Version 7.0ish. Digital Humanities. Running. Pedagogy. Linux.

• Mother Jones on twenty first century water wars.
• Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost’s “Computing Makes the ‘Man’: Programmer Creativity and the Platform Technology of the Atari Video Computer System.”
• Scott Esposito’s essay from The Quarterly Conversation on Kafka and Argentinian novelist Adolfo Bioy Casares.
• Harper’s has a free excerpt from Thomas Frank’s new book The Wrecking Crew: How A Gang Of Right Wing Con Men Destroyed Washington & Made A Killing.  I wish Harper’s would offer full text articles for subscribers like me; their pdfs keep crashing on me in multiple operating systems.
• According to TechCrunch, Fleck, previously blogged about, is up for sale.  I never did find a good use for it…

Last week Apple announced that the newest version of their browser, Safari, was going to also be available for Windows. I’m not much of an Apple user. I used one as a kid, but these days the computers in my room either run on XP or Ubuntu Linux. After hearing about Safari being available for Windows, I became curious enough to download it. So did over one million other people.

I played with Safari for a few hours and I have to say it is very fast. That is, however, about the only thing it offers that stands out. Tabbed browsing is nothing new anymore. RSS integration is nice, but I read my feeds via Thunderbird. I’ve never found a web or browser integration I really enjoyed. The lack of plugins, like Firefox, or widgets, like Opera, really turned me off as well. My Firefox browser is deeply customized, and my Opera browser, via their speed dial feature, opens everything I use in it with a mouse click.

Safari also has some serious security issues. TechCrunch reports that there is a variety of known problems already. Wired goes as far as to ask who in their right mind would run Safari on Windows?

I uninstalled Safari the morning after I downloaded it. There isn’t any reason for me to use it; with good options like Firefox, Opera, and the new, admittedly nostalgia ridden download of, Netscape out there, Safari offer nothing that would compel me to use it.

Recently there has been a lot of buzz on the Internet about “search identity,” primarily because of a Wall Street Journal article about it. Having been harassed Online in the past few years, the perpetrators even going so far as to create a fake Myspace page for me and to harass a member of The Dropkick Murphys, someone who I had interviewed for his other band Fit For Abuse years ago, using my name, I thought it was a great idea awhile back to try to get involved with one of the numerous identity search engines (TechCrunch has a list of them).

I heard Leo Laporte talking about ClaimID on his radio show one week so I signed up. I really like ClaimID so far; adding new content is easy and the RSS feed is useful for those who want to follow you. My ClaimID link is also on my email signature now and my resume.