Today is Bloomsday, and in fact is the 100th bloomsday, the day that is the day James Joyce's Ulysses takes place.

I read Ulysses years ago, liked it but I'm sure I didn't get as much out of it as I could have. It took me 8 months, and I was pushing it even at that.

However one passage from it has stuck with me lucidly ever since, furnishing me with a phrase I repeat to myself often when appropriate it. I don't quite remember the context, some moment when Leopold Bloom is thinking about all the people that die every day around the world, and he says "shoving them under doublequick"... or something like that. Such a powerful, but brutally simple, thought.

This article explains how to use your iPod to make a pirate radio station.

There's lots of great ideas for what to do with such a portable FM transmitter. One of my favorite is:

We usually keep a couple tracks of silence ready to go, ever get stuck at a stop light for like 10 minutes and the dude in the next car is blasting the radio? With the super easy iPod interface you can quickly get to the station he

• steev's blog

Ok I know I just blogged about Mark Morford the other day but this particular column of his is really extragreat. doubleplusgood. He is my new favorite writer ever. Well, not really, but he's so freaking great, so clever and zillion miles an hour and cynical and yet so idealistic and outraged, he's like if Mark Leyner wrote for a newspaper and was really really angry all the time.

But the good thing about this particular installment of his column is that it ends happy. It basically says, let's be optimistic and happy, no matter how bad things seem to be, because to just be stressed out and fearful and angry and paranoid all the time will destroy us.

And that's an important thing to remember.

Chris Bowers brings us a great rant on Iraq.

Today for the first time, my blog started getting spammed. How freaking lame. Like I don't have enough trouble with email spam. Luckily, I know SQL and it was fairly simple to just go into the mySQL shell and mass-delete all the spam comments. But I also looked around for some methods of preventing blog spam, and I foung this handy article,
"Seven quick tips for a spam-free blog". I've done 2 of them already. Hopefully this doesn't become a huge problem...

This column by Mark Morford about behavior modifying drugs is really freaking great. It has this totally biting, barbed, super-sarcastic, laser-focused blast of invective style to it. I really love it. Read it.

Godammit, i fucking HATE it when i have to listen to somebody sitting in a cafe talking on their damn mobile at elevated volumes, and even worse is what happened just now, when 2 of the jackasses where doing it. It would be hilarious if it weren't so annoying, 2 people sitting together at table, both talking on their cellphones, yelling into their phones, actually. I mean, it wouldn't be that bad if they would at least talk in a normal tone of voice, but so many people have this "HI!! YOU PROBABLY CAN'T HEAR ME CUZ YOU'RE ON THE PHONE WITH ME! SO I'LL TALK LOUDER" way of speaking.

The other day, walking into this same cafe and seeing all the wireless laptop wankers, I felt slightly annoyed, in that "and I'm one of them" kind of way. And I wondered if cafe laptops were the new mobile phones, in terms of people being annoyed and having contempt for them as a symbol of yuppie affluent lifestyle, now that mobile phones are used by everyone of all classes everywhere. But laptops will never, ever be as annoying as mobile phones. you don't yell into your fucking laptop, even if you're an asshole. grrrr....

This article about wireless access points that run linux is pretty interesting. Lots of semi-utopian (capitalist-utopian) ideas about what to do with the things. But the point is that they are what Cringely, the author, calls a "disruptive technology." Cell phones, personal computers, and the internet itself are other examples of disruptive technologies. Yes.

The thing he fails to mention is that disruptions caused by disruptive technologies are not always a good thing. Nuclear fission is another disruptive techology. The powered looms that spawned the Luddites was another. The list could go on. It's like the assumption that all change is good that so many new economy business gurus preached. uh uh....

It brings to mind one of my favorite Marcuse quotes:

"The traditional notion of the 'neutrality' of technology can no longer be maintained."
-Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man

(thanx matisse)

So I just found out about this rather promiscuous female blogger who worked in DC for a Republican Senator from Ohio. She blogged about her quite active sex life, juggling 6 different men. Not only did she fuck a lot of men in a short time but some of them were paying her to do it. Eventually she was fired, supposedly for "misuse of office equipment" (she posted to her blog from her office computer). Read more>>>