Started with this. I needed to know how to remove the hardbound spine from a book.
Guess which population of savvy users had done this and had multiple discussion threads on the best way to go about it?
Yup. Metafilter here and again.
I sent an email to the local Kinko’s ( sorry FedEx, it’s Kinko’s to me ) and we’ll see if they have the spine guillotine.
My first news aggregation site was memepool.com. This site was basically a sporadically updated blog that had “good” links. Like most people of the era, I had been getting URL’s in the mail for a great number of years already, but in 2001 when I encountered this site, the standard for quality and range of links was sufficiently raised.
Let me also introduce a third axis called freshness that could be added which measures the frequency of update. These will be the elements in our three dimensional grid of considerations.
Notably, the latter two axes are much more subjective ( last post can be measured ).
I take my final in Trigonometry this afternoon.
I’ve got a rendezvous with Blue Moon Wheat Ale and disc II of Ergo Proxy around 1900 this evening.
We live in a woodsy part of Texas which means that the out-of-doors is warm, humid, grassy, with thick shaded forests where flora can decay and be consumed by insects and whatnot. This creates near legendary swarms of mosiquitoes in the summer, and provides a home to a great many arthropods that break down dead organic matter and help the cycle of life continue.
As such, it’s not entirely unusual for one of these creatures to permeate the illusion of the hermetically-sealed home and lo, there is a bug.
When encountering such a bug a human can ask, “Shall I dispatch this small, yet alive bit of matter, animated by forces unknown or shall I do something else with it like dress it like Carmen Miranda and play showtunes or, perhaps, return it to the great out-of doors.
Oftentimes when coming across a “roly-poly” I will take an extra moment, scoop it up in its defensive ball form and return it to the nearby garden. I wish it well on its way. I hear the great chimes of Lhasa toll for me and the name avalokitesvhara whispers on the wind. Lauren says “That’s very Buddhist of you”.
But last night as I wandered into bathroom I noticed an insufficiently cute Symphylian of some sort scurrying across the floor. In a moment I grabbed a copy of Vanity Fair and with the full fury of 18-th century Johnathan Edwards’ Puritan God, struck out at that interloper, tossing a brick through the delicate gossamer web that suspends the lives of all sinners and arthropods over a firey Hell.
Although I feel bad that as I turned him to a shade the last thing he saw was the forced, painfully-cool smirk of Shia LaBoeuf. The perfume girl ad on the back was much more pleasant.
The League, apparently up a bit earlier than I was today (quelle surprise), has already noted that we had a little shin-dig up at Manuel’s north last night in observation of my foray into that strange world known as the thirties.
I have always felt that 25 would be the best age, this came from analyzing aging from two extreme poles.
In junior high school I thought that there were a lot of silly rules ( no sideburns, must be clean shaven, couldn’t say damn ) and silly wastes of time ( my math education ). I saw no reason for this to end before 18 and graduation.
I then extrapolated what I knew about college and thought that it amounted to more school, but in a better environment. But every college person I had ever met had told me that they were poor. To my early teen mind this “poor thing” was “the sucks” ( I didn’t realize that it would invite a certain cleverness which would actually be part of the charm ) so I figured you’d want to be out of school a bit.
Based on these lower bounds, 25 seemed like the winner.
Being a child of the 80’s, and particularly 80’s television, I had a distinct aversion to ever becoming 30. That aversion was created by thirtysomething.
I know you’re asking, “What the hell was a ten-year-old doing watching that show?” I have no explanation, why I wasn’t watching “Moonlighting” baffles me as well.
It appeared to me that when people became thirtysomething they became really, really whiny. To me, the details of their lives that they spent so much time whining over were all so tiny and obvious. I couldn’t believe that people had so much angst over being a married / a parent / having to go to work / should they boink the secretary, etc. I remember distinctly thinking for a bunch of grown-ups you’re incredibly juvenile and irresponsible and….something else
The word that I was bereft of at the time that I have now is this: self-indulgent.
I have always tried, or at the very least since I read Nietzsche or Kierkergaard, to try to live a responsible life. One where when you eff it up, you own up. When you commit, you deliver. Why you buy-in you go all-in. And lives of thirtysomething seemed painfully irresponsible and undercommitted.
Oh yeah, and whiny.
Realizing I was about to cross out of the target zone, I was thinking that I would just slip over the threshold, but to my great surprise Lauren cajoled and pushed, with some help from my sister, to get my agreement to do a bit of a festive something. While Thursday night was a special night fo’ jus’ me and my lay-day ( Brick Oven dinner, etc. ), Saturday was for my friends and I.
The Social Bobcats drove the not-inconsiderable drive up from Houston to have a lunch with us. It was really great, they ran over to Rudy’s BBQ and brought back a big white bag full of MEAT and sweet tea. It was really nice to share a leisurely meal of Texas BBQ before a bit of Wii-sports.
I hope the Social B’s get a Wii for their new home. It’s da shizit.
Yesterday evening I had the great pleasure of meeting my sister, her husband, The Leagues of Melbotises, composor/musician/linguist/and master of Unicode characters Trevor, and the family of my co-worker Forrest. About 10 people and I all had the chance to ring in my thirtieth at Manuel’s North. I had the chile relleno del mar ( as suggested by my brother-in-law ) and the desert of postre de cacao.
I must add, Forrest’s kid has a face for commercials and so much personality. I must say having his baby-teeth smile and peals of laughter was a really special addition.
Afterwards those without a young one in tow retired back chez nous for some wine / hard likker and conversation. The topics ranged from Spanish customs, to Galician Celts, to “WTF happened to public commons in Europe / Austin”. It was enjoyable, festive, and thoroughly enlivening.
As I stood rinsing out wine glasses underneath balloons Lauren had inflated, I was very glad that Lauren had pushed me a bit out of my low-inertia state to make it all come together.
What? How am I now paying 17% more on my monthly note? Surely those dancing cowboy ad people wouldn’t have oversold me on my dreams by making cheap money possible today all the while plotting that I would have to owe dramatically but years later?
I mean, all reputable lenders use cheap gimmicky ads to draw you to a responsible lending institution that will help you chart a financially prudent course to home-ownership.
In the meantime I pay rent, until…
Work.
Recently my zaibatsu has decided to start communicating a social message. At the heart, the company sells networking hardware. But let’s face it, no one has ever gotten misty-eyed at the mere mention of Dense Wave Division Multiplexing.
No, but DWDM promises a commodity product: bandwidth. And you can sell the dream of what bandwidth enables:
When you see those opportunities, enabled by tons of bandwidth, buying big network hardware becomes very compelling. If selling big network hardware is your bread and butter, you want people to see as many of these “Oh Gee!” opportunities as possible.
Lately, the world has been singing Web 2.0 mantra.
I see Web 2.0 as the technological shift which is going to finish the work of the Modernist era: Institutions will fail ( church, nation states ), Science will accelerate, collaboration will flourish, and non-linear power-dynamics will erupt ( Yes, I did get a philosophy degree just to say that last one ). This shift is sneaking in under the cloak of “Wikipedia for the enterprise” or “Youtube on your network” but will erupt into thousands of skunk works and start-ups. It will truly change the model of production within the technological enterprise. I’ll stop before the zombies of Engels and Marx knock at the door.
By Xarxes
But to make all that video-enabled, non-linear, collaborative formatting work, you need some serious bandwidth, and if you need that, you’re going to need network gear. It’s basically demand stimulation for the product we supply: like stimulating wars when you sell bullets. It’s a good story for selling and it’s a good technology inside.
I’ve been asked to be part of a team that’s deploying some of the technologies that create the “Web 2.0 experience” and have them enterprise-grade, in place, and working within less than 30 days. For anyone who’s worked within corporate IT, 20 days is an incredibly fast, mayhap impossibly fast delivery schedule.
So that’s what I’m doing at work.
At home I’m working on taking my 4th trigonometry exam and the final some 10 days later.
I did take a break from it all last night and watched the first disc of “Ergo Proxy” with Lauren last night. The first disc has been enough to make us ask “What the hell..?” and has filled out just enough story to make me want to get the next disc to see if it starts to make sense somehow. And what else can I say, Re-L is a hottie.
I also registered for two more classes from ACC in the fall semester: Calculus I and Latin I.
The calculus class is something I wanted to take last winter, but was so rusty I had to take a few preparatory laps before jumping into it. And Latin, well, I had always wanted to learn it. Even back in high school ( I was pragmatically steered towards Spanish ). After some 13 years of The Bobcat and my’s joking about the travails of Caecillius and Cerberus being in the mensa, I will at grasp this notion. I hope to do some fun programming in Cocoa and / or Ruby as I learn about it. The old languages are very rigorous and rule-based, it should be interesting to program around that.
Lauren suggested that I must like being stressed out. I don’t think I do really, I just dislike my own ignorance a lot more.
