parker higgins

I had the pleasure of using Noisebridge’s book scanner to “rip” a couple of rare or unusual books I had lying around. So far as I could tell, none of these had been digitized yet, so that’s kind of exciting. Here’s a picture of me at work, taken by Maira.

In honor of the Oxford Dictionary Online selecting “selfie” as its word of the year,¹ here are a few examples of remarkable selfies from the public domain. Why might a work–selfie or otherwise, be in the public domain?

I helped Maira edit an excellent piece that she wrote for the EFF blog this week called “How Can the New York Times Endorse an Agreement the Public Can’t Read?” Fortunately, the article has gotten a lot of pickup, and I think it’s raising some very important questions that haven’t hit the mainstream. (In part because there hasn’t been much media coverage of the TPP at all, which in turn stems from the secrecy of the agreement—media organization unwilling to speculate about the contents or report on the secrecy itself are simply not going to cover it, which is kind of the point of the secrecy in the first place.)

Lou Reed died today at 71. His music — especially the the four Velvet Underground records — have always been very important to me. (If you must know, not actually always, but starting from the time Liza at Camp Half Moon loaned me Loaded and I listened to it over and over on my Discman.)

The rainbow lines of BART always appealed to me, and I got an idea this morning to isolate just the lines and turn the colors up to something brighter. I’ll probably use the concept again, but in light of the ongoing strike (and especially in light of yesterday’s fatal accident), I decided to dedicate the first outing to the workers.

I’ve been building IKEA furniture, which means I’ve got a lot of giant empty cardboard boxes sitting around my apartment. It seemed a waste to just throw it out, so I decided to make something out of it.

I haven’t ripped a CD in a long time, so tonight when I had occasion to, I was at a loss for the right method. I used to rip CDs mostly on a computer that runs Ubuntu, but I no longer have an external optical drive, so I was stuck using my Mac. Here are my (loose) requirements:

Salon has run an interview with Bill McKibben, a longtime journalist and environmental activist. His journalism 25 years ago played a major role in bringing climate change into the public’s attention, and his work with his organization 350.org has moved opposition to the Keystone pipeline to a prominent position.