Category: long story short

  • Map sketches from over the Pacific

    (san francisco peninsula) (new york harbor) (san francisco bay) (western north america) (bering straits)

  • Happy blog day to me

    Boy was I smart to start my first real blog on my birthday (in ’97). It sure helps keep things straight around here. Somehow along the way I turned 45. What. The. Fuck? Now, in honor of the kind of manic blogging I used to do before the twitter and the employment, I will actually…

  • Down in the Blue Mountains

    teeny falls Originally uploaded by true dirt Briggs took some wonderful pictures in Oz. This one’s from the rainy day we climbed down the ravines in the Blue Mountains.

  • The book has arrived!

    the book has arrived! Originally uploaded by erin_designr We started our book proposal around June of ’08…

  • Smile! You're on candid skitch

    Not a manga or mad man among them.

  • The new phone book is (almost) here!

    The writing is over (for this edition), the book has “shipped to the printer,” and the cover mechanical (shown above, in its technicolor glory) is in the can. My tech writing career is now complete: an animal book with O’Reilly!

  • Open source unbooks and a pattern language for groups

    Two hot bookmarks today, each of which probably warrants a full blog post: Book’em, Github | Linux Magazine tech authors posting source code and sometimes entire books on GitHub Pattern Language of Group Process A pattern language for group dynamics whose goals include (1) To support Purpose-driven design. Form should follow function, (2) To deepen…

  • When in Rome…

    When my Bulletin article got written up in Metafilter, I started posting replies in haste without allowing the conversation to unfold naturally. I’ve spent a lot more time at Reddit in the last few years than at Metafilter, and more time than both on the Well. Along the way, I forgot some of my experience…

  • Bulletin article Boingboinged

    Cory Doctorow picked up on a brief mention from Bruce Sterling in his wired blog pointing to my recent bulletin article. Cory adds Stupid pitfalls of social media: This American Society for Information Science and Technology paper by Yahoo’s Christian Crumlish has a tidy little cosmology of dumb things that social media does. Commenters seem…

  • Comparing hosting options

    There is a very real prospect that the sweet sweet deal the Mediajunkie publishing empire has had these many years with Tiedrich and associates may need to replaces by something inevitably not half so sweet. What this means is that I may need to find a new host for my multiple and various web experiments.…

  • What was the Watergate scandal?

    Another in my new series of longwinded Aardvark answers made public, in this case answering a question about U.S. history from a 19 year-old in New York State: “What was the watergate scandal?” Here’s my answer. (How’d I do?*): Watergate is the name of a famous hotel in Washington, D.C. where a lot of political…

  • Why is Dante's poem called the Divine "Comedy"?

    I got this question from Aardvark and gave a speculative answer i’m not sure, but it may go back to the greek definitions of comedy and tragedy, which are different from ours today. for the greeks, a comedy is a drama with a happy ending and a tragedy is a drama with an unhappy ending.…

  • gee and i've only met barlow once

    gee and i’ve only met barlow once Originally uploaded by xian was JP Barlow idly doing the comparisons today, or is this more like secret-admirer spam?

  • Playing around with Utterz

    Posted a thought via mobile that popped into my head driving to work this morning, part of an ongoing imaginary argument: Mobile post sent by xian using Utterz.  Replies.  mp3

  • Testing Anil Dash's text-embed idea

    Anil Dash blogged recently about adapting the embedding method used for rich media on personal / blog / social sites (most common use case: embedding a YouTube video on a MySpace page) to simple text quoting. He has added an embed code to each of his entries and I’m going to paste it in, inside…

  • If I have to appear in Valleywag this is the way to go

    Started off Saturday morning with Kick ’08. Namedropping: Talked to George Kelly, Erin Malone, Anil Dash, Jessamyn West (yay!), Simon Willison, Owen Thomas, Hugh Forrest, Micah Alpern (briefly, passing on the escalator), Janna Hicks DeVylder so far….

  • Nevelson revisited

    After I posted about that Louise Nevelson exhibit at the de Young museum and seeing the model for the sculpture near my parents’ apartment at 92nd and Park Ave in New York, my sister scanned and emailed me a photo of the four of us siblings posing in front of the sculpture, circa 1974. (The…

  • Finding my bliss

    A week or so ago I posted a semi-whimsical question on Facebook: > Has anybody seen my bliss? I was following it but I think I fell too far behind. (Hat tip to Joseph Campbell, pictured here, who seems to have coined the phrase “follow your bliss.”) My friend Aldon Hynes wrote an interesting post,…

  • Things to done

    Saturday * Get salad greens and heirloom tomatoes at the farmer’s market at Splash Pad park * Work out with B at the gym * Drop off shirts at the cleaner * Start laundry * Make pizza and salad * Fix problem with misdirected payments to writer client * See Michael Clayton * Have a…

  • The limits of multitasking

    I was running a search on a labeled group of messages (from a mailing list) in my mailbox, looking for just the unread ones, but I was also doing something else at the same time (actually two or three other things, drinking coffee, firing up a YouTube video, looking for a file on my desktop)…

  • Unescaped entities on the loose

    So, I’m back from the Dead Symposium at UMass (I’ll post my slides soon), and Thanksgiving has come and gone, and I’m at the office now wrestling with my new MacBook Pro, trying to get everything possible onto it from my old G4 without breaking any of the new stuff. I think I’m almost there…