Brian Jepson’s Weblog

We’re taking a real vacation this week–up to Keene for a couple of
days, over to Boston, and then probably up to Freeport, Maine. Email and
blogging will be light, but I’ll be sure to post to my TextAmerica Moblog.

That geek mystique: “Jepson said he first noticed the term geek gaining positive connotations in 1993, with the introduction of the “geek code”, a method used to compress data to speed up e-mail when modems were painfully slow.”

You’ve got the be fscking kidding me. A free copy of one of my books to the first person who posts a comment reconstructing what I originally said.

Update: Christopher got it right (get in touch with me about the free book; it’s bjepson at jepstone dot net).

I mentioned the geek code, and then made the mistake of going into an aside about why it was once important to keep your .sig around 4-5 lines (well, I think it’s still important, but many folks don’t). It’s really my own fault–I’ve been told that when you talk to the press, you shouldn’t meander like that–say what you need to say, and repeat it a few times.

These folks are working under really insane deadlines, and one or more people will get their hands on what they wrote and mess with it before it’s printed. Still, I really like the end result–it’s really a thing of beauty.

Update: I got got a nice call from the author, who wanted to correct the piece. He’s going to go with something along the lines of “a code to represent a geek’s skills and interests.”

Joshua
Marketos: “they could still put an eye out.”

This excellent
picture from Simon’s Living in Dryden blog makes me really feel the
cold. I’ve got a frost picture of my
own that might warm you up.

Shawn
Wallace: “…social momentum is a sign of a healthy public life; people
produce a great deal, artistically and otherwise; individuals find
themselves learning more (and memorizing less) and maybe even becoming a
little more understanding and compassionate.”

Glenn
Fleishman points to something that’s very dear to me: “coffee
houses were often the mailing addresses for folks before street
addresses were common.” In the early 1990s, when I was still in
college, I fell in love with the idea of third places
as described in Ray Oldenburg’s The
Great Good Place. So my friends and I put together something called
the Cafe de la Tete. Yeah, the name was a little pretentious, but the
goal was to offer people something really unique–a place to live when
you’re not at work or at home, a place with hopefully as few pressures
as possible.

It was really great fun; we didn’t try to make any money at it, and some
great stuff grew out of that: zines, performance art, a good connection
between the URI scene and what was going on at AS220. The Cafe kept going for a while,
under the direction of various people. It’s not around any more, but
its spirit touched a lot of people, and I think we’re all more
well-rounded for it.

I set up a moblog for any
New Year’s photos I take in the next 24 hours or so.

I’ve been corresponding with
Timothy Stone about the instructions
for Mac OS X startup items in Mac OS X for Unix
Geeks. Yesterday, he sent me the photo that appears to the right.
Tim was reading my biography, which mentions the coffehouse I ran while
I was there. Turns out that his wife did a stint at the University of
Rhode Island, and has a Cafe de la Tete mug to show for it. What a
small world!

As has been reported
elsewhere, the Apple Music Store is pretty hosed right now.
Although clicking on Dead City Radio brought me directly to Chuck
Mangione’s Feels So good and Clicking on WSB brought me to Missy Elliot,
I was still able to get into the Thanksgiving spirit by typing in
“Thanksgiving Prayer” and buying the piece
directly from the search results.