Stickboy, I support you having a picture of yourself but this picture doesn't do you justice. You look way hotter in real life. Does anyone else agree with this? Support yourself and change the pic.



On another note, we saw everyone out at the pink tonight and I did a ton of advertising. I finally handed out the flyers that I was embarrassed to hand out. I thought they were the worst graphic design I ever made, but I only had a photocopier to work with so give me some credit. Here is the color original.



Jill, Teres, Mike, and I spent the night advertising via chalk which lead to a night of advertising with flyers and markers. I hope someone reading this decides to start a journal, chalk advertisment is now a choice for your sign up referral.



I love for mobile blogging. I wish my cell phone cam only had a flash. I guess I could carry and external one around but it seems impractical. I would be the first to buy a cell phone cam with a flash.

Southern Yankee found her hottest man in pink at the pink and he walked her home? I hope so at least. Maybe they will watch some space porn?

By the way Stickboy and Keith, I think you know each other from a weird towing experience. Maybe you can meet up and figure it out.

Tonight we went to Merlins on the corner of Breckenridge and Elmwood in celebration of the new spell checking capabilities on the site.



We ordered 2 dozen steamer clams and corn on the cob. It looks tasty, as you can see below.



On the wall there is an award and article about Merlins being chosen as the Artvoice reader's choice clam bar, I agree, accept for the wait. I bet the wait would be easier if we were drinking like everybody else.




Big clams are better than little ones, they fill you up. They also have snow crab legs, a bunch of different types of oysters, shrimp, lobster
dainties, clams casino, oysters rockefeller, and dungeness crab.

As they say in Germany. "it tastes."

A lot of you seem concerned about adding entries or reading the site while at work. That is why I created the email system a couple weeks ago. The email system allow you to both read the last ten journal entries or post a journal entry including attached pictures using only your email. This looks a lot less scandalous than the web. For instructions, check out the Info page, which shows up every time you log into the site. Or simply click here [inlink]info,7[/inlink].

I am so glad that i spent about 12 hours straight developing the spell check. I am so angry that the stupid ISP could not install the pspell libraries for PHP.



I was tired of waiting though, as I requested it about 3 months ago, so I went ahead and built my own spell checking class and functions. I assembled about 400,000 english words into a mysql database dictionary, and you'll can add to it, using the spell check function. For instructions see the most current news article [inlink]news,319[/inlink]

I was searching through google news, which lead me to CNN which lead me to an article on blogging and a blog by the very famous japanese techy, Joi Ito I was interested in seeing what his blog was like and what he had to say abou internet communication.

BLOG 1 front page - an email from Steve Kurtz to Joi Ito and his response. I will mirror it here because it will surely be gone someday when we try and look back on what happend. You can alos read it at Joi Ito Site

VERBATIM COPY FROM JOI ITO BLOG

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Email from artist suspected by FBI of bioterrorism
08:25 JST

Art - Health and Medicine - US Policy and Politics

In the comments on an earlier post on this blog about an artist suspected by the FBI of bioterrorism, there was a great deal of speculation about the incident and the facts.

I emailed the artist, Steven Kurtz, asking him for the facts, and here is his reply.

Steve Kurtz

Hi Joi,

Its a long and complex story.

To shorten it:

I was detained for 22 hours by the FBI/

They seized my wife's body, house, cat and car. These items were released a week later. In the house they seized computers, science equipment, chunks of my library, teaching files, I-D, and all my research for a new book.

The only thing I have gotten back is my wife's birth certificate

On Sunday, two members of CAE got summons to appear before a Grand Jury. (This is bad. It means I will be charged. Grand Jury is a closed court--only the FBI gets to present its case).

The Grand Jury will meet on June 15. In all proabability, I will be arrested shortly thereafter.

Best,
Steve/CAE

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ITO's RESPONSE
Many people talked to me about this incident and strongly support the FBI's position on this. I still don't know enough details on the FBI's handling of the matter, but I DO think biotech as art is a legitimate form of art. At Ars Electronica, we did a whole festival on Life Science as art. Artists, including Steve, publish their works, talk about the impact, and often teach. Terrorists do not.

One famous example of biotech art is the bioluminescent rabbit created by genetic engineering, adding genes from a jellyfish to a rabbit to make it glow in the dark. This created a great deal of controversy and debate. It was the intention of the artist to cause this debate with an extremely tangible project.

I believe this form of expression is important and mistaking artistic expression for something else is a great risk to society. However, I suppose it would be prudent for artists to be aware of the risks involved in handling the "supplies" they use for their art.


It's kind of sad that he chose to use the Glow Rabbit as his example of biogenetic art after we heard the CAE people denounce it as fetishist at the Collaborrative Networks conference.