It is a well known fact that hackers – the original MIT hackers, anyhow – love Chinese food. In truth, I think it’s because the only restaurants open when they’d come to after 7, 13 or 24 hours of straight programming, only to find it was 4am and they were about to faint from hunger. [...]

Richard Stallman, otherwise known as rms or the founder of the free software movement, will be in town for a series of lectures at UBC and BCIT. I have been reading Stallman’s stuff since I wrote my master’s thesis in 2003. Although he has sometimes passed off as a crank, much of Stallman’s work has [...]

My first panel of the day was entitled The Intersection of Culture Jamming, Hacking and Hactivism. On this, the last day of the conference, attendance had reached capacity. Literally thousands (I heard estimates of 2,000 and 3,000) of every nerd imaginable: The stereotypical anti-social, disempowered, tech freak expressing his barely concealed rage and marginality through [...]

I received my copy of Reconstructing biotechnologies: Critical social analyses in the mail today. It is from Wageningnen, an academic publisher out of The Netherlands. It is a lovely book, replete with all sorts of fascinating articles about the appropriation and reconstruction of biotechnologies for sustainable rural development. My little essay on wikis fits – [...]

Now that I have finished all the pesky non-dissertation requirements of my degree, I’m settling in to the research/fieldwork phase. This is the phase directly before the writing of my dissertation. While completing my comps and writing my thesis proposal, I did not have much time to keep up with nor dig deep into the [...]