❮❮prevnext❯❯

Melissa and I took a trip to Philadelphia - "birthplace of Independence" and of me. (I kept asking people there if they missed me but I guess they were all tourists?)

We got through like half of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, hit Monk's Café, went to the Philadelphia Zoo's LumiNature light show, then made a quick stop at Dalessandro's on our way out for cheesesteak.

---

RIP Pelé! Not that I'm that grand a fan of the beautiful game but I remember watching video of him at YMCA soccer camp. Also this Atari Game, Pelé's Soccer: (Random memory: pontificating in a precocious 4th grade way (possibly to a bemused dental assistant, for some reason?) how this game was a great example of a video game could be a fun good game without being very faithful to the original sport, with each side's 3 field players running in triangular lockstep.

---

From to-day I enter upon my 64th year. The paralysis that first affected me nearly ten years ago, has since remain'd, with varying course -- seems to have settled quietly down, and will probably continue. I easily tire, am very clumsy, cannot walk far; but my spirits are first-rate. I go around in public almost every day -- now and then take long trips, by railroad or boat, hundreds of miles -- live largely in the open air -- am sunburnt and stout, (weigh 190) -- keep up my activity and interest in life, people, progress, and the questions of the day. About two-thirds of the time I am quite comfortable. What mentality I ever had remains entirely unaffected; though physically I am a half-paralytic, and likely to be so, long as I live. But the principal object of my life seems to have been accomplish'd -- I have the most devoted and ardent of friends, and affectionate relatives -- and of enemies I really make no account.

I only had 3 rules. To be on time, like if we're gonna have a meeting, everyone's on time. And to pay attention, listen when you're speaking, 'cause if we're gonna teach, you gotta listen, and then play like hell when I tell you to. Play like hell on Sunday.

Seriously.

Go out to the woods sometime. Find a big tree, the biggest you can.

Go up to that tree, lay a hand on it, and ask it about what it feels, about how it feels about having won its place. Ask it how it feels about having smothered and shaded out a hundred smaller enemies, and then feasted on their rotting corpses. And that huge ancient oak tree will tell you how sweet triumph tastes, and how death pays for life.

Then find one of the struggling little scraggly trees under that oak, and ask it what it feels, and it will tell you of patience, of endurance, and of how sweet will the bones of the giant taste when the giant falls at last, and gives the sapling its chance.

Plants understand more of triumph, of death, and of how death and life are but two sides of the same coin than most humans ever will.

Yesterday I mentioned finishing up a yearlong "quote format" cleanup project on my blog - I had a daily morning ritual of using its "this date on the blog" tool, usually while I was still lying in bed. It was a great excuse to take in the depth of my almost-two-decades blogging in project and I think I miss the habit already...

I also mentioned doing an internal reconfiguration that was too boring to talk about - and that's not untrue but thinking about why I had to do it triggered thinking about the general history of my longest-running personal project...

My first blog-like thing was a series of text files on my PalmPilot, which I called KHftCEA or Kirk's Home for the Chronically Easily Amused - it wasn't designed to be public but eventually I posted it online. It ran from spring 1997 until the start of my blogging at the 2000/2001 turnover.

So I switched to "writing online". (The first entry says "Maybe I'll use spellcheck" - I forgot that used to not be integrated into browsers!) Each day's entry on my early blog was a single file, but I quickly started to use "of the Moment" (Quote of the Moment, Link of the Moment, etc) headers to create sub-entries. And almost immediately in the activity it became a practice to at least have something up every single day.

A sidenote, from 2003-2013 a daily comments section on my site formed a bit of community - I graphed its rise and fall after clearing out the enormous amounts of link spam that ended up swamping it.

Another - quite literal - sidenote was Dylan's Pointless Sidebar - in 2002 I gave part of the site to be a microblog for my BFF Dylan... in 2004 (slightly to Dylan's annoyance) I let our mutual friend Sarah add entries, and then later that year opened it up to all of the site regulars, and that enhanced my site until it wound down in 2008 or so - right around when Facebook and twitter were really picking up steam.

It looks like May of 2008 I dabbled in using twitter (come to think of it, for a while I used the old "KHftCEA" name as my twitter handle) but because my blog was always my permanent archive I built some tools to mirror (easily if still manually) what I was putting on twitter onto my blog (These days, I still tend to repost most of my content on Facebook, since despite its well-known flaws, it's the only place that lets me post the longer form stuff and have comment threads about it with people I know in real life.)

Anway. Eventually I stopped posting much to twitter, but the tools I made for the mirroring were better suited to the blog updates I was doing - content-specific forms for quotes or retweets or image uploads, with only the "long form" writing still placed in the old files structure

So every day's entry had two parts: the long form section, if any (like a big photo gallery or rambling essay) and the smaller links and quotes for the day, broken up my little horizontal rule markers. My big activity yesterday was to internally merge the two sections, so that even days with both types of section would just have one file. The only change that should be visible to users is that on old entries, the "of the Moment" subheaders are still present but they now have the same horizontal rule markers breaking them up.

Yeesh. This went on longer than I expected. Which is kind of appropriate for a blog that has run 19 years, and that I hope to keep on for many decades to come. (Yikes, I just scared myself typing that! I do have a psychological hangup where it's hard for me to stop doing something once I get committed to it, it always feels like too harsh of a refutation of my earlier self. That's what fixed mindset and not having a real intuitive belief in personal growth will get you-- for worse or, often, better.)

---

When I come across people who describe San Francisco as a leftist/communist nightmare, I just laugh.

San Francisco is a right-wing technocratic dystopian nightmare with a veneer of superficial progressivism not so thinly veiling far-right, ultra-capitalist social darwinism.

I got the book "Great Lego Sets" (DK always makes the best books like that, ya know?) for Christmas. At first I was miffed that Blacktron Message Intercept Base was the representative of the "Blacktron" line (cira 1987) when it was the "Renegade" that really stuck with me.
(Here's the video for that- JANBRiCKS has pretty good coverage, hadn't heard of them before.)

For my money, this is when Lego Design first start getting cool - this ship, with its asymmetrical design (probably inspired by the Millennium Falcon, come to think of it), swept-forward wings, and that distinctively Triforce-ish logo. (Not to mention the Pilots with their cool opaque helmet visors) Before this, I felt I could reliably make cooler designs than the original sets, years later I certainly couldn't, and this set represents the transition. (Also, this ship DID sort of make the cut in the book, on a special page about the whole history of the Lego Space series.) 2 years later they'd finally start making cooler windows (see 6781: SP-Striker vs Renegade's clunky yellow cockpit) but I really think this was the turning point.

Space Lego was always special to me - Lego is the best "CAD" kit kids have for good-looking solid 3D design (Erector and K'nex are superior in some ways, but everything looks skeletal and wireframe) - I mean now kids might have 3D printers and Minecraft and what not, but then, this was it! Also, besides my Star Wars- and Trek-fueled excitement about the future, I knew that today's Towns, Castles, and Pirates didn't have little round studs on every surface... but the future MIGHT - so in that way the sets were "more realistic".

---

Oh, and here's a history of lego bricks- the book had a page on the history of the bricks thmselves, but didn't really mention when the "tube" design in the mix Part 1 and Part 2

---

Also I had this grand slam Christmas Gift in 1984 - Robot Command Center - - LOOOOOVED those grabby arms

---

What this world needs is Studio Ghibli Lego Sets- My Neighbor Tortoro and Porco Rosso and Nausicaa especially. A while back the Cambridge Scout wrote about School of Honk - I show up in 2 1/2 of the 4 photos, I think because my tuba is so shiny and brass.

---

Spiders are the only web developers who are happy when they find bugs.

We're in the exact point of climate change as when wile e. coyote runs off the cliff but hasn't looked down yet

---

I'm sure if we had poets, they'd be writing about the swallowing of Miami Beach by the sea.

Sometimes I think my folks are bummed that I seemed disinclined to hold on to their retirement home (and the summer and holidays getaway spot for us for many years) on the Jersey Shore once they don't need it, but with geologists like Hal Wanless saying "Many geologists, we're looking at the possibility of a ten-to-thirty-foot range by the end of the century" my reticence isn't just a lack of sentimentality.

---

Co-opted characters, but I like the line...

---

James Harvey has been posting some cool stuff about design in sci-fi movies. It reminded me of how much I love the design work in the Wipeout series. Maybe because it's based on parts simple enough that it has the "I could do that, maybe" flair. from Ben Mordecai on the Quora What should every person be knowledgeable about or be proficient in by the age of 20?:

1. How to cook 10 good meals
   
2. How to dress like an adult and not a teenager
   
3. How to get enough sleep on a daily basis
   
4. How to manage your tasks, projects, and calendars so that you never miss a date or forget anything important.
   
5. How to read 100 pages in a day with the same comprehension you would experience if they were spoken to you.
   
6. How to relate to the opposite sex without objectifying them or being afraid of them.
   
7. How to break arbitrary addictions: soda, Facebook, TV, video games, tobacco
   
8. How to pay bills on time and not spend more than you can afford
   
9. How to be comfortable in your own skin, without constant need of affirmation, showing off, sounding smart, whatever.

So I figure I'm somewhere around 6 1/2 out of 9. Anyway, I like this list better than Heinlein's "Specialization is for Insects" litany.

Related, from Basic Instructions How to Take Stock of Your Life:

"You've made mistakes, and people have suffered for it, but you've never deliberately hurt anyone."
"That's true. I always mean well."
"If there were a classification for what you are in Dungeons and Dragons, it'd be something like 'incompetent good.'"

Early morning fun link finds: http://www.cracked.com/article_20173_6-places-youll-recognize-from-background-every-movie.html and this impressive bit of old school sound fx and new school web audio toys http://webaudio.prototyping.bbc.co.uk/

---

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2839#comic so that explains the whole time thing... This is my buddy Kay on his bike.

Kay and his gal Dachary are on a motorcycle trip. From Cambridge, MA to Tierra Del Fuego, the southernmost tip of South America.

It's pretty mindblowing. They're running a blog at corporaterunaways.com (Kay quit his day job for this.) -- you can follow their progress on the map as well as reading their regular updates.

Man, the cajones this kind of trip takes is really something, and I salute them. Currently they're in Mexico. Already their trip has at times read like a checklist written by Murphy's Law but they are persevering and seeing some really amazing things.

I'd say check out the site, their flikr stream, track their map location, maybe make a lil' Paypal donation -- I did, I think Kay said it helped a bit when his glasses got destructed...

---

http://counternotions.com/2010/12/28/the-unbearable-inevitability-of-being-android-1995/ - How Android vs iOS is Google vs Apple, with Google not always living up to Don't Be Evil.

---

http://www.dutchbikeco.com/_blog/Dutch_Bike_Co_Weblog/post/Seattle_Snowpocalypse/ - tempted to make bike "snow chains" w/ cable ties...

---

http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-8-g.i.-joes-most-frequently-left-in-box/ - what Shipwreck was to GI Joe, Riker (bearded) was to TNG.

---

http://clientsfromhell.net/post/2168532314/client-you-told-me-youve-changed-xy-but-you - @clientsfh Y'know, if Clients From Hell adds a comments feature there should be a "the client was kinda right" button
--Terrifically brilliant. Does something like this really exist? It should.

---

In pressing open a door that might be a bit heavy, I automatically go to brace my wrist with my other hand. Wuss, or just conservative? At some point in the late 90s, I moved all of my CDs into 4 monstrous black folders, along with the booklets (and the card from the back of the jewelbox if it had a tracklist that the booklet lacked.)

The massive folders were divided roughly and labled by genre. So for 7 or 8 years, my music was sorted into

• jazz / r and b / classical
• rock / rap / novelty
• electronica / world / compilations / soundtrack
• chick singers / guy singers / pop

So, when I actually wanted to locate a specific disc, I had to think about it in terms of this categorization.

I used this structure when I ripped all my CDs into iTunes. (Though I kind of overdid it in the folder structure...
C:\data\media\music\MONSTROUS\MONSTROUS 2 - rock rap novelty
is 2 or 3 levels too deep.)

I'm thinking about switching primary computers, and they say that it's much easier to keep the ratings I've laboriously applied to every song if I let iTunes rearrange the folders on its own. I'm oddly reticent to do that. I have this weird, nostalgic attachment to my old, hamfisted way of organizing my musical life, even though it hardly ever comes up when I'm using iTunes or my iPhone.

Information Nostalgia and Clutter! I need to fight it.

---

Chargers 8-8, in playoffs. Pats, 11-5, not in playoffs. Stinker! http://tinyurl.com/suxforpats

---

Can you break New Years Resolutions before you actually make them?

---

"I don't think you can have ambiance without setting something on fire." --Green St. last night On my way to Rockport.

Some small bits of football history are being made today, if nothing else, the simulcast. With the Patriots having this much success of late, here's a page with a lesson on how hardluck the team has been historically speaking:

The Patriots were founded by Billy Sullivan, who was barely able to scrounge up $25,000 and hustle it down to the Mercantile Bank & Trust in Dallas to stake his claim to the eighth and final AFL franchise in 1959.

Which pretty much set the tone of his ownership. His son, Chuck, made his fortune the Steve Martin way: "How I turned a million dollars in real estate into twenty-five dollars cash!" Substitute Michael Jackson for real estate and you get the real story.

Good times for now, though, boy howdy! Do any of the networks carrying it offer a reason to watch on their channel in particular? Same announcer, right?

Another minimalist update... off to see Jane in Maine!

---

Video of the Moment
The Evolution of Video Games... a little uneven, and missing the middle generations, but cool... (2019 UPDATE: not sure what this was originally, maybe this is close...)

Cuteness of the Moment

--I gotta say, the story of the tsunami-orphaned hippo and his adoptive mommy Tortoise is really one of the cutest giant mammal / giant reptile pairings ever.

Thanks for all the feedback yesterday. I really appreciate it... more later.

---

Toy Review Excerpt of the Moment

ROCK 'EM SOCK 'EM ROBOTS
The Americans sure knew how to name toys. We, to be honest, didn't. So, while this boxing automaton chestnut went under one of the best names for any game, or indeed any thing, ever, in the States, the rather rarer British version was renamed... Raving Bonkers Fighting Robots.

Interesting to see what they got vs. what we grew up with. The descriptions are detailed and pull no punches about great or ultimately stupid any given toy was. The main TV Cream site has more of the same about different lost bits of British popular culture.

---

Weird News of the Moment
Under things you'd kind of hope to see on the "Weekly World News" or some other tabloid with lots of made up stories: Woman Gives Birth To Own Grandchildren...triplets, in fact, for her own daughter who was unable to conceive. Not quite "I'm my own grandpa", but getting there. So for most of this holiday season I've been over at my Aunt and Uncle's. It's a pretty full house, my pseudocousin Llara and her writer mother Donna-Lane are there, along with my mom in from London.

The one time I've been home was on Friday when I went on a bit of a decluttering rampage. I actually did it a pretty good job of getting rid of all these useless instruction manuals, a whole book-shelf worth, along with all these maybe-useful-someday-but-probably-not computer bits, wires and plugs and PC cards and what not that are clogging my closet. Well, by good job, I mean made a big "to go" pile in the middle of the front room so that the entry way to our house looks a bit like a junkyard, but still.

Though it seems I'm pretty small change on the decluttering and simplification front relative to Donna-Lane. Her stated guideline is, in the event of her death, it shouldn't take more than a morning for Llara or whomever to clear out her stuff...ideall, only like an hour. This goes all the way too not having a lot of clothes, making good use of the public library rather than maintaining a personal one, etc. It's an interesting goal, but I'm always tempted to give media and clothing a free pass. I have a ton of books, CDs, and video games, and probably always will. Though probably half of my clothing isn't stuff I ever actually wear, and I didn't think I'd feel like Stalin conducting purges, I could probably get rid of the same percentage of books and videogames and not miss what I got rid of. (I guess I'm less concerned about dumping CDs, since they fit so neatly in those black folders.)

So what about you all? Do you feel like waging a battle against clutter in your own life? Do books and DVDs and what not get a 'free pass'? Comments welcome.

---

Link of the Moment
I was more amused than I expected I'd be by 20 ways to monkey with telemarketers. Very clever ideas, but who has the energy for all of that? (And thanks to this state's relatively old "Do Not Call" list, we've really had few calls for the past long while.)

---

Quote of the Moment

What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art.

I have to sort of apologize for yesterday's entry, it's an overdone gag. There was actually a glitch in my publishing system, and it came up with a blank entry, with no whitespace. I added a bit of space, and liked the result. Plus I preoccupied with my latest gaming obsession, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. It's very addictive and time consuming...not addictive in a Tetris way, but in the "do well and I'll show you something new and cool" sense. It's about the most fun and pseudo-realistic driving game I've ever played. And amazing music from the 1980s! 99 Luftballons, Sunglasses at Night, Michael Jackson, Run DMC, a ton of others. (In fact, they've released the soundtrack as a set of 7 CDs.)

It also has the main character performing some outrageously antisocial behaviors, with an astonishingly small regard for (virtual) innocent life...for instance, you pretty much only hear that great soundtrack in autos that you've carjacked...ah well.

So to make up for yesterday's indulgence (though I did find the blank space on the page a bit refreshing) here's a backlog flush with tons of stuff.

• Though the original site for this, markpoyser.com, seems to be defunct, I still had this helpful diagram to Wallstreet inbreeding in my cache: "ImClone, Martha Stewart, Merrill Lynch, Enron, Arthur Anderson, Global Crossing, Tyco, WorldCom, Adelphia, et. al."
• Is calorie restriction the key to longevity? Dunno. Is it worth it? Could those rumors of scientists coming up with a way of giving the benefits of that kind of diet, without actually having that kind of diet?
• Rules for Massively Multiplayer World Design, online virtual kingdoms (or galaxies) with lots and lots of people playing at once. Oddly, a very recent slashdot article talked about the addictiveness of this kind of gaming, and reminding players that the companies are out to keep you online as long as possible, keeping you just interested enough to keep you playing for hours and hours despite the annoying "timesink" challenges. (I think "Vice City" has many of the same properties, providing time consuming challenges in a very detailed world, even though it's usually pretty obvious I'm the only real human in it.)
• I'm not sure if this is an exact quote, but Bush said something very close to "I'm not interested in nuance"...that describes about half the problem with his presidency right there.
• With my Atari project in a coma, sometimes I wonder if I should have tried programming for a more modern game console like the Dreamcast, with its 4 controllers and much much much more power to work with.
• I keeping meaning to go back and listen to his NPR "On Point" broadcast on Finding the Perfect Mate, asking "Can we learn to fall in love?"
• Wired.com had a piece on people using Blogs to cope with Alzheimer's Fog. That's related to why I keep two journals, this descendent of my old "quote journal", and then a more diary like one...I think few people have a really great memory in the long run, and this stuff helps me keep track of the cool stuff.
  
  I also wish I could come up with a way of making a trust fund to keep sites going in perpetuity. I wonder how much of a central investment you'd need, to have the interest fund an ongoing static site?
• I've already kisrael'd APOCAMON, a japanese-cartoon-style retelling of the Book of Revelation, but the rest of E-Sheep is wonderful as well. The Guy I Almost Was, about a young man thinking about reinventing himself from starry eyed technohippy to Kerouac-ish writer of the people in the early-90s recession sticks out in my mind.
• And you thought you had to deal with dumb people at work? (Not entirely dissimilar from Bill the Splut's old SHAWT, or "Stupid Human At Work Today" theme in his journal.

• Oh, one world at a time!

  Rejection is the greatest aphrodisiac

  What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.

  All of those were from my old friend, fellow alum, and former coworker Zachary Blocker's quote page (now defunct, alas) (the page, not the person, I mean. I assume.)

Now with such a big entry under my belt, I can go blow the whole day on Vice City and still feel vaguely productive! Haha! Quote of the Moment

"I wish it need not have happened in my time."
"So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

Saw that the other night with Mo's brother Dan. Pretty cool flick. I find this advice really comforting, especially in troubled times like this. Of course when I think back, I'm not sure if this time is as troubling as, say, World War II, not to mention stuff like the Cuban Missile Crisis.

---

Link of the Moment
This slate.com article suggests maybe Osama had beef with the WTC's neo-Islamic architecture. Face it pal, we're a co-opting culture; that's our strength.

---

Image of the Moment

Me and Toni, the tuba section at dear old Euclid High. I've always liked the weird swagger in this picture. Toni, write me some e-mail, don't just leave little cryptic things in my guestbook!