September 2006 archive

Science Fiction Short Story: 'Picnic'

Finally, the big publication event. I present to you: free culture, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license, which I think is the best CC license.
Related background/promotional posts:

Part 1: Free Culture?
Part 2: Free Culture: An "Inside the Slush Pile" Exclusive!
Elsewhere: Now available at manybooks.net in a variety of formats!

Remember, this is all for [...]

Free Culture: An 'Inside the Slush Pile' Exclusive!

In the first installment of this series, I promised to lend my keen insight to a comparison between the old print publishing business and the new online publishing business. What qualifies me to perform this service? Well, I have limited experience in the traditional publishing industry, having garnered forty-two rejections on five [...]

Metapost: So close, yet so far...

I was so close to having the next installment of the free culture publication series ready to post for you tonight, but it needs some work, and I need to go to bed and get up early for work tomorrow. Too many people know about this thing for me to call in sick on [...]

Getting Images to Display in a FeedBurner Feed and Some Hasty Thoughts on Free Software

I'm trying out FeedBurner for managing my feeds and for email subscriptions. (See: New! In the right sidebar under the syndication links.) It was pretty easy to start using with the help of this WordPress FeedBurner plugin for redirecting the RSS and Atom feeds to FeedBurner. My initial impression of their service [...]

Free Culture?

I have some free culture I'd like to share with you. Written culture. A previously unpublished science fiction short story, by me. "No, thanks," you say. "That's the problem with the web. Any idiot can publish his adjective-laden tripe. If it was any good, someone would have paid you [...]

Metapost

I'm stealing from the Comics Curmudgeon, although maybe he just stole the concept from someone else in turn. He differentiates his on-topic material (skewering the funny pages) from miscellaneous housekeeping chit-chat by labeling the chit-chat as metaposts. I like it as an early warning that you're not getting the advertised goods. It's [...]

Eeyore is Dead

Originally published in Free Software Magazine.

No, not Winnie-the-Pooh's friend, but that computer I mentioned last week. Do you feel cheated? Maybe you were expecting a murder mystery instead? Although Eeyore the donkey seems more like the died-of-natural-causes type. Let me briefly eulogize Eeyore the computer before wandering erratically to a new subject: copyright control.
Eeyore-the-Computer is [...]

StarTribune isn't del.icio.us

I mentioned in a previous post that seeing the "Save to del.icio.us" link on the Minneapolis StarTribune web site was one of the things that nudged me in to paying more attention to del.icio.us.

In addition to promoting their articles, I think the Strib would like to be new and trendy. Hey, kids! Look! [...]

Ubuntu for Web Surfing and Spreadsheets

Originally published in Free Software Magazine as Moving to freedom, one step at a time.

Time to get on with the move. Giving up Windows is like kicking a drug habit. It's easier to take the path of least resistance and keep using. If quitting proprietary software was a twelve step program--although let's [...]

Blogging for 'Free Software Magazine'

Tony Mobily and Dave Guard over at Free Software Magazine kindly invited me to start a blogging account there. I'm scheduled for Mondays and today you can read my first entry, Moving to Freedom, One Step at a Time. (Unless they saw what I wrote and decided to bury it :-)
If you found [...]