paper time in the big city

October 29, 2002 by Eric Richardson

So it's paper time again, and I'm definitely running a little bit later of a schedule than I would like. The prompt for tonight is:

Craft an analysis exploring the relationships, however fraught and contradictory they might be, between discourses of law & order, urban space, and hip-hop creative culture.

googlefun

October 28, 2002 by Eric Richardson

I finally got around to autologging my google hits into a db, so googlefun will now be constantly up to date. Eventually I'll flesh it out to provide some more interesting stats and graphs, but I think even now it's a fun little view into how people find my site.

stupid video card

October 28, 2002 by Eric Richardson

So I've been having sporadic video problems for the last two months or so, and recently they've started happening all the time. I run XFree86 with the NVidia drivers on an old TNT card (Diamond Viper 550, I think), and recently I've been getting absolutely atrocious performance from things that previously had run fine (transparent Eterms in particular). It's like the lag of a slow remote connection, even when typing in a local window. The only thing I've found to make it go away is switching back to the stock nv driver (and losing Xv acceleration). I'm really at a loss to explain this. It started happening with really nothing relevent changed.

Living in The Diamond Age

October 23, 2002 by Eric Richardson

I just saw an article on Wired about "walls" of radiation detection around major cities. Immediately I thought of the dog pod grid in The Diamond Age. Granted, the implementation isn't exactly the same, but the idea is really similar and it's only a matter of time before modern technology catches up and implements similar aerostats.

wow... that was easy

October 22, 2002 by Eric Richardson

So I was doing a little browsing, and came up with a topic that I think should be really interesting. The semi-anonymous communication of the Internet enables much of a person's physical identity to be hidden. What I want to explore is whether this can truely lead to genderless communication, or if gender will inevitably work its way into Internet communication. I found some sources that look interesting, though I'll readily admit I've read a good two paragraphs or so of each of them.