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It’s not original, but my adoration of alliteration is altogether too alluring. Here’s the first installment of Tech Tuesday, a few links and my brief thoughts on the world of technology. Fortunately, it’s an easy enough segment to start this week, what with SXSWi (South by Southwest Interactive) in town.

Wearing Your Stickybit on Your Sleeve, or Elsewhere
Stickybits are the sought-after items in the giftbags given to attendees of SXSWi. In short, they’re barcodes on stickers that allow you to overlay digital information on real-world objects. Scan the sticker with your iPhone or other (inferior) device, and you can either tag the physical object with digital comments or photos or see what others have posted. Don’t be surprised to see these pop up at a lot of places in Austin now.

Drowing in Ads at SXSWi
I understand the necessity of advertising, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. I appreciate creative advertising much more than the brute approach. (I appreciate skipping commercials even better). Marketers, keenly aware of the masses of people drawn to Austin for SXSW, try to outdo themselves every year.

A very personal Google Android vs. Apple iPhone war just got some more personality
A new team member working on the Google Android phone “calls out” the iPhone. Even though I’m still an ardent iPhone supporter, the quote in this article has merit. He talks about the “open vs. closed” debate of these two platforms and how that relates to what the Internet is supposed to be about in the first place. It’ll be interesting to see what each of these companies do in the mobile sphere in response to each other.

Go here to see the full list, but these would be my three favorites:

I shall attempt to post a weekly NoiseTrade.com album widget for your perusal. I’ll only post ones I’ve actually downloaded. If you haven’t tried NoiseTrade, you should. It has a lot of great music and a great distribution deal – get the album for free if you recommend it to five friends via email or pay what you think it’s worth. They also appear to be adding new artists and albums every few weeks.

I don’t use it as much as I should, but that will change. Tonight’s download was to help ease me out of my bah-hum-bug-ness for the Christmas season (only because I’ve been rehearsing Christmas music for six weeks already!) Click the album cover to hear all the tracks!

From the failblog

This scan reminded me of something that once crossed my desktop that I almost didn’t catch. In an article to get people to volunteer to teach English, one sentence read, “Let’s do our part to help stamp out literacy.”

Here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

These are the words of David Foster Wallace, an author I somehow had not heard about until his untimely, recent death. Infinite Tragedy is now on my ever-lengthening to-read list.

The above quote was copied from Purple State of Mind, the blog of Craig Detweiler.