A coworker today underestimated my age by at least six years. While that's awesome for me, it's going to be even funnier for certain members of my family.
That's because I forgot to mention that my sister, who lives locally and is 4 years younger (plus smarter and probably wealthier) than I (just like her twin, incidentally), has been mistaken for my older sister a couple of times recently.
I don't think I want to make too much of it, because probably the reason has more to do with my actions than how we each look. Still, as a proper older brother, I will make fun. Of course, she's married, has a career she likes, and has her crap together, so whatever.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Could all you non-family and friends avert your eyes for a sec?
Okay, now they're distracted, I feel I should let my pals know I'm really happy. Everything's coming up Daniel recently.
I know I'm usually a marginally optimistic cynic who glosses over the fundamental meaninglessness of life with a palaver of wry fart jokes and girlie-drinks, but due to a couple of strokes of really good luck recently I'm just psyched all day. It's embarrassing.
That is all.
I know I'm usually a marginally optimistic cynic who glosses over the fundamental meaninglessness of life with a palaver of wry fart jokes and girlie-drinks, but due to a couple of strokes of really good luck recently I'm just psyched all day. It's embarrassing.
That is all.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Insomnia?
I haven't had insomnia in ages, but if you could check the time of this post you'd note that either I'm taking a very ambitious and optimistic line on Tuesday or I'm awake at a simply stupid hour of the day.
Seriously, I was only vaguely aware that a 4:30 AM even existed. I thought maybe it was a story concocted to frighten children, like the chupecabra or libertarians.
I'd like to think I'm awake because of excitement over either my job search or my burgeoning romantic life, but if I'm honest, I think the positive developments in both those areas would lull me to sleep like a big somnolent baby. I haven't a clue why I'm still awake.
Sure, some of you will say, why did you wash down a pitcher of margaritas with a latte at 10:00 PM? To you I say, "for America!" Also, "hush. No one likes a smart alec."
Actually, I won't take any guff about my eating habits, since I learned today, after swanning around in a hot tub at the Marriott where my friend is staying and then using their balance scale, that my curious "unemployment diet", which seems to include incautious beverage choices and a plenitude of cheese sandwiches at irregular hours, is causing me to lose weight. I'm back down to what I weighed in college, so that's fun.
Maybe my weight has tricked my brain into keeping college hours, which I recall totally sucked.
Anyway, I've put the "bonus" awake-time to marginal use by killing a (preposterously large) cave cricket. The trick, it turns out, is to move slowly, not quickly - just like the knife fights in the confusing movie adaptation of Dune where Captain Picard tries to teach Kyle MacLachlin to kill Sting in slo-mo and a floating dirigible of a fat dude with weeping sores gives me nightmares for a week (0r something). You know the one.
In cricket updates, I'm becoming inured to the horrible little bastards ... though I still kill them with a distressing relish, considering their only crime is being frankly hideous.
Don't give me that look! I was unpopular in high school too, so don't you dare go taking the side of the ugly misunderstood crickets. If there were goth emo stoners lurching around your basement in the middle of the night, hiding under the fridge, and leaping at you when you went to take a slash, you'd whack them with rolled up copies of Rolling Stone too, whether you listen to Tool or not. I'm fairly certain Robert Smith would approve. Morrissey of course would be disdainful and quietly maudlin about it.
Okay, I'm going to try this whole sleeping thing again.
Seriously, I was only vaguely aware that a 4:30 AM even existed. I thought maybe it was a story concocted to frighten children, like the chupecabra or libertarians.
I'd like to think I'm awake because of excitement over either my job search or my burgeoning romantic life, but if I'm honest, I think the positive developments in both those areas would lull me to sleep like a big somnolent baby. I haven't a clue why I'm still awake.
Sure, some of you will say, why did you wash down a pitcher of margaritas with a latte at 10:00 PM? To you I say, "for America!" Also, "hush. No one likes a smart alec."
Actually, I won't take any guff about my eating habits, since I learned today, after swanning around in a hot tub at the Marriott where my friend is staying and then using their balance scale, that my curious "unemployment diet", which seems to include incautious beverage choices and a plenitude of cheese sandwiches at irregular hours, is causing me to lose weight. I'm back down to what I weighed in college, so that's fun.
Maybe my weight has tricked my brain into keeping college hours, which I recall totally sucked.
Anyway, I've put the "bonus" awake-time to marginal use by killing a (preposterously large) cave cricket. The trick, it turns out, is to move slowly, not quickly - just like the knife fights in the confusing movie adaptation of Dune where Captain Picard tries to teach Kyle MacLachlin to kill Sting in slo-mo and a floating dirigible of a fat dude with weeping sores gives me nightmares for a week (0r something). You know the one.
In cricket updates, I'm becoming inured to the horrible little bastards ... though I still kill them with a distressing relish, considering their only crime is being frankly hideous.
Don't give me that look! I was unpopular in high school too, so don't you dare go taking the side of the ugly misunderstood crickets. If there were goth emo stoners lurching around your basement in the middle of the night, hiding under the fridge, and leaping at you when you went to take a slash, you'd whack them with rolled up copies of Rolling Stone too, whether you listen to Tool or not. I'm fairly certain Robert Smith would approve. Morrissey of course would be disdainful and quietly maudlin about it.
Okay, I'm going to try this whole sleeping thing again.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
WTF?
Since when did Whiskey Tango Foxtrot become an acceptable lengthening of WTF? It's longer than the original phrase (which is "what the f***" ... which is actually "what the fuck" for those of you not frightened by words, and "what the fundoodle" for those of you who are).
I heard a guy on NPR use it, and I think he was a colonel in the U.S. army. I wasn't paying attention, so he might have been a janitor at the Quickee Mart, but he was probably someone of some import to be a guest on NPR.
That is all.
I heard a guy on NPR use it, and I think he was a colonel in the U.S. army. I wasn't paying attention, so he might have been a janitor at the Quickee Mart, but he was probably someone of some import to be a guest on NPR.
That is all.
Friday, August 21, 2009
Oh Holy Christ on a Cricket!
I've seen the face of evil, and it's a cave cricket.
That ugly bastard up there lives in my apartment. They're relatively harmless except that every time you see one on your way to the bathroom in the middle of the night, a tiny portion of your soul shrivels up in horror.
They don't chirp. They don't (thank God!) bite. And in fact, they don't seem to do much at all. They do move like lightning when you go to squish them though. Fair enough, I guess. I'd move too if I were being squished.
However, they look like a cross between a cricket and a hairy spider - which, in case you're interested, is actually the recipe for unadulterated evil. They look just wrong and I hate them.
Apparently you can get rid of them with caulking and maybe an exorcism.
That ugly bastard up there lives in my apartment. They're relatively harmless except that every time you see one on your way to the bathroom in the middle of the night, a tiny portion of your soul shrivels up in horror.They don't chirp. They don't (thank God!) bite. And in fact, they don't seem to do much at all. They do move like lightning when you go to squish them though. Fair enough, I guess. I'd move too if I were being squished.
However, they look like a cross between a cricket and a hairy spider - which, in case you're interested, is actually the recipe for unadulterated evil. They look just wrong and I hate them.
Apparently you can get rid of them with caulking and maybe an exorcism.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
What's a blog?
So I got a question from a loyal reader and family-member that went along the lines of "what the hell's this 'blogging' thing all about anyway?"
Obviously, she's reading this blog, so she's at least vaguely aware, but it's true that the term blog gets used a lot to mean similar, but subtly different things. I thought I'd take a shot at answering the question here.
It's a technology:
When I worked for the uninitiated, their conflation of the technology with the trend was the hardest part to get around. At its most basic, a blog is some code on a server that makes it easy to publish chronologically ordered articles on a web site.
Generally there are a couple of screens for writing, editing, and managing the "posts", and it's all set up so that you don't have to know an <i> tag from an <em> tag to do anything.
A user writes a post or two, publishes them, and sends a link to friends. When the friend shows up to the main blog page, they see a list of all posts from most recent to oldest. Clicking on any post's title takes you to a "permalink", which is a fancy way of saying "a page with just one post on it". Generally, comments about a post live on the post's permalink page.
It's important to separate the tech from the phenomenon, because you could use blogging software to publish stuff that wouldn't really qualify as a blog. Anything it makes sense to publish in chronological order will do. Daily sports results would work fine, but they wouldn't set CNN on its ear as Bloggers have.
It's a phenomenon:
Any jackass can publish anything. Look at me for instance.
It's important to note that "anyone" includes Fortune 500 companies as well as schizophrenics and hobos. Who publishes and why has a distinct impact on the blog's reach and content. The fact that anyone can publish means a lot of people have, so there's a wide variety of blogs out there. However, most of them, certainly the ones you hear about, have fallen into a few categories ....
Friends and family blogs, like this one, are good for people who are far from loved ones, are crap at writing letters, but want to keep folks apprised of what's up in their lives. Basically it's stuff I want people I know to hear from me.
Diary blogs are about people's cats and are narcissistic in the extreme. No one cares about your cat! Focusing on the fact that your readers (if they exist) are people, not the ether, should turn a diary blog into a friends and family blog.
Corporate blogs, are a mixed bag. Sometimes a CEO is blathering on about whatever comes to mind. Other times, a blog is part of a larger web-site and deals with specific issues. An example of the latter would be any of a number of Consumer Reports' blogs (e.g.: http://blogs.consumerreports.org/electronics/)
Pro Blogs are sites that started as blogs and became proper publications. Imagine a broadsheet turned into a proper paper and you've got the idea. Blogs like engadget and gizmodo are examples.
They have no non-blog presence, like CR does, but they command a big audience. They're what all the fuss is about when people talk about blogging. They are also what aspiring bloggers are aiming to be when they start their puny little humor blogs. Ahem.
A lot of new publications recently have taken this form simply because blogging software is easy to come by and convenient to use.
RSS
RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication and is confusing to most people.
It is basically a way for a user to find out when there are new posts on a blog you like. It's a bit more involved on the publisher's side because RSS is a format you can use to package up all your content so it can be used and displayed elsewhere. This "atomization" of content has had a lot of impact on the Web because, by providing a standard, RSS has made it easy for one site to seamlessly integrate content from other places on the Web.
From the user's end, you usually see images like this:
. When you click on them (this one's inert, but try at the bottom of the main page), your browser or some other program like your blog reader, or sometimes Outlook or another email program (I understand) will help you pull updates about a blog into a spot where it's convenient for you to read up on them.
Twitter?
Twitter started as a "micro-blogging" platform, which meant you had to keep your posts to 140 characters or less. Twitter's too much to get into here, because functionality not found on most blogs altered the way people interact with it so it's no longer just a micro-blogging tool.
Obviously, she's reading this blog, so she's at least vaguely aware, but it's true that the term blog gets used a lot to mean similar, but subtly different things. I thought I'd take a shot at answering the question here.
It's a technology:
When I worked for the uninitiated, their conflation of the technology with the trend was the hardest part to get around. At its most basic, a blog is some code on a server that makes it easy to publish chronologically ordered articles on a web site.
Generally there are a couple of screens for writing, editing, and managing the "posts", and it's all set up so that you don't have to know an <i> tag from an <em> tag to do anything.
A user writes a post or two, publishes them, and sends a link to friends. When the friend shows up to the main blog page, they see a list of all posts from most recent to oldest. Clicking on any post's title takes you to a "permalink", which is a fancy way of saying "a page with just one post on it". Generally, comments about a post live on the post's permalink page.
It's important to separate the tech from the phenomenon, because you could use blogging software to publish stuff that wouldn't really qualify as a blog. Anything it makes sense to publish in chronological order will do. Daily sports results would work fine, but they wouldn't set CNN on its ear as Bloggers have.
It's a phenomenon:
Any jackass can publish anything. Look at me for instance.
It's important to note that "anyone" includes Fortune 500 companies as well as schizophrenics and hobos. Who publishes and why has a distinct impact on the blog's reach and content. The fact that anyone can publish means a lot of people have, so there's a wide variety of blogs out there. However, most of them, certainly the ones you hear about, have fallen into a few categories ....
Friends and family blogs, like this one, are good for people who are far from loved ones, are crap at writing letters, but want to keep folks apprised of what's up in their lives. Basically it's stuff I want people I know to hear from me.
Diary blogs are about people's cats and are narcissistic in the extreme. No one cares about your cat! Focusing on the fact that your readers (if they exist) are people, not the ether, should turn a diary blog into a friends and family blog.
Corporate blogs, are a mixed bag. Sometimes a CEO is blathering on about whatever comes to mind. Other times, a blog is part of a larger web-site and deals with specific issues. An example of the latter would be any of a number of Consumer Reports' blogs (e.g.: http://blogs.consumerreports.org/electronics/)
Pro Blogs are sites that started as blogs and became proper publications. Imagine a broadsheet turned into a proper paper and you've got the idea. Blogs like engadget and gizmodo are examples.
They have no non-blog presence, like CR does, but they command a big audience. They're what all the fuss is about when people talk about blogging. They are also what aspiring bloggers are aiming to be when they start their puny little humor blogs. Ahem.
A lot of new publications recently have taken this form simply because blogging software is easy to come by and convenient to use.
RSS
RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication and is confusing to most people.
It is basically a way for a user to find out when there are new posts on a blog you like. It's a bit more involved on the publisher's side because RSS is a format you can use to package up all your content so it can be used and displayed elsewhere. This "atomization" of content has had a lot of impact on the Web because, by providing a standard, RSS has made it easy for one site to seamlessly integrate content from other places on the Web.
From the user's end, you usually see images like this:
. When you click on them (this one's inert, but try at the bottom of the main page), your browser or some other program like your blog reader, or sometimes Outlook or another email program (I understand) will help you pull updates about a blog into a spot where it's convenient for you to read up on them.Twitter?
Twitter started as a "micro-blogging" platform, which meant you had to keep your posts to 140 characters or less. Twitter's too much to get into here, because functionality not found on most blogs altered the way people interact with it so it's no longer just a micro-blogging tool.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
On owning a cafe that offers wifi
Does anyone know if there's a device or program you could use to alert you when your wifi is down? I guess you'd need a bit of software on your wifi enabled smartphone trying to access the internet - but only via the wifi. It would buzz if it couldn't, thereby alerting you that your local wifi was hosed.
Someone needs to build this device or software for cafe owners. Failed wifi is becoming the number-one reason I won't go back to cafes now, which sounds lame, but every cafe offers coffee and tables. Besides, nothing pisses you off at a cafe like losing Internet and not knowing when/if it's coming back.
Doug, build this and we'll be rich I tell you!
Someone needs to build this device or software for cafe owners. Failed wifi is becoming the number-one reason I won't go back to cafes now, which sounds lame, but every cafe offers coffee and tables. Besides, nothing pisses you off at a cafe like losing Internet and not knowing when/if it's coming back.
Doug, build this and we'll be rich I tell you!
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