Sam Wilson's Journal

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This is the complete archive for the Reading Category. [Show full posts]

How thoughtful of Nature to not be disturbed by people. It was near to the ship, and there Mr. Broadhurst found the traces of two distinct camps, which nearly a century and a half had not obliterated. Indentations were still apparent in the ground made by the feet of the company while moving, in the [...]

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Today I bought a Kobo Mini ereader. It’s lovely: small and simple, feeling light and nice to touch. It’s got an on button on the top edge, and a USB plug on the bottom; the rest is screen, bezel, and back (the latter two of a sort of micro-fluffy textured plastic). So far, so good. [...]

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Great post yesterday from The Blasphemous Bicycler about people not controlling their own data: The reasons for this are fairly easy to deduce. We were all swept away by “social media.” To send a tweet, update your Facebook status, or post a picture of your victuals on Intagram is a trivial task. Composing a blog [...]

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Oh for some quiet space in a library! Bring back shushing librarians [arc'd] by Laura Miller in Salon, 2013-01-31.

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Gunzburg, Adrian; Austin, Geff (2008). Rails through the Bush: Timber and Firewood Tramways and Railway Contractors of Western Australia. Perth, Western Australia: Rail Heritage WA. pp. 208–210. ISBN 978-0-9803922-2-7. OL12330925W.

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Open Library catalogue entry.

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“Make things that can be archived (databases cannot be, not if you don’t also store the application that reads them). Make it possible to change one’s data structures (the ways in which things are stored — not the file formats, so much), and leave old data alone. To update, copy and morph; don’t try to [...]

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p.41, on reading the ‘news-in-brief’ section of the daily paper: Tragic end for Verona lovebirds: after mistakenly thinking his sweetheart dead, a young man took his life. Having discovered the fate of her lover, the woman killed herself in turn. A young mother threw herself under a train and died in Russia after domenstic problems. [...]

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Trees have roots; I have legs. And believe me, that is a huge advantage. [...] Is it possible to read Plato while wearing a Walkman? [...] Books are a great bulwark for private life. [...] Imagine a world where neuro-chemistry could explain Mozart… It is conceivable, and I find it frightening. From Telerama, via Presseurop [...]

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I knew Kernighan and Plauger were forward-thinking, but hadn’t realised they were 22 years ahead of their time! (Oh, and for my own future reference: How to tear in Gimp.)

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Believing we have all the technology we’ll ever need, we seek to draw attention to its destructive side effects. This seems foolish… —Neal Stephenson, Innovation Starvation It is the first day of a new month. Does that mean anything? Not really, but it’s a convenient thing to kick me in to writing again. Can we [...]

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Kevin Kelly, in The European: Most of the problems today have been generated by technology, and most future problems will be generated by technology as well. I am so technocentric that I say: The solution to technological problems is more technology. Here’s a tangible example: If I throw around some really bad ideas in this [...]

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Own your identity by Marco Arment: If you care about your online presence, you must own it. I do, and that’s why my email address has always been at my own domain, not the domain of any employer or webmail service. … Sadly, most people don’t care about giving control of their online identity to [...]

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Best Book award for Fighting For Fremantle! And a few crappy photos from my phone:

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…When I asked Feal and Carol Saller, who oversees the Chicago Manual of Style, if there was a chance their organizations would go over to the other side, they both replied, in essence: “How about never? Is never good for you?”… — The Rise of “Logical Punctuation”, Ben Yagoda, May 12 2011, Slate.

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“Machines should work, people should think.” The message repeats itself several times; it’s the core of the film’s techno-utopian vision. We can imagine IBM executives and lawyers and public relations agents sitting across a table from Jim Henson telling him to make sure he includes these lines in his film. What if, following William Empson’s [...]

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I’m not actually all that enthusiastic about this silly address book plugin, y’know. I’d rather be back fiddling with a little idea I had a while ago for a distributed bibliography thing for WP. Something a bit like LibraryThing, except that all the book data is stored within one’s own database, and importing other people’s [...]

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I yearn for quiet (I’m a Quaker, after all, and feel silence to be a necessary precondition for hearing the ssvw). Especially when I’m reading. But public libraries are not silent. Libraries, you see, are meant to be fun. In the morning, there are creches that consist not of storytelling but percussion-accompanied singalongs. Foreign language [...]

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So here I am, back in the office, and bored again. I have spent the morning trawling the Arts Full Text database; from the ‘Notebooks’ category, to ‘Reading and Books’, and thence to things about binding, I’ve been remembering that thrill of quiet, sparse, precise, personal times in libraries, with books and a notebook. Nicholson [...]

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Why oh why does Tilley’s not open until nine o’clock?! Doesn’t anyone in Lyneham understand the joys of escaping first thing in the morning to a nice warm café, a good book, and the ignoring of everything one’s supposed to be doing for a few hours?! I mean, really! I do have plans, of course, [...]

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Hurrying off to uni after remembering the chai & cake stall, I forgot my lunch and the honey (not sweet mate), but managed to prove to myself the wisdom in having a slow bike. [Oh how I wish I could get my digital camera to work with these uni computers!] I got the chai on, [...]

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I haven’t posted for a few days because I have not been doing much worthy of note. A bit more playing with boxboard pidgeonholes, a bit of reading (Morris mainly, this morning the first book of The Prelude, as well as sundry other texts relating to the… [gotta go...]

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