This is an archived page. (current posts)

8.27.2003  

Miserable Internet

Now this is genuinely funny: Michael Kelly's Page of Misery: Why I hate the Internet. Classic.

(Yet another great suggestion from Helmut @ Halarooney.)

8.26.2003  

BLOGFODDER

While you're asleep, do you miss being awake? Why would it be any different with death and life?
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A new sappling growing from the decaying trunk of an old fallen tree.
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If there's one thing I've learned from Walleyball, it's to not celebrate too soon.
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How much, in the last century, can we really have changed if old wisdom like "Don't count your chickens before they're hatched" still applies so freaking well?
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Is a resting pulse of 88 BPM a bad sign?
How to get back to slow time?
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How many pages of introspection constitute a tangible increase in wisdom?
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You have to have something at stake beyond repetition of past successes and avoidance of known failures.
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If I was going to paint, what would I paint?
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You have to be able to separate the Now from the Forever.
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8.19.2003  

Im-Modest

So what I want to know is how the hell the Modest Mouse song "Gravity Rides Everything" ends up in a Nissan soccer-mom-mini-SUV commercial? I know those guys gotta eat, and more power to them for gaining a subversive toehold in the mainstream, but the song is way too good to be chopped into a 20 second feel-good riff.

8.15.2003  

Tweedy

"All of my daydreams are disasters
She's the one I think I love
Rivers burn and then run backwards
For her, that's enough"

- New Madrid, Jeff Tweedy

8.13.2003  

And I Quote:

"If you're an intrinsically curious person, what does a personality boundary even look like?"

Even if you don't normally read music reviews, or give a hoot about the Waterboys, you've got to read at least the first half of this column on Glenn Mcdonald's "The War Against Silence" site. This guy is really freaking smart.

 

negentropic

order out of chaos
making something from nothing

8.11.2003  

Forward Ho

My dilemmas stem from laboring under the illusion of free will.

8.07.2003  

Semi-Literate Literature Rate

I know you've got precious little time on your hands, and it's pretty likely that your desktops (real and virtual), bookmarks, post-its, etc. are already overflowing with stuff to read. But just in case you're in a content slump, or adding one more "to read" bookmark gives you that narcoleptic sense of well being, here's a list of some things I found worth the time it took to read them:

* The Atlantic | Caring for Your Introvert is a nice bit of explanation about a group I feel more and more a part of.

* The Tyranny of Email explores what happens when the tool start to use the user, instead of the other way around, and offers some very sensible solutions.

* iTunes 4, is Apple stupid or courageous? at kottke.org is a nice piece about Apple's relationship to digital music distribution; like several other blog entries on the site, it leads to a long, well thought out discussion about related topics.

* A pair of articles at The Morning News, a site I just found recently thanks to another blog:
Nothing’s Shocking really nails it on the topic of the mass culture regularly co-opting the fringe (and seemingly faster each year); and The Mormons: Our Secret Weapon in the War on Terror is the funniest thing to come out of the post 9/11 political landscape I've seen yet. Plus, I've got a soft spot in my heart for playful (i.e. harmless !) Mormon bashing, but that's another story.

* Weblogs and Journalism, at Tom Coates' plasticbag.org, explains some of the motivations behind blogging better than I could, and helped me understand my own instinct for it a bit better.

* The Floating Island is amazing; not so much that the Brits thought of militarizing icebergs in WW2, but that the thought had never occured to me before. Perhaps we do this now, but no one knows it... the new black helicopter!

* Cory Doctorow lights a good match with Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia, about how we're pretty much doomed to never be able to find half the stuff that'd be a perfect match for what we want to know.

* And speaking meta-phorically, a bit of geeky web junk at webmonkey (one of the first tech sites I visited regularly when my butt initially hit the FT web developer chair) called Metadata, Mark II, previously mentioned here related to the still-mindblowingly-cool GeoURL.

 

ODE TO SMALL TOWN LIFE

I live about 7 blocks from where I work. My house and the building my office is in are on the same street: College Avenue, in Greencastle, Indiana. As of today, I show my pots in two shops within 4 blocks of the web shop. The new place, a coffee shop, is literally across the street. I parked my car at the office (yes, I drive sometimes. OK, a lot of times. But I'm working on that.) and carried the boxes to the shop without so much as changing parking spaces.

We only lock one of our cars - the new one - and while we haven't gone native to the extent of not knowing where the key to our front door is, I enjoy leaving bikes, pots, yard implements, piles of cash and so forth, outside in the yard, undisturbed. (OK - there was that one time some guy tried to make off with a big pot, but I think he was drunk or in a fraternity. Wait, that's redundant...)

At our end of the street, I can count 8 other families that also work at the university. That's out of about 15 houses. I know most of them fairly well. We recently bought a lawnmower to share with our next door neighbor. Cindy makes the 2 minute trip to the fresh produce stand at the north end of town for local corn and tomatoes. In the summer, with the students gone, it feels like a small town from 100 years ago sometimes, despite the monolithic campus buildings and empty parking lots.

We recently gained the dubious distinction, as a town, of being worthy of a "super" Wal*Mart, but that's about as cosmopolitan as it gets. It's a one-Blockbuster, one-McDonalds kind of place. We generally rotatate through the same five restaurants, if you don't count the occasional binge at Taco Bell.

Is there a point to this, you ask? Perhaps not, but it raises a question for me: Is living here better than growing up in San Diego? Or life in Iowa City, or Phoenix, or Boulder?

I'm not sure. But I do know that day by day the place grows into me like roots into soft dirt; the pace, the weather, the people become more where I am, where I exist, one small bit after another.

So far, that's OK by me.