parker higgins

Today I got a chance to check out the last day of the Ex Postal Facto conference, made up of a few panels at the San Francisco Public Library. The conference was dedicated to mail art, and today’s panels featured a handful of people that have been in that scene for decades, including these two:

We had a keysigning party at work today, and after it finished a few of us were looking for a way to visualize the newly increased signature density. It turns out the best tool for the job is called sig2dot, which is available in the Debian repositories (and as a Perl script on its homepage).

I had a great time this weekend editing Wikipedia at the San Francisco satellite of the Art+Feminism edit-a-thon. Check out the venue:

I’ve been disappointed to see a lot of journalists get a recent story about security breaches and Yahoo Mail wrong. In particular, I worry that this kind of misleading reporting will contribute to worse security practices for both the companies that users trust with their data, and the users themselves.

For the first time in a long time I have started a new article on the Wikipedia. This one’s about Michael S. Rogers, Navy Vice Admiral and presumptive nominee for Director of the NSA and head of the U.S. Cyber Command. These two jobs are the one being vacated by General Keith Alexander after he retires in mid-March, and obviously it’ll be kind of a crazy time to be taking over the NSA.

One of the excellent things about running Copyright Week—and there were many—is that copyright activists around the world gave some top-level overviews about what is going on in their countries. Two of my favorite came from regions where copyright reform has been long promised but yet to materialize: Australia and Brazil.

I’m having an issue on Android where every time I type the letters D-O-N-T it corrects to “DONT” (and not “don’t”). I can’t figure out to fix that, but in my attempts I came across my personal dictionary of words I’ve added to the spellcheck. I think this list is pretty hilarious. Here it is, in its entirety:

Today’s my birthday. And although I believe that the traditional “Happy Birthday” song is in the public domain but for copyfraud of enormous proportion, it’d still be nice to partake in a new musical tradition. The Free Music Archive held a contest this year to write a new birthday tune. They picked some pretty great winners!

I made this goofy picture for something on Twitter, but I want to make sure I save this one for posterity. Anyway, here’s Susan B. Anthony teaching elder stateswoman Elizabeth Cady Stanton how to use her new iPad.

I’ve been working on a writing project around the Grey Album, and that’s required a lot of research and digging into events that unfolded in 2003 and 2004. In some ways that’s incredibly frustrating: nearly every link I encounter is broken and requires more searching or an Internet Archive lookup,¹ and in some cases can’t be dug up at all. But in other ways it’s great, as the years between have been plenty of time for new information to come to light and sometimes heated issues to cool down.