For our first three years in Montreal, we lived in a Francophone working class neighborhood, on Frontenac, just south of Sherbrooke St. The ad for the place didn’t mention a neighborhood, and we knew we were east and south of the Plateau. We deduced that we resided in the Hochelaga part of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve. Our landlord …
Category Archives: Unanswered Questions
Blooper or Freudian Slip?
Names omitted to protect the innocent; otherwise copied verbatim: Dear Dr. Jonathan Sterne: Thank you so much for agreeing to participate in reviewing the tenure and promotion documents of —–. As you know, excellence in research activity is one of the most important areas of evaluation for promotion to the rank of Associate Professor and …
A Few Thoughts on the Virginia Tech Massacre
Despite my taste for violence in fiction, I have a very limited appetite for mediatic violence when it corresponds to something that actually happened. Which is to say that I’m not particularly a news junkie when it comes to disaster and monstrosity and thus have not been following the Virginia Tech Massacre beyond reading enough …
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Ten Things that happened or that I learned on our 8-day trip to Seattle
1. I wrote a sentence in my book about how depending on what country you’re in, you get a totally different view of the psychoacoustic research leading up to mp3 coding (though the concepts — masking, critical bands, etc., are all the same). Then Lucent (the fools who closed Bell Labs) won a suit against …
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I give up
Every week during football we get a barrage of Telus ads featuring monkeys. But we can’t figure out what kind of monkeys they are. A quick google search yielded no information.
Books
It occurs to me that one good use of this blog, and one way to maybe start some conversations, is to list books that are coming in. I purchase a lot of books, probably more than I have time to read, but my intentions are strictly honorable even if the result is, well, more Benjaminian. …
Sage Update
As you may know, I have been in an email exchange with various people at Sage since receiving a copy-protected version of my own article as my “author’s copy” for my New Media and Society essay on the mp3 format. (Click here for part 1 of the story.) This week, I heard back from Sage’s …