure myself I'm not becoming a workaholic. Little did I know that as soon as I plonked my handful of selected CDs on the counter, the fire alarm would go off and I'd have to wait out the front of the store for 10 minutes while waiting for the fire department to give the all clear. Anyway, despite the delay I was very happy with my purchases.

However, in the process of listening to my new CDs I discovered that, instead of White Zombie's "Astro-Creep 2000" I've been given the soundtrack to "Eddie". Pretty funny, I guess, but I'm going to draw the line at listening to what is no doubt described as "Music from, and inspired by, the hit comedy Eddie". When it's headlined by a Coolio track (without so much as the word "gangsta" in the title) you know it's a worry.

Wednesday, September 08, 2004

Too much information!

I think the main thing preventing me from spending more time browsing the Web for interesting content was I had to dial-up and be sensitive to the phone needs of housemates before. Now, with ADSL, I can surf whenever I want. Which raises the issue that there's so much out there to look at, and not nearly enough time to see it all. I'm sure I'll come up with some strategies for getting the most value out of a reasonable amount of computer time, but I'm not there yet.

While I struggle to keep on top of everything I want to investigate, here're a few of the places I've been recently:

http://www.labor4refugees.org/ - title speaks for itself
http://www.defeathoward.com, http://www.rockagainsthoward.com/ - likewise

http://www.wikipedia.org/ - an open content encyclopaedia. I'm sure I'll find something I know enough about to contribute (rating the superhunks?)

A couple of on-line books which I haven't got around to reading yet:
http://www.cluetrain.com/book/index.html
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/wemedia/book/index.csp

Plus stuff which may be the next generation of what I take for granted at work, thanks to the collaborative environment of Lotus products (and related to my blurb above about info overload) http://www.research.ibm.com/SocialComputing/AR.htm
I actually feel quite cut off from the world when on my home PC, as at work we have pervasive Instant Messaging and presence awareness. I only miss it when it's gone. Might have to play with some other IM tools to reconnect.

I might almost be able to mistake all the "news" above as a life, but I'm far too cynical for that. Next time, I'll hopefully have something to say about the new Hellboy I bought from K on Monday (haven't even started it yet, though).

Update (2/10):
I would've lost Liv's comment when reshaping this post, so here 'tis: "Wikipedia is very cool. You might be interested in this dicussion, which I got to from Brianstorms." Thanks Liv, I was interested!