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Random question about emotional sharing:
When you are craving some one to listen to you and or vent to and or commiserate, what percentage is "just wanting to be heard/felt/seen/validated" vs... I dunno, mostly just hoping the stressor will go away?

Lemme know!

For me I feel it's 1/3 the former 2/3 the latter. I'm always willing to listen, but I don't always want to vent, at least not to an individual - I'm sort of too aware that being reminded they are likely helpless to materially help isn't a pleasant feeling for them...

Even validation- sometimes most usefully channeled as "it makes sense that you feel that way", which validates the feeling without necessarily agreeing to all parts of it - seems like it could backfire for me. I mean who wants to hear "boy that situation really does suck!" (or its opposite, "that's not so bad, people have it worse, buck up")

I dunno. I do feel blue today, and I sort of want people to hear about it. Maybe it's yet another ego thing; I want people to admire what a stalwart little muddler-through I am.

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Scientists making mech bodies for mushrooms...

uplift!
though I wonder if there's a sign of true intentionality? or is it like when you have plants make stock picks, but you don't really suspect they know what they're doing...
Also, it does make you wonder about reaction time (though I guess the video is sped up 10x). Like life at human speed must be ridiculously fast for most things.
(Also I think about the comic Supergod - one of the most pervasive deities was fungus based, who was kind of an avatar of death/rebirth...)

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The blues isn't about feeling better. It's about making other people feel worse.

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I feel as a kid in the 80s we saw this illusion a lot, but not so much now...

I'd almost consider making a third addition to my (relative innocuous) tattoo set, but I'm not sure I like its message. Like, there is no correct way of interpreting the whole thing, and the "2 square legs" and "3 round legs" are equally valid. And that's kind of the opposite of my life philosophy, which is that there IS a universal Truth, and some views of it are more likely correct than others, but we are definitely uncertain about what the Truth is.

	We're Stupid Say What?	Terrible Christian Rap from the 90s. My dormmate Chris could still quote it in recent correspondence, to my consternation ("We're stupid fresh, fly and def, funky hype homeboys")
	Rocket Queen Guns N' Roses	I don't have much G-N-F'N-R... some place I read that the passionate moans were actually semi-authentic? So I was curious how it worked within a song.
★ ★ ★ ★	These Are Days 10,000 Maniacs	Interesting paeon to youthful sensuality and motherhood, I think I only had that one MTV unplugged version.
	Expert in a Dying Field The Beths	I love VRTY's quote "As a librarian, I feel this song haha", though maybe it's more about losing love....
★ ★ ★ ★	Beer Run Todd Snider	Friends at PPLM weekend cited it as we made our own beer run... "Be -double E double are you-N-beer run / All we need is a ten and five-er, / Car and key and a sober driver" - catchy!
★ ★ ★ ★	Counteraction Cornershop	Sitar etc in this cool little number.
★ ★ ★ ★	All Summer Long Kid Rock	Kid Rock is reprehensible in a lot of ways, but this song (sampling Werewolves of London and Sweet Home) with its weird nostalgic tip is great, though I found out it from Cracked making fun of it for the rhyme "And we were trying different things / We were smoking funny things"
★ ★ ★ ★	Platinum Richard Jacques, henry parsley & Louis Edwards	used for the end credits of this Handspring documentary, it might be very studio but it sounds so good, great percussion and horns.
	Blues & The Abstract Truth Oliver Nelson	I don't love jazz, but I love this title, mentioned on "Strong Songs"
	Le téléfon Nino Ferrer	Goofy French comedy song, via this tumblr post
★ ★ ★ ★	Caught Up Usher	Really like the sound of this "Neo-Soul", playing at the Moxy Hotel in Boston
★ ★ ★ ★	Visions of Gideon Sufjan Stevens	from the movie "Call Me By Your Name", so lovely and sad.
	Sanctus Missa Luba	A Christian spiritual sung by Africans, from a book "The Works of His Hands: A Scientist's Journey from Atheism to Faith"
	Haus of Holbein SIX	Funny stage musical song, I think I like the accents, from this tiktok
	Prayer in C (Robin Schulz Radio Edit) Lilly Wood & The Prick & Robin Schulz	One of the most shazamed songs. Not bad recent pop.
	Copacabana Herb Alpert	Popped up as an earwig, I dig the big box percussion and crowd vocals in this one.
	Are You Washed In the Blood Alan Jackson	Sometimes old Salvation Army songs pop up for me as earwigs... I like this folksy version though it ends abruptly (and man, "washed in the blood of the lamb" is just a weird image, even if it's meant to be a like a super-duper soul detergent.)

The soul should always stand ajar.

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One of the things that commends travel, art, nature, work, and certain drugs to us is the way these experiences, at their best, block every mental path forward and back, immersing us in the flow of a present that is literally wonderful--wonder being the by-product of precisely the kind of unencumbered first sight, or virginal noticing, to which the adult brain has closed itself. (It's so inefficient!) Alas, most of the time I inhabit a near-future tense, my psychic thermostat set to a low simmer of anticipation and, too often, worry. The good thing is I'm seldom surprised. The bad thing is I'm seldom surprised.

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Some years ago I myself made some observations on this aspect of nitrous oxide intoxication, and reported them in print. One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question,--for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.

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Mysticism is the antidote to fundamentalism.

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Language, [Terence McKenna's "Stoned Ape Theory" contends], represents a special case of synesthesia, in which otherwise meaningless sounds become linked to concepts.

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I'm struck by the fact there was nothing supernatural about my heightened perceptions that afternoon, nothing that I needed an idea of magic or a divinity to explain. No, all it took was another perceptual slant on the same old reality, a lens or mode of consciousness that invented nothing but merely (merely!) italicized the prose of ordinary experience, disclosing the wonder that is always there in a garden or wood, hidden in plain sight--another form of consciousness "parted from [us]," as William James put it, "by the filmiest of screens." Nature does in fact teem with subjectivities--call them spirits if you like--other than our own; it is only the human ego, with its imagined monopoly on subjectivity, that keeps us from recognizing them all, our kith and kin. [...] Before this afternoon, I had always assumed access to a spiritual dimension hinged on one's acceptance of the supernatural--of God, of a Beyond--but now I'm not so sure.

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Many reports are given of deep mystical experiences, but their chief characteristic is the wonder at one's own profundity.

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Psychedelic drugs cause panic and temporary insanity in people who have not taken them.

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The psychedelic experience can yield a lot of fool's gold.

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We have the longest childhood of any species. This extended period of learning and exploration is what's distinctive about us. I think of childhood as the R&D stage of the species, concerned exclusively with learning and exploring. We adults are production and marketing.

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And suddenly I realized that the molecules of my body, and the molecules of my spacecraft, the molecules in the body of my partners, were prototyped, manufactured in some ancient generation of stars. [I felt] an overwhelming sense of oneness, of connectedness . . . It wasn't 'Them and Us,' it was 'That's me! That's all of it, it's one thing.' And it was accompanied by an ecstasy, a sense of 'Oh my God, wow, yes'--an insight, an epiphany.

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Do you see the world as a prison or a playground?

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Keltner believes that awe is a fundamental human emotion, one that evolved in us because it promotes altruistic behavior. We are descendants of those who found the experience of awe blissful, because it's advantageous for the species to have an emotion that makes us feel part of something much larger than ourselves.

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Depression is a response to past loss, and anxiety is a response to future loss.

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The usual antonym for the word "spiritual" is "material." That at least is what I believed when I began this inquiry--that the whole issue with spirituality turned on a question of metaphysics. Now I'm inclined to think a much better and certainly more useful antonym for "spiritual" might be "egotistical." Self and Spirit define the opposite ends of a spectrum, but that spectrum needn't reach clear to the heavens to have meaning for us. It can stay right here on earth. When the ego dissolves, so does a bounded conception not only of our self but of our self-interest. What emerges in its place is invariably a broader, more openhearted and altruistic--that is, more spiritual--idea of what matters in life. One in which a new sense of connection, or love, however defined, seems to figure prominently.

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This, I think, is the great value of exploring non-ordinary states of consciousness: the light they reflect back on the ordinary ones, which no longer seem quite so transparent or so ordinary. To realize, as William James concluded, that normal waking consciousness is but one of many potential forms of consciousness--ways of perceiving or constructing the world--separated from it by merely "the filmiest of screens," is to recognize that our account of reality, whether inward or outward, is incomplete at best. Normal waking consciousness might seem to offer a faithful map to the territory of reality, and it is good for many things, but it is only a map--and not the only map.

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I've always been interested in how humans visualize and put metaphors to time ("life's like an hourglass glued to the table" I've been told) Some of my interest was sparked by recognizing how idiosyncratic my own way of spatializing the course of a year and the course of a week as counterclockwise circles (I made visualization of those timehoops a while back)

All of these are akin to synaesthesia - time isn't inherently spatial, but we find the metaphors for it useful.

This Anthropology.net article discusses a few of those metaphors that were less familiar to me

• I knew of the Aymara of the Andes, who reverse the more common view of marching into the future with the past at our backs - "the past is known and has been seen, and thus lies in front. The future remains unknown and unseen, and is relinquished to be behind the ego".
• For many speakers of Mandarin, "the past is referred as above the speaker. And the future referred to as below the speaker." (I'm not sure if the metaphor is that of plummeting? That's almost as morbid as the hourglass glued to the table!)
• For the the Pormpuraawans of Australia "time always flows from east or the past to west or the future" regardless of the current location and orientation of the speaker.
• For the Yupno peoples of Papua New Guinea, "time is a topographical concept, time winds its way up and downhill." (The article points to speculation on how this might relate to the group's literally uphill migratory history.)

If you dig this topic, you might like the book "Einstein's Dreams" by Alan Lightman, that posits the great thinker dreaming of different ways times might behave, and how humans might respond. (If time slowed down noticeably with velocity, would people attempt to live their life always in motion in order to have more time, put their houses on wheels and go go go? Or in a universe where time slowed based on proximity to a central point, would adults with young children or old people journey to be nearer that point, while people trying to flee bad memories would head as far away from it as possible?)

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The fact that "a fucking casual" is an insult in some circles of hobbies - a thing that you do in your free time for fun - really says something about how bad some people are at having fun.

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That the first thought that goes through your mind is what you have been conditioned to think. What you think next defines who you are.

That is such an interesting thought about identity and our relationship with our subconscious selves and the implications for change and growth. Sometimes I can have such ugly initial thoughts - (a bit like the french term L’appel du vide, the call of the void.) It does raise the question: what's the realest you? Is it that conscious voice that steps up and corrects the first bad thought it, like the quote implies? Or are you not "authentically" changed until you've successfully reconditioned yourself? 4-star stuff in red. And there's a lot of it! So a good month but not much that really blew my mind.

• Freestyler (Bomfunk MC's) So very late 90s UK.
• Bali Ha'I (Peggy Lee) I faintly recall hearing this haunting chorus from "South Pacific" as a kid.
• The New Tetris (Title) (Neil D. Voss) The classic Tetris song Korobeiniki plus a breakbeat (and magic chimes)
• Run the World (Girls) (Beyoncé) Melissa wondered if it was the military-ish snare that attracted me to this, overall it's a great song.
• Theme from Star Trek (Leonard Nimoy) Nice lounge-ified version of the classic theme.
• One Day (feat. Ryan Tedder) (Logic) This video really goes into ICE detention policy and sets it against white nationalism, which I wasn't expecting when I went for the link - strong stuff. Music wise, I love the descending chromatic notes of the background.
• Problem (Lucky Chops) Instrumental cover of the Iggy Azalea song - just realized that bari sax might be the same guy from "Too Many Zooz"
• Crosstown Traffic (The Jimi Hendrix Experience) I really don't have enough Hendrix. Enjoy the double, sometimes single entendre of this song.
• Who Dat Called Da Police (New Birth Brass Band) This shows up in HONK circles
• Monster (feat. Jay-Z, Rick Ross, Nicki Minaj & Bon Iver) (Kanye West) Love the autotune stuff and roar sample that opens this
• Father and Son (Cat Stevens) A lot of sophistication and emotion in this.
• Shaving Cream (Benny Bell) An old camp favorite. Oddly, my version has different verses than this one I really like when they mix up the rhyme to say "I am taking a ... SHAVE, my queen"
• Here Come the Girls (Trombone Shorty) Well, the lyrics aren't NOT a bit sexist. Saw him do this live at Blue Hill Pavillion.
• Pusherman (Curtis Mayfield) Missed this song. Amazing spinoff of Blaxploitation
• Sexuality (Billy Bragg) Mostly I like the opening couplet.
• Both Hands (Live) (Ani DiFranco) I keep thinking of "the low moan of the dial tone".

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A FB exchange from Aug 12 that stuck with me:
Nick:

"i'm listening to a radio production of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, and i'm getting kind of tired of it. the whole premise is that some "psycho-historian" predicted the fall of his own empire and invented some crazy 1000-year plan of 120dimensional chess that would "limit the duration of the time of barbarism that followed". because if you're smart enough you can set into motion a thousand-years-long conspiracy. and if you are not in a gigantic empire then you're in barbarism apparently.

am I going to feel this way whenever I read a sci-fi classic?"

Kirk:

In theory, I like the metaphor of a billiard ball, that the course of a few atoms were unpredictable but get 'em into a billiard ball and it was pretty easy, and that's how psychohistory works. I guess it doesn't hold water but I can't exactly explain why not. (Maybe because the real world isn't the metaphorical equivalent of a nice flat billiards table :-D )

Matt:

Asimov was writing in a world that had statistical mechanics (which he'd have encountered in his chemistry training) but not so much chaos theory.

I thought Matt's point was concise and quite probably correct. See also: the law of unintended consequences...

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Random observation, years ago I recorded the Violence and Gore section of the IMDB's Parents Guide to 300 as a bit of "found poetry".

But somehow these days it's WAY watered down -

Wonder what happened? The old one was a bit over the top but the new one really doesn't do the movie justice.

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Even as you grow older... there's just something about the world that kind of... When you're young, you've got a lot of rough edges, and the peaks will go super high, and the valleys will go super low. And as life kind of goes on, the valleys get filled up with stuff, so they don't quite as low, but the peaks get worn down too, so you don't have that absolute sense of wonder, and merriment, and mischief and all that kind of lovely stuff that you did when you were a kid. And I think [Glorious Trainwrecks] really tried to bring that back, you know what I mean?

It's disturbing how integrated this for native speakers of English, and how unconscious we are about it... do other languages have similar?? We can say "the big yellow house" but not "the yellow big house"

I'm trying to think if there's any metameaning to those categories in that order, or if it's just learned by example? It seems so detailed for people to just absorb...

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Question: even in new apartments, why are power outlets universally vertically aligned? Most large wall plugs hang down - and not just the newish Apple things, but even those old black "wall warts" Ataris used. If they were side by side (but with the plugs still aligned vertically) it would be a much better use of space... is there a technical reason, like people would rather avoid a horizontal cutout in the wall or something?


Followup: posing this question on FB got some ok answers... one thought is (I think) these things are often mounted in studs, and the spacing between studs wouldn't work well in "landscape" mode, so to speak. Also, when the positives, negatives, and grounds are lined up all parallel, it's easier wiring in the box itself.

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Little boys and girls (like age 6) doing human tractor pull of 440 lb John Deere tractors. #westernMAlife

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What we once enjoyed and deeply loved we can never lose, For all that we love deeply becomes a part of us.

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Blender of Love 5 and 4 star:

• My Favorite Picture of You (Guy Clark) The studio version of this made my 5-star list. It feels so true; the picture he's showing on the album cover must be the one in the song. When he says "click" it gives me a shiver; such love, such remorse.
• Wild World (Cassandra Jenkins) A LOVELY cover of Cat Stevens' song.
• The Time Is Now (John Cena & Tha Trademarc) There's a new version of Rick Rolling that uses this, Cena's entrance music. It's a super energizing song.

And the rest...

• Tusk (Fleetwood Mac) I kind of like this song, and the use of Marching Bands, but wish the sound balance was more in favor of the band...
• Barley & Grape Rag (Rory Gallagher) A prodigous 13 year old was playing this at Rockport's Acoustic Musical Fest... nice little bluegrass-y number
• Sail (AWOLNATION) I missed this one when it was fresh. I've seen it on cat videos since...
• X Gon' Give It to Ya (DMX) Maybe I saw this on a trailer? I like his powerful angry delivery.
• Shoop (Salt-n-Pepa) I really dig Salt-n-Pepa's uninhibited and uncompromising enthusiasm about sex on their terms. (Could do without the songs use of 'retard'; interesting that that word gets censored in the video.)
• Can't Let Go (Lucinda Williams) Heard a cover of this at Bryan's birthday party, another nice bluegrass-y number
• The Peoples' Champ (feat. Hellnback) (A Tribe Called Red) I dig the mix of hip hop and first people's music, along with the activist sentiment
• Encyclopedia Frown (Jonathan Mann) Anna Anthropy's cat in exciting pirate adventures! Fun video... also a version with more people singing than the one I have. Actually, I may have to replace the guy-and-guitar version I have with this one.
• Music From the "Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation" Movie Trailer (The Action Band) A remake of the actual progression of music from the trailer. (I'm still looking for awesome remixes of the original theme... I remember trying to march to it at Tufts Marching Band... we take the field once a year, so that year we pick the song that goes 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 1 2??)
• Cheeseburger in Paradise (Jimmy Buffett) I remember Mo requesting this song in Florida. And more recently Melissa didn't realize it was an actual song, she thought that the title was just like a metaphor.
• New York (Angel Haze) Angel Haze is kind of harsh, but I like the sound of it.

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No one's being jailed for practicing her religion. Someone's being jailed for using the government to force others to practice her religion.

See also: @NextToKimDavis... Davis is either terribly misguided or just trying to ride the Loony Conservative Gravy Train. TIL My Kevin Bacon Number is a healthy 2, because a boss at Alleyoop was an extra in Footloose. From Garrison Keillor's new Guy Noir novel The Straight Skinny:

As I got skinnier, I got great pleasure out of swanning through a crowded room and leaning against a pillar or abutment and striking an elegant pose and watching women fling themselves at me like moths on a lightbulb. On May Day, a child of twenty-one named Moxie hit on me in the Brew Ha Ha. She was plump, like a popover, and wore daisies in her hair and a smock that said Color Me Happy, and she said, "I'm sitting over there and I'm going, like, Who is that totally hot guy? And I'm, like, Do I dare walk over and talk to him? And I'm going, No way. And then I'm going, like, Why not. You look hot. Like, how old are you?"

"Darling child, if you and I were to talk and my shoulder brushed your shoulder, we'd be caught in a rushing torrent of ravenous passion and down the white-frothed spillway and over the roaring cataract of romance and into a whirling vortex of desire--kissing, caressing, clutching, grabbing, thrusting, crying out with hunger and delight-- and, beautiful as our intentions might be, it simply wouldn't work and here's why--I live in many different verb tenses, such as the imperfect indicative, the past imperfect, and the subjunctive, and you, sweetheart, only in the present indicative. I mean, you're going, like, Who is that guy? but I have gone or might have gone or will have gone, but you just pretty much keep going, and someday you may look back and wonder where I went. And I'll be, like, not there."

She gave me a triumphal smile. "I had been hoping you could come to my apartment and we might have come to know each other better," she said, a predicate that almost stole my heart away.

Love it. Despite the English major, I don't remember ever having had learned about the various tenses, so being able to identify them still carries magic for me. I am very fond of using the present tense in storytelling, however, because it makes things so much more immediate. (Similarly, I don't mind the use of 'like' as a framing device, in lieu of 'said', since it implies the quote that follows will be acted out, rather than merely recited.)

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Nothing human disgusts me, Mr. Shannon, unless it's unkind, violent.

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Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important.

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I feel like a lot of common game design patterns today were originally invented as monetization tools for arcade games. We got used to them.

40 Year Old 3D Computer Graphics (Pixar, 1972) from Robby Ingebretsen on Vimeo.

via kottke, maybe the first 3D film render ever, from 1972. I liked the font they used for the titles-- not the first one they rotate, but the other one.

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I have the weirdest issue where chrome won't display youtube iframe content on my blog's preview page, but it's fine on my site. Ideas?

iPhone 4 photo of a ladybug on Amber's car. Fullsize original here. I laid on the "digital zoom" a bit too much, but still pretty impressive for a cellphone camera!

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At the Peabody Essex Museum...

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"Punch bug green! [light tap]" "What are you, twelve?" "...Times three!"

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It is going into the Library of Congress, you know.

At my old job, we had a nice kind of team culture going for the developers.

Our manager Scott asked us to do weekly staus reports at end of day on Thursdays. I thought it would be easy to forget that, so I set an iPhone alarm to remind me, and then figuring the rest of the team was in the same boat, I decided to get in the habit of nudging people. To do so, I invented a persona for our group Skype chatroom called "Nagbot 3000". In theory I could have made up an automated script to do the reminder, but A. that would be work and B. It was kind of fun trying to think of variants to keep things lively.

Nagbot 3000 was generally appreciated by my coworkers. Here are some excerpts I saved at some point...

[Aug 2 2007 16:31:21] NAGBOT 3000 SEZ: status reports for sbruce.

[Aug 16 2007 16:30:20] NAGBOT 3000 SEZ: status tonight!

[Aug 23 2007 16:30:31] NAGBOT 3000 SEZ: STATUS

[Aug 30 2007 16:54:51] NAGBOT 3000 SEZ: STATUS

[Sep 6 2007 17:12:06] NAGBOT SEZ; geez, i guess there's status though everyone seems hipdeep in demo prep...

[Sep 20 2007 16:30:31] NagBot sez: DO YER STATUS
[Sep 20 2007 16:30:48] NagBot sez: *beep*

[Sep 27 2007 15:02:45] NAGBOT 3000 SEZ: status

[Oct 4 2007 16:31:28] NAGBOT 300 SEZ: DO STATUS

[Oct 11 2007 16:17:57] NAGBOT SEZ: STATUS

[Oct 18 2007 16:52:39] NAGBOT 3000 SEZ: DO STATUS

[Oct 25 2007 16:31:02] NAGBOT 3500 (now with politeness module) SEZ: DO YOUR STATUS REPORT PLEASE

[Nov 1 2007 16:30:25] NAGBOT 3000 [NOW WITH POLITENESS MODULE] SEZ: KINDLY DO YOUR STATUS REPORT, THANK YOU

[Nov 8 2007 16:30:48] NAGBOT 3000 (W/ POLITENESS MODULE UPGRADE) SEZ: IF YOU WOULD BE SO KIND, PLEASE DO YOUR STATUS.

[Nov 15 2007 16:47:22] NAGBOT 3000 SEZ: DO STATUS

[Nov 29 2007 16:33:46] *************NAGBOT 3000 SEZ: DO STATUS**************************

[Dec 6 2007 16:30:31] NAGBOT 3000 SEZ: DO STATUS. PLZ.

[Dec 20 2007 16:30:14] NAGBOT SEZ DO STATUS

[Jan 3 2008 16:31:47] NAGBOT 3000 W/ NEW "X-TRA SASS" CIRCUIT SEZ: try to scrape together some kind of decent status report for this weird, holiday-stricken no-man's-land limbo of a week

[Jan 10 2008 16:37:17] NAGBOT 3000 (Freeware Basic Edition) SEZ: do sta.

[Jan 17 2008 16:32:11] NAGBOT 3000 (with music upgrade) SEZ (to the tune of Howdy Doody theme):
IT'S DO YOUR STATUS TIME,
IT'S DO YOUR STATUS TIME,
SCOTT WANTS TO KNOW WHAT YOU DID DO,
SO TELL HIM AND BE TRUE

[Jan 24 2008 16:40:47] NAGBOT 3000 SEZ: IT IS ABOUT TIME TO DO YOUR STATUS REPORT.

[Jan 31 2008 16:31:11] NAGBOT 3000 SEZ: SEND IN YOUR STATUS PLEASE.

[Feb 7 2008 16:30:34] NAGBOT 3000 SEZ: STATUS STATUS RAH RAH RAH

[Feb 14 2008 16:44:56] NAGBOT SEZ: DO STATUS, CHA CHA CHA

[Feb 21 2008 16:35:07] NAGBOT 3000 (RHYMING UPDATE) SEZ:
The Time Has Come
The Walrus Said
To Write Things Done and Not:
Plus Obstacles, And Take All That Stuff
And Send It O'er Scott

[Feb 28 2008 16:31:22] NAGBOT 3000 (NOW WITH NEW BELLIGERENCE MODULE) SEZ: HEY YOU YA I'M TALKIN' TO YOU YOU GONNA GET YOUR DUMB STATUS INTO SBRUCE OR WHAT

[Mar 6 2008 16:36:01] NAGBOT 3000 (NOW W/ POWERPOINT MODULE) SEZ:
----------------------------
Status Reports
* Due Thursday E.o.D.
* Send to Scott
* Report 3 things:
-what you did this past week
-what you plan to do next week
-obstacles in your way
----------------------------

[Mar 13 2008 16:31:05] NAGBOT 3000 (JAPANESE EDITION) SEZ: 自分のステータスレポートをご覧ください。

[Apr 10 2008 16:30:56] NAGBOT 3000 (Mr. T Special Edition) SEZ: I PITY TH'FOOL WHO DON'T CUT OUT ALL THAT JIBBAJABBA AND DO A STATUS REPORT!

[Apr 17 2008 16:45:20] NAGBOT 3000 (with a little help from NagNAGBOTBot) SEZ: DO YOUR STATUS REPORT

[Apr 24 2008 16:28:01] NAGBOT 3000 (late 80s hiphop edition) SEZ: LOOKIN' AT MY GUCCI IT'S ABOUT THAT TIME

[May 1 2008 17:00:51] SLIGHTLY DELAYED NAGBOT 3000 SEZ: do your status!

[May 8 2008 16:30:30] NAGBOT 3000 (special Matrix Bullet-Time FX Edition) SEZ: dddddddddooooooooooooooooooo yyyyoooooooooooooooooouuuuurrrrrrrrrr sssssssttaaaaattuuuuuuuuuuuusssssssssssss rrreeeeeeeeepppooooooooooooooorrrrrrttt

[May 15 2008 17:23:45] NAGBOT 3000 SEZ (SUPER SECRET ENCRYPTION MODULE ENGAGED): qb lbhe fgnghf naq pbatenghyngvbaf ba xabjvat ebg-guvegrra!

[May 22 2008 16:33:20] NAGBOT 3000 (limerick edition) SEZ:
there once was a guy from rockport
whose career was nearly cut short
his work went unheeded
cause all that he needed
was to do his status report!

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http://www.thebigmoney.com/articles/judgments/2009/09/03/emotional-rescue - how moods are almost literally contagious, and what that means for the economy. "f you put two people in a room facing each other, without talking to each other, their moods will converge, or more likely, the mood of the less expressive person will move towards the mood of the more expressive person." What are the implications of that for how I want to live my life?

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on my car, the first leaf of fall? AARGH!
(eh, maybe just from a dead branch but still)

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http://magweasel.com/category/reading-room/ - has an amazing translation of "Phantom of Akihabara", about gamers after a Japanese censorship apocalypse. Also the site is a good PC-Engine blog too.

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http://www.care2.com/greenliving/the-9-types-of-intelligence.html - Amber sent me the link. EVERYTHING needs to be evaluated in a many dimensional kind of way.... though you end up sounding too much like that "evaluating a poem's greatness" shtick Robin Williams has all the students rip out of the book in Dead Poets Society.


I'm almost ashamed to admit how much I like this song and video. (Admittedly the song is better in the early measures with that great straight-ahead beat, before it gets all Euro-Popy, but still.) Given the Emo Lyrics it might seem to be wildly inappropriate, but I find it a great big dancing batch of nihilistic delight. (Turns out I had previously posted an animated GIF of a scene from it.)

It's interesting to compare this to the use of the Gary Jules cover in an ad for the shooter game Gears of War...

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Giuliani led Republican chant: "DRILL BABY DRILL! DRILL BABY DRILL!"

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Palin reminds me a bit of that Roseanne storyline where she wins the lottery.

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As dumb as the metric vs english units is, decimal point is a dot in US and a comma in Europe is probably worse for internationalization.

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DtI (dumbness that irritates) the Prudential T-stop's main E-line outbound stairway label says only "to Heath St", skips saying "Outbound"

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DtI: Amazon's "Hello. Sign in to get personalized recommendations" the last two words are clickable. Verbs > Nouns for links!

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Republicans think every "war" can end up as neatly as WW2: "in Iraq", "against Terror" "on Drugs". They are wrong and they are a danger.

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I was thinking it was odd to have so many seafood restaurants near work, but then I remembered, this is Boston-Boston, duh.

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I don't judge 'cause I give benefit of the doubt, don't want to be responsible for fixing. I do get angry at minor things that Shouldn't Be

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Unlike "The Tao of Pooh", "The Te of Piglet" is a preachy, pedantic, and even apocalyptic work.

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Sunday I was introduced to this young impossibly willowy Chinese w/ an Oxford physics PhD. Her family name, Eu(?), was old family--eugenics? A bit sore today... I was finally feeling the gravel work yesterday so that, combined with a day of shed-paint-scraping (all the sense of drama of peeling a grape with the sensual pleasure of nails on a chalkboard!) and then some more jumping off the sea wall with some errant, stinging plunges, plus a bit of redneck sunburn... well, I've seen better days.

I learned something from Saturday's beach trip, which involved less jumping and more diving: A few hours after I was back in my car, leaning over and reaching under the seat for the GPS, when a small stream of sea water came out of my nose. What the? I had no idea that my head had such vase-like properties. I should hunt for a good 3D-map of the sinuses, figure out just what that's about.

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Brilliance of the Moment

--Star Trek's "The Trouble With Tribbles" as an Edward Gorey adaption. So frighteningly clever, and pitch-perfect in execution.

Heading up for a day or two to Bennington. Further updates as time and 'net access allows.

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Quote of the Moment

Well, we all got misery, but it passes, it always passes!

.... I used to use this in my .sig file, haven't thought about it in a while but it bounces in the back of my head.

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Curse of the Moment
Speaking of misery... on August 1 this gimpy crow was hopping around the Sox basepath and things have been terrible ever since. Not just the team playing like crap, but medical problems as well: Manny's knee, Ortiz with heart palpatations... even stuff as bad as Jon Lester getting diagnosed with lymphoma. For a while I thought it was just that they needed to Varitek to mold the pitching, but now I'm not sure.

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News of the Moment
As everyone has heard I'm sure, the Crocodile Hunter is dead. I don't know about the rest of y'all, but my takeaway message is this: DON'T MESS WITH STINGRAYS....

Having Internet connectvity problems so I'm prewriting this the day before, just as a hedge against not being able to get back online.

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Poltical Potshot of the Moment

I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.

Look just because "paying attention to the world outside your agenda" isn't your strong suit, Mr. President, doesn't mean you speak for everyone.

Followup: and please stop feeding us that this is a "Perfect Storm" type coincidence of events. It's not. Katrina veered off the city proper, and lots of people could say: it won't just be overflow, there very well might be a break. "Ultracatastrophe", feh.

What I REALLY wonder about; what is the motivation of the people taking potshots at rescue helicopters? Idiots looking for a thrill? Lawbreakers who somehow prefer anarchy to the attempts to keep order? Paranoids who think the copters are out to get them? Sadists who dig human suffering? Stark raving loonies? People mad that they weren't earlier on some list to get aid? Seriously, there has to be SOME kind of reason, as reprehensible as it might be. (FOLLOWUP: not sure if it answers "why helicopters" but the mayor thinks desperate drug addicts are a big part of the problem right now.)

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Snappy Comeback of the Moment

"Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?"
"Sure we are, you can go ahead and get out..."

So I spent a rather long time updating my quote-o-matic viewer, harvesting quotes from kisrael.com all the way from May 17, 2002...309 quotes new, up to 1662 in all. It took a surprisingly long time to weed out all the good quotes, maybe 20 minutes per month. By the end I was definately asking myself "is this worth it?" but a few days ago, after most of it was done anyway, UnavailableName dropped a few quotes he liked that he had found in the old version, so that was encouraging.

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Windows Annoyance Rant of the Moment
I wrote this to send into the site ThisIsBroken.com:

This might be more of a gripe, or just a reluctance to shift to a new mental model for search, but the way recent versions of Windows conduct file searches in the sidebar of the current explorer window seems like a huge step backwards from the old way of a seperate finding app...

1. You lose your place. Often, I'm still interested in keeping the current explorer view open when I hit Ctrl-F to conduct a search, but now my whole window becomes dedicated to this one search task.
2. Often in NT2K it takes a few seconds for the "Look in" field to be automatically field in with the location of the current Folder. Type in a quick search term, hit return, you get a message "A valid folder name must be entered"
3. The only way to know if you're looking at a "real folder" or search results is to look at the window caption. And even when the caption indicates "Search Results", it gives you no hint of what you were searching for. (Admittedly, a detailed description could get wordy, but still, having 3 windows that say "Search Results" in the task bar isn't that useful in refinding a specific window.)
4. To get your normal explorer view again you have to hit an IE like "back" button. This seems like a broken paradigm to me, that viewing a folder is one "task location", viewing search results is another "task location". To my mental model, an explorer view represents a "noun", and a search is more of a "verb", results and all. It's not like search results are really making up a "virtual folder".
5. When you hit "back" to return to your folder view, the sidebar stays up. But the "Look in" field doesn't get filled in with the new folder location unless you close the sidebar and reopen it. Conversely, if you close the sidebar, your search results remain...it looks just like a regular folder though! Also, the "Look in " field changes, but the main search fields remain filled with the old data, which is useful but inconsistent.
6. To start a search you either have to know the Ctrl-F mnemonic or use a graphical icon, there doesn't seem to be a regular menu option for it.
7. If you accidentally hit "Up Folder" instead of "Back", you get taken to a folder view of the Desktop. Why isn't the "Folder Up" option greyed out while conducting a search? It's not like it's an easy way of backing up to the parent folder to redo the current search...that requires all the steps I outline in complaint 5...
8. Don't get me started on XP's default "File Searching For Dummies" mode. Maybe it's good for novice users, and it can be turned off, but for exerienced users it's just a pain in the butt, and we become amazed that other people who seem otherwise to be pretty bright always use it...or even worse, with the goofy animated assistant.

I suppose my main problem is I don't share the idea I describe in complaint 4, and I really miss the old "hit Ctrl-F to launch a seperate simple find application that keeps your place here" . And maybe it's sightly easier for them to give the options to view details, thumbnails, etc in the results. (Though Photo thumbnails are often very sluggish to load.)

Maybe they were looking for a way of letting someone repeat a carefully constructed search from a different location (hence the inconsistency in complaint 5) but it seems like a poor tradeoff to me.

This app is something I use on a daily basis, and not liking its forced browser model (probably some offshoot of that whole "oh but you can't seperate the browser from the OS!") is a constant low-level thorn in my side.

If anyone knows a way of getting back the old behavior when I hit ctrl-F, I'd love to hear about it. Even some registry setting that causes a Ctrl-F search to open up a new window rather than overtaking the current one would be a HUGE improvement.

So it is a subjective opinion, but I'd say: This Is Broken. Quote of the Moment

Let me put this in words even a genius could understand: YOU ARE NOT A GENIUS.

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Article of the Moment
LA Weekly story on people who are really, really obsessed with Disneyland. Have I ever been that obsessed with anything? I dunno. I don't think so. I've been reasonably deep in a few hobbies like video games, but I can't think of anything that's inspired that level of devotion in me.

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Poems of the Moment
If you got some time, check out the poems of Jason Pettus. He contacted me looking for some information on Cocheam, where we went in Germany, but he writes some good stuff, I'm trying to get a feature of his stuff on the 'Blender. If you're in a hurry just check out Jane the Geek.

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Geek Link of the Moment
Heh...sidebar for a gamespy.com article: from 1976 Creative Computing, Playing PONG to Win! Show this to our grandkids. Media News of the Moment
Looks like the NY Times has finally made good on its plan to publish same-sex wedding announcements. I didn't realize the things gave so much backstory--this (probably soon to expire) New Yorker article mentions they only started doing that a few years ago. Pretty cool, though Timothy Noah on Slate thinks the whole idea of high-status-weddings as news is a bad idea to begin with.

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Geekdom of the Moment
Dave's Book of Beings is very cool in a D&D geek way, a bunch of illustrated monster designs and descriptions, from the author's youthful imagination. Reading through the source books was always my favorite part of Role Playing Games (Never did get around to a proper set, with the dice and paper record keeping and all that.)

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Quote of the Moment

I guess one person can make a difference but most of the time they probably shouldn't.

Man, I think love this line, but maybe it's just a way for me to justify being lazy. Quote of the Moment
Today Garrison Keillor is discontinuing his column at Salon.com, alas. I've gotten many wise quotes from that column in my various journals. Here's one quote that's been in the back of my head for a long while, from his (non-Mr. Blue) book "We Are Still Married":

What keeps our faith cheerful is the extreme persistence of gentleness and humor. Gentleness is everywhere in daily life, a sign that faith rules through ordinary things: through cooking and small talk, through storytelling, making love, fishing, tending animals and sweet corn and flowers, through sports, music and books, raising kids--all the places where the gravy soaks in and grace shines through. Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people. If we had no other purpose in life, it would be good enough to simply take care of them and goose them once in a while.
--Garrison Keillor on "Why Are We Here"

That was in response to Life Magazine posing many people, famous and not, the question "Why Are We Here?" (I liked John Cage's response: "No why. Just here.") I'd be somewhat remiss if I didn't mention how Keillor opened his response: "To know and serve God, of course, is why we're here, a clear truth that, like the nose on your face, is near at hand and easily discernible but can make you dizzy if you try to focus on it hard." which doesn't completely jive with what I feel right now, though kind of can if you squint at it hard enough through Unitarian Universalist lenses.

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Links of the Moment
Wow...I may have seen the most mind-bendingly badly designed page on the web. Hippies and the Internet, not always the best combination. Take Supa Dupa Babee's example and don't use drugs. (Or else you may end up like the people who came up with Supa Dupa Babee.) (both links via Portal of Evil)