News

Offline until Jan 1

I'm going on a much-needed offline holiday between now and January 1, 2006. Save your email until then, or send me a message to get some substitute addresses you can write to if you need an urgent reply. Remember that you should always send Boing Boing suggestions to the form here, and not to my email address.

Happy holidays! See you in 2006!

Alternative Down and Out covers

Mitch did a project for a San Francisco State University course in Design and Industry in which he created three alternative covers for Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. He sez,

The cover titled "experimental" is a photo I shot of Tomorrowland with my Digital Rebel from the Monorail last year. I added vertical grain to it to give it a dissonant look. The type is terminal inspired.

"conventional" is a drawing of a robot action figure that I did a little while back which turned out to work really well with this project. Reminiscent of the animatronics in the story. This is my favorite of the covers.

Not much to say about the typographic cover other than I like the way your name turned out with the bisecting line.

Reading from Themepunks book II

Last month at London's Stanhope Centre, I gave a little reading from the next book of Themepunks, the novel in progress that Salon syndicated book one of last autumn. Paul Parkinson recorded it and put it on his podcast -- here's the MP3 of the reading and the Q&A that followed.

Flights of Fancy on Flexible Chips

New York Times, December 7, 2005

Editorial in today’s NYT Christmas Circuits section

I have an editorial about the effect of programmable logic on gizmo design on the front page of today's New York Times Christmas Circuits section:

PLASTIC created the age of whimsical forms. Suddenly a radio could look like a moo cow. A chair could look like an egg. Toy ray guns could bulge and swoop. The exuberant designers of the golden age of plastic explored all the wacky, nonfunctional, decorative shapes that household objects could take.

Now that same plasticity is coming to microcontrollers, the computer chips that act as brains for the chirping, dancing, listening and seeing devices that line our knickknack shelves and dashboards and fill our pockets. The proliferation of cheap and cheerful programmable chips promises a new age of "whimsical logic," chips that power devices whose functions are as delightfully impractical as their forms, the sort of thing you find in a stocking but keep on your desk forever.

Speaking at Apachecon San Diego, Dec 12

I'm giving the opening keynote at Apachecon, the conference for users and developers of the Apache open source Web server and related tools. Other keynotes are coming from Sun's Simon Phipps, XML-inventor Tim Bray, and VR pioneer Jaron Lanier, and there are sessions and tutorials on Xpath, SpamAssassin, Subversion, mod_python and mod_perl, as well as open source business models and tons of other topics.

ApacheCon is in San Diego, and runs from 10-14 December, 2005 at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina, and there are still several scholarships available for students working with Java.

My talk, "Open Source is not a crime -- yet!" is on Monday, December 12 at 9AM. I'll be talking about US and international legislative threats to copyleft, Free Software, and Creative Commons -- hope to see you there!

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