Wide Aperture

At a friend’s suggestion, I’ve taken to “cloud blogging” recently, spending more time contributing comments and responses to others’ sites and blogs, rather than keeping to my own solipsistic little web domain.  I’ve found it really refreshing, and feel attuned for the first time to the conversational nature of the blogosphere.
Responding thoroughly to other people’s [...]

If you don’t follow this site (overwhelmingly likely), I’m a grad student doing social science research on the Web.  This sounds simple, and being employed at a university, I have access to a lot of tools for just these sorts of projects.  Unfortunately, on closer inspection many of them turned out to be far less [...]

This is based on a comment written in response to a post on the NBC Nightly News‘ Daily Nightly blog, which references the fact that Goldman Sachs recently sell-rated General Motors for the first time ever.
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Not to pick on a great American company, and I realize that the globalized market has made things way more [...]

Okay, I love OSX dearly, but this sucks.  When did iCal turn into a memory hog? I launched it after the last Leopard system update and my system went into slo-mo.  And not just a little bit.
You’d think I were trying to render a Pixar film on my PowerBook.
The System Monitor screenshot says it all [...]

Clay Shirky’s new book, Here Comes Everybody is at once highly readable and a massive undertaking. He sets out to explain, as many recent authors have done, how new communication technologies and the people who use them are changing the world we live in. This is a task so large that, to my [...]

The power adapter for my aging PowerBook literally melted this week.  Apparently at some point I’d put too much tension on the cord, causing the wire to separate inside the plastic housing.  The effect was that the current must have been literally arcing inside the cable housing to get from one portion of the power [...]

My first video is up today at the Ventura County Star’s website.
Here’s a link to the accompanying story. Photo credit: John Nichols Gallery