Archive for July, 2008
Baston-bound
Jen and Phole are on their way to live and work near the hahbah in Bahston!
We celebrated with them on Tuesday night before they set off on their long journey, but not without helping workaround a glitch here and there ; )
Above you can enjoy a quick, stop-motion memory of the two of them discovering they’d successfully locked themselves out of their garage.
Fortunately, Phole was able to figure out the fit of the lock was just a lil on the tight side [Meta helped, too], which means it’ll fit juuuust right come winter.
Just like that, problem solved – which has me feeling that’s how smoov things will go for them in MA.
Safe journey – we’ll be out to visit soon : )
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Admit it…
…you want to learn how to yodel like cowboy Wylie here :
From Wikipedia :
Yodeling (or yodelling, jodeling) is a form of singing that involves singing an extended note which rapidly and repeatedly changes in pitch from the vocal or chest register (or “chest voice”) to the falsetto voice, making a high-low-high-low sound. This vocal technique is used in many cultures throughout the world.
In Alpine folk music, it was probably developed in the Swiss Alps as a method of communication between mountain peaks, later becoming part of the region’s traditional music. In Persian and Azeri classical music, singers frequently use tahrir, a yodeling technique that oscillates on neighbor tones. In Georgian traditional music, yodelling takes the form of krimanchuli technique, and is used as a top part in three/four part polyphony. In Central Africa, Pygmy singers use yodels within their elaborate polyphonic singing. Yodeling is often used in American bluegrass and country music.
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Touch Me I’m Going to Scream Part II
If you’re not hip to Black Cab Sessions, you are in for a treat!
…if you touch me, well i just think i’ll scream
cuz it’s been so long, since someone challenged me.
and made me think… about the way things are…
made me think…about the way they could be.
i believe it- why? oh my…
ooh my lord…ooh my lord…i don’t even know why…but…
oh! this feeling it is wonderful! don’t you ever turn it off!
oh! this feeling it is wonderful! don’t you ever turn it off!
feelings…why? oh my: human needs. heartbeats.
i can see it…all. by the way you smile.
i’m smiling too! i see myself in you.
i am with it! ooh man i am wired!
ooh my lord! ooh my lord- yeah…now i really know why!
oh! this feeling it is wonderful! don’t you ever turn it off!
oh! this feeling it is wonderful! don’t you ever turn it off!
So long, Facebook
Today i say goodbye to social networking. I no longer wish to opt-in to additional consumer surveillance.
If i had an office job that bored me to tears, i would surely feel differently and continue to click my way through mob, zombie and other such mindless *wars*.
Alas, i have no such job and after a discussion about its pros and cons, it is undeniably clear that the cons ruthlessly outweigh the pros.
After using the features that Facebook provides *free* to users for the past couple of years, in all fairness it was fun to occasionally find a long, lost pal.
However, given the amount of information Facebook sells about me and anyone else who uses it, I began to think this way : “They’re making lots of money off of tracking what I spend and where and potentially using my words and images without my knowledge. Is that such a great deal for anyone else?”
To boot, I was friends with a lot of people who I never see or actually have much in common with [towards the end i actually started removing "friends"].
As for the friends i see on a regular basis, i don’t need such a tool to stay in contact with them.
So — so long, social-networking-disguised-as-data-mining-and-profiling sites!
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YARTGROYTV
Have you ever wondered why they call it television “programming”?
Wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that it INFLUENCES people how to behave would it?
Wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that it TEACHES people to adopt an identity that isn’t their own would it?
Wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that it CONVINCES people that they need to act a certain way to be COOL would it?
Wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that the WORLD would be a better place without it would it?
Fact : programming is programming you.
Yet Another Reason To Get Rid Of Your TV :
Is ANYONE here to make friends?
This “reality” makes me think there’s not much difference between television programming and how these people feel/think at work, at home and in society at large.
Are YOU here to make friends or are you just here to *win*?
You *winners* aren’t able to answer that honestly and that’s ok – you didn’t come here to make friends.
The rest of us didn’t come here to make friends with self-serving bullies.
Sadly, according to this study, the bullies aren’t going away any time soon.
It’s easy to get down about this but, fortunately, there ARE good people around who help balance them out : )
The only catch is, you won’t see or *meet* any of them on TV.
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In the Beginning was the Command Line
My pal Steve turned me on to this essay, written in 1999 by Neil Stephenson.
Highly recommended.
Here’s an excerpt :
If I can risk a broad generalization, most of the people who go to Disney World have zero interest in absorbing new ideas from books. Which sounds snide, but listen: they have no qualms about being presented with ideas in other forms. Disney World is stuffed with environmental messages now, and the guides at Animal Kingdom can talk your ear off about biology.
If you followed those tourists home, you might find art, but it would be the sort of unsigned folk art that’s for sale in Disney World’s African- and Asian-themed stores. In general they only seem comfortable with media that have been ratified by great age, massive popular acceptance, or both.
In this world, artists are like the anonymous, illiterate stone carvers who built the great cathedrals of Europe and then faded away into unmarked graves in the churchyard. The cathedral as a whole is awesome and stirring in spite, and possibly because, of the fact that we have no idea who built it. When we walk through it we are communing not with individual stone carvers but with an entire culture.
Disney World works the same way. If you are an intellectual type, a reader or writer of books, the nicest thing you can say about this is that the execution is superb. But it’s easy to find the whole environment a little creepy, because something is missing: the translation of all its content into clear explicit written words, the attribution of the ideas to specific people. You can’t argue with it. It seems as if a hell of a lot might be being glossed over, as if Disney World might be putting one over on us, and possibly getting away with all kinds of buried assumptions and muddled thinking.
But this is precisely the same as what is lost in the transition from the command-line interface to the GUI.
Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself–and more than just graphical. Let’s call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense.
If you wish, you can download and read his essay in its entirety here.
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