Craig Talbert's blog

An eBay window in to my upbrining...

I'm selling some stuff on ebay that's been in my dad's basement for years/decades and seemed like it might be valuable to someone.

http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQsassZthesupercraig

I've had my eBay account since 2000. That's scary.

...

Ohh, and good to see Vox back up.

I SAW TOM MORELLO (AKA THE NIGHTWATCHMAN)!!!

He was playing at the Larimer Lounge tonight. It was fun. He did the same kind if thing here in Denver that he did in New Orleans when he sang This Land is Your Land.

The Nightwatchman (Tom Morello) - This Land is Your Land

I got him to sign my Axis of Justice brochure.

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My Wikipedia User Page

I just updated it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Craigtalbert

I included my infamous review from Who's Who Among American High School Students, since I figured if I ever ran for office or was getting a top secret security clearance, it would come up anyway.

You're only as sick as your secrets.

Chocolate Covered Espresso Beans

It turns out I got a Christmas present I didn't know I had from my cousin Sarah. It included chocolate covered espresso beans and that made me pretty happy.

Speaking of Sara(h)s. I got an email from one of them through flickr, who happens to be married to Carl Ives. Only, I can't quite figure out how to email her back.

Apparently, the articles I read are important

I installed Google Toolbar awhile back. One of the things it will do is show you the PageRank of every site you visit. It turns out my my CiteULike page has a PageRank of 4/10 -- which is pretty good for something that I've never promoted.

Google juice is a curse as much as it is a blessing. Now everyime I add an article to my CiteULike library I'll think, "Do you really want the world to know that you're reading this?"

Review: An Inconvenient Truth

Thanks to people who donated to sharethetruth.us my girlfriend and I got to go see An Inconvenient Truth. sharethetruth.us manages money put in to a general fund to pay for people to see the movie. Incidentally, a Christian group is doing the same thing (The Inconvenient Christians), but they'll only buy tickets for people who claim to be "Bible-believing Christians."

I was both impressed and alarmed by the movie -- impressed by the presentation (Al Gore is definitely worthy of Presentation Zen) and alarmed by the content. If you haven't seen it yet, you should. Avail yourself of the sites I mentioned and convert briefly if you have too.

I was surprised by a few other things aside from the information on the impending climate crisis. I was expecting that Al Gore would bring up Global Dimming at least once during the film, and if he did, I missed it. I'm also surprised that there wasn't more organizing efforts officially endorsed or made by the movie producers. Scott Silber, a local Boulder activist, is fond of saying that good activism is like riding a bicycle, one of the pedals is education and the other peddle is organizing -- you need to have one foot going on each pedal to get anywhere.

An Inconvenient Truth presents the facts better than I've ever seen them presented before. The movie's official blog has some information to help you get organized. But I think it's going to be up to us to get people organized to take action. If you live in Colorado, check out environmentcolorado.org, and get subscribed to the email list for updates and things you can do to help locally.

Expired T-Shirts

I have a some t-shirts that I've refused to throw away -- some of which are almost 10 years old.  I finally decided it was time to let go of them.  But, I wanted to take pictures first.  Check these out.

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Sleeping is good for people around you

It's easy to forget that when you're up late and cranky the next day, not only do you feel pretty bad, but you're also making life harder on the people around you.

Finally migrated everything to Gmail

Mark Lyon's Gmail Loader probably worked flawlessly in 2004, unfortuantely it looks like Gmail's SMTP servers  require TLS/SSL now, which it doesn't support. However, it's still the best tool I found to help miragte email from another server to Gmail. If you have access to a smtp server that allows relaying or doesn't require authentication, you could use that instead, or you could just do like I did and download Jsmtpd, configure it, run it, point Gmail Loader to localhost, and go. I tried a lot of other smtp servers that would run on my windows desktop, Jsmtpd worked and was easy for me to configure.

After migrating all of my colorado.edu mail, I'm still only using 9% (245 megs) of my Gmail quota.

Gattaca and Malcolm X are movies that age well

I saw Gattaca and Malcom X tonight. Gattaca was made in 1997 and Malcolm X was made in 1992, but neither of them "feel old" when you watch them.

There's a two scenes in Malcolm X were he's putting lye mixed with mashed potatos in his hair to straighten it. I've wanted to know more about that for a long time, but when I searched for it in that past I never found information about it. I searched again tonight and eventually found the Wikipedia article on on hair relaxers, which discusses many of the racial issues surrounding it. The talk page for the article is equally if not more educational.

Speaking of  Malcolm X, one of his former advisors, John Henrik Clarke, had a good documentary made about him awhile back, A Great and Mighty Walk. It's also about a decade old, but if you get a chance, I recommend watching it.