 Friday, January 17, 2003
It's Barbie on the Phone
"Who's that on the phone? If Mattel gets its way, it'll be Barbie, calling girls everywhere with personalized phone messages to celebrate special occasions. The latest invention from the toy giant is pre-recorded greetings from Barbie, whose phone calls can be ordered from Barbie.com to wish girls a happy birthday or happy holidays. Some personalized greetings even include the girl's name, and the time, date and location of the call can be specified for either the same day or up to one year in advance." [infoSync]
So it turns out that the company across the street, Productions Plus, is the temporary headquarters for the 32-foot peanut. It just started showing up one day. They said it opens, but they couldn't open it for us, and they didn't have any peanuts. Still, how many people can say they've had their picture taken with the largest peanut in the world. :-)
Renaissance Now: Save the Public Domain!
"In Eldred v. Ashcroft (previous story), the United States Supreme Court decided that the 'limited times' clause in the US constitution should not be taken all too literally. Copyright is now, for all practical purposes, perpetual. Perhaps, if a prolific young writer of your childhood died in a tragic accident immediately after writing his first book, you might actually live to see the release of a 'contemporary' work into the public domain. Copyright is 'life of the author plus 70 years'.
We may have lost a battle, but we can still win the war. With Larry Lessig's blessing, I have set up a mailing list (and associated wiki page) devoted to the specific issue of international copyright term reform. This is an issue we can all agree on. This is a cause we can rally around. This is where we can prove if this Internet thing can really make a difference or not. We have to try." [kuro5hin.org]
Also, today's ZDNet AnchorDesk explains why you need to fight for your right to copy music, movies, and over at Salon, Siva Vaidhyanathan asks after the copyright smackdown: what next?.
Get Paid to Buy a Cell Phone
"Amazon continues to offer amazing deals on cell phones (via rebates). They'll pay you to buy this Sony Ericsson T68i Phone! It's a $299.99 phone with a $300 rebate (upon service activation), meaning you pocket a sweet penny at the end of the transaction. The phone is nice-looking too: color display, Bluetooth, GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) for mobile Internet connectivity, and it 'is the first phone to support MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service), allowing you to send images, animation, and sound clips in your messages.' Best move fast on this one though, the rebates expire January 27, 2003. [via Dennis Mahoney]" [megnut]
This may finally push me into a new phone and cell contract. I'm having to physically move away from the computer now so that I don't go buy this phone right this minute!!
"iVia is an open source Internet subject portal or virtual library system. As a hybrid expert and machine built collection creation and management system, it supports a primary, expert-created, first-tier collection that is augmented by a large, second-tier collection of significant Internet resources that are automatically gathered and described. iVia has been developed by and is the platform for INFOMINE, a scholarly virtual library collection of over 26,000 librarian-created and 80,000 plus machine-created records describing and linking to academic Internet resources.
The software enables institutions to work cooperatively or individually to provide well-organized, virtual library collections of metadata descriptions of Internet and other resources, as well as rich full-text harvested from these resources. iVia is powerful, flexible and customizable to the needs of single or multiple institutions. It is designed to help virtual libraries scale. This article describes the results of the last four years of work on iVia as funded by the National Leadership grant program of the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (U.S. Department of Education), and the Library of the University of California, Riverside.
A more detailed description of this software is available in the January 2003 D-Lib Magazine at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january03/mitchell/01mitchell.html.
All are welcome to use this software. Projects interested in working together or collaborating on co-development of systems or virtual library collection content building should contact Steve Mitchell, Project Director, at smitch@ucrac1.ucr.edu."
This is interesting - I'll have to try to look at the description later, though.
The Bad News: My Sony Clie N710c has died. Normally I would cheer and exchange it under the warranty for a newer NX-70 (without the camera), but then I won't be able to use a keyboard with it and I take all of my meeting notes that way. I think the problem is actually software-related, not hardware, which means I probably have to start over from scratch and re-install everything. So far BackupBuddy has been no help because whatever file is corrupted was backed up. Sigh.
The Good News: The National Peanut Tour is back! Except that the truck is now hidden behind a building and we can't see it. The folks in the computer room think I'm on drugs, imagining a 32-foot peanut, so I need proof. If we can find it, I think Kate and I are going to take some pictures and get us some peanuts!
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