Category Archives: Zombie Posts

Demiurge, Moi?

Today's word is demiurge. I didn't quite know what it meant, so I had to look it up. Answers.com defines as follows:

dem·i·urge (dĕm'ē-ûrj') pronunciation
n.

  1. A powerful creative force or personality.
  2. A public magistrate in some ancient Greek states.
  3. Demiurge
    A deity in Gnosticism, Manichaeism, and other religions who creates the material world and is often viewed as the originator of evil.
  4. Demiurge A Platonic deity who orders or fashions the material world out of chaos.

[Late Latin dēmiurgus, from Greek dēmiourgos, artisan : dēmios, public (from dēmos, people) + ergos, worker (from ergon, work).]

I mention this because someone has called me a “Domain names demiurge” and I think it's brilliant: The people who like my work can think definition one, and those who hate it can think definition three!

I should perhaps explain: although it doesn't seep into this blog much, one of the issues that turns up with some frequency in my academic work has been the regulation of domain names. Some of my articles, especially the ones critical of ICANN, the major institutional actor in this area, have been very controversial, as has some of my online advocacy at ICANNWatch.org.

[Original draft 3/20/2005. In preparation for my blog redesign, I found draft blog posts that somehow never made it to publication. This is one of them.]

2010: Although the link to the blog posting where this happened is no more, or at least not findable by me, I’m pretty sure I didn’t hallucinate it. In any case, it seems appropriate to post this now, as I’ve just put the finishing touches on my latest — and I think last — ICANN-related article (online soon), which is an analysis of the ICANN/US “Affirmation of Commitments”. Of course, I also said that the previous ICANN-related article would be the last. And also the one before that.

Posted in Law: Internet Law, Zombie Posts | Comments Off on Demiurge, Moi?

Annals of Safe Waste Disposal

(A note mainly to myself, but please read along.) As a result of some delayed Spring cleaning…ok, very delayed Spring cleaning…I find I have a number of things to dispose of.

The useful items are going to charities.

Most of the trash I know what to do with.

But I have three classes of toxic waste that take special disposal: batteries, compact fluorescent light bulbs (aka CF bulbs), and a very very old non-functioning laptop.

Radio Shack kindly took the batteries, including the one from the laptop. I removed the hard drive for security. The issue is what to do with the carcass.

Miami-Dade doesn’t make either of these tasks easy. The only place I can find that will take the CF bulbs are the County’s Permanent Home Chemical Collection Centers facilities, which are not exactly next door:

The Centers are located in West Dade at 8831 N.W. 58th Street, and in South Dade at 23707 SW 97th Avenue Gate-B. Normal hours of operation are Wednesday through Sunday, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The web site doesn’t actually say they take CF Bulbs (although this list includes “fluorescent bulbs” generally), but Greener Miami says they will [2010: Archive.org version], and I trust them. (I did try calling the number for the Centers, but gave up after 10 minutes on hold.) [2010: Miami-Dade has changed the Centers’ web site to make clear that they do in fact take CF Bulbs.]

And even if they will take the CF bulbs, they won’t take the electronics. For that I have to go to certain of the Trash & Recycling Centers (the ones marked with a “2″):

  • North Dade 2*
    21500 NW 47 Avenue
  • Norwood
    19901 NW 7 Avenue
  • Palm Springs North 2*
    7870 NW 178 Street
  • West Little River 2*
    1830 NW 79 Street
  • Golden Glades 1, 2*
    140 NW 160 Street
  • Sunset Kendall 2*
    8000 SW 107 Avenue
  • Snapper Creek 1, 3*
    2200 SW 117 Avenue
  • Richmond Heights
    14050 Boggs Drive
  • Chapman Field 3, 4*
    13600 SW 60 Avenue
  • Eureka Drive 2*
    9401 SW 184 Street
  • West Perrine 2*
    16651 SW 107 Ave
  • Moody Drive 1, 2*
    12970 SW 268 Street
  • South Miami Heights
    20800 SW 117 Court

Sigh.

[Original draft 9/3/2008. In preparation for my blog redesign, I’ve been going through draft blog posts that somehow never made it to publication. This is one of them.]

2010: I still have the light bulbs somewhere.  And as I’m doing another round of cleaning now, the piles of toxics are likely to grow.

Posted in Miami, Zombie Posts | 3 Comments

Attrapé

Yahoo Groupes (sic) is unhappy with me:

Votre navigateur n’accepte pas les cookies. Pour afficher cette page, vous devez modifier les préférences de votre navigateur pour qu’il accepte les cookies. (Code 0)

And it’s true too.

Somehow “Votre navigateur n’accepte pas les cookies” seems like amazing Franglais. This is why I wonder if I still speak French sometimes: The language has borrowed so much English that it has left me behind.

When I go to France, I sometimes wonder if people think I sound like someone speaking Edwardian English. If I could only convince myself the effect was Shakespearean …

[Original draft 1/15/10. As part of my blog redesign, I’ve been going through draft blog posts that somehow never made it to publication. This is one of them.]

Posted in Internet, Zombie Posts | 4 Comments

Other Places, Other Lives

Outpost Nine :: Editorials :: I am a Japanese School Teacher (2010: Linkrot — archive.org version is here):

In August 2003 I moved to Kyoto, Japan as a part of the JET program. I am an assistant language teacher in three Jr. High schools. The experience has been…interesting to say the least.

One of the cool things about the Internet is the window it gives you into other lives–although one certainly could suggest here that the window is more into the life of the writer than into the life of the Japanese students he writes about.

I sometimes think that in the long run, one of the major things this medium will do for us is make new sorts of national and international connections more common. A few years ago, I suggested that,

The Blogosphere is young, but it shows some signs of potentially evolving into a miniature public sphere of its own, a sphere of shared interests rather than shared geography. Conceivably, the rise of a Blog culture, even one composed primarily of nonpolitical, wholly personal diaries, may enrich the public sphere. The impulse to read some Blogs may not be that different from the impulse that brings viewers to soap operas, but the experience of regularly encountering another person’s diary, of following along in a stranger’s life, might have value. If it encourages readers to identify with someone different from themselves, it encourages them to attempt “the intellectual exercise of viewing life from the perspective of others — to try to walk in each others’ shoes, to respect each other enough to engage in honest discourse, and to recognize in each other basic rights so as to create sufficient autonomy to make the discourse possible.” That encouragement is only part of what is needed for discourse ethics to flourish, but it is a start.

It’s an optimistic, perhaps unrealistic, hope, but it connects to some important theoretical commitments and aspirations,

If a social and legal system reproduces itself in a way that disables honest discourse among citizens, then it deserves to be criticized: it is not legitimate, and is potentially evil. A Hobbesian predator’s value system is more than just repulsive to outsiders — it is substantively invalid in terms of discourse ethics because by putting such heightened value on short-term selfish material gain and so little value on the needs or rights of anyone other than the individual, it prevents the victims of that worldview from engaging in the very discourse that might allow them to learn why they are making themselves so miserable. In contrast, a social system that encourages citizens to embark on the intellectual exercise of viewing life from the perspective of others — to try to walk in each others’ shoes, to respect each other enough to engage in honest discourse, and to recognize in each other basic rights so as to create sufficient autonomy to make dis-course possible — is on the path to legitimate lawmaking. Such a society enjoys at least a relative legitimacy, even if the rules in place today are not the ones that discourse theory would demand.

It may seem absurd to connect any of this to the author of Outpost Nine, an American guy dodging Japanese school children who he claims want to do unspeakable things to him in the hallways. He doesn’t quite seem up to bearing all this freight, or even much of it. But in the end, we’re all in it together.

[Original draft 5/10/2006. As part of my blog redesign, I’ve been going through draft blog posts that somehow never made it to publication. This is one of them.]

2010: The links in this piece all seem to be dead, at least as far as the teacher’s diary is concerned, and replaced with uninteresting ‘editorials’ about his love life. Which is sort of a shame, as the stuff about Japanese schoolchildren was, modulo unreliable narrator, a window into a very foreign world. I’m posting it anyway, (with a link to archive.org for those who care about (alleged) weirdness in Japanese schools) as the parts about the Internet reflect what I was thinking about in 2006, and still gnaw on today.

Posted in Internet, Zombie Posts | 3 Comments

Stop Windows from Copying Files Accidentally When Ctrl-Click Selecting

Fixing Annoyances: Stop Windows from Copying Files Accidentally When Ctrl-Click Selecting :: the How-To Geek

[Original draft 5/10/2008. In preparation for my blog redesign, I’ve been going through draft blog posts that somehow never made it to publication. This is one of them.]

2010: Since I implemented this fix, I’ve never had the problem again.

Posted in Software, Zombie Posts | 2 Comments

I So Don’t Do This Networking Stuff

How to Save the World, a blog I generally like, has a repulsive essay, The Ten Keys To Effective Networking.

The item is repulsive in part because it credibly argues that careers are furthered by treating people as means rather then ends, by selling yourself in a soundbite, and the display and exchange of favors. I’m fine with the exchange of favors stuff — I’m not that much of an ivory tower guy — and I understand that there are times in life when you have to sell. But the idea that you “prune your networks” (abandon people who are not useful), and “understand that every conversation is an implicit contract” (nothing can be abstractly interesting?) is just too much like what I least liked about living in Washington D.C.

And yes, there are a bunch of neat people I’ve met over the years that I wish I kept up with. Life just gets in the way.

[Original draft 3/21/2004. As part of my blog redesign, I’ve been going through draft blog posts that somehow never made it to publication. This is one of them.]

2010: I was reminded of this last night: we went to a very swanky law school event at an large and quite elegant home some small ways south of here. The guest list was studded with important people and large donors.   I didn’t recognize many of them, and ran away from one of the few I did — a right-wing local congressperson — since it seemed like an occasion where I should be polite.   We spoke to a few people we knew.  We went home.

Posted in Readings, Zombie Posts | 6 Comments