Week 9: Emesis

An abject journey not unlike Dante's inferno only we have evangelical computerese rather then the Terza rima of the Tuscan poet and a goading Ceausescu in place of the honey-tounged Virgil.

week 9: Ebooks

"Without books we might just melt into the airwaves, and be just another set of blips." Thus writes John Updike and indeed as a replacement for actual books ebooks is an obscene idea that would throw any discerning man into a fit of atrabileous rage. Needless to say the 'kindle' is a disgusting thing that could only be invented in an epoch of technocracy and decadence. This would all be true if were for the marxist internet archive http://www.marxists.org/ which allows the disenfranchised proletariat to gain free access to a large selection of works by Stalin, Lenin Trotsky, Luxemburg and other communist luminaries. Viva la Revolucion!

Week 9: Podcast

Stiri din Romania. language podcast.

There are many important reasons to learn the Romanian language such as Schimbarea la faţă a României and Pe culmile disperării

Week 9: YouTube Button

Does anyone else remember this?! I like sifting through the cultural debris on youtube kind of like a latter-day version of Baudelaire's ragpicker searching for curious flotsam in the televisual wasteland. Pinky and the Brain in German is quite disturbing, it loses its ironic distance and Brain just seems like a blatant Führer.

Week 8: Discovery Web 2.0

I browsed through the book section of the web 2.0 awards. Biblio.com allows you to search through over 50 million rare books, maunscripts and incunabula. Some interesting finds were:

First-edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'Flappers and Philosophers' in green-cloth, lettered in gilt and blind $ 55,000

A very rare first issue of Baudelaire’s “Fleurs du mal,”Containing the Six Suppressed Poems
$19,500

A signed and inscribed presentation copy of Louis Ferdinand Celine's Voyage Au Bout de La Nuit by Editions Denoel et Steele $27, 000

Cosmographica by Ptolemy Super-Royal folio, with woodcut historiated and Maiblumen initials, ornamental woodcut borderpieces $1,275,000

Bibliophilia is not for the man of humble means.

Week 8: Online productivity tools

Zoho was blocked but Google docs was quite impressive, very useful especially for people who rely on public computers. The user examples were interesting and showed its wide variety of applications such as planning a trip through Alaska. I can even see myself utilizing this program for certain peregrinations in soviet wastelands and the like.

Week 7: Social Networking

I like the Hennepin page. I might use facebook if I went overseas otherwise I don't really see the point, blogs are bad enough. Maybe I should become a luddite.