On July 8 my father’s day present comes into play as we take in an afternoon performance of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot starring Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) at Haymarket Theatre here in London. As a comic, sci-fi geek and Beckett head, it’s about as perfect a storm as it can get. In honor of the occasion, here are some Godot links from around the websosphere:

1) Official website for the haymarket production.

2) Sparknotes (one of many online Cliff’s Notes knockoffs) commentary on the play.

3) Act I of the 2001 Beckett on Film production of Waiting for Godot. There are links on this page to clips of Act II as well, of varying degrees of quality. The entire Channel 4 Beckett collection is worth a look, as well, though.

4) Waiting for Godot… this guy’s philosophy. This fellow goes on quite a tangent about what Waiting for Godot really means.

5) The Barbie (or Ken, actually) edition. This looks like it was, at some point, a brilliant idea. Unfortunately, copyright (f)laws have rendered this one kind of useless. YouTube apparently found that some part of the track infringed on someone’s rights to sell something. Next to the clip it reads: “This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by WMG. The audio has been disabled.”

Because, you know, I get that. Because someone heard three minutes of something on a YouTube video of some people essentially playing with plastic dolls, will decide, “all right then. No need to buy that now, I’ve experienced it to its fullest right here.” Total sense making. Based on all the blatantly stolen stuff you can find on YouTube, I hadn’t previously thought they actually paid attention to copyright. Interesting. If anyone out there knows where a version is with audio still enabled, let me know and I’ll update the link. However, watching it in silent mode is a slightly creepy, surreal way of testing your memory of the lines. Read more…

No Comments / Jul 02.09 / Literary Pretense / by yours truly

The Guardian is compiling a database of missing Iranians, those who have been either abducted or killed by the government. It’s a remarkable graphic display of what people who protest their governments can face and also another example of The Guardian’s great use of flash as an actual educational tool.

This format could be used for a number of other campaigns focusing on the disappeared or massacred.

Hundreds, probably thousands, have been arrested in Iran since the presidential election on 12 June. Human rights and campaign groups such as Human Rights Watch, the Campaign for Human Rights in Iran and Reporters Without Borders have been collecting and publishing the names of those dead or detained.

We have brought those lists, and reports from trusted media sources, into a database that we are asking readers and those elsewhere on the internet to contribute too.

DATA: download the full spreadsheet of the dead and detained

• Can you do something with this data?
Flickr: Please post your visualisations and mash-ups on the Flickr group or email it to datastore@guardian.co.uk

— Iran election: faces of the dead and detained  @ guardian.co.uk.

No Comments / Jul 01.09 / War and Peace / by yours truly

UPDATE: Human rights workers abducted: toys, medical supplies, olive trees confiscated. Get the latest here.

ALL WE WANT IS TO REACH GAZA. WE DO NOT SEEK A CONFRONTATION

Activists aboard Gaza justice boat demand they be allowed to visit their friends & family in besieged Gaza, and deliver their cargo of medical supplies, children’s toys, and reconstruction kits. They invite the world to join them.

(At Sea, 60km off the coast of the Gaza Strip) – Human Rights activists aboard the Free Gaza ship, the SPIRIT OF HUMANITY, today demanded that the Israeli Navy immediately stop threatening them. Read more…

No Comments / Jun 30.09 / My Palestine crush / by yours truly

• My psychological Profiling Via Twitter: http://TweetPsych.com?name=drew3ooo #
• http://pic.gd/f32dfd 1947 – 2009 #
• Setting up another tool to contact Teacher Support at getsatisfaction.com and loving the user experience. Why isn't all the web this cool? #
• Iran state TV tries one ring to rule them all: http://bit.ly/Hqm8l #
• FYI: "Iranian 'intifada' is celebrated in the US, while Palestinians are still ignored" ( http://bit.ly/OCosu ) #

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No Comments / Jun 28.09 / Life is Uncategorized / by yours truly

Simon Larbalestier’s photography featured on a few Pixies albums in the late 80s, early 90s. His photos carry a sort of southof-the border look that lended the alterna surf punk band’s the right imagery to match its sound. Surfa Rosa was my intro to this band which influenced a lot of my music taste since.

Not to mention, being a fan of the music also helped me get away with having this poster on the wall of my room. His work is now for sale here.

His bio at the site is here. Also here is some of his later work in Cambodia and elsewhere, and a lot of talk about buddhism, which sort of reminded me of my favorite photo how-to book, the Tao of Photography. His new stuff still has a lot of the same look and feel of the former, and I think I’ll add them to my list of 99 reasons the Pixies should get back together for more than a one-off track.

No Comments / Jun 27.09 / Good things / by yours truly

According to TweetPsych, I often use twitter to tweet about my various senses, discuss positive sensations and feelings, talk about various cognitive processes like learning, thinking, knowing, etc., talk a lot about jobs and  work, and often tweet about the future. My Social behavior rating is much higher than my moral imerative rating. Some people who think like me include drapetomaniac, werner, Phil_Adams, nickflare and renn.

Somewhat of an interesting web toy, but it analyzes your last 1,000 tweets, a number I’m no where close to yet. Still, the concept of analizing people based on their public content has potential. I doesn’t include a narcissism rating, which I guess must just be a given considering you have to be using Twitter in the first place in order for it to work, and thus think you can distill your Wisdom Tooth like insights into 140 characters to the eternal delight of your impending masses of followers.

According to it’s new site profiler, drew3000.net spends a lot of time talking in the present tense (case in point here) and often makes “references to physically upward movement, Like upstairs, climb, etc.” Hardly Freud, but it’s interesting that psychological analysis is entering the automated stage. Once the web really analizes what people are thinking about based on what we all put online, I think we’ll see a Skynet style response, which you could hardly consider unjustified.

No Comments / Jun 26.09 / InterWeb / by yours truly

Every now and again it’s a good idea to turn on your own just to see what it’s like on the other side. It helps to have something to actually disagree with them over. This post goes over my recent days spent arguing with the “liberal” commenterati (obsessive commenters on websites. A google search tells me I didn’t coin this word. Damn) about the protests in Iran. It wasn’t a pretty time, but it was an interesting one. If it’s not a tech. or nerd site I tend to avoid these areas anymore.

In this case, it’s regarding the ever changing situation in Iran. The battle ground in question is the comment area at Common Dreams, a usually progressive left news site. It was a wholly satisfying experiment. I learned a lot about a lot about the nature of comment areas, their addicting qualities and how quickly the conversation sort of descends into self-parody. I learned something about myself: According to these people I must work for the Mossad or CIA. Read more…

No Comments / Jun 25.09 / Why We Fail / by yours truly

I recently contacted the administrators of parliamentlive.tv to see about getting access to about five minutes of footage from a House of Commons session I wanted to include in a video project.

Being that this was a public proceeding, lacking any sort of national security concerns and having to do with the common good, I thought this should be a fairly simple process. After all, the footage is openly available on a government website. It’s already been filmed, edited and posted. Getting the raw file should be no big deal. As it turns out, however, UK Parliament keeps about as tight a control on its content as the BBC does an episode of Doctor Who.

The response I got back cautioned me that “The situation relating to the use of Proceedings of Parliament on website is very complex.” And while I could freely link to any recording on the Parliament website I wanted to, should I actually choose to host and play a clip anywhere else or combine it with a video project, “this would be possible subject to a number of conditions.” Read more…

No Comments / Jun 24.09 / InterWeb, Pissing me off, Politics is everything, Tech / by yours truly

• Suggests signing up for the cyberbullying forum on TES Connect. See you there! ( http://bit.ly/ajtBe ) #
• FYI: The PDF looks interesting, and no, it’s not a link about portable document format ( http://bit.ly/125v5m ) #
• Show support for democracy in Iran add green overlay to your Twitter avatar with 1-click – http://helpiranelection.com/ #
• Reading: “The Revolution Will Be Tweeted: Activism in the Age of User Generated Content” ( http://bit.ly/PebnB ) #

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No Comments / Jun 21.09 / Life is Uncategorized / by yours truly

It takes a little time to load, but the video below is worth the wait.

No Comments / Jun 21.09 / From Elsewhere / by yours truly

Ring in 2010 and get the year off to a good start by celebrating it in Gaza. Post this banner.

– Via Norman G. Finkelstein.

No Comments / Jun 18.09 / My Palestine crush / by yours truly

This post is being donated to Danny O’Brien, and his very cool ideas using Opera Unite. I add my name to this challenge. Come up with this and I’ll set up and run any needed server space and find the people to promote, disseminate and otherwise flog this in farsi.

Now, over to Brian:

The demo services that Opera offers are great, but they really are just demonstrations. It’s generating a lot of excitement and “wuh?” in equal measure on the discussions I’ve seen, which is something I recognise from my attempts to proselytize the edge to those already excited by the cloud.

It occurred to me (encouraged by Stef) that a great and timely Opera Unite application, just for the next few days, would be a web proxy  for Iranians. Run it on your Opera service, post your machine’s Unite URL onto twitter with a tag #spartacus, and Iran would be drowning in potential proxies to use.

No Comments / Jun 16.09 / From Elsewhere / by yours truly

On July 8 my father’s day present comes into play as we take in an afternoon performance of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot starring Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) at Haymarket Theatre here in London. As a comic, sci-fi geek and Beckett head, it’s about as perfect a storm as it can get. In honor of the occasion, here are some Godot links from around the websosphere:

1) Official website for the haymarket production.

2) Sparknotes (one of many online Cliff’s Notes knockoffs) commentary on the play.

3) Act I of the 2001 Beckett on Film production of Waiting for Godot. There are links on this page to clips of Act II as well, of varying degrees of quality. The entire Channel 4 Beckett collection is worth a look, as well, though.

4) Waiting for Godot… this guy’s philosophy. This fellow goes on quite a tangent about what Waiting for Godot really means.

5) The Barbie (or Ken, actually) edition. This looks like it was, at some point, a brilliant idea. Unfortunately, copyright (f)laws have rendered this one kind of useless. YouTube apparently found that some part of the track infringed on someone’s rights to sell something. Next to the clip it reads: “This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by WMG. The audio has been disabled.”

Because, you know, I get that. Because someone heard three minutes of something on a YouTube video of some people essentially playing with plastic dolls, will decide, “all right then. No need to buy that now, I’ve experienced it to its fullest right here.” Total sense making. Based on all the blatantly stolen stuff you can find on YouTube, I hadn’t previously thought they actually paid attention to copyright. Interesting. If anyone out there knows where a version is with audio still enabled, let me know and I’ll update the link. However, watching it in silent mode is a slightly creepy, surreal way of testing your memory of the lines. Read more…

No Comments / Jul 02.09 / Literary Pretense / by yours truly

The Guardian is compiling a database of missing Iranians, those who have been either abducted or killed by the government. It’s a remarkable graphic display of what people who protest their governments can face and also another example of The Guardian’s great use of flash as an actual educational tool.

This format could be used for a number of other campaigns focusing on the disappeared or massacred.

Hundreds, probably thousands, have been arrested in Iran since the presidential election on 12 June. Human rights and campaign groups such as Human Rights Watch, the Campaign for Human Rights in Iran and Reporters Without Borders have been collecting and publishing the names of those dead or detained.

We have brought those lists, and reports from trusted media sources, into a database that we are asking readers and those elsewhere on the internet to contribute too.

DATA: download the full spreadsheet of the dead and detained

• Can you do something with this data?
Flickr: Please post your visualisations and mash-ups on the Flickr group or email it to datastore@guardian.co.uk

— Iran election: faces of the dead and detained  @ guardian.co.uk.

No Comments / Jul 01.09 / War and Peace / by yours truly

UPDATE: Human rights workers abducted: toys, medical supplies, olive trees confiscated. Get the latest here.

ALL WE WANT IS TO REACH GAZA. WE DO NOT SEEK A CONFRONTATION

Activists aboard Gaza justice boat demand they be allowed to visit their friends & family in besieged Gaza, and deliver their cargo of medical supplies, children’s toys, and reconstruction kits. They invite the world to join them.

(At Sea, 60km off the coast of the Gaza Strip) – Human Rights activists aboard the Free Gaza ship, the SPIRIT OF HUMANITY, today demanded that the Israeli Navy immediately stop threatening them. Read more…

No Comments / Jun 30.09 / My Palestine crush / by yours truly

• My psychological Profiling Via Twitter: http://TweetPsych.com?name=drew3ooo #
• http://pic.gd/f32dfd 1947 – 2009 #
• Setting up another tool to contact Teacher Support at getsatisfaction.com and loving the user experience. Why isn't all the web this cool? #
• Iran state TV tries one ring to rule them all: http://bit.ly/Hqm8l #
• FYI: "Iranian 'intifada' is celebrated in the US, while Palestinians are still ignored" ( http://bit.ly/OCosu ) #

Powered by Twitter Tools.

No Comments / Jun 28.09 / Life is Uncategorized / by yours truly

Simon Larbalestier’s photography featured on a few Pixies albums in the late 80s, early 90s. His photos carry a sort of southof-the border look that lended the alterna surf punk band’s the right imagery to match its sound. Surfa Rosa was my intro to this band which influenced a lot of my music taste since.

Not to mention, being a fan of the music also helped me get away with having this poster on the wall of my room. His work is now for sale here.

His bio at the site is here. Also here is some of his later work in Cambodia and elsewhere, and a lot of talk about buddhism, which sort of reminded me of my favorite photo how-to book, the Tao of Photography. His new stuff still has a lot of the same look and feel of the former, and I think I’ll add them to my list of 99 reasons the Pixies should get back together for more than a one-off track.

No Comments / Jun 27.09 / Good things / by yours truly

According to TweetPsych, I often use twitter to tweet about my various senses, discuss positive sensations and feelings, talk about various cognitive processes like learning, thinking, knowing, etc., talk a lot about jobs and  work, and often tweet about the future. My Social behavior rating is much higher than my moral imerative rating. Some people who think like me include drapetomaniac, werner, Phil_Adams, nickflare and renn.

Somewhat of an interesting web toy, but it analyzes your last 1,000 tweets, a number I’m no where close to yet. Still, the concept of analizing people based on their public content has potential. I doesn’t include a narcissism rating, which I guess must just be a given considering you have to be using Twitter in the first place in order for it to work, and thus think you can distill your Wisdom Tooth like insights into 140 characters to the eternal delight of your impending masses of followers.

According to it’s new site profiler, drew3000.net spends a lot of time talking in the present tense (case in point here) and often makes “references to physically upward movement, Like upstairs, climb, etc.” Hardly Freud, but it’s interesting that psychological analysis is entering the automated stage. Once the web really analizes what people are thinking about based on what we all put online, I think we’ll see a Skynet style response, which you could hardly consider unjustified.

No Comments / Jun 26.09 / InterWeb / by yours truly

Every now and again it’s a good idea to turn on your own just to see what it’s like on the other side. It helps to have something to actually disagree with them over. This post goes over my recent days spent arguing with the “liberal” commenterati (obsessive commenters on websites. A google search tells me I didn’t coin this word. Damn) about the protests in Iran. It wasn’t a pretty time, but it was an interesting one. If it’s not a tech. or nerd site I tend to avoid these areas anymore.

In this case, it’s regarding the ever changing situation in Iran. The battle ground in question is the comment area at Comm