What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. --Foreword to the book.

Just finished this book today. It was written in 1985, it talks about Dallas, and the 700 Club, Reagan and many other (by now) old fashioned things. It only talks about computers in passing, as this new thing that everybody is talking about.

And it is extremely current. It's been 27 years, and it could have been written yesterday. You'll just need to replace some TV shows with Twitter, Reddit, or G+, but it has made me think a lot about my own relationship with information, and amusement. I couldn't help but think about this book when reading various essays that touch culture, education, or politics these days.

It has also made me realise my own incongruence: being proud of not owning a TV, while I spent hours of my waking ours watching cat videos, news snippets in Google Reader, or curating links that have been reshared dozens of times.

If you're at all interested in understanding our culture and discourse, do yourself a favor and get a copy. It's not long, nor dense in academic jargon. It's only 9 euro with free shipping in the Book Depository, and they even have a Kindle version in Amazon.

I'm typing this from the departure gate of the Beauvais airport, about to board my plane back home. I came to Paris for the Debian MiniConf, a/k/a another excuse to meet so many friends. Needless to say, it was great fun.

I already signed and mailed all the keys from the KSP, and spent some time during the weekend finishing the transition of my blog from Blosxom to Ikiwiki. I liked Blosxom, specially the fact that it produced static pages, but I wanted to try Ikiwiki, with its elegance and so many interesting features. The combination of web-edition, backed by revision control, with a static blog finished convincing me.

So, I have just changed the feed link in Planet. I hope I don't flood you! (I took the effort of adding meta tags to all my old posts so the GUID won't change).

And thanks to the MiniConf team!