Peter Forretbecause eloquence is, like, whatever
I just discovered a really neat online publication: Cabinet Magazine. Here follows one of their articles, on Andrew Mole, a American photographer of the early 20th century. Kind of a Spencer Tunick, with a patriotic message and way more clothes (uniforms, actually).
The Belgian Facebook community is growing and I was expecting to have a first ‘spam’ invitation eventually. It came a couple of days ago, from a group that goes by the name “In Loving Memory of Juliane Angel”. It seems to be created by a guy in rememberance of a girl that died some time ago (Juliane Angel). Even if this sad story is not a marketing ploy (which I don’t think it is), the invitations are still ‘unsollicited’. Whether they are ‘commercial’ is hard to say now, that might only become apparent when there are enough members (only two for the moment).
There are different scenarios that enable people to share their Wifi. FON uses customer Wifi routers, Wifidog/OpenWRT uses custom server machines (PCs), and Whisher has a an interesting alternative: they aggregate Wifi passwords. You install an local application that you communicate the WEP/WPA key of your Wifi router to. This application will communicate this to the central Whisher service and give it to other clients when required. The other users do not see the actual key, it’s their application that does the login. Their mapping page seems to be broken, so it’s hard to tell how many Whisher-compatible access points there are in Belgium.
Imagine you can walk up to your favourite hardware store and tell the guy: “Give me the biggest, fastest, meanest laptop you have. Money is no issue”.
This is the video to “In Context” by Field Music. It’s just a hand drawing a really long line on a white background, but it’s worth watching until the end.
(via infosthetics.com)
I got an email from Gene Graham, who has just finished his first full-length documentary on the early days of Disco. Me being a fan of house and disco music, that is one movie I’d like to see!
This week in my newspaper: there’s a re-issue of the fabulous “Steve McQueen” album (1985) by Prefab Sprout. Prefab Sprout is: songwriter Paddy McAloon on vocals, guitars, keyboards, Martin McAloon on bass, Wendy Smith on backing vocals, guitars, Neil Conti on drums. It was one of the first vinyl records I ever bought and certainly one of the best. The quality of the album might have something to do with the producer: Thomas Dolby.
I was talking to a doctor friend about cholesterol and stuff and he mentioned some interesting facts about alcohol: drinking up to 2 units of alcohol per day is good for your health. The numbers I find on the New England Journal of Medicine site are somewhat smaller (1 unit per day) but the effect is proven:
