In 6th grade I was kicked out of the Catholic church and CCD in my hometown for drawing cat butts in the CCD workbooks and asking provocative questions in class. But it was the cat butt that pushed me over the limit...

Sarah and I are playing with Google a lot these days. I just started playing around with the Google Web API and created this Google Poem Generator. Check it out here:


Have fun with it...

I wanted to make a banner for (e:strip), so I thought, well, who should be on it except the president? Of course! So I made him good and porky and put it into the banner. But then it got little and I thought I'd post the bigger version. Took me about 20 minutes to make the president fat like this... whee! No clone, stamp, or brush tools used...

Wow, drop out for a week and the whole world goes topsy-turvy. I just got the whole rundown from Paul the other night, and I have to say that on the one hand I'm incredibly shocked at some folks' vindictive behavior, and on the other hand, it's just like the Internet. While I don't discount the technical hassle of dealing with trolls (people out to start problems on a website or forum), I do wonder about the appropriate ways to deal with this. Of course, I'm not writing this to criticize anything, simply to engage the issue...

Andy Cline wrote this great essay that used to be available on his website ( ). Unfortunately, it looks like he's left that school and the document is unavailable.

I'll summarize based on an essay I wrote discussing his approach. He endorsed the Platonic (read: Socratic) approach to dealing with flames and inappropriate posts on class-based discussion groups. I think the same principles can work here. If (e:s) is a site based on building community and social interaction, then the Socratic method of questioning the offending poster could be of some use. The idea is that the group self-censures based on group desire. Rather than deleting or ignoring an inflammatory post, the poster is questioned by members of the group until they either give a legitimate explanation of their view (hard to do in cases of pure trolling) or else they will eventually recant in the face of group pressure.

I'm not saying that this approach can satisfy all situations. And there is the possibility that a more technically savvy attack could be executed against (e:s) in response to topics posted here, and then the Socratic method isn't going to be of much help. But I think it's useful to contemplate all forms of dealing with issues; not just technical restrictions, but group behaviors we could work to develop, too...

my $.02...

They're coming up -- woot! OK, Paul wanted me to post a link to Pleix (http://www.pleix.net), but then it was down when I checked it. Usually it's up, and these folks make super rad videos... Paul should check out the Futureshock video, which is a video for a song by Atmosphere. Has anyone else checked out Seven's Travels? It's good stuff...

"Ground control to Major Tom: We found a hole in your theory and we named it Shawn."

Must learn Unix better... But that's another story. I'm thinking about rebuilding a box into a media server using the ClarkConnect Linux ISO (http://www.clarkconnect.org). Anyone got any experience with this?