At drinks last night, Rick pointed out that nobody on the democratic side of this presidential campaign is talking about restoring the civil liberties decimated by the Bush administration. Then I read this column today. Oh, and this. There is a world of trouble coming.
Author Archives: Jonathan Sterne
School Starts Tuesday
on what should be a beautiful 30 degree day (that’s 87, American readers). I hope they’ve fixed the A/C in my seminar room. Apart from that little worry, I am feeling the usual beginning-of-the-year optimism. Perhaps it’s tempered a little bit by the knowledge of the administration that lies in wait for fall, but I …
*&!$%^!
Our fantasy football league draft was scheduled for 9pm. I have been working from home online all afternoon with no problem. At 8:45, as we’re getting ready, the modem goes down and says our Sympatico username is invalid. One hour on the phone with a script-reading tech support person and multiple resets and it finally …
Mobile Dataspace
Like about a bazillion other people, the iPhone’s worldwide breakout — and the hype around it — has caused me to consider the value of having a convergence device. I experimented once before with the HP iPaq Travel Companion, which is a lovely GPS device but Windows Mobile is incredibly kludgy, especially for things like …
Winning Season(!)
Thursday night, the False Consciousness, our departmental softball team, completed our first winning season. We did it by beating a team with a better record than we had (they were 4-2 coming in and we were 3-3) and knocking them out of the playoffs. Rather than composing my own narrative, I will repeat Greg “Coach” …
Phenomenology of the International Date Line
but first, this: There is something uncanny about flying for more than half a day and landing in Vancouver 3 hours earlier than when I left Sydney. UPDATE: I forgot to mention that we met someone who flew over the day before his birthday and when he arrived in Australia, it was the day after …
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What you almost missed
Hopefully I’ll have something more insightful to say about Australian culture after 3 weeks there. We leave tomorrow. I had hoped to entice a Francophone friend to take over the blog in my absence, to chronicle her attempts to get service in French at chain coffeeshops in NDG and Westmount (it’s funnier than it sounds), …