❮❮prevnext❯❯

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Harris is doing well by not sucking up to a press corps that has gone for vibes and is more interested in a "both sides" horse race.

Frankly it's been rough for the press ever since craigslist killed the classifieds cash cow, and the on-demand attention economy shifted online. Sucks, because thoughtful reporting would be great right about now, and there are islands of it but... yikes.

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One thing I've found out at Harvard Square and Copley Square: Wasps dig the restaurant Dig.

As a person, he told me, your biggest problem is other people. You are vulnerable to people, and reliant upon them. But imagine instead that you are a twenty-first-century river, or desert, or polar bear. Your biggest problem *is still people*. You are still vulnerable to them, and reliant upon them.

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For anyone trying to discern what to do w/ their life: PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO. That's pretty much all the info u need.

... John Green talks about her a lot. I'm glad I got to meet her and correspond a little before she died. Am always surprised when I re-learn she went to Tufts.

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At the end of his life, the great picture book author and illustrator Maurice Sendak said on the NPR show Fresh Air, "I cry a lot because I miss people. I cry a lot because they die, and I can't stop them. They leave me, and I love them more."

He said, "I'm finding out as I'm aging that I'm in love with the world."

It has taken me all my life up to now to fall in love with the world, but I've started to feel it the last couple of years. To fall in love with the world isn't to ignore or overlook suffering, both human and otherwise. For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of the stars. It is to hold your children while they cry, to watch as the sycamore trees leaf out in June. When my breastbone starts to hurt, and my throat tightens, and tears well in my eyes, I want to look away from feeling. I want to deflect with irony, or anything else that will keep me from feeling directly. We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.

Sendak ended that interview with the last words he ever said in public: "Live your life. Live your life. Live your life."

Here is my attempt to do so.

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Never predict the end of the world. You're almost certain to be wrong, and if you're right, no one will be around to congratulate you.

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Diet Dr Pepper is god's perfect softdrink

John Green has a similar feeling for the drink.

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[Home is] not a place, but a moment.

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But I think it is also hard for us to confront human-caused climate change because the most privileged among us, the people who consume the most energy, can separate ourselves from the weather. I am certainly one such person. I am insulated from the weather by my house and its conditioned air. I eat strawberries in January. When it is raining, I can go inside. When it is dark, I can turn on lights. It is easy for me to feel like climate is mostly an outside phenomenon, whereas I am mostly an inside phenomenon.

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I remember as a child hearing phrases like "Only the strong survive" and "survival of the fittest" and feeling terrified, because I knew I was neither strong nor fit. I didn't yet understand that when humanity protects the frail among us, and works to ensure their survival, the human project as a whole gets stronger.

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A few years ago, I ran into an old friend, who said of our high school, "It saved my life. But it also did a lot of other things." So, too, with the internet.

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who are you,little i

(five or six years old)
peering from some high

window;at the gold

of november sunset

(and feeling:that if day
has to become night

this is a beautiful way)

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But I want to be earnest, even if it's embarrassing. The photographer Alec Soth has said, "To me, the most beautiful thing is vulnerability." I would go a step further and argue that you cannot see the beauty which is enough unless you make yourself vulnerable to it.

That's a thing that still gets me. A lot of people conflate openness and vulnerability. But that vulnerability mostly comes from attachment, hitching our wagons to what we want to be rather than what is.

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When we are young, we drink our coffee with milk and sugar. And as we age, we drink it with milk only, then we drink it black, then we drink it decaf, then we die. Our next eater is at decaf.

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Depression is melancholy minus its charms.

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Years ago my mother used to say to me, she'd say . . . 'In this world, you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant.' Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.

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[Courage is] when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway.

For me "licked" isn't always being defeated per se, but at risk for having my delicate ego ending up a bruised mess.

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Don't just do something. Stand there.

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a photograph can't help taming what it shows

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After the death of the poet Jane Kenyon, her husband Donald Hall wrote, "We did not spend our days gazing into each other's eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention." Hall goes on to note that third things might be John Keats or the Boston Symphony Orchestra or Dutch interiors or children.

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The pleasure isn't owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you.

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Looking up toward the looming mountain ranges in the distance, I was reminded of what nature is always telling me: Humans are not the protagonists of this planet's story. If there is a main character, it is life itself, which makes of earth and starlight something more than earth and starlight.

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A 2009 study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology found that people given license to doodle recalled more information than non-doodlers, perhaps because doodling requires just enough brainpower to keep the mind from wandering.

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When people say, 'we have made it through worse before' / all I hear is the wind slapping against the gravestones / of those who did not make it.

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Driving alone at night is heartbreak without the agony.

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You're going to be okay, you know. Not in the short run . . . And also not in the long run, I guess. But in the medium run.

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Minor epiphany: I have almost the same fixed mindset for my body that I do for my emotional / intellectual self and life in general. Like, I'm reasonably happy with it and confident about it, but I am rarely inclined to push its boundaries, to find out more exactly what the limits are, or to extend them through dogged persistence. And I also expect it to be very reliable, always able to do what I ask, so long as I don't ask for too much.

I'm sure upcoming decades may force me to recognize that neither my body nor my wits are infinitely reliable...

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kidpix.app recreates old doodling software. I wonder what the modern day closest equivalent is...

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I like that the first American coin said "MIND YOUR BUSINESS"

via Cracked.com

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sketch.metademolab.com kind of a cool "animate kids drawings" tool. I like how it lets you see how the sausage is made On the way down to NJ, we listened to Flula Borg on one of Melissa's favorite podcast, "Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend". At the end they had a fascinating "theater of the mind" segment with the joke that all the sound effects Conan was providing contained the word of what the sound effect was describing - so he wouldn't make, say, crunch noises for footsteps, he'd say the word "footstep" in a crunchy way, so to speak. It's a lot of fun to do! I feel like I've seen that idea visually (like illustrations that embed the name of the thing illustrated) but never as sound. (Honestly I think the bit was better without the animations here, but still.) Also Flula Borg is a delight! He really leans into that cheerful goofy German angle.

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"Putting pine nuts on your salad doesn't make you a grownup."
"F*cking does."

This lovely cool down reminds me how the first part of quarantine was marked by my library of hoodies.

Seems like a long time ago! And it was. And its has not been as fun a summer as some but not as bad as it could've been.

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Ha, someone leveraged the Evangelion / Animal Crossing logo similarity I noticed into a crossover:

You can get stickers of it here.

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Cicada on the window screen

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Cicada on the window screen

There's one thing computing teaches you, and that's that there's no point to remembering *everything*.

I recorded that 17 years ago, with the comment "I'm trying to utilize this statement as encouragement to discard all these old files that are only slightly interesting in a 'passing interests and random activities of Kirk in the late 1990s'". I'm still not sure I got the knack of that.

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I feel I can tell I am becoming an old by my lack of enthusiasm for unisex one-piece-looking rompers a few folks at my company's shore side outing are wearing.
--an old favorite Far Side of mine. I know the feel.

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I'm having a pretty severe case of "why is there no time during a week"?

I feel like there was a time where there was an ok balance for, say, reading, projects, and video games, as well as some quality time with an SO.

I guess the main culprit is band tuba stuff. It's at least 2 chunks of time a week, usually a bit more. And it's a highly rewarding activity, but not cheap.

It seems like if you work you kind of have to pick a single free time activity (like "kids", for some people!) and everything else goes around the edges. (Maybe even if you're not working) Maybe with intense discipline you could get 2 or 3 big things juggle at once, but man. It's not easy.

Blender of Love

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There's a line from a Russian poem. It says: 'We love just once in a lifetime. And spend the rest of our lives looking for something similar.'

(via humans of New York -- he has a super crazy sad tale)

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No Nazis - No KKK - No Fascists USA -

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You can't be anti-participation trophies and pro Confederate statues. They are the world's biggest participation trophies.

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In the past, empires were ruled by emperors, then kingdoms were ruled by kings. Now we have countries.

So this marked 20 years worth of photos, posted! Thanks to everyone who took time to comment, its been a great stroll down memory lane. Some cuts from the original short story (and I'm surprised at how detailed I remember the original), but so cool and quirky...
Over the past few years I've realized that I use an idiosyncratic visualization for certain kinds of time; I see the cyclic nature of the twelve months of a year and the seven days of a week in the form of a circle, both going counter-clockwise. I spent some time today generating images reflecting this view. Here's a reflection of what a week is like for me:

I guess the specific rotation and counter-clockwise direction reflects a dash of synesthesia, and also how important physical layout is to my sense of recall -- if I'm trying to do a week-based day calculation, I'll often use my hand to as an arrow to mark my place in the week, in the same way I'll still unconsciously shape an "L" with my left hand to recall which direction is which.

I'm less certain why I place the weekend down. My best guess is see that as the start and stop of a week, and is either "heavier" or "where the week meets the road" (to stretch the physical metaphor, since I view myself as moving in the fixed week-wheel rather than it moving to accommodate me.) The counter-clockwise motion then springs from that - I read left-to-right, so the Saturday-Sunday "start" to the week is in that "forward" direction, and thus drives the rest of the loop.

Years are even more strongly laid out in my mind's eye:
Here the calendar starts at the top, as one might expect, but I think that's because I view a year as progressing from school year to school year, with the loveliness of summer vacation anchoring as the base (though a separate desire to have the numeric transition be straight up tilts the thing a bit.)

Neither visual is strongly color-coded for me, but week vs weekend and the various seasons have a different ephemeral feel, here color-coded for grins.

As a side note, I used a new technology for this, p5.js -- the same processing.js I've used for years, but now as pure javascript, rather than going through some weird java-to-js convertor. Highly recommended! You can check out the working page and source code if so inclined.

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It would be fair to say that the concept of a forest is simpler than the concept of a tree.

You will displace about 2 buckets of water, regardless (of how dense you think you are)

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Japanese Robots in space: Great Thing, the Greatest Thing, or a Scary Astroboy from Your Worst Nightmares?

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Every person is beautiful until proven otherwise. Then they are still beautiful; I just can't be around them.

--from the shooting of the movie "Metropolis", via 45 Behind The Scenes Photos That You've Probably Never Seen Before
--via 22words. Man, that's kinda freaky.

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The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool.

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http://www.slate.com/id/2301312/ - intelligent hatin' on the classics

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"if there's one thing i've learned how to do in this life, it's disappoint women"

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And, really, who blindfolds an owl??

--Supercharming Lego CubeDudes by Pixar Animator Angus MacLane. Doing the heads at a 45-degree angle is so clever...be sure to click the link for more.

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The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.

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Math should advertise more.

(after I kinda geeked out on how Chipotle's "over 60,000" combinations was probably 2^16)

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http://samizdat.mines.edu/howto/HowToBeAProgrammer.html - How To Be a Programmer

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http://kiuchi.jpn.org/en/nobindex.htm - notes of a Japanese Soldier in a USSR prison camp. Sweetly human.

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Things I wish I knew how to google: the tracklists for McDonalds 80s "Shake Burger and Fries" (I think) giveaway tapes - great 50s-60s music

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http://inessential.com/2010/08/09/flexibility_and_power - good points on UI design and when "less (flexibility) is more (power)", though I still miss having some basic options on iDevices, like "open this link in the background"

borrow some wabi-sabi sauce

ramble

2009.08.15

Mr. Ibis posted the following recently, his comments below:

I found this arresting image online somewhere and I just had to save it. It captures so many facets of existence in one image. Overall, it has a very Wabi-sabi (侘寂) feel, which is an aesthetic I'm particularly drawn to -- impermanence, natural decay, the sorrow of the ephemeral. At the same time as this photo is pointing helplessly at sun-faded childhood dreams, it also affirms the power of nature to triumph over the works of man. And that, in the end, is a comforting thought. Not only for the health of the planet, but for the health of my soul. My impermanence is part of the natural order, and my own passing, and the passing of things that I love, is not to be mourned.

Fantastic thought, it really gave me pause. I'm not intuitively drawn to nature enough to have previously thought of the possibility of applying a satisfaction with the impermanence of all things to humanity in general, even though I'm a bit down on our long term chances. And by down, I kind of mean for the interesting idea of civilization that I so cherish, rather than our species as a whole. Or even an idea like "mammals".

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A woman on the subway had a "Piggly Wiggly" plastic bag. Odd, probably aren't any around here. In fact once I iPhoned Amber noted that the list of states with Piggly Wigglys has a near 1-to-1 correspodence with her mental list of states she doesn't want to live.

a kirk by any other name

ramblehistory

(5 comments)

2008.08.15

I was thinking about aliases I've used over the years... (warning, some of this preadolescent stuff is cringe-inducingly dorky. And this whole entry is a bit overly self-centered...)

When I was a kid and got a high score in an arcade game I'd enter a single "Z" in lieu of initials. It seemed Cool and was easier to enter. (In the years since I've decided it's moderately cooler to leverage having a short name and will enter "KRK" on the few games that still have the option.)

I also had a few pen names, as well as names I'd use if I were making video games. "Lord Logan" (Logan being my middle name) comes to mind, an alliterative nod to "Lord British" who made the Ultima games. Also I vaguely remember a "Troll" character... I think I remember making up sprites for it (a version shown here as well as I remember it now) and going so far as to scratch the name into my desk and getting yelled at by my mom. Also, the name "SPAZZ" comes to mind though I don't remember for what.

Probably the biggest experiment was going by "Logan" in middle school. I was unhappy about moving after sixth grade, and I think the name change was an expression of that, also the usual teenage self-dissatisfaction (around the same time my dad was sick.) I changed school districts during high school and quietly went back to Kirk, though this created some confusion at my church, where they decided to split the difference and call me Butch. (Or, in full, "Kirk Logan Brother Butch Israel Brother")

Also in high school I picked up "Kirkles", the alleged term of endearment "Lynnie-Poo" had for me, according to our mutual friends. And in Spanish class my name resisted Spanishization so I went by the (allegedly an actual nickname) "Nacho"

Later in high school I do remember enjoying picking callsigns in the game Wing Commander... I think "Metropolis" and "Whiplash" were my favorites.

It was around this time I also used signature characters, signing highschool notes with characters who would sometimes hold up signs of commentary ala Wile E Coyote. Zinger the clown, shown here, was first, but he was quick supplement by Alien Bill who has been with me ever since. Alien Bill Productions was also my default company for games or programs I'd make in college, marginally classier than "Barking Spider Productions" that I used in high school. Neither Zinger and Alien Bill are actual aliases, though sometimes people get confused about the latter.

In college I picked up "kisrael" in the classic Unix tradition of "first initial and last name" -- I was just pleased that since my last name starts with a vowel it makes a nice name in all. "Kirkjerk" was when I was looking for an appropriately menacing, at-most-8-character name for when people were playing the game Death Rally at work. I also went through a series of AOL Instant Messenger names before remember my kirkjerk password, including kirkamundo and thegreatkirkini.

I guess for the most part I'm pleased with my first name and like variations on it. Also I'm never compelled to do much role changing online, or that whole projective AOL-ish "HotStuff74" or whatever (and isn't it odd how so many people, some of whom might otherwise be a little coy about their age, tag on their birth year?)

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Video of the Moment

--Since today's ramble was kind of dull and kirkcentric, here's something pretty cool...

open wide. wider.

(9 comments)

2007.08.15

I had a dentist appointment this morning.

Life with the dentist... well, the dental hygenist... has gotten better since I figured out I can kind of cooperate with her, think about what part of my mouth she's working on and try to angle things appropriately. It's much less painful than just trying to keep my mouth open as wide as possible the entire time.

I amused myself my trying to think of a story with a main character who found a dental checkup the most relaxing thing in the world and would try to generate excuses to go. But then I realized the only way that would seem realistic to me is if the character had such a screwed up and stressful life that having someone scrape and prod around the teeth and gums with sharp instruments was a nice distraction.

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Quote of the Moment

One of the best things to come out of the home computer revolution could be the general and widespread understanding of how severely limited logic really is.

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Link of the Moment
I was amused by Slate's glossary of Hedge-Fund-ese.

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Photo of the Moment

--Slightly odd thing to see out your window, planes refueling over Back Bay... I also posted a brief video on Youtube that shows the whole scene.

the more clever you *think* you sound...

(4 comments)

2006.08.15

I've been carpooling with Tim since I started my new job. The conversations during the trip make it worthwhile... often techie, sometimes political, almost always geeky...

This morning we were talking about the popularity and feature set of various OSes. (Random side note... I've noticed a lot of Russians who say that's short for "Operational System". Funny how I notice that "ing" to "ional" change so much, even though it barely makes a difference in meaning.) He's a strong Linux advocate on many fronts, using Windows because he has to for work (though even there he uses OpenOffice instead of Microsoft's offering, and is delighted that no one ever seems to notice) and for games, while I'm kind of a Windows guy, sort of coasting on the way Windows really was a superior alternative in 1995.

I consider myself a bit of poweruser with OSes, very deft in several areas, from commandline quick-and-dirty scripts in Unix and Windows to setting up shortcuts in ways that let me start most of my favorite applications in 2 keystrokes (but without relying on 3rd party installs), from using Windows without a mouse (a skill honed from when I was leaning wayback in a papasan chair and couldn't reach the mouse easily) to just generally flying around the various folders throughout my harddrives.

When it comes to UIs in general, I tend to be intensely conservative. I dial back Windows XP so it looks the way 95 did. OSX and various flavor os Linux GUI have never really clicked for me. I still use this ancient version of Paint Shop Pro that I've been using for a decade, despite some limitations and irritations with it. You would think I would have the skills to pick up these new systems fairly easily, but I realize there's a single underlying theme in all of this... I'm good at the UI I use not because it's a good UI, or I like UIs, but because the UI of the OS is intensely uninteresting to me, strictly a means to an end, and any time I notice or think too much about the UI, it's probably a bad thing. Similarly, I don't like Mr. Ibis' route of customizing Windows desktop to "powerize" them, because then I'd be more dependent on those modifications, and my skillset less transferable to other people's PCs, as well as uppping what it takes to feel comfortable in a new workspace of my own.

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Quote of the Moment

[On Billy Beane realizing that many good baseball players are discarded by the major leagues because they don't look like good players] The latter discovery in particular struck a chord with me because my football career has been blighted by exactly that sort of prejudice. English scouts visiting my Friday morning five-a-side game have (presumably) discounted me on peripheral grounds of age, weight, speed, amount of time spent lying on the ground weeping with exhaustion, etc.; what they're not looking at is performance, which is of course is the only thing that counts. They'd have made a film called Head It Like Hornby by now if Billy Beane were working over here. (And if I were any good at heading, another overrated and peripheral skill.)

baclklog flush #60

(1 comment)

2005.08.15

I don't think anyone was holding their breath for this but I added my 3 favorite angles of that Rockport seasnail to the desktop wallpaper page so you can download them in their full 1600*1200 glory...pretty decent background I think.

• Senababy's writeup of E3's Scavanger Hunts are funny, funny, funny: last years and this years.
• In other anecdotal news...a lot of American popsongs make it other countries untranslated. A friend of mine from Germany had a teacher who swore that "Under the Boardwalk" was about/"sung by" bugs that lived under the wooden floorboards of someone's house. Anyway, there was a bus with a billboard for Dennis Leary in "Rescue Me"...somehow because of the song Ksenia had the idea that "Rescue" was something like the F-word. (And the billboard, with Leary falling from a building as seen from the window he jumped from, didn't help matters.) Ah well, live and learn.
• 10eastern.com's Found Photo gallery is terrific fun. If you feel inclined to browse the whole thing I definately suggest taking advantage of the "view as thumbnails" feature.
• Note to self: check out Darwinia ...it looks like it might be that game I wish I had made...
• Ten things I learned about the future at the Wired NextFest. Ksenia and I stopped by that when we were in Chicago...it was cooler than (though a bit similar to) the Museum of Science and Industry. We couldn't stay there long, had to run for the Architecture Cruise, and of course the bums wouldn't offer any kind of admittance or discount for the next day. Losers. Still like a lot of geeks I feel a kinship with the magazine, just given when it started coming out and when I started getting into computers.
• Another thing I learned in Chicago, specifically the office building where I was taking InstallShield training from Macrovision...revolving doors with shaded glass can be very disconcerting, because they seem to start up and slow down on their own accord, you can't always anticapte their movement correctly, especially when approaching from the outside on a bright day.
• Heh, didn't find out how a half-virtual, half-real baseball game went...
• Coolest flash interface to an art site I've seen.

squeak

(1 comment)

2004.08.15

Quote of the Moment

Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse.

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Link of the Moment
Wow...Arlington's street signs are so bad they're worthy of their own website...which I found linked to on that site about designs that are just Messed Up, This Is Broken.

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Videos of the Moment
This page of Skating Videos had some pretty amazing footage, including Matrix-esque shots. If you're in a hurry I'd suggest just going for "Bennihana" Quicktime Video. (There are also some less exciting tutorial static pages in the links there.)

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Weather of the Moment
I was about to write this but then I realized how small-potatoes a complaint it was compared to thousands and thousands of people in Florida...but, what is the point of a blog if not to magnify our petty issues out of all proportion?

Anyway: this weather has be stymied. It's chilly, but extremely humid. Damp. Clammy, even. What clothes do you wear for that??

captain abe

historyfamily

(2 comments)

2003.08.15

Everyone knew that young Abe Scheinfeldt was destined to find a vocation in religious work. Many thought he would become a cantor at the temple in his native Boston. His parents held a secret hope that he would become a rabbi.

But then, at 17, Abe encountered a street preacher who led him to faith in Jesus Christ.

For the next five years he sailed the world as a freight deckhand, reading the Bible and growing in faith, even though he had no human mentor to guide him.

When his ship finally returned to Boston, Abe chanced upon a Salvation Army open-air meeting. Almost immediately he decide to join the "salvation war." Within a year he became a cadet at the Army's School for Officer Training in New York, and in November 1901, he was commissioned as an officer and appointed to the Men's Social Service Department.

Following service in New York and New England, Captain Scheinfeldt was transferred to Grand Rapids, Mich., where he met and married another officer, newly commissioned Lieutenant Inez Witherington.

Less than six months later, when they were serving in Bloomington, Ind., the young couple's zeal put them at the center of a full-blown riot. The Bloomington Journal of Sept. 7, 1914, reported that Captain Abe was arrested for "holding a religious service on the streets of Bloomington."

"The police used their clubs on the heads of both men and women," the newspaper reported. Some 500 townspeople protested, but the authorities were adamant.

Three citizens posted bond for the captain, and he was released. Immediately he returned to his troops and began preaching again, only to be arrested once more. "By this time," the paper reported, "the crowd had swelled to at least 1,000 people and most of these followed him back to the jail."

Again local citizens posted bond, but this time Scheinfeldt, on advice of legal counsel, went into a nearby drugstore for refreshments while the crowd outside grew to "at least 1,500 to 2,000 people." The newspaper reported, "Every man, woman, and child in the crowd was protesting against the action of Mayor Harris and the police and deploring the arrest and disturbance of the Salvation Army leader when he was attempting to hold an outdoor religious service."

Abe Scheinfeldt's promising career was cut short by his untimely death from tuberculosis in 1927. His wife passed away in 1961, but the legacy of these two stalwart soldiers lives on in the lives of their daughter, Mrs. Brigadier Mary Moody, and a granddaughter, Major Betty Israel, now serving at The Salvation Army's International Headquarters in London, England.

Priority is one of the print publication of the Eastern Territory of the Salvation Army. (Though check out that site, it's interesting how modeled it seems to be on People magazine.) Abe Scheinfeldt was my great-grandfather.

what women want

2002.08.15

Phew, I was worried I had lost all of the old correspondance between me and Mo, but luckily it's all still there on the hard drive, squirreled away. Time to start thinking about a good plan for making backups...

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Links of the Moment
One of the biggest conversation topics on Slashdot lately is this article asking about alternatives to engagement diamonds. Interesting seeing the geek reaction to them, generally negative. At the risk of swimming in stereotypes, it makes sense, guys who are less concerned about social niceties and more about things that are purely functional, and people with historically so-so track records. By hook or by crook, diamonds are a part of the cultural landscape, though I think that "two month salary guideline" is a bit silly. One of the posters pointed to an Atlantic piece on the diamond trade, and how artificial much of that situation is.

'Course, Mo sort of ended up footing the bill for her own diamond, at least temporarily, thanks to embarrassing bank card failure (I had just switched bank accounts, and the card wasn't working the way I expected.)

You know, I never noticed "niceties" is spelled "nice ties".

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Quote of the Moment

I tell men, if you want to impress a woman don't send her flowers, send her a maid. Because if you're going to spend $55 on a dozen roses, they're dead the next day. A maid costs about $40 and you still have $15 left to get Chinese food and one rose. By the time you come over we haven't cleaned, and you have food, a rose, and you. Baby, we'll do you all night long.

Interesting idea, I wonder how it would work in practice.

sex

2001.08.15

Warning, pretty much every link today is rated R or at least PG-13. Don't look at it if you're not supposed to.

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Link of the Book
Wow, remember Madonna's 1992 Sex book? I really respect what she was trying to do with this book, it was really daring, and talked about things that many people feel but far fewer admit to. Sure it was a skin book, but that was half the point!

That 'Sex book' link seems to an amazingly comprehensive web reproduction of it (down to closeups of collages, and HTML-text versions of some of the wordier pages) though I wonder if it's missing a page or two.

Below is my favorite image from it but this one is also pretty amazing and I never thought I'd so wish that I was Vanilla Ice...

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Quote of the Book

The best way to seduce someone is by making yourself unavailable. You just have to be busy all the time and they'll be craving to see you.

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Image of the Book

I love the feeling of fatigue and "what have I gotten myself into" this picture has, especially in the context of the pictures that seem to be from earlier in the same session. (Hint: the slack rope over her legs.)

KHftCEA 2000-08.1 August

I told Mrs. McL that I felt I'm pretty much a craftsman, and while that has a certain dignity, it doesn't touch people the way, say, being a teacher would. She agreed, but pointed out I'm probably not a great teacher since I'm impatient when people don't 'get it' as quickly as I think I would.  
00-8-15
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