linkdump for 2006.11.05
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Chunklet interviews indie rockers on their attitudes toward earplugs.
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Cool network neutrality stickers.
linkdump for 2006.11.04
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Wow, I find this surprising. The item doesn’t provide a lot of explanation, but hopefully details will filter out over the next few days.
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This interview with a Canadian doing NGO work in Oaxaca provides a nice primer of the teachers’ strike there.
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concerning the dynamiting
One of the more successful projects I’ve assigned in the “Making Alternative Media” class I’m teaching this semester is research presentations. At first, I hoped students would have alternative media texts in mind to present, but, due to the lack of political engagement on the part of my students, I wound up assigning topics for my students to research and present. While this annoyed me at first, it’s also proven to be an opportunity for me to learn more about a topic without doing the legwork. While students didn’t surpass my knowledge on topics like The Church of the Subgenius, I learned quite a bit about The Realist and the “What Would Jesus Drive” campaign. It’s also nice to see the familiar from a different perspective.
I assigned one student to present on Houston’s Pacifica affiliate, KPFT. (I tried to assign Texas-related projects as much as possible.) Worried there might not be much information about the station’s history, I poked around the internet and found something quite interesting. Although I’ve studied Radio, TV, and Film in Texas for the past four years, I never knew that the station’s transmitter was bombed twice in 1970, KPFT’s inaugural year. The KPFT site has a short movie up promoting the station and discussing the bombing. Unfortunately, the video is so compressed that the viewer mostly sees artifacts, but it’s still an interesting view into the historical moment. One thing I find surprising is the use of lite classic rock like Simon & Garfunkel and James Taylor in the soundtrack. I’m not sure if these artists were associated with left-wing political movements in 1970, but, although Houston was home to some amazing proto-punk bands like the Red Krayola, the connection between punk and leftist politics was yet to be made.
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linkdump for 2006.11.03
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Awwww yeah! A Firefox extension that helps you manage and cite Web pages for academic research. I can’t tell you how long I’ve wanted something like this.
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I had more to say about this stupid article about two Austinites who “tied the knot Tuesday night in Oaxaca city in the midst of an anti-government rebellion.” Thanks for the local angle and little information, Statesman!
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It’s interesting that Lost sees half-a-million BitTorrent downloads a week, when you can watch it more legitimately on ABC’s website. I’m not crazy about ABC’s flash player, though.
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linkdump for 2006.11.02
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Azmeraw Zeleke fashions coffee machines from artillery shells left over from Ethiopia’s civil war.
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Mark Cuban posts an anonymous email about an interesting arrangement in the YouTube acquisition. Google set aside $500 million of the $1.65 billion purchase price to deal with IP litigation.
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indie rock or anything
Tonight I turned on the radio in my truck and heard this anti-marijuana and anti-indie rock PSA on KVRX, UT’s painfully indie student radio station. I thought to myself, “Why in the Sam Hill is KVRX running this?” After the spot, my fellow grad student Phil came on the air and ranted about how the government is targeting indie rock in its marketing campaigns. He later gave this blog props for pointing him to the spot.
As I was driving to school, I decided to stop by the studio to see what was going on. Phil put me on the air and complained a bit about the colors I use for my links. (I know, they really do need to change.) His co-host suggested I might have a Java problem, and as I tried to explain that I used stylesheets for the the colors, Phil seemed to be confused about how Java came up. He looked around the room and asked each person, “Did you say Java?” To further derail the conversation, I said, “It was me, but I said Jawa. You see I don’t actually write my blog. I have a sweatshop of Jawas writing it for me.”
In case any readers were actually listening to KVRX, I want to explain that comment was, in fact, a joke. We take a strong anti-sweatshop stance here at infobong.com, and the idea of blogging Jawas is simply ludicrous. I’m not even sure if Jawas can type.
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linkdump for 2006.11.01
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I think this has been around since at least 2003, when a vandal added some text about WMD in Iraq.
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The folks at Stay Free! are co-ordinating a project to protest the short lifecycle of iPods by making art out of broken iPods. I’ll participate if someone gives me a broken iPod.
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Researchers at the University of British Columbia conducted a study that suggests women who learn theories that gender affects math performance do more poorly on math tests.
