Last week:
Lennon Remembers has been in my pile of books longer than anything else (with the possible exception of The Power Broker and Mason & Dixon†). Kim got it for me in a second-floor used book store on the Upper West Side about 7 years ago and I just finished reading it. The book is a long interview with John, Yoko and a Rolling Stone reporter conducted in December 1970 soon after the Beatles had broken up.
I used to be a huge Beatles fan (I cared enough to get very upset that the Anthology albums didn’t include “Watching Rainbows“, “Sour Milk Sea” or some other good bootleg songs). I also tend to be an apologist for Paul, so it was interesting to hear what John said about him — specifically that he was a bastard and an egomaniac.
To be fair, John said as much for other people too, including himself. Some quotes:
The Beatles were the biggest bastards on earth.
People like me are aware of their so-called genius at ten, eight, nine… I never forgave her [his Auntie] for not treating me like a fuckin’ genius or whatever I was, when I was a child.
…I can knock the Beatles, but don’t let Mick Jagger knock them. Because I would like to just list what we did and what the Stones did two months after, on every fuckin’ album and every fuckin’ thing we did.
There are other interesting things in there, so read through it if you like the Beatles.
Next, I’m going to read a book called Green Centuries that my mom gave to me.
* The last three words in the book are “scrapbook of madness.” The full quote is:
Q. Do you have a picture of “when I’m 64″?
A. No, no. I hope we’re a nice old couple living off the coast of Ireland or something like that—looking at our scrapbook of madness.
† I just haven’t been in the mood for over 1,100 pages of Robert Moses or almost 800 pages of Thomas Pynchon’s version of pre-Revolutionary America. Go figure.
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I just finished reading David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster. I enjoyed it, but I had to resist the urge to go and look up each word I didn’t know when I was reading (since there were many, many of them). To give some examples, I did pick out a few words to look up:
I also looked up heliogabaline and discovered that he is not just using obscure words but is also making words up. I’m all for creating new words*, but it certainly breaks my habit of looking words up in the dictionary when those words aren’t in the dictionary.
Up next, Lennon Remembers.
* Many years ago I contributed a couple of new words to the Pseudodictionary — tonguewater and skimper. I was Googling around to find the links to those and found out that the Urban Dictionary has a much different definition for skimper than I had.
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Last week I continued working on several projects that aren’t quite done yet, but I should have at least one or two things wrapped up soon. I’ve been helping put together some updates for the Foundation section of www.mozilla.org and have also been researching and thinking about some non-profit management issues.
One of the research projects involves looking into tools that might be useful for the Foundation. There is a lot of non-profit related open source software available, although it seems that many of these projects are no longer active or are not mature yet. CiviCRM looks promising and I’d be interested to get feedback from people who have used this before. What did you like about it? What features were missing that you would have liked to have?
At mozdev we just updated the way we track project activity to make it easier for people to find projects that are currently under development. I think the breakdown of project activity is interesting, so I wanted to share some of the details.
There are over 1600 projects hosted on mozdev and
If you haven’t been to mozdev recently, take a look through some of these lists to see what people are working on.
Note: The totals have been updated to reflect a fix to a bug we just found that was counting new projects created before 2004 as inactive.
There’s not much of an update for my Mozilla Foundation work last week since I’m in the middle of several things that aren’t done yet. It was an active week for mozdev though, so I’ll give a status update on what has been going on there recently.
I just finished reading Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. It covered a range of different space topics and I found it interesting to see how much has changed since the book came out in 1994. He talks about one day landing a probe on Titan, for instance.
At the beginning of each chapter is also a quote pulled from a wide range of different places. I scanned back through after finishing and it seems that more quotes came from Moby Dick than anywhere else. I was forced to read that book in high school and I only remember long digressions about the origin and use of ambergris. It’s one of those books I probably would have enjoyed if I had read it by choice, so I think I might go back and read it again.
For reference, those quotes were:
Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn.
The great floodgates of the wonder-world swung open.
It’s too late to make any improvements now. The universe is finished; the copestone is on, and the chips were carted off a million years ago.
(To somehow bring the space and Melville threads together, I wanted to see if there was a constellation of a whale. Turns out that there is and it is called Cetus.)
There was one other non-whale-related quote that I liked and wanted to include in this post. It is from Rainer Maria Rilke:
Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,
To give up customs one barely had time to learn.
I think I’m done reading space books for a while. Next up, a collection of essays* by David Foster Wallace.
* The one with the piece about lobsters, not the one with the piece
about cruises.
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When the Firefox New York Times ad came out a few years ago, I was working at an online ad agency in New York. I got a copy and hung it up in my cube where people passing by would see it. This also prompted the person sitting next to me to start a Mozilla vs. IE war in the tech department.
I got back in touch with this person recently and I’m happy to say that he’s seen the light. He not only uses Firefox, Thunderbird and Sunbird now, but he also just posted his first extension on AMO. It is a coupon notifier that shows you if the site you are on has any offers available. I don’t think I really need free shipping on a $250 order from the Diaper Cake Depot, but it’s cool knowing that it’s there.
I like reading about space topics in general, but I’m particularly interested in issues related to open source software and alternative energy. I recently came across information about each of these that I wanted to share.
This article mostly talks about the free and open source software that is used by NASA in its missions and on the ground. There is a little information about NASA contributing bug fixes and features back to the community, but the article explains that this often runs counter to existing government contracting rules.
This blog is part of a National Security Space Office study on the feasibility of space solar power. This concept has been looked at several times in the past, but there are big challenges with the technology. There are big potential payoffs though, so it is certainly something to take seriously. I did some research on this a few years ago and wrote Whatever happened to solar power satellites?
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I was traveling for most of the last couple of weeks and got behind on posting status updates, so this will cover the last three weeks.
Week of July 20
Week of July 27
Week of August 3
You are currently browsing the davidwboswell blog archives for August, 2007.
