Moby Dick Big Read

Moby Dick Big Read:

‘I have written a wicked book’, said Melville when his novel was first published in 1851, ‘and I feel as spotless as the lamb’. Deeply subversive, in almost every way imaginable, Moby-Dick is a virtual, alternative bible – and as such, ripe for reinterpretation in this new world of new media. Out of Dominion was born its bastard child – or perhaps its immaculate conception – the Moby-Dick Big Read: an online version of Melville’s magisterial tome: each of its 135 chapters read out aloud, by a mixture of the celebrated and the unknown, to be broadcast online in a sequence of 135 downloads, publicly and freely accessible.

Awesome. I’m going to listen to it in podcast form.

/via Open Culture.

July 31, 2017

Resilient Web Design

Jeremy Keith:

Resilient Web Design is a short book. It’s between sixteen and seventeen megawords long. You could read the whole thing in a couple of hours. Or—because the book has seven chapters—you could take fifteen to twenty minutes out of a day to read one chapter and you’d have read the whole thing done in a week.

Can’t beat the price. I’ve already dug in a little. Hoping to dig in a bit more during this snowy weekend.

December 16, 2016

Tubes by Andrew Blum

Andrew Blum, in Tubes:

“For all the talk of the placelessness of our digital age, the Internet is as fixed in real, physical places as any railroad or telephone system ever was.”

I must get a copy of this book. I found it via Jeremy Keith’s nice post about visiting the Heart’s Content cable station recently. I love how Jeremy wishes (and actually does) visit some of the places that are vital in the birth of the telegraph and Internet.

Most people in this world couldn’t describe to you the way the Internet works. Some, though, could more than likely describe to you the way a telegraph works. At least as its basic “sending Morse code over a line drawn between two locations” description. When people think of the Internet they do not think of it as a physical network the way they do the telegraph. But they should. You should.

I think it is great to remember where we’ve come from and also that the Internet is still, and will be for some time, a huge series of cables and routers and boxes and boosters and buildings and the list goes on and on. To understand the network is to be a better developer.

July 3, 2012