ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Archive for May, 2008

Deep in Editing —

With editing GET LAMP something like 4-5 hours a day, every day, my time for updating this weblog is getting scant, and random. I might add a helpful and thoughtful entry every day, and then nothing, nada for a while. I suggest you utilize the RSS feed if you aren’t already. I have no real […]

The Fun Drive? Oh, Wait —

I’ve been debating whether to celebrate 10 years of textfiles.com by having a fund drive. I figure I’d change the opening page (which would only show up on the main site, not the mirrors), with a quick “hey, throw me some bucks if you’ve had a good time” message, and have my paypal there (and […]

Blockparty: The Competitions and Awards —

Because he is incredible, and he truly IS incredible, Jim Leonard has taken the hours of raw footage of the competitions and awards of Blockparty and rendered them out into a coherent collection of events and browse-worthy movies. Here’s the central page for all of this. You can even watch songs being played, while the […]

The Mask of the Night —

Here is what the new face of my sleeping hours will be. My second sleep lab was a fitting; they had me take an Ambien, and had me wear a nose mask, then they tried different pressures on me throughout the evening. (This time, thanks to Mr. Ambien, I slept the full night.) Did you […]

The Wikipedia Database Secret —

Actually, it’s probably not entirely a secret, but here you go. Wikipedia database dumps fail constantly. They fail in great numbers, and are then not re-attempted for weeks. As a result, many changes go on for months with no backup. The databases sometimes scroll off, meaning you lose the older ones while not having new […]

A Payphone Map, 25 years on —

I was recently sent mail about a payphone textfile that has found new life on Google Maps. Here it is, along with some background history from the author, which I’ll reprint below: “A collection of payphones in Santa Barbara that I compiled in 1982 when I was 14 years old. I still have the address […]

That Endless Knocking —

At some point last year or so, I discovered my box was sending out spam. Lots of spam. Thousands of pieces. I felt very bad. It took me a while to figure out where and how. Basically, I had a somewhat old methodology for allowing people to submit to the BBS List and so you […]

Huzzah and Thanks —

Three boxes arrived from ULINE to my house. The three boxes contained five hundred more boxes. Why did I order three boxes containing five hundred boxes? Because so many people have ordered my documentary that I ran out of boxes to ship them in. Roughly three thousand of you have ordered copies of my little […]