Sticks and Stones

We are always looking for new Contributing Authors. If you would like to write for Sticks and Stones, send us an email with the following components;

1. Write about yourself. This can be as long or as short as you like.
2. If you’d like to submit your CV, you may, but this is not required.
3. If you have a blog, link to it.
4. A sample blog post.
   1. It can be on absolutely any topic.
   2. It can even be one you’ve already written and published.
   3. It must be in the range of 200 to 500 words.

We’ve kept the brief very vague so as to not constrain you in any way. The application is meant to be very informal. Any more requirements would deflect focus from the quality of your writing, which is what we are most interested in.

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I just updated the content management system running this blog from WordPress 2.3.2 to 2.3.3 because one of our authors was unable to log in. In the process I remembered to back up the theme and the CSS stylesheets that make this all possible.

While that worked nicely, my forgetting to save the wp-content/uploads folder means all our photos are gone. Of course I have them saved on my computer but with 60 posts it may take some time to put them back up. What that realistically means is that I’ll put them up tomorrow between 11PM and midnight after making dinner, cleaning up, doing some work, and going through the inundating excesses of Google Reader.

Update on 7th February: The images are back!

Technology, while beautiful, simple, and full of potential can be infuriating.

While I am writing a ‘Meta’ post, I should let you know that we now have social networking buttons with every post. This means if you use Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Technorati, Slashdot, or Newsvine you can submit any post from this blog to those sites.

We’re getting a pretty consistent 700 - 1000 pageviews per day, which is nice, but we deserve higher numbers considering the level of effort put into each post by all six of us. So, if you like what you see, spread the word (now easier, by clicking below: via Digg, del.icio.us etcetera).

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My parents had chosen the school. It was just one week before the start of the semester and I, four years old, had never seen the place I would spend another five years at. So, today was the day that I would get to glimpse the campus.

We were on our way to an event, I don’t remember what it was, and passed along Orchard Road to get there. Along the right was an endless fence. Tall, black, with gates at various intervals. The bars were thinly spaced so seeing the buildings was difficult.

The very first day was daunting. I know I must have experienced many new sights and sounds but what I remember most strongly from that humid Singaporean morning was the stench of steaming laksa being prepared for the hordes of giants in the High School.

The experience was vile. The buildings were unimaginably tall, cold, and bleached white from the glaring relentless sun. The teacher had a strong accent, I would only later learn that she was Canadian, which was exotic and hard to follow. Everyone was nervous, everyone felt tiny, and by 3 P.M. (nap-time) everyone was exhausted.

It was an anomalous start to a half-decade that I would love, but from that first day’s experience, I was dreading Tuesday morning 9 A.M., and the start of assembly.

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Molly Wood from CNET’s Buzz Out Loud podcast has started a new blog called ‘Cult of Ownership’. While we’ve written on copyright in the past, in fact the very first Sticks and Stones post was about the Creative Commons licensing used on this website, Molly is uniquely qualified to offer a comprehensive view on the tech industry and how we understand our rights regarding what we create.

In an age of more freely available digital artwork, music, and video, we perceive these materials to be free to use, share, remix, and indulge in - but those who know copyright law, especially the dreaded DMCA and the beleaguered concept of ‘fair use’ will know that this perception is very far from reality. I highly recommend Cult of Ownership, and strongly suggest you head over to the blog and read it in its entirety.

To answer the question in the title of this post, yes you do have the right to edit my photo of the Jaguar E-type, as long as you state that the original work is mine, and that you don’t use your edition or my original for commercial purposes.

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Today, Monday 21st January 2007, is officially the most depressing day of the year. Yep that is right, it is Blue Monday.

By using a formula involving the weather, debt, time since the festive season and general motivation levels, today is that day that nobody looks forward to. I must say I probably have to agree. I arose this morning and saw out the window nothing but grey skies, rain and trees blowing in the wind. I followed the news to see that £77bn has been wiped off the value of stocks in London (Northern Rock’s 46% increase being a notable exception). I then saw that government finances are £46.3bn in the red, and looking at most of the personal finances of the nation, a similar situation of debt is occurring.

I was now really searching to find some good news, but sadly to no avail. The government has lost more data (the MOD at fault this time), a British soldier has been killed in Iraq, flights are still delayed in Heathrow, the Diana inquest still appears to be going nowhere, and the Home Secretary is afraid of walking the streets of London alone at night.

So what good is left in the world. I could only find two things: this blog is continuing and the DFS sale is still on. Yipee!

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