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02.28.03 good. # 02.27.03 this is so sad. # we have different evening rituals, jessie and i. once we arrive at home for what we believe to be the last time of the day, he locks the front door, throws the dead-bolt and turns out the hall light. we both change our clothes, me to jeans, a t-shirt, my baggy gray sweatshirt if its cold, like tonight. he puts on fresh socks, a sleeping t-shirt and his checkered blue and gray pajama pants. if its cold out, like tonight, he will put on the ugly green long-sleeve shirt that hangs on the back of his chair, the one he's had forever that i hate so much. sitting down in the rocking chair, the red one that came that used to belong to my grandfather, i pull my feet up, knees hugged against my chest. i close my eyes, lean my head back against the headrest. with my eyes closed, i can feel the slight, almost imperceptible motion of the rocker, the brain's inner gyroscope exaggerating them to gross proportions. suddenly i'm tumbling backwards, the chair spinning head to tail, left to right, flipping around at the whim of some universal wind. when its quiet, like tonight, i stay like this, listening to the rain, to the hiss of the street traffic, the wet animal sounds of the cat cleaning, the crinkle of folded paper as jessie pages through his book. like this, eyes closed, tumbling backwards through my life, i could sit for hours. # i haven't been bringing you much radiohead news over the past few months, mostly because it's been largely speculative and not all that groundbreaking. however, as the situation currently stands, the new album appears to be mostly in the touch-up stage, with final production and artwork issues being pegged. quite a few festival dates have been lined up for this summer, placing the boys throughout europe, with no dates yet confirmed for the US. working titles for the album are supposed to be either 2+2=5 or Are You Listening?, though i should hope that something more clever than that emerges before the anticipated release date of june 9. and if you've been listening to any bootlegs (doubtful that you have, if any of this is news to you) then you'll have an idea of the guitar-driven rock sound that this album is promising. then again, you never know what nigel, thom et al can do to things in the studio.. # 02.26.03 that's the one i liked too, for what it's worth. # 02.25.03 dinner would have been ready on time tonight, if only the oven hadn't been smoking for the last hour. at least we know the fire alarm works! # rented disc one, season one of six feet under tonight. jessie and i hadn't seen all of the first season and with six days left before season three starts up, tonight seemed like a good time to start catching up. needless to say, we're sure to buy season one on DVD soon. to my surprise, i'd forgotten how amazing a show this is. i expected the pilot to be a little weak, especially in comparison to the latter half of last season, when the show was really hitting its stride, but amazingly episode one was every bit as impressive as the rest of the show. its really the most emotionally affecting hour of broadcast i've ever encountered; when it's over, i'm left exhausted, stunned and anxious for more. # 02.24.03 i'm so going to try this out. post script: it works, easily, and it's very cool. now i just need something useful to do with it... # 02.23.03 tabbed browsing arrives in safari v.62 and above. can't wait for this download to become available... update: as of v.62, tabs are availble only through the hidden debug menu. # we got an orchid yesterday. i'm very fond of it. before moving here, i would have never gotten something so delicate, but since we moved into the new apartment (southern exposure is the key here) my plants have been thriving. even my rescued violet is in bloom. the next goal? floor plants. # finally, people are starting to make their feelings known about the showing of commercials before movies. how is it that i pay the theater $10 for the privilege of watching commercials? i hate it. i hope these lawsuits get the message across. # fang family looses it: examiner lays off staff. no word what happens after monday's paper comes out, but it looks like the old hearst icon is finally dead. # 02.22.03 happy wedding day, mr.s sparky & stephen! where's the honeymoon gonna be? # 02.21.03 warning: the previous entry is very "geek-only." please be warned. # DIGESTION somewhere between all of this talk of power laws and verticals within the blog system, i've gotten lost. which is extra troublesome, because i believe the questions raised are going to be very important to the place google-blogger wants to take us, wherever that place may be. the thing i don't understand in all of this is a discussion of how the system is affected by self-awareness. first of all, is the system really self-aware? it would be inexcusable if it weren't, but really, who are the people visiting blogdex, daypop and technorati? are the bloggers, en masse, visiting and using these tools? or are they being used by a subset of the system's population, by the lurkers and the watchers but not necessarily by the bloggers themselves? or does a device like blogdex contribute to this power law phenomenon? does it enable it? technorati is interesting. it's a tool for extrapolating data on the linking patterns of weblogs. like blogdex, i suppose, with more input-direction. point the fire-hose, instead of always drinking from it. something i don't understand about tools like these is how they can report this data in real-time without generated a noticeable effect on that data. i'm sure this is just a gap in my understanding of statistics or feedback systems or something. still, it seems to me that self-awareness would curse blogdex; it would contribute to a positive skew towards those sites which are climbing in rank. doesn't being number one on blogdex increase the interest and propagation of a link, generating more incoming links and increasing its popularity, thus keeping the link in its number one position? obviously this isn't happening, or if it is, it does not have a lasting impact on traffic within the system. why is this? can it simply be attributed to the fickle nature and short shelf-life of blogger's attention? or is some kind of breaker built into the code? so is the system really self-aware? because whatever they're planning behind the wall at google, there's no doubt in my mind that it is going to make the system self-aware, push us all into the know, whether we like it or not. will it continue to work? Steven Johnson calls bloggers the earthworms of the internet, and he thinks that why google wants them. because the bloggers will help built a semantic web, surfing and chewing and digestizing and categorizing, hundreds of thousands of little information earthworms chewing through the internet, making it that much easier for google to understand. but earthworms are not a community, are not self-aware. what would happen to their digestive role if they were? if all the earthworms knew that the dirt was better over here, they would flock in that direction, until all the earthworms (at least the majority) are chewing on the same spot of dirt, ignoring all of the other, unturned soil around them. or maybe i'm stuck on the wrong idea. maybe google's idea to harness bloggers as a cultural barometer. they could decipher trends, fads, cool, based entirely on trends displayed by our thoughts. something a little less Johnson and a little more Gibson. # 02.19.03 [begin geek] perhaps the most interesting thing about microsoft's announced plan to acquire connectix isn't the fact that redmond will now own Virtual PC for Mac, but rather The Beast's plan to use virtualization as a migration tool for a large and aging base of NT 4 servers. basically, it's the same approach apple took to the macos9-to-os x conversion, with the implementation of classic. keep running those old kludgy nt4 applications that you're so attached to, but run them in emulation mode on a shiny new piece of ms server code (10% more stability, free!). all in all, it's a surprisingly good idea. [/end geek] # i will now officially stop telling people i never get sick. i've jinxed myself. # 02.18.03 there's so much going on. it's hard to decide where to start. how many times have i said that? did you know it took me almost three days to secure a washing machine in my building? yeah. not that i'm a particularly driven washer watcher. still. i can't quite get a handle on this chicago night club event. i mean, 21 people? it's inhuman, the pinnacle of our mob mentality. have i told you that my father's central california hardware store is selling out of duct tape and plastic? they say north korea may withdraw from the 1953 armistice. they also say north korea has untested icbm capabilities. still, we're training our attention on iraq. have i mentioned that my father's hardware store is selling out of duct tape and plastic? # 02.17.03 ...and you should have seen it. # did you see the simpsons last night? no. 300 wasn't anything special to me (i have an alergic reaction to guest appearances, with the exception of that one episode with n'sync, 'cos it was just too damned funny). but no. 301 — what a delight! perfect non-linear simpsons form. ..and a hot plate! # a new version (x2 and counting) of movable type is out. not that i've installed it yet. i like to wait, let the bugs settle. as an aside, i'm intrigued by kung-log, an mt client app, rendered in cute os x aqua. not that i've installed it yet. the download is sitting on my desktop as i ask myself, do i really need this? # 02.16.03 google buys blogger. news at 11. update: evan tells all. cory has concerns. will blogdex be outdone? steven johnson, i'm sure, will tell us that this is a good thing. he'll be right. # 02.14.03 i'm just bad with email. plain and simple. i sit down, i read them, i think of clever things to say in response, and then i simply fail to write them. nothing happens. i tell my fingers to go cmd+n and start typing, but instead they just go cmd+tab and start typing. i finished my book last night, always a satisfying endevor. i can't decide if i should take these blank valentines i meant to send you to work today instead. are powerpuff girls appropriate for the workplace? have an adventurous valentine's day! they say. please do. # 02.12.03 yay! safari update. still no tabs though. and no support for MT bookmarklets. drat. # i'm very upset with myself today; i left my trusty and well looked-after umbrella in a cab this morning. just my luck. it was such a good umbrella too, small enough to take anywhere, sturdy enough to hold up in a windstorm. i'm happy however to see smokey & miho tonight with aaron. good times and lost umbrellas; a typical wednesday if ever there was one. # 02.10.03 GET A GRIP i really need to adjust my attitude. i've got to get a handle on this pessimism, this cynicism that's run rampant through my conscious over the past week. this thing going on at work (i've promised myself never to post about work, but here, now, i'm suspending that rule) has got me all spun around, and i've let it get to me, eat away at my sense of security. i've been tapped for a cross-departmental reorganization, a move that takes me out of what i know and love and throws me, quite hard, against the wall of something cold and unfamiliar. it's more work, more responsibility, and it seems, quite honestly, more opportunity. this thing, i know in a very intellectual way, might well turn out to be a Very Good Thing for me. i need to wrap my brain around that idea, and let go of the fears i'm taking into it. what bothers me most, at this point, is how badly i've let it affect my attitude. i pride myself, really i do, on being resilient; optimistic about and resilient towards change. so its particularly disorienting that i've let this job change upset me so badly; its sapped my positive energy. i know, again intellectually, that its not such a bad thing, or at least i can make it not such a bad thing. but emotionally i can't seem to reconcile that knowledge with the anger, the fear and the sadness. i feel as though some goal (career wise) was directly in front of me, squarely in my sights, only to be snatched away. i've got to get over this, get my head back into the right space. somehow i've come to believe that the necessary attitude shift is tied intrinsically to my dreams. since this was announced to me last week, my unconscious hours have been filled with a sense of panic, disorientation, feelings of disconnect and of discontent. fever dreams, tectonic, surreal, indiscernable. they're about work, about terror, about the frighteningly unknown. and i know that they're a check, a litmus for my increasingly acidic psyche. i need a break from these dreams, a re-orienting blank mental slate. i need a recharge, and i need a good night's rest. # talking tonight to an old friend, a former boss, and she's telling me that her new company services the same field that i'm working in. --that's great, 'cos this company i'm running my jobs with right now is duuuuumb. --oh yeah, she asks. who are you working with? --company XXX, i tell her, the handwriting now firmly on the wall. --yeah, so, that's my company. jaw, floor. damn. # 02.09.03 i'm soliciting feedback: wait for an ibook rev or buy the 12" powerbook? my computing needs aren't very g4, but there's always the little voice saying why the hell not? # 02.08.03 in addition to the previously mentioned strange dream, my hands and feet have been going numb all morning. tingle tingle tingle. gives me the creeps. # i dreamt last night that i was stalking the devil, my job to find him and the portal from which he had escaped. he was bleeding to death here on earth, taking some kind of medicine in an attempt to revive his dead body. so buffy, and i wasn't even drinking before bed. # 02.07.03 have you seen the new billboards of calvin klein model travis? what a hot bus stop he makes. but wait! what's this? his own WB show? well, if that's not ripe for a snarky comment, i don't know what is... # i'm such a geek. i totally want to go see william gibson reading tomorrow night. UPDATE: ok, so i'm a geek, and i have bad author-luck. courtesy of mark, i was able to secure a bizarre little edition, the "first electronic edition" floppy of virtual light. (mark has a story behind this disk, btw, but i'm parsing for brevity.) anyway, it was appropriate, as my first gibson novel was vl and was checked out from a library, (meaning i don't have a 'first book ever' to have signed). plus, it seemed just off-key enough to be interesting. anyway, i was officially the last person in line and when it finally came time, the good author just sort of...signed it. that's it. continued a conversation with someone next to him. totally blown off. just like the near-miss email exchange with steven johnson. where did that go? sigh. # 02.04.03 how do you google people? i thought it might be fun to track down some random people from my past in that most modern of manners, but it seems i just don't have a nack for it. first of all, i can't think of anyone to look up. big problem number one. secondly, when i do come up with names, all i get back are sports scores and rosters. pages and pages of sports stats. maybe if all my childhood crushes and friends didn't have such damned ordinary names, this would be easier... # oh babies, it's still so frightening out. but don't worry, little friends, i'll tell you when it's safe to come out of your holes. # 02.02.03 the weekend is a blur of fever dreams, falling sky and shaking ground. i wake in a cold sweat, from a dream with skewers through my gut. monday looms ahead, weighed down by the oppressive heat of these moments. i wish this weekend would restart, come back around in a better light. stay safe today, dear friends. # « January 2003 | archive index | March 2003 » built with movabletype |
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