In preparing to move, I had to ship several kilos of Crap That I Have Accrued® to the United States. I just sent three packages, totaling 16kg.

Thanks to the retarded, but (as of last week) completely private, German postal monopoly, it cost me 106€.

Even worse, the Deutsche Post uses a bizarre per-package payment system, which means that if I had spent 2,30€ on a box, I could have put the contents of my two smaller packages into one bigger package, saving me a cool 29,70€. But they did not tell me this until after they had already sent both of the packages behind the Very German Line of No Fucking Return. (It's a yellow line, which always indicates something powerful/dangerous/final here.)

Holy crap, this makes me want to vote FDP in September. It's all well and good to protect the people against the tyranny of the market, but this is a perfect instance of Europe needing to loosen up the reigns on business and encourage some healthy competition.

After all, when was the last time anybody thought:

*Sigh* Paying low prices for shipping goods is simply not worth the oppression I suffer at the hands of Federal Express, UPS, and the Postal Service.

I heard today on NPR's On The Media that John Roberts may have some pro-business leanings on the Commerce Clause. This reinforces my long-held belief that Roe v. Wade is the Wolf's Clothing, an easy way to tie up the Democratic party in their own tongues. I'm working on a long piece that hits on this topic, but for now, don't look at abortion rights: Bush is a business man, so keep your eye on the money interests. When the Senate gets to the confirmation hearings, watch carefully and see what the Senate focuses on.

I was somewhat surprised to see Robin Williams appear in some relatively complex films (complex from what I hear anyway, I have yet to see any of them). I always figured his serious films were a relatively new sidetrack, but I just happened across Terry Gilliam's bizarre The Fisher King tonight on television. (I wonder when the last time that got airtime in the US was....) Decent flick, although a little long for my taste. Coincidentally, I just last week read a New Yorker piece from last December about Eric Idle's production of a Monty Python-Holy Grail musical, for which I have seen 0 reviews as of yet. If somebody might be so kind as to point me to one....

This is a very sad time, one that only students will truly understand.

Everyone is heading home after their semester or year here in Germany. One by one, we are dispersing ourselves across the globe, trading the daily contact on which we have gorged ourselves for the thin promise of communications satellites and glass fiber, which may possibly -- but more likely will not -- defeat the evil drifting influences of time, space, new loves and new jobs.

Even in a networked world, saying "Goodbye" has not changed.

Data Creep

In addition to my PDF Farm, I've now got a pod farm going. In six months, I've managed to amass more than 2 Gb of podcasts and audiobooks, the vast majority of which (about 95%) I have actually listened to. What to do with this stuff?

My dream would be an automatic Speech-to-Text engine running behind iTunes (where they all get imported) and in front of a robust indexing database. Then, while I'm searching for other bits of stuff, the indexed transcripts will return hits, too.

This kind of deep searching offsets some of what Maciej feared would happen if audio took over blogging. Winer and Curry have pushed podcasting through the roof, and for good reason. It's a medium that lends itself to exchanges of lots of audio information automatically. It's convenient to listen to and digest, if you're an auditory person (which, I admit, I'm not).

But we don't yet have any way of building this stuff into our external memory banks yet. We can't search it, we can't deconstruct it, and we can't remix it easily. iTunes does have some cool bookmarking features, but that's certainly not enough. If this stuff is to become useful in a meaningful way (as in, more than just a distribution medium for indy rock and the rants of geeks in their moms' basements), we need to be able to look inside and extract the contents of these podcasts.

The best part of my pdf farm is that it represents both my knowledge (things I've read), my potential knowledge (I have a folder gathering articles that I intend to read), and forgotten resources (read them, but they don't spring to mind). This could be a huge resource for me, as I work on tackling several upcoming projects, all of which have interconnecting threads. If I had some way to sift through all of this information easily, who knows what I'd be able to do?

A rough estimate now gives me 217 pdf and text documents totaling 164Mb. This is an impressive collection of stuff. Now I just wish I had some tools to help deal with it.

This could take the form of file tagging (á la delicious) or some sort of brute search engine (Spotlight), but whatever form I choose needs to be able to put the relevant information into context and deliver it to me without too much fuss on my part. And it should be smart; when I type "chad," I don't just want a list of articles about the Debacle of 2000 and the Darfur crisis. I want two lists: one about Florida, one about Darfur.