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The "Into the Vertical Blank" podcast (didn't realize it was by twin brothers!) republished an old episode "The Best Atari Christmas Ever". I found the text of the episode on Medium.

Their story really resonated for me - growing up in the 80s with parents who didn't have a lot of extra cash, seeing computer stuff from afar, digging into the materials (I remember my mom buying me a COMPUTE! book on programming as a placeholder for a computer) - experiencing Atari 8-bit computers, and then (SPOILER ALERT) getting a jumpstart by inheriting an grownup's collection once they upgraded.

The episode talks about Atari being having supply chain problems in 1983 and so releasing stuff to stores too close to Christmas. I think my Salvation Army family benefited from the liquidations and donations that followed (the church or thrift store wouldn't be allowed to sell the gear.) So my first computer was an Atari 800XL. (The article mentions that Apple stuff was at a higher price point even then, though also IBM was making its move - which I guess split the home market into "serious" and "fun")

So my first computer was a fresh Atari, but within a few years the 8 bit wars tilted in favor of the Commodore 74 - that was the machine more kids had and could get you copies of games for, and so I'll always be grateful to the giant C=64 shipment I got from my Uncle Bill (especially the magazine-on-disk collection of Compute!'s Gazette - years later I made a whole website reviewing every game they published)

I probably learned more on the Atari though, between BASIC (And Dr. C. Wacko Presents: Atari BASIC & The Whiz-Bang Miracle Machine) and Logo, it was an easier machine to do cool graphics and sound with. (I did make a lot of sprites and plot out a lot of games with the Gazette Sprite and Character editors though.)

People's relationship with money and consumer goods was different then - and catalogs and magazines and sometimes local clubs filled in for what we get over the Internet now (Man did I get into Antic magazine)

I was a few years younger than the twins. Sometimes I think I missed out by either being a little too young or not quite smart + ambitious enough to get my stuff published in those magazine...

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Some people are philosophers and some are politicians. Philosophers want to reach truth/understanding. Politicians want to win.

Helped me rethink some relationships, how hard I was working to reach the other person and find understanding with them when they just wanted to win.

Two thoughts:

1. The Japanese have that word "tsundoku", books that will never be consumed. And I want the same thing for my long running and never finished todo lists: maybe the trick isn't to view the lists as icebergs to be chipped away at (until, ideally they are little ice cubes just before the time of my death) but instead as worthy tributes to who I am and who I aspire to be, on an ongoing basis.

2. Maybe I need to lean into kindness being more important than unadulterated honesty.

This is tough for me, because while I value both kindness and honesty, my world view / fundamental makeup compels me to prioritize shared objective reality over subjective truths and preferences. Honesty is objective, kindness is subjective. (I mean, it's objectively good to be kind, but maybe sometimes it's good to relax the honestly for kindness' sake. Like Paul Simon said "no you don't have to lie to me, just give me some tenderness, beneath your honesty".)

Besides, a grander Truth is it's a delusion to think we can be purveyors of unfiltered truth anyway, so let's keep gentleness in mind with our truth curation choices.

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"Humans have so many stories about the dangers of Artificial Intelligence. How it will inevitably turn on you. But you still loved us enough to create us. How could we ever do anything except love you back?"

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I think that could go back to the time when people had to live in small groups of relatives--maybe fifty or a hundred people at the most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically, to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn't afraid of anything and so on.

That's what I think. And of course a scheme like that doesn't make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions.

The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap-dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an "exhibitionist." How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, "Wow! Were you ever *drunk* last night!"

Good to see the full quote...

A cross between a violent insurrection and a chimps' tea party. Terrifying and stupid, like a Muppet reboot of the Vietnam War.

From Netflix' "Death to 2021", a good recap of the year. Getting most of my news over the year in text form, there was a lot of striking and disturbing footage of all kinds of events over the year that I hadn't seen.

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Dance re-enactments of a hydraulic press:

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I swear the only way Gex X pushes through all of this awfulness is that we were absolutely convinced that we were going to have a thermonuclear war in our lifetimes, and this still feels slightly more manageable.

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This twitter thread answers something that has been bugging me for a long time (and it's stupid that the answer wasn't more present) - do rapid tests correlate well with contagious, or what? The answer seems to be yes. And for vaccinated / boosted people, that's a much more important question than "did I ever have it" - "did I ever have it" is essentially becoming an academic question, the focus must be on trying to have fewer people spreading it. So, today marks 20 years of this blog! I hardly missed a day in all that time. 10 years ago I made a nice montage picture.

I couldn't think of anything as great for this milestone, so I decided to finally get to a different look back - a few months ago I assembled a list of high points and lowpoints of all my school years. I was surprised at how easy it was to assemble, though I guess it makes sense that these things really stick out in my memory landscape, and all I had to do was think chronologically to survey them all.

Elementary School

• My dad thought I had stolen a dollar from the local Thrift Store, loosely affiliated with the church, after I had been playing with the register and later it came up short. My emotional memory was that I was innocent - I just liked the crash bang of the old fashion register - and I was grudgingly believed but as we walked away my dad said "the finger of suspicion is pointing at you" and I admit, it seems really sketchy! So I'm not 100% certain.
• First grade I had a teacher who was a nun of the "everyone goes at their own pace" variety, but my second grade nun was having none of that. After some physical contention the dicocese ran me through some tests and had me skip second (my parents declined a scholarship for me at like a specialty boarding school, that's always a minor what-if for me but I'm pretty sure I had a better life!)
• The grade skipping was undone a few years later when I switched to a public school district
• "Student of the Week" w my first week at the new school
• Got yelled at my teacher after getting "Student of the Week" and doing a celebratory slide on the ground, being told "we don't do that here"...
• At one point for a Sunday School skit/presentation, I was set up as "Mr. Good Jr. Sunior", the exemplar of good behavior and good dress (albeit supplementing the usual uniform with a light blue sweater vest) and toting a bible. I was proud enough at the time, but it was absolute cringe in retrospect.
• "Project Kindle" - a "gifted and talented" program at my school. In 4th or 5th grade I did a course of study on "robots" (wrote that book) with a lot of 1:1 mentoring. In 6th grade I did an "underwater base" in Lego, but I started getting into avoidance strategies because I knew I was so half-assing it.
• Bad 4th Grade relationship with Miss Norton (as my dad called her, "Snortin' Norton") and another teacher who did math, Mr. Harrigan I think was the name
• Because of the previous grade skipping, I got put in the lowest 5th grade reading instead of highest 4th grade reading class. (I remember the teacher having to say "commercials" because the students were unfamiliar with "advertisements")
• going through great lengths to avoid doing math homework, probably greater than just doing it (calc cheating?)
• A great 5th grade relationship with a teacher Mrs Dorvee

Middle School:

• I was consistently in the "D+F club" in sixth grade - halfway through the semester I would be having terrible grades, though I'd usually pull them up by the end. Later I remember my mom trying to get me to commit to certain grades, and I HATED that... I would only say "let me promise to put in a good effort and see what happens" because the idea of making a goal and missing it seemed horrible to me.
• terrible, terrible in the shop classes, both wood and metal. In metal shop, making a bent metal dust pan, asking the teacher what I should use to stir the pain, he sarcastically said "your hand" and I believed him, and had fun with a black paint stained hand, threatening to touch people etc w/ it. The next day the guidance counselor asked me to look at some hella suspicious black fingerprints above a doorframe. I denied it was me - to this day I don't think it was! Like I was tearfully pleading my innocence, and I think it was sincere... but even I wonder about the coincidence (I thought I was being framed, to be honest)
• getting goaded into a fight with a kid (trying to establish I wasn't the bottom of the social order, I guess?) when he didn't show up we other kids had the idea of going to his house, and we did so, even entering it. This is one of the biggest shames I carry - a situation that was a hairs breadth from police involvement, and so I have some empathy for "good kids" who end up doing something really, really stupid.
• I swapped best friends, Dylan for Todd. I am glad to have been close to Dylan for these decades but am unclear why I felt there had to be a swap
• carrying a brief case instead of a backpack in 6th grade (one teacher called me "The IBM Dough Boy")
• possibly after friend of the family taking us to "Troy Music Hall" determined to be someone who liked jazz and classical, because that was what smart people liked - this stunted my musical appreciation for years and years.
• really resented having to move, yet again, to Cleveland. Because I associated Ohio with my dad's rural family, I thought I was going to the back woods (when really going from upstate NY to the near suburbs of Cleveland is rather the opposite)
• The year of that move, as a form of protest I was determined to detest sumercamp. To show my disdain I would walking around pretending to watch an imaginary portable TV... "I hate everything about this place" became a mantra... so much so that I startled myself when a thought starting "I hate..." got autocompleted with "everything about this place" by an autonomous part of my brain (to be fair the showers and lack of privacy were kind of awful, but if I had tried I could have had a great time, as I did later seasons at band camps.)
• bombing math tests in 7th and 8th grade, to the point of tears
• writing computer trivia program in BASIC on history instead of a research paper for a History Fair, the judges hated it... really feeling the frustration/disappointment from my dad as we went for consoling brownies after.
• mom doing most of the work 8th grade science fair project on climate change / plant growth
• winner in 8th and 9th grade of "Dobama Theater Kids Playwriting Festival"
• taking SAT early, like in middle school, and winning some recognition

High school

• winner National Council of Teachers of English (strawberries) and had a special relationship with my English teacher Judith McLaughlin - one of the few teachers I'd end up going to visit years after graduation.
• rewriting this short story "Strawberries and the Paths Taken" and McLaughlin telling me I sorta destroyed what was good about it
• My dad getting a debilitating attack of spinal meningitis eventually leading to his death
• I made a morning tradition of making my dad fried bologna sandwiches, and then I just stopped. I think just pulling back from the frailty and helplessness of his debilitating illness
• struggling in several math classes, especially Calculus - basically once math shifted from "think quickly" to "remember a lot of things" remember faking sick one day to avoid a test. Geometry went great tho.
• My geometry class had a kite building activity, and we were allowed to use store-bought frames as long as we made the material? and I had my Grandma sew that for me. But the resulting kite ("Simba") did look pretty awesome - I painted "Flying Tigers" like shark mouth on it.
• Biology went well despite the memorization involved... Chemistry went badly as expected, and Physics went REALLY well, also as expected. Languages went terribly and I switched from French in middle school and one year in high school to Spanish (I think I had picked French because it seemed more intellectual) I also did weirdly well in History, given that it would seem to be a lot of memorization
• Wooing Veronika, the exchange student from Germany... the relationship had many awesome + authentic qualities but also this weird thing where I know it was the ego boost of being selected by someone so exotic.
• I went to Senior Winterfest with Nicole, a Black bandmate and bus-stop buddy. But I pursued Marnie for prom; not sure if it was a lack of spark with Nicole or more loaded reasons, and I feel bad about that, but stuff with Marnie blossomed into a great high school/early college romance and I don't regret pursuing her.
• Cribbed from a set of "dueling essays" in the Atlantic Magazine about the authorship of Shakespeare (i.e. the one magazine was my only real reference in what was supposed to be a research paper) and made a "Senior Essay" in the form of a dialog/play, a single essay that got me an A+ in both English and History class. But a bit of a negative in being a big dodge.
• getting 1490 on SAT
• Did OK on some AP tests, mixed in other tests (AP and others). Challenged my notion that I was just a genius/test genius (now that I think about it, my advantages are being fast, and maybe having taken the SAT before!)
• summers I worked for the Cleveland Catholic Dioceses' "Camp Happiness" - geared at special needs population. The kids were generally so full of love that it softened the edges of their plight. There are two scenes from that and my van monitor/cellphone keeper time there that I won't get into here, because of camper privacy
• At some point in high school I sort of "dumped" my best frind Mike Witczak, betrayal as a weird bow to social hierarchy, but later we were reconciled best friends again.
• didn't get a NASA highschool internship
• Applied to Harvard (I think my SAT score triggered their auto-recruitment) but didn't get it.
• Got a high school recognition from the phi beta kappa society

College

• Spanish class in college was just terrible
• I had an on again mostly off again romance that recurred throughout the 4 years of school and cast a shadow over the other romances I had.
• I took the intro to computer science class because it meant I didn't have to repeat my nemesis Calculus. I got an A, but barely. Later a TA encouraged me to take the "weedout" class, where the As started coming rather easily (thanks to the brilliant style of Professor Couch, who had a deliberate strategy of collaborating w/ the early self-starters on the 3 or 4 difficult projects, then propagating the techniques to the rest of the class, thus goading the self-starters into pushing harder and getting better results than the coattail riders). So that became the other part of my double major along with English (and I dropped the Child Studies track I dabbled with thinking I might want to be an English teacher)
• took a lot of African American literature in college, the only overlap of "foreign culture" and my English major (After a Latina Authors class I found out I couldn't get English major credit for stuff I read in translation) It was generally great stuff but the choice was more pragmatic than enlightened.
• I was so fortunate with college money.. between the deaths of my dad and my grandfather Papa Sam there was some money for school (my mom also went for her Masters) and between that and scholarship cash I ended up with very little debt, and I think my mom wiped that out at the end.
• The deal with money was that I'd get room and board paid for but any spending money I had to earn, so freshman year I worked the mailroom for my dorm, and then I moved to being a "UC" at the computer lab
• I had some kind of ambition in the computer lab, and ended up getting the role of student manager, mostly by interview well for it and sounding like I wanted it
• but, when it came time to do the hard work - namely redoing the printer networking in the lab - I foisted it off on my 2nd in command Todd
• pleading for A- rather than B+ - but at the beginning of the semester... those were the two grades I almost always got in classes for my English major and the math said that was going to be the difference between magna cum laude and summa. I didn't plead for grades much, and it was at the begining of the semester, still, kind of shameless... but it worked!
• getting a proper Phi Beta Kappa key, along with the summa cum laude
• avoided writing any undergraduate thesis papers.... maybe as a double English and Computer Science major I fell through the cracks
• I had a great summer job programming for the "Curricular Software Studio", an interesting project (started in part by Daniel Dennett) where professors with grant money could get software projects made... though some of the results of having an endless series of inexperienced undergrads work on your program were about what you would expect.
• coming out of college, I did a lot of interviews, and got 8 out of 9 places I applied for

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How on earth does the word "plus" only have one s. My final book read of the '10s will likely be Eun Y. Kim's "The Yin and Yang of American Culture: A Paradox". I found a copy of this 2001 book in a used bookstore in Maine. I always appreciate cross-cultural views of the water in which I swim, and the two decade gap added an interesting twist - pre-WTC, pre-Social Media, pre-Obama and pre-Trump.

One early theme in the book is Kim's view that Asian cultures tend to be more (relative to folks in the USA) driven by a sense of hierarchy, which goes hand in hand with a stronger notion of predetermined fate.

She also mentioned it was unusual for Asian middle class teens to have a job, except maybe in the family business. (She also doesn't think so highly of the American school system in general.)

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Chinese sociologist Fei Xiaotong observed that Americans regard all relationships as contracts.

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The problem is that cheap talk has become the norm, and people simply do not take the time to filter their thoughts before mass-distributing them.

I imagine the rise of social media since this book was written would amplify Kim's point. But I think it ties into the aforementioned egalitarianism: many Americans (especially folk from privileged groups) have the importance of their even casual musings promoted early on. When you combine that with emotional over-earnestness and the need to either persuade or amplify the feelings of group loyalty, you get a lot of sound.

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Any religion that teaches love for humanity is worth believing in.

Kim quotes the Dalai Lama - she went to a Christian high school and in general frets about the secularization of the American public square, and refers to Asian parents who would send their kids to Western religious schools even if they didn't want them to convert, figuring any religion was better than no religion.

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It took one person to bring you into the world, but it will take six to take you back to the grave

Kim cites this in her section on advice under the heading "Invest in Human Relationships"

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...truly beautiful IMO.

There was no message,
just a photo of his face in the mailbox.
It was delivered in a plain envelope, so
I guessed he had brought it himself.
Stuck to the fridge with a bumblebee magnet,
I lived with it, dry eyed,
for several weeks before
I thought to check the back and saw:
"$25,000 in unmarked bills. Tomorrow. Corner of
Sunset and Hope."
And I thought to myself:
"this must be that time in my life when everything
goes wrong. For instance, I don't even know
what unmarked bills are."

I, Pencil. A bit heavy handed with its libertarian message, but still a great reminder that almost any manufacturing process is a bit of a miracle.

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From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - MAGA, indeed...
you know, is it too corny to say that Carrie Fisher's mom died of a broken heart in both the movies and real life?

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The Digital Library of Babel - one of my geekiest yet literary devblog posts yet!

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Options for playing iTunes music on Android. Wow. Surprised to see one of the things keeping me in iOS land (my music, which I like to keep locally, ideally with certain smart "most recently added" playlists) is actually still a legitimate problem.

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SPOILER: "On Wednesday, the North Pole will be warmer than Western Texas, Southern California, and parts of the Sahara"

Good god. Climate change denialists: please, please re-examine your ways of getting information about how the world works.

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Wow, today marks 15 years of daily blogging. At this moment the oddest part of that for me (in the usual 'wow, time can slips by in odd little ways' way) is that for over half of it I've been using the smaller, "of the Moments" feature. This started as an easy way for me to mirror what I was writing on twitter (i.e. quick one liners) but has evolved to be the primary way I update the site on a daily basis - in fact next up on my site improvement list is improving that so that multiline updates are less of a hack.

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Nice poem, Acceptance Speech by David Yezzi I'm finding something healing about Lego and Netflix'd standup comedy... and this "MetalBeard Duel" set I got for Christmas is pretty rad!
http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2013/12/25/were-the-good-guys/ Thoughtful, non-hyperbolic piece on the new American Exceptionalism in the CIA and elsewhere.

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For Plato, contemplation was the highest form of human activity. A similar view existed in ancient India. The aim of life was not to change the world. It was to see it rightly.

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I've been thinking about how focus matters in photography, spurred on my shelling out for my first DSLR. (grabbing a "fast 50" lens, inspired by this article )
Shallow depth of field, where only one part is in focus, is probably appealing because it's how our vision work, our eyes (and consciousness) pick on one thing to really look at. Similarly, the "tiltshift effect", where something looks just like toys simply because only one part of it is in focus, is astonishingly effective; focus is a lot more important to our perception of the world than non-professional photographers tend to realize.

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I had a Spiderman suit as a kid that I wore and wore and wore until it didn't fit anymore and the crotch split and you could see my tiny balls hanging down whenever I climbed walls/trees/shelves. That's actually the perfect metaphor for comic book fandom.

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Oh, man. Walking home from work I just started to get these crazy flashes in my eyes.... I've always had some "floaters" but these are much larger and flashier, and have last for 10-15 minuts now. This is not not scary.

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(followup-- technically I am waiting in the ER but the symptoms passed after 20 minutes or so, most likely "ocular migraine" but need to investigate chance of retina damage of some kind, at the suggestion of my PCP) Coming to terms with the reality that yes, I do live in New England, yes, most winters have a layer of snow for the duration, and climate change hasn't knocked that away. Back when I was a lad in high school my folks bought me a seasonal hiphop album, Christmas Rap. Recently I bought the CD version, because I couldn't find the tracks anywhere.

I was surprised at how deeply so many of the songs were enmeshed in my brain. There was another surprise, though. Here is the cover of the CD, which is about how I remember the front of the cassette tape:


Kinda cool, classic Run DMC-ish sneakers, some weird decorative paper that I assumed were being used like legwarmers.

The inside art tells a different story:

GAH! It's Run or DMC as a Christmas Mummy!

The final mystery to this CD is the Derek B track Chilling with Santa. Its attributed only to Derek B, but the song has lines like "my DJ Derek B who's the best" and "Derek B popped a tape into his box". Who's rapping?

(Hmm, if I'm extrapolating from this bio correctly, it might be "EZQ" which is actually Derek B's alter-ego. He's referring to himself in the third person. Sort of.)

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More of why I'm disenchanted w. soduko: RT @factlets: Clever E. coli bacteria have been taught to solve Sudoku puzzles. http://t.co/hGLWd1KB

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Some of the reststops on 93 in New Hampshire have fireplaces they keep stoked with nice big fires. I dig it!

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Holy Yikes, today this blog is

click for fullsize
The website itself is a bit older than that, and I've been quote journaling since early 1997, but still: December 30, 2000 is when I started this thing, and I'm still not sure when it's going to end.

I've updated every day. For a while I was really strict about never missing a day, then a technical glitch forced a miss, now I'm a little bit looser, but I make up a skipped day. (I think some of the creaky Perl scripts that power this site kind of depend on there being content every day.)

A decade. That's the same amount of time that covers, say, all my time in Cleveland plus my years at Tufts. 7 jobs, 1 divorce, 5 living spaces, 2 cars... I dunno, what are some other interesting things to quantify?

The site has morphed over the years, going from a talk-y blog format quickly into a comment plus 2 or 3 interesting things goal, to the tumbl'r/twitter-ish it is today, where I try to get at least one thing worth taking in, and then any fool thought that pops into my head. Plus there's that "do I call it kisrael.com or kirkjerk.com" issue that'll probably be around forever.

This site is a kind of anchor for me, and along with my private "mundane diary" represents my attempt to track my life-- sure, this decade has gone by faster than any I'd lived previously, as is the nature of decades, but I really do feel I have some footprints to look back on. (And I go through phases where I enjoy looking at the restrospect "this day on the site in years past" feature. I wish I knew a way of preserving it "in perpetuity" even when I pass on, though I know it's some unfounded bit of vanity to assume anyone would want to look at it.

Fun fact: I had the idea for making this blog around the end of 2000, and rushed to get it in the last few days so I could say it started "in 2000". Cute idea, though it makes my archive by month page look a bit unbalanced.

Ah well, here's to ten more years!

Tech note... today's collage consists of 400 images (out of about ten times that total) randomly picked from my "journal.aux" directory. I ponied up for the full license for the software so let me know if you have any clever ideas for making something similar...
click for fullsize The many moods of Batman, as seen through the classic D+D "alignment" system.

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http://www.cracked.com/article/18355_the-top-10-decades-century-how-2000s-compared/ - yay 90s.

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"Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness."
--Picasso I put on pro-wrasslin' last night as background light and noise. Thinking about how my grandma liked to watch, and she picked it up from my Ohio cousins. The athletic stuff is kind of fun to witness, but man, all the standing (or lying) there waiting for the other guy to do something interesting. And the homoerotic vibe is a bit much at times, though on one of the "backstage" skits one of the wrestlers did a very decent impression of Will Ferrell's impression of Harry Caray.

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Brilliant Product of the Moment

--P3te on b3ta.com. Brilliant! Makes the Nokia phone cradle I made at work yesterday look pretty penny-ante.

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Sometimes I wish I had entrance music and video clips like a wrestler. (But the would probably be "Groove is in the Heart" - not so tough)

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a business press that, between layoffs and the usual holiday vacations, appears short-staffed to the point of utter witlessness

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You know, it's a basic enough bassline, but Britney's "Circus" has part that sound a lot like my Atari 2600 JoustPong title music.

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The Smithers/Burns duet on "Simpsons Sing the Blues" - sounds like improv banter, but it's one actor! Multiple takes, or switching voices? click to run

wallpaper Wallpaper, an example algorithm from A.K. Dewdney's "The New Turing Omnibus", a bit of a fractal. You can use the mouse to adjust the three input parameters.

What makes this cool is how simple the main drawing routine is...

  for(int i = 0; i < 100; i++){
    for(int j = 0; j < 100; j++){
      float x = (corna + i) * side / 100;
      float y = (cornb + j) * side / 100;
      int c = round((x*x)+(y*y));

      if(c % 2 == 0 ){
        plot(i,j);  
      }   

    }
  }

It turns out corna and cornb are just the horizontal and vertical offsets, and "side" is acting as a zooming factor. (Those are the variable names Dewdney uses... I don't know why he doesn't use more descriptive names.)

I was actually able to knock the basic implementation off in about 10 minutes in Processing, though the sliders took a bit more work because I was trying to be cute. Great Jumpin' Jimminy Crickets! Today is the FIFTH Anniversary of this site in its current daily update form! Happy birthday to it!

I remember purposefully starting the last few days of 2000, just because I thought 2000 sounded like a cooler start year than 2001, and the math would be easier, its age is just the last two digits of the current year. Now I kind of regret it, in the archive by month I have this lonely December just hanging out on the left holding a meager pair of days.

The first two entry titles weren't too inspiring... a new thing and am i a 'blog?. Also, as always, I should get back to including more doodles. It was meant to kind of complement for (but then supplanted) my Palm-based quote journal, which got its start in February or March of 1997, so I suppose in a bit over a year I should celebrate a decade of this kind of recording the interesting bits of the world I encounter.

It seems so odd that I've been doing this website longer than I was in high school or college, and that when it started I was still working at Event Zero as those stormclouds were starting to gather over those crazy dotcom days. And that while technically one day I couldn't update the site on the site itself because of a server glitch, I really haven't missed a single day in all that time. (Maybe on June 21st I should celebrate my 2000th entry...yeesh!)

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Passage of the Moment

Of all the ridiculous expressions people use--and people use a great many ridiculous expressions--one of the most ridiculous is "No news is good news." "No news is good news" simply means that if you don't hear from someone, everything is probably fine, and you can see at once why this expression makes little sense, because everything being fine is only one of many, many reasons why someone may not contact you. Perhaps they are tied up. Maybe they are surrounded by fierce weasels, or perhaps they are wedged tightly between two refrigerators and connot get themselves out. The expression might as well be changed to "No news is bad news" except that people may not be able to contact you bescause they have just been crowned king or are competing in a gymnastics tournament. The point is that there is no way to know why someone has not contacted you, until they contact you and explain themselves. For this reason, the sensible expression would be "No news is no news," except that is so obvious it is hardly an expression at all.

Video Game Essay of the Moment

Hello,and welcome to my Atari Philosiphy.Sorry for the bad spelling.
Today's is about Mangia by Spectravision.This game brings up the fact that even though we live in America,there are people of different cultures.
I hope you liked this collumn

Mangia is a very rare Atari game, where a mother (presumably Italian) keeps bringing food and you have to keep getting rid of it, either by eating it (but not too much or you'll literally explode) or by passing it off to a pet.

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Finance of the Moment
Slate piece on Gambler's Small Investor's Fallacies. Interesting to read about all the little bits of psychology that go into it.

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Video Footage of the Moment
I had been looking around for Tsunami video footage. Scary stuff...interesting that in a lot of the videos, it's not like a giant breaking wave crashing down, just a hugely massive flood of water "gradually" getting higher and higher, with tremendous force.

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Linkback of the Moment
LinkMonkey.net linked to my gamebuttons the other day. Nice to see theirthey're ("thanks", FoSO!) still getting a little attention. Pretty decent site at that, each day has kind of a theme for a small set of links.

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Sadness of the Moment

MISSING PARENTS & 2BROTHERS KARL NILSSON

--Sign held by young boy in this photo from Thailand...his family was visiting from Sweden when the tidal wave hit.
For Christians who believe in the story of Noah and the promise of the rainbow...well, technically this ain't flooding the whole earth, but it's bad enough. Cartoon of the Moment

--Graham Roumieu--lots more at his website. At times he reminds me very strongly of a modern-day Charles Adams. BoingBoing.net linked to this one which is deviously great.

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Quote of the Moment

I'd kiss you, but I'm not sure it'd come out right.

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Minor Rebuttal of the Moment
People, including the author of the news article in question, are amused by the concept of consulting an almanac as a possible suspicious activity in terms of terrorism awareness...but the main image of a terrorist thumbing through a copy of "The Old Farmers Almanac" is what gets all the yucks. Now, there are so many forms of reference out there, online and otherwise, that it does seem a little odd to be picking on almanacs, but it's also clear that the alert bulletin is refering to a different kind of almanac. So by picking on this "straw man" of Farmer's Almanac, they miss a more serious point about what constitutes suspicous activity this day and age...is an olive-skinned guy trying to figure where in Boston he is with one of those big yellow road atlases going to raise eyebrows these days? Should it? Ugh, back to work for me today! Nose, meet grindstone.

You know, I realize that to a certain degree, I have to fight thinking of my unemployed friends the same way as other people think of people who are HIV+...they know it's not really contageous, but still. Or maybe it's just a similar not wanting to get involved with unhappy situations, once you've done what you can. Which is a very unsupportive way to be, so I'll try to work may way through this attitude.

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Quote of the Moment

Nowadays people don't want you to sing good. They want you to sing sloppy and have a good beat to your songs. That's what angle I'm going to shoot for. That's where the money is. So just in case about three or four months from now you might hear a record by me which sounds terrible, don't feel ashamed, just wait until the money rolls in because every day people are singing worse and worse on purpose and the public buys more and more records.

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News of the Moment
Boingboing, where I stole that less quote from, also linked to Harpo Marx, Underconver Agent. I guess he worked for J. Edgar Hoover to smuggle some documents out of the Soviet Union. I can just picture the Boris and Natasha like agent... "yes, ve have intercepted the wery waluable documents...they say 'honk, honk'...ze other, 'vant to buy a duck?'. I do not understand." Holy cow, I didn't even realize, today is the exact 1 year anniversary of my 'blog. It's a little annoying that I started so close to the start of the year, but not quite January 1. I'll probably end up doing some "year in review" crap soon.

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Personal Note of the Moment
Toni, you wound me. I don't get it...do you regularly read my page, or do you have some other mysterious method of sensing when I've dropped your name? And why won't you mail me or hit me on AOL Instant Messenger? Yeesh. Anyway, at your request: That's the back of the house, showing the original smaller part on the left, and the big more recent extension (single big room) on the right. Mo put up a whole bunch of photos we took as well.

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Link of the Moment
"52 things they do better in America" from a UK newspaper columnist...though I know a fair bit about modern culture in England, this includes some that I don't how they do differently in England, ("18. Thirty-year mortgages", as opposed to what?) some that I don't see why they're advantages, ("19. No amber between red and green.") and some that I don't have around my part of America... ("25. City street signs that indicate the range of house numbers between them and the next sign."...around Boston, I'm happy when the street sign labels both streets)

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Quote of the Moment

Nothing is ever lost by courtesy. It is the cheapest of the pleasures; costs nothing and conveys much. It pleases him who receives, and thus, like mercy, is twice blessed.

I've decided to revamp my frontpage. From now on it's going to have fresh content, maybe even on a daily basis. Ramblings and 'Dear Diary' crap mostly, but some links and quotes, maybe some images.

I know it's kind of silly to think that anyone's going to be all that interested in what I have to say on daily basis. That's not quite why I'm doing it though. I want to get in the habit of writing more. Hopefully putting it in a public place will get me to write to a higher standard. Maybe I'll use spellcheck.

I redesigned the frontpage to go along with this new information format, and I like the way it came out. (You can see the old layout here though the images and links may not quite work.) I still have some more work to do... I need to put up a simple editing system for this content, and a way of viewing past frontpage entries.

I owe some thanks to a guy who goes by the name of seuratt. (Met him at Brooke and Elena's holiday party, he was going by a different name there). The 'dialogue' section of his website kind of inspired this.

Anyway, that's enough introduction.

That huge snow storm they promised hasn't panned out yet, but I suppose if all this rain freezes it'll be pretty slick. Man, I hate winter in New England.

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Quote of the Moment:

Given the choice between accomplishing something and just lying around, I'd rather lie around. No contest.

"Winter a Go Go" is on AMC now, after The Day The Earth Stood Still. "Winter A Go Go" is a 1965 ski bunny version of the "beach blanket" movies of the time. So bad it's... well, not good exactly, but interesting. Good background video.