The World of Stuff .com

Mind mashup

One of the organizations I’m involved with is Florida Free Culture, UF’s chapter of Students for Free Culture. On Tuesday, we had an event called Mind Mashup. It took place in the main library on campus and was organized with the help of the librarians. Thanks, librarians!

At the event, we explained the concepts of the public domain and Creative Commons, demonstrated some free software for editing photos, audio, and video. We also presented a list of public domain and CC-licensed resources for people to mash up. In our advertising for the event, we had suggested that people bring their laptops so they could follow along and start right away. Some people did.

The event was actually pretty well attended, particularly by student journalists. I got pulled aside to talk to an Alligator reporter’s microphone, and an Alligator photographer got some shots of me.

The brief article appeared the next day. Of course, the only photo they published was of our only demonstration of a non-free program, viz. Adobe Premiere. I wasn’t quoted, but they did post some of my sound bites with the online version of the article, so you can hear my all of my hemming and hawing.

When the Mind Mashup was over, I hurried to the building next door to get to the Esperanto Club meeting, where Andy was giving a lesson in my absence.

In other news, I met my new roommate on Monday night. I haven’t seen too much of him around, but he seems like a good guy. I think we’ll get along well. But here’s a funny thing: remember how I said, like, last week that people shouldn’t assume that everyone is straight until proven gay? Well, I assumed my roommate would be white, but he’s black. All I can say is: daaaang.

Pretty interesting: some irate messages hidden in old video games by their developers. (Via waxy.org)

What the Internet Knows About You can tell you what popular web sites you’ve recently visited. Find out how it works for the details of this clever exploit. (Via waxy.org)