I have just begun reading Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis which I have a dead tree copy of (somewhere), because I read it in high school, but the palm version from Project Gutenberg is much more handy at this time. I remembered liking it before. What’s not to like about becoming a horrible vermin?

This morning (as the power was going out again) I finished reading We the Media on my palm. I really enjoyed chapters 1 through 8, and they even led me to come up with a bunch of potential risky entrepreneurial ventures relating to personal journalism. But chapter 9 and on seemed tedious to me, part of it was just that it was packed with a bunch of information I already know concerning the perils of online conversation. And the information about how the copyright cartel is fighting against technology to preserver their business model is something that I have read about daily for a while now, so I guess I am wearied to that subject as well.

For the most part I enjoyed it, and it is very comprehensive and did get me thinking about some potential ventures or useful collaborative news sites that could be worthwhile. But if you have been reading Dan Gillmor’s blog or something like Politech for a while you may find yourself struggling to re-read stuff you already know.

There is a probably not nearly exhaustive, yet full supply of links to many blogs and sites that may be interesting, although the links and copious footnotes don’t play well on the palm and I suspect they are mildly annoying in the dead-tree version. And while the Appendix “Web Site Directory” does aggregate all those links for you so you don’t have to hunt through the text, finding an HTML version on the books webpage has proven a challenge. And the PDF published by O’Reilly doesn’t have links embedded. So I grabbed the PDF of that chapter and converted it into a web page with the links easily clickable, so if you are reading, have read it or just want to look at all the links check it out here.

Another Wikimedia project WikiBooks that apparently has been around since July of 2003, but I just noticed that the amount of information I will never take in continues to grow. But there is probably some useful information there, and maybe someday I will contribute.

My brother and his friends grew up in a time when instant messaging was king. They all would come home and IM each other until really late. And in college it was a way to keep tabs on friends, because you could fill your profile and away message with witty, sarcastic, stupid or good information. I have seen party invitations made exclusively via away message. Some people take great pride in their ability to have funny away messages, and have grown a great readership of their away messages, or away message stalkers as I have heard them called.

I have been away message stalking my brother for a while, occassionally I miss some of his good ones, but often I find myself reading his messages aloud to my co-workers. So in an attempt to make sure I don’t miss even a single message I thought it would be a good idea to write some kind of software that would grab his messages and syndicate them into an RSS feed or a weblog or something. So I did. With the help of Python, Twisted and pyBlogger I have thrown together a quick Python program that logs into the AOL IM network using the OSCAR protocol (I would have used the public TOC protocol but AOL has crippled it, and I think sometimes has TOC outages) and monitors Tom’s status and blogs his away messages seconds after he makes them. You can check out the archive at Tom is Away.

I imagine there will be some problems with it as I just threw it together, but I plan on publishing the code once I clean it up a little more, so others can set up away message stalking sites. Anyway enjoy the hilarity of Tom’s syndicated Away messages.

Today I am sore, tired and completly satisfied. Yesterday was the black belt test, and I came to a waypoint on a long journey that started two years ago when I earned my black belt at Wing’s Martial Arts Academy. It was a great experience, and I am better for having accomplished this. Today I feel like I can accomplish anything.

Next week you can order the First 100 strongbad emails on DVD. Best news so far today. Thanks boingboing.

I have dug up the relic from my college days, the Palm III mainly because I felt like doing some reading of the public domain stuff on the awesome Project Gutenberg. The experience (which I tried before) has been great so far. I am using The Weasel Reader because of its use of the zlib compression algorithm, Trying to stretch those 2MB as far as they will go.

It has been great. I am almost finished reading Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow and the experience has been great. First it’s a pretty good story, that is available under a creative commons license and I was able to read it very fast, because for some reason I was able to take my palm and read a few pages in lots of places that ordinarily would have warranted a raised eyebrow and some somewhat insulted/joking remarks about my being bored with their company if I was reading or even carrying a dead-tree book.

I’d recommend reading that book, or buying me a newer slightly smaller, with better resolution and more memory screen palm , or checking out A Place So Foreign and Eight More also by Doctorow, which I bought and recently finished. Some good stuff in there. I think he released some of those short stories under a creative commons license as well, link.