This is an archived page. (current posts)

Wednesday, August 27  

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.)

Tuesday, August 26  

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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Tuesday, August 19  

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.

Friday, August 15  

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

Wednesday, August 13  

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

Monday, August 11  

Forward Ho

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

Thursday, August 7  

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.

Wednesday, August 6  

the ebay experience and what i hate about it

I'd gotten hooked on the idea of buying a sub-$100 banjo, and suffer from an extreme lack of local music/pawn shops and desire to drive to the closest nearby town, so there I am on ebay, mashing the refresh button like one of those heroin mice in a lab experiment...

then somebody skips in with 17 seconds to go and swipes it away - that was the perfect one! i'm sure of it! oh, why didn't I say $93 instead of $91.50?

Tuesday, August 5  

NOW THIS HAS GONE TOO FAR!

No sooner do I say all sorts of blissful things about Google, and they finally start indexing other parts of my site: Google Search: negentropic otherstuff. They even got video hell!

 

FINALLY

It finally happened: my public-acceptance fantasies fullfilled, even if for a fleeting instant.

Ahh... the proverbial 15 seconds of fame (if it will even last that long). Why do I care? Who else will? Perhaps it's the appearance of controlling something at a distance, of being able to tweak something here and seeing it change there. Maybe it's the equivalent of wearing an obtrusively loud shirt in hopes of prompting a reaction. Or typically juvenile "look at me!" behavior. Or just being an idiot.

 

Outsider Art

Here's a sketchy site*, but with a great roster of lo-tech artists on display: Outsider Art.info. I gotta say, I really like some of this stuff. What is it that's so appealing about painters who aren't trying real hard or are incapable of reproducing "reality"? That it hits the subconscious? Reinforces our skewed and inescapable personal perspective? It's just freaking wacky?

* $bling bling$ idea of the day: And while we're at it, why the hell don't I look at art on the web more often?

 

O Faithful Reader!

Then there's this [as you will have noticed since you obsessively drive your tired eyeballs to my blog on a near-daily basis for a fresh download of detritus from my randomized brain]:

I've been tweaking my blog interface lately -- resizing column widths, playing with fonts, stealing nice bits of CSS for my template from other sites, adding some teaser titles -- and would love the feedback that I so richly deserve for my efforts. Now, naturally it's still got a long way to go, but seriously, waddaya think?

 

Writing Dirt (and Rarely)

So I reckon it's bad blogtiquette to link to oneself, but I had a thought about my Rare Earth area of the St. Earth site. I started it long before this blog, as a place to put my clay-related rantings & writings, but it's since been eclipsed in both my love and attention by said blog. Hum.. what to do, what to do?

Perhaps it's reason for existence would be enhanced if I committed to a publishing schedule; a new "column" each month or something. "Can I do one more thing on a regular basis?", I ask myself. Uhrm. Duh. And perhaps it's layout would be vastly improved if I just got it over with and made the damn thing another blog. Herhm.. blog². I am intrigued.

Monday, August 4  

I [Still] Feel All Googley Inside

So while it makes me feel like a corporate fanboy whore to write a post about Google, using it's subsidiary Blogger, I'll admit to being enraptured by the sort of product-love that comes about somewhat rarely these days (since the web stopped being cooler than J-Lo). I wonder what my list would be, if I were inclined to make it, of the companies/products that I have unabashed affection for? The typical, obvious ones, like Apple, Nike, Half.com? But wait, I have plenty of reservations about each of these... or have in the past. Products are easier to out-and-out love, because they sidestep company politics and practices to a better extent: my ideal small-time example would be my treadle wheel, handmade by Waves of Grain in Minneapolis. Truly, truly, couldn't live without it.

Here's the Forbes article from May 26th, Forbes.com: All Eyes on Google, that got me started on this - it nicely sums up what's going on in search heaven these days