Monthly Archives: September 2008

J.K. Rowling prevails over fandom and perhaps opportunism

By Michael Becker | Published: September 8, 2008
A U.S. dis­trict judge has ruled that a Michigan-based com­pany can­not pub­lish an ency­clo­pe­dia about the pop­u­lar Harry Potter nov­els because the ref­er­ence books uses too much of author J.K. Rowling’s orig­i­nal material. The mate­r­ial for the Harry Potter Lexicon was taken from a Web site oper­ated by Steven Vander Ark, a for­mer school librar­ian. [...]
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What I expect from the Apple event on Tuesday

By Michael Becker | Published: September 7, 2008
A new iPod, just in time too, because we were just think­ing of buy­ing a new one for my wife. This means that now we have to wait a few months until things calm down before we buy her new iPod, or else we have to hunt­ing for a store that will still be car­ry­ing [...]
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A decade of Google

By Michael Becker | Published: September 7, 2008
It was about this time of the year in 2000, the heady days before 9/11, before down­load­ing .mp3s was really ille­gal. I was just start­ing col­lege and hav­ing my first real expe­ri­ences with fast Internet service.
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Reboot

By Michael Becker | Published: September 5, 2008
For some rea­son, the news today that car­toon­ist Lynn Johnston has cho­sen to reboot her pop­u­lar “For Better or for Worse” strip has... affected me. It’s not like I read the comic strip; I haven’t read the funny pages with any reg­u­lar­ity since the days of “Calvin and Hobbes,” but I did read the strip [...]
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Crying over spilled ink

By Michael Becker | Published: September 4, 2008
A quick note today while things are fresh in my mind. We used to say that when a story was cov­ered exten­sively by the media that a lot of ink was spilled on its account. Of course, this refers to the decid­edly old timey process of actu­ally writ­ing some­thing in ink... you know, with a [...]
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