16 Jun 2013

When Your Dead Blog Dies

My webserver fell over last week. I bought the hardware from a guy across the continent on eBay for plus shipping more than 3 years ago. It ran all my course wikis, handled my personal website and a few other tasks it picked up for my friends as a dedicated webserver back before there was a cloud. Until it failed, the hardware had run for 1172 days without so much as rebooting, thanks to the unparalleled stability of free software, and my all-too-paralleled recklessness as a system administrator.

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permalink | personal | 2013.06.16-09:00.00

10 Aug 2009

On Returning to Blogging – At Fifty

I pretty much gave up writing personal essays for the web after I founded SFLC; just when RMS & I were getting ready for the making of GPLv3. It seemed to me then that everything I thought about from day to day was subject to attorney-client privilege, or was the internal business of SFLC, or was a diplomatic statement that shouldn’t be anticipated by a personal blog. I think institutional blogging is invaluable, and I love what my colleagues do at softwarefreedom.org, including the podcast. My course wikis at Columbia are experiments in teaching conducted whth my students & former students that are teaching me every day. I live in the web. But writing about the various things that matter to me, in real time, in the constant process of trying to hope efficiently that all of us could have more freedom? That’s a habit I had gotten out of.

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permalink | personal | 2009.08.10-15:55.00