Set up my GeoURL last night. Eventually that’ll go in the ego block. Err, once I get back to working on the blog. After I finish some other projects.

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword, by Eddan Katz is great. [CC Public Domain]

Reproduced in its entirety:

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword*

You will not be able to stay home, dear Netizen.

You will not be able to plug in, log on and opt out.

You will not be able to lose yourself in Final Fantasy,

Or hold your Kazaa download queues,

Because revolution is not an AOL Keyword.

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.

Revolution will not be brought to you on Hi-Def TV

Encrypted with a warning from the FBI.

Revolution will not have a jpeg slideshow of Dubya

Calling the cattle and leading the incursion by

Secretary Rumsfeld, General Ashcroft and Dick Cheney

Riding nuclear warheads on their way to Iraq,

Or North Korea, or Iran.

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.

Revolution will not be powered by Microsoft on

The Next-Generation Secure Computing Base

And will not star Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee

Or Larry Lessig and Martha Stewart.

Revolution will not promise penile enlargement.

Revolution will not get rid of spam.

Revolution will not earn you up to $5000 a month

Working from home, because revolution is not

An AOL Keyword, Brother.

There will be no screen grabs of you and

Jeeves the Butler one-click shopping at My Yahoo,

Or outbidding a shady grandma on eBay for

That refurbished iPod 20-gig.

MSNBC.com will not predict election results in Florida

Or fact-check the Drudge Report.

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.

There will be no webcast of Wil Wheaton boxing

Barney the Dinosaur on the dancefloor at DNA.

There will be no mob- or wiki- blog of Richard Stallman

Strolling through Redmond in a medieval robe and halo

As St. iGNUcious of the Church of Emacs

That he has been saving

For just the proper occasion.

Survivor, The Osbournes, and Joe Millionaire

Will no longer be so damned relevant, and

People will not care if Carrie hooks up again with

Mr. Big on Sex and the City because Information

Wants To Be Free even while Knowledge Is Power.

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.

There will be no final pictures from inside the

World Trade Center in the instant replay.

There will be no final pictures from inside the

World Trade Center in the instant replay.

There will be no RealVideo of 2600-reading,

Linux-booting white hat hacktivists

And Mickey Mouse in the public domain.

The theme song will not be written by Jack Valenti or

Hilary Rosen, nor sung by Metallica, Dr. Dre,

Christina Aguilera, Matchbox 20, or Blink-182.

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.

Revolution will not be right back after

Pop-up ads about eCommerce, eTailers, or eContent.

You will not have to worry about a

Cookie in your browser, a bug in your email, or a

Worm in your recycling bin.

Revolution will not run faster with Intel inside.

Revolution, dude, is not getting a Dell.

Revolution will increase your Google rank.

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword, is not an AOL Keyword,

Is not an AOL Keyword, is not an AOL Keyword.

Revolution will be no stream or download, dear Netizen;

Revolution must still be live.

*See generally Gil Scott-Heron, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

kindall has a great post on mefi that summarizes the history of synthesizers. I remember being pretty blown away by the Korg Z1 when I heard it (one of the earlier physical modelling synths). This was back in the day when I dabbled in audio gear.

Related: Wikipedia: Synthesizer, the history of electronic music, SLSR – Synthesis and Modelling Resources

This is amazingly cool. Corey and Charlie Stross are collaborating on another story (see Jury Service), and they’re writing it online using MT. See the blog for Unwirer, A short story collaboration by Cory Doctorow and Charlie Stross.

This would actually probably be more interesting in a wiki/bliki, if there were one with good visual diffs and time-based playback.

Wow, this is so awesomely catty. Harks back to the good old days in comp.infosystems.www. Thanks to Simon for the pointer. I added my two cents.

Hmm, based upon the websites, if you were a prospective student, which would you rather go to?

• USC School of Fine Arts
• Rhode Island School of Design

One of these sites isn’t designing to its audience. See also: Aesthetics and Usability: A Look at Color and Balance, IBM relates Perceived Usability to the Real Thing. Snide remark: what good are blue links if you’re going to force the page width to 950 pixels? [actually there’s no strong relationship; try 2: what good are blue links if it looks hideous?]

Related Sites: GUUUI – The Interaction Designer’s Coffee Break, InfoDesign, Usability Views, cityofsound/blog, antenna, brightly colored food, Bloug, In My Experience

Tim Robbins, National Press Club, Washington DC, April 15, 2003:

I imagined our leaders seizing upon this moment of unity in America, this moment when no one wanted to talk about Democrat versus Republican, white versus black, or any of the other ridiculous divisions that dominate our public discourse. I imagined our leaders going on television telling the citizens that although we all want to be at Ground Zero, we can’t, but there is work that is needed to be done all over America. Our help is needed at community centers to tutor children, to teach them to read. Our work is needed at old-age homes to visit the lonely and infirmed; in gutted neighborhoods to rebuild housing and clean up parks, and convert abandoned lots to baseball fields.

Of course, the rest of the speech goes on to outline how wrong things have gone. And well, he’s right, of course. I was speaking about this with a friend about this a few weeks ago while I was feeling particularly frustrated and helpless. There are more and better ways to make a difference than screaming into the storm. Less talking, more doing.

Thanks for Nothing: Bush’s gift to taxpayers—and Halliburton.

But this is nation-building Republican-style, with huge contracts awarded in secret to politically connected companies. They now say that the “emergency” oil-field contract to Halliburton, formerly run by Vice President Dick Cheney—and, gosh, who would have predicted that Iraq’s oil fields might need to be repaired after a war?—is only worth $600 million, not the $7 billion originally reported. I suppose we should be grateful for that.

Insects thrive on GM ‘pest-killing’ crops

They fed resistant larvae of the diamondback moth – an increasingly troublesome pest in the southern US and in the tropics – on normal cabbage leaves and ones that had been treated with a Bt toxin. The larvae eating the treated leaves grew much faster and bigger – with a 56 per cent higher growth rate.

Defense agency pulls OpenBSD funding:

About $1 million had been allotted to add new security features to OpenBSD, an open-source OS that many consider to be the most secure free implementation of a Unix-like system. The project had finished most of the work in the first three months of the grant and had been recently using the money to fund more security enhancements to the software, de Raadt said at a recent security conference.

…

Earlier this week, de Raadt said he was told that officials from DARPA were concerned about statements appearing in press reports that indicated most of the grant was being funneled to foreign researchers, an apparent no-no for government-funded projects. Moreover, de Raadt believed that the U.S. government took exception to comments he made indicating that the money spent on his project meant that fewer cruise missiles were being built.