Until further notice…
Will be offline for a while. Comment on this entry or email me if you want to reach me.
I just don’t know why…
Apparently, once a year my guts need to be ripped out.
Shalom Bayit
It’s been a long week. The electric bill is way too high. We’ve replaced all the bulbs with energy savers, turned the thermostat to 80-ish and run only the electronics/computers we need, and still we’re looking at half a g on our bill. So between all this and the vent that leaks water, we suspect the A/C has been bad for awhile. We told the landlords this, but they haven’t listened as the bill has climbed from $200-ish to its current levels. So here we are, waiting for them to call us back (they’re probably out of town for the weekend), not knowing if they’ll reduce rent as they should or if we’re going to have to move. They have expressed that they don’t want us to move, as they like having stable tenants, but they’ve made the situation untenable. The problem is that they are very insistent that it’s not the A/C (despite what the A/C repair guy said three months ago) and it clearly is. So we’ll see which side wins out – the side that wants to be right or the side that wants stable and sane tenants.
What’s in a name?
In honor of the announced retirement of the Gameboy name, I thought I’d post this picture (The evolution of the Gameboy and its successor). Thank you, Nintendo. You’ve given me and countless other people these platforms that have provided innumerable hours of fun. Oh yeah, and you can see some of my library here also.
Madness? This is Digg!
Lately I’ve been overdosing on information intake. The problem isn’t the amount, I think, but rather that there are so few effective filtration methods. If one withdraws entirely, then details are missed and the picture never resolves itself. However, if there are too many junk items, it takes too long to process and an endless feedback loop ensues. So long story short, I had to cut Digg loose. I love the amount of information it delivers, but the endless boorish commentary is just too much. A lot of people assume that there’s some conspiracy to Digg, but I don’t think there is. Sure there are mathematical algorithms, but nothing conspiratorial. I think that there is a certain type of person that’s drawn to Digg, and that the odd stories that keep getting pushed to the front page essentially appeal to that type. Of course it’s likely a range of several characteristics that all come out to a similar mindset, but there’s still a basic commonality between them. I think if you watched enough stories and read enough comments, you could probably decipher the whole thing, but then again, why? Indeed, that’s what I asked myself: Why? Bottom line, it’s not as democratic as it wants to be because its democracy only appeals to certain ranges of people. It lacks many of the draws that politics has at its disposal. For instance, if you don’t vote in an election, it will surely have an effect on your quality of life. However, there’s no such draw at Digg, and so we can conclude that if among the people that have an interest in voting in an election, only a percentage of eligible voters actually do so, then among the people that have an opinion on any given subject being Dugg, then even fewer eligible persons will do so. So you’re only getting a very small percentage of the actual number of opinions out there, and only from a range of personalities. This dilutes the concept of democracy to the point that it’s not really effective in measuring what the general populace thinks is interesting. So that’s why I’m not really interested in Digg, despite its pretension to the democratic ideal.
Twitter Fight Club
If you’ve seen the movie Fight Club, you’ll catch on instantly to this game. The video below has the relevant lines in it, but I’ll describe it first. In the movie, there’s a line:
“You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis. You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.”
When you see someone shilling for a product/OS/idea on Twitter, tell ‘em: “You are not your f$cking xxxx.” It’s that simple. They then can up the ante by repeating the same for a product/OS/idea you’re shilling for. No justifying it. Just take it and hit back until you’re done. Have fun!
QFT
“We are, you’ve doubtless begun to grasp, a profoundly wounded group of people. But trust me, when you better know the circumstances of our lives, you’ll be astonished we’re as functional as we are.”
- Galilee, by Clive Barker
Incoming…
It’s interesting to me how twitter has changed both my blogging habits and my RSS reading habits. First, I can now read Digg via Twitter in a way that Thunderbird really couldn’t provide via RSS. The reason for this is that Twitter forces a short summary of the article, which I can then use to decide whether I want to read more of or not. Engadget has become somewhat readable again for me for the same reason.
In a similar vein, I don’t blog as often because I twitter things that would normally just clutter up the blog anyway. I look at my last post and think, I should have twittered all that stuff. It wasn’t worth a post.
The wiki seems to be going well, and I’ve got the style sheet mostly how I want it. There are a few things I need to check, but it looks generally like the rest of the site, so I can do minor adjustments as I go. The main thing is getting all the articles in there and finding an easy way to add new users. I won’t be doing that tonight though. Ended up staying up all night working on the wiki last night, then was extremely groggy driving to work this morning. Even coffee wasn’t helping, so I think I need to catch up on my sleep a bit. Been really nervous about the money situation, so I’m not sleeping well, and when you combine that with the fact that Lily’s going through the temper tantrum stage, it’s not hard to end up just staying up all night. Must get more sleep. I’m nerve-wracked and constantly under massive amounts of stress. I seriously need to get some steady income.
