Still going after all these years.
Moving slowly this morning, thinking slower. Bad sign when there’s an executive review in 40 minutes. We’ve entered the slippery slope towards fall here in Seattle: two grey days in a row, beads of water on the cars. Paying bills, drinking coffee, waking up.
We’re sending my inlaws off in style tonight (their flight is tomorrow noonish) with dinner at Etta’s. Looking forward to it.
I’ve started clicking my own Blogtree link–not to be vain, but to browse Blogtree for other blogs that might be interesting reading. A lot of them are familiar, but every now and then I run into a cool weblog that engages my attention.
Accordingly, the first “random weblog of the day” here at JHN is Brilliant Corners. And not just because he’s namechecking Monk. Bill Turner discusses Barthelme and postmodern fiction intelligently one post away from linking to two contrasting articles about making movie trailers. Plus he wrote his own blogging system using Perl and MySQL. Check him out.
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Latest radio asinine moment: Country DJ fired for sounding too Southern — in Atlanta! Greg nails this one:
Like much of the rest of the industry country music has taken a nosedive — but that has nothing to do, so we’re told, with playlists programmed by committee, managers so out of touch that a quintuple-platinum Grammy-winning sleeper hit still can’t get airplay, or artists that aim to sound less like Johnny Cash than Rick Dees. Nope, the problem is that the DJ — on a country station — in Dixie! — sounds too Southern.
“…vocal tolerance is even better. Keeping your tolerance to yourself only exacerbates the problem.”
Marriage counseling? Nope, he’s talking about the longstanding practice on the web that emphasizes generation of correct outgoing code but acceptance of incorrect incoming code. He points out, rightly I think, that unless you find a way to tell the source that generates the broken code that it’s broken, that no progress will ever be made.
Don’s story is in the context of the new RSS feed on his site at GotDotNet, which I highly recommend subscribing to if you’re a developer or interested in XML web services.
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I never got back to working on IM and weblogs on Saturday. We spent the morning at Pike Place Market. In the afternoon Lisa and I finally installed Roman blinds on the roof panels of our “solarium” — a little bay next to the kitchen and dining room, it’s constructed from six patio window panes, three slanting up from the floor meeting three slanting down with the roof line. Unfortunately we also found out that there are serious leaks around all the panes when I tried to wash them. More contractors, more $.
Sunday we took Lisa’s dad to Mass and did some gardening. The soil in the bed next to the driveway is packed like concrete and very sandy, so we are concluding sadly that we’re going to lose one or two of the rhododendron bushes that the previous owners left. (They weren’t planted in shade anyway, so they were pretty much doomed.) I dug out a couple 1.5 foot holes for some Tuscan rosemary–besides being tasty, the plant also gets really cool blue flowers which should look nice. Hopefully they’ll do better than the rhododendron. I finished the day by washing both our cars for the first time since we’ve moved. Then finally I rolled Lisa’s car INTO THE GARAGE–yes, we’ve finally unpacked or moved enough stuff to make that possible, though you can’t open any doors on the passenger side when it’s in. A red letter day by any measure.
Userland announced that Frontier (which runs this site through the Manila weblog suite) and Radio Userland now have beta support for IM. Flexible architecture: Jabber and AIM are included, other drivers can be written. You can IM outbound or you can use an IM client to write to your blog. (I haven’t tried it yet but once we get done with our morning activities I’ll be back to give it a whirl.)
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Nicholas D. Kristof in the New York Times: Bush Vs. Women. Is the administration’s appalling record of actively trampling efforts to better the condition of women worldwide the result of
Kristof makes an alarming case, based on the administration’s record, that the real story is closer to (c).
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Happiness is… dinner on the patio for the first time in a new house. Takeout Thai food, with a chilled Languedoc and an Oregon Pinot Noir, and the company of Lisa’s parents. Music courtesy Frank Sinatra, Wynton Marsalis (Levee Low Moan, one of the few Wynton albums that breaks free of manner and drops down into the blues), and Joe Henderson. Perfect sky, sunlight slowly fading behind the hedges. Good stuff, in other words. Such a pity this only happens for three months a year.
[Originally written 8/10 but never posted due to blog error. Oh well. Never too late to update.]
A couple of quick reading notes, a la the old “Hit and Run” columns that the Suck editors used to do when they couldn’t get a full piece out of any of their websurfing fun:
Phew! Looking over this, I see it’s high time I blogrolled Boing Boing. (Is that sentence English?)
Doc Searls had his Airport Base Station stolen at the LinuxWorld convention. Cory Doctorow at Boing-Boing suggests we all flow Doc a buck (to borrow a Tony Pierce-ism) using PayPal so that he can buy a new station. I’ve contributed, won’t you? Let’s show that Blogistan’s generosity isn’t a one-time event.
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This morning I was finishing my tea and getting ready to head to work when the phone rang. It was Larry Mueller, who will be in Seattle for his grandmother’s 100th birthday and wanted to catch up with us? Maybe we could do lunch? Or maybe dinner and we could put him up?
Yeah, I think we could manage that. We haven’t seen Larry in a few years–since I went to b-school at MIT instead of Virginia, where Larry is director of financial aid at Darden–and I was beginning to despair of catching up with him again. Besides, we owe him. Shortly after he moved into his new home, he did us the favor of letting us stay with him before he had curtains. Well, Larry, most of our windows don’t have curtains yet either, but you’re welcome to stay as long as you’d like.
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It’s been a day of remembering why friends are important. We were unable to go rafting with Michele this weekend, much to our chagrin, and I was feeling bad that we were letting the friendship down. After all, we haven’t been able to hang with Shel for a few years while on different coasts, and now we can’t make it work on the same coast.
But when I got home last night there was a package from Amazon. Was it the new AV cable I ordered? No, it was addressed to Tim and Lisa. Inside was a pasta roller attachment for our Kitchenaid mixer. The note said something about “in case we ran out of the dried stuff,” and was signed by our friends Charlie and Carie Page.
Of course this is the point. Friendships that are built through a long period of relationships aren’t destroyed by one missed weekend. But it’s a good idea not to take them for granted anyway.
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Eric Olsen and company have launched BlogCritics, an online communal blog about music, books, and popular culture with a traditional critics’ bent. This is the sort of site that Greg and I used to idly dream of starting one day, before we went on, him to get 1200 hits from InstaPundit and me to get continuous hits from Google wanting to know about Wil Wheaton naked.
Anyway, BlogCritics is still looking for authors, so sign up…
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It could only happen in America: Barney the Dinosaur vs. Wil “Wesley Crusher” Wheaton, boxing for charity (the Electronic Freedom Foundation). I’m surprised Wil hasn’t blogged about it yet.
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Couldn’t figure out yesterday why I was getting referrals from www.imabigsexybeast.tk. Went to the page and it was my weblog plus a popup for dot.tk. Now Craig Pfeifer confesses he did it while playing around with dot.tk’s new free domain registration service. You don’t have to have a primary or secondary DNS server either, just a valid URL.
So now my site can be reached at www.imabigsexybeast.tk. Thanks, Craig. I’ll return the favor once their registration engine is working again.
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