Du mußt Caligari werden

Week 9: Emesis

2009-05-21T20:44:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-26T17:39:00.000-07:00

"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

2009-02-26T19:18:00.001-08:00

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

2009-02-01T20:46:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-27T13:47:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-26T14:48:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-26T14:31:00.000-08:00

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.

Week 6: Library 2.0 & Web 2.0

2008-12-28T17:23:00.000-08:00

All five articles are basically in agreement about the considerable changes this technology will bring but a few of them are little too feverent in their web 2.0 evangelism. Rick Anderson's skepticism at the very idea of having an actual library collection is far more disastrous then any of those looming 'icebergs'. Few of us live in a truly post-print era; it is only a mercifully small minority of the reading public (i.e. technophiles) who actually use those electronic readers for a novel or any kind of sustained reading. There are already many free online databases such as Project Gutenberg that digitize thousands of canonical texts surely it is the task of any decent library to ensure a fair portion of these texts can be accessed in the superior medium of the book.

Week 6: Technorati

2008-09-06T21:47:00.000-07:00

Technorati will be useful for those who want to sift through some of those 50 million blogs. The what's popular technorati blogs: "gizmodo", "paris hilton", "techcrunch", "cheatcodes" left me feeling a little depressed.

Week 6: Del.icio.us

2008-09-06T19:46:00.001-07:00

With a controlled vocabulary Del.icio.us could have been useful in an educational context but a bit haphazard as it is. The quasi-social aspect i.e. "peering into another user's filing cabinets" is a little unseemly.

Week 5: Wikis

2008-09-06T16:07:00.000-07:00

I occasionally use wikipedia, mainly to procrastinate. For some topics wikis can be quite a dubious source of information and it tends to attract a lot of amateur experts, so must be used with discretion. The book lover wiki was good. It's easy to see the uses this kind of technology could have for Manakau libraries; book reviews, readers advice etc and parochial types would enjoy the kind of local histories and genealogies offered by St Joseph wiki. I went on to the learning 2.0 wiki and added my favourite number 'O': "Thou wast a pretty fellow, when thou hadst no need to care for her frowning ; now thou art an O without a figure"

Week 4: Technology Related

2008-09-06T02:32:00.000-07:00

This exquisite reading device, invented by the Italian engineer Agostino Ramelli, facilitated the reading of multiple books at once. As the sixteenth century blurb asserts: This is a beautiful and ingenious machine, very useful and convenient for anyone who takes pleasure in study, especially those who are indisposed and tormented by gout. For with this machine a man can see and turn through a large number of books without moving from one spot. Moreover, it has another fine convenience in that it occupies very little space in the place where it is set, as anyone of intelligence can clearly see from the drawing.

Week 4: Trading Card

2008-09-06T01:48:00.001-07:00

My creation
Originally uploaded by pinkstainsareheroic

Two great German philosophers on one trading card.

"Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein."

Week 4: Flickr

2008-09-03T01:57:00.001-07:00

siberia
Originally uploaded by Vasily Sankov

I find Siberia more palatable then Learning 2.0. For now I am going to have to take refuge in Dostoyevky and dream of endless glacial winters, wooden plank beds, rheumatoidism and cabbage soup swimming with coackroaches.

Week 3: Rollyo

2008-09-02T19:47:00.001-07:00

I suppose a search tool like this could be good for specialist topics where google is too broad. A white box with a red cross in it kept popping up instead of rollyo but eventually managed to post it up thanks to a bit of help from Sue.

Week 3: Library Thing

2008-09-01T02:21:00.000-07:00

Des Esseintes also derived a perverse pleasure from handling this minute volume, whose covers, made of Japanese felt white as curdled milk, were fastened with two silk cords, one China pink, the other black. Concealed behind the covers, the black ribbon met the pink ribbon, which was busy adding a note of silken luxury, a suggestion of modern Japanese rogue, a hint of eroticism, to the antique whiteness, the virginal pallor of the book... The 'soul' of a book is lost in the simulacral texts of Library Thing. Of course most books lack the opulence of Des Esseintes', but worn down, aged books possess a sort of decayed beauty to the connoisseur of dilapidation. So while unlikely to endear itself to the discerning bibliophile, Library Thing probably had some kind of disgusting appeal to obsessive cataloguers.

Week 3: Image Generators

2008-08-31T01:24:00.000-07:00

My pseudo-marxist porridge box, after all porridge is the lumpenproletarian food par excellence. Incidentally does not all these generators of Steven Seagal movie plots, Danielle Steel covers, reality TV show premises etc remind one of Adorno's adage that it is precisely the eternal sameness, this compulsive repetition, that we seek in mass produced cultural commodities?

Week 2: RSS

2008-08-03T16:53:00.000-07:00

Blogroll: http://www.bloglines.com/blog/jksdghj

I've gotten horribly behind on this but I am turning a new leaf. No more lassitude and procrastination. Although the RSS exercise is very conducive to the aforementioned. I did however discover, through a Lacanian blog, a video of Zizek calling vegeterians degenerates which was enjoyable. Of course I hold the exact opposite view and strictly agree with Porphyr's De Non Necandis ad Epulandum Animantibus on these matters. Unless Zizek was referring to degenerancy of a bodily kind.

Week 1: Introduction

2008-07-13T18:56:00.000-07:00

Setting up the blog was fairly start foward. I've never used web 2.0 tools before so this should be a learning curve for me. Below a Francis Bacon triptych for your viewing pleasure.