b.rox

We played host over the weekend to an eleven-year-old boy whose mother (a friend of ours) had to make a trip out of town. But it was a trip for us as well even though we stayed here. I was reminded of what a radically different way children have of being in the world. They [...]

Our new camera arrived yesterday afternoon, a Sony DSC-HX5V. This is the first shot, straight out the box, without understanding how anything works.

Not bad.
So far, I’m quite happy with the camera. It is small, exceedingly easy to use, and the image quality is more than satisfactory. It also has number of “gee whiz” features [...]

Dear Issa,
Of all the projects I’ve worked on in a decade of such work at the University, one of the very first remains one of the very best. I’m talking of course about the website, Haiku of Kobayashi Issa. Through this project I learned plenty about scripting search queries and managing Japanese character encoding. But [...]

Recently I have been reduced to taking photos with my phone. It’s handy to have a camera in your phone, but these days it’s just about all I have.
For years now I’ve had the use of an old beat-up Nikon Coolpix 990 from work. I had it with me when we evacuated, and so was [...]

photo by spike55151
So I took the first six seconds of “So Emotional” and looped it eleven times, each time at a lower bit rate. I call it “The Degradation of Whitney in Eleven Stages,” and you can listen to it on SoundCloud. (My apologies to Whitney Houston. This is just intended to demonstrate how [...]

Here’s a screenshot of a graph of my social network on Facebook, generated with the Social Graph application.

This isn’t anything new, but I was interested to see the visualization. The three main clumps are, from left to right, my high school, Indiana (mostly Bloomington) and New Orleans. Some family members can be found in a [...]

I am pretty excited about HBO’s new series, Tremé. I still haven’t actually seen it yet, but I feel like I have, almost.
It premiered Friday night, and I had a couple invites to see it in some venues that would have been fun. (Like the Charbonnet Funeral Home in Tremé. That would have been a [...]

The ubiquity of Facebook plus the end of Net Neutrality plus the conversion of the open internet into increasingly walled off proprietary information delivery systems is turning the public sphere into a much less free place than it ever has been and people seem to LOVE IT.

— jeffrey on nolablist (walled off proprietary information [...]

I remember back in 2004 I had a revelation on how Netflix could enhance its service by adding social features. I thought it was a such a good idea I contemplated writing to them to make the suggestion. I never actually contacted them, but I was pleased as punch when they actually did roll out [...]

Today I moderated a panel discussion titled “Web Logs and Scholarship.” I recorded the audio live, so here’s a slidecast of the entire thing.

Finally created a ROX page on Facebook.

Not sure exactly what to do with it, but if you like the show become a fan and we’ll figure something out together.
Maybe.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered my nursery school photo is being used by Cory Frickin’ Doctorow for an article on Boing Boing.

The subject? Counter-terrorism, natch.

England’s West Midlands counter-terrorism unit is putting nursery schools on notice to check out their four-year-olds to make sure that they’re not being “brainwashed” into “Islamic extremism.”

It should be noted [...]

These are my answers (from about a month ago) to a really dumb chain e-mail which I got from a really close friend. I’m posting this here just for fun but please, if you get the e-mail, don’t propagate it. Invent something better. These questions are really dumb even for a goofy “getting to know [...]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/imh/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
I’ve made a few changes to the streaming audio station as I continue the constant pursuit of perfection. Finally came up with a name: radio.rox — blindingly obvious but thanks to Charlotte for prodding me in the right direction. The name suggests the new web address:
radio.rox.com
…which is where you’ll find it.
It [...]

Awrite — I’m taking the plunge and starting my own net radio station. This will be going 24/7 or as long as I can keep it up.
Want to listen? Please be my guest. If you know my “taste” in music (and I do use the word “taste” advisedly) you’ll know what to expect. If not [...]

A photo I took in 2005 was recently used to spur a collaborative writing assignment.

I have no idea where the class was even located. I only found this through Flickr’s referrer logs. The students used EtherPad to collaborate, allowing me to see the final product.
Here are their instructions.

As a group pick one image from [...]

It was some fun watching the Saints dismantle the Patriots last night. And now I’m doing the wave. No, not the audience wave — I’m not that big of a sports fan and I do still have my basic sense of human dignity. I’m talking about Google Wave.

Google describes Wave as “a personal communication and [...]

Some of my neighbors have been bickering, er, I mean debating about Comiskey Park here in Mid-City. The basketball goals that used to be there were taken down when an television production company made plans to rebuild the park for a reality show. That didn’t pan out in the long run, and the park was [...]

Yesterday I presented a workshop which I called “Global Immediacy: Using Video Telephony to Bring Distant Guests into Your Classroom.” It was designed to get faculty thinking about how they might use applications such as Skype in their teaching. I had a little help from George “Loki” Williams of SocialGumbo, we had a good attendance, [...]

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I got a strange e-mail from an old friend today:

I’m sorry for this odd request because it might get to you too urgent but it’s because of the situation of things right now, I’m sorry for this odd request because it might get to you too urgent but it’s because of the situation of things [...]