Categories
Weblogging

Beautiful music and a web of discovery

Recovered from the Wayback machine.

I love music, all kinds of music — everything from Alanis Morissette to Lifehouse to Aerosmith to Sting to Billy Joel to the Beatles to Opera to Swing to classic rock and roll and on and on and on. Everything but disco and jazz that’s too heavy. You name it and unless it’s too extreme or bizarre, I’ll probably like it.

Tonight, there was one song I couldn’t get out of my mind — Rufus Wainright’s “Hallelujah” from, of all things, the movie Shrek. If you’ve seen the movie, you know the song I’m talking about — a beautiful melody that can bring tears to your eyes. Tonight I listened to it over and over again, while I did a little exploration.

I actually found a song about weblogging. Maybe you’ve seen it? It was almost a googlewhack, there’s only two links to it within Google. Part of it goes:

No one’s reading my web log.
No one cares about,
What I got to say, and I’m
Getting’ kind of discouraged.
Hope someone reads it all today.

I might just quit this here web log.
It’s too much trouble to,
Write it every day, and I’m
Getting kind of depressed, now,
Even more depressed than I was before.


Blowing the seeds off a dandelion, watching them get caught up in the wind and dance away, wondering where the seeds will land and if they’ll sprout.

    • At

Mandy’s Place

I don’t want to take another step. I don’t want to feel like I’m on a moving walkway that will force me to take that step whether I want to or not. I just want to stay here. I’m in a comfortable place right now or it is becoming comfortable. I don’t want to go out and fight battles right now. I know what is ahead and I don’t want to face it yet but the walkway keeps moving and I keep moving with it. I might have to start walking backwards but I don’t think that will help because then I’ll trip and fall down and I’d be really unprepared for what will come. I could turn around and start running the other way but that option doesn’t get me anywhere because then I’ll have to keep running for the rest of my life. I can’t try to always swim upstream. Someday I’ll see that it is shorter just to swim all the way across the river.

    • At

The Rock Pool

Back to school tomorrow.
I am torn between anticipating and dreading it. How I am ever going to get up at seven in the morning I do not know. How am I going to get used eating on a schedule again? Am I going to survive this year without getting majorly disillusioned with the whole schooling system and depressed. Again.

    • At

Stephie’s Blogger

LOOK EVERYONE! Michelle signed my guestbook! MICHELLE IS THE BEST GUESTBOOK SIGNER EVER! So this entry is just for her.

At

A Secret Smile

I blubbed when I heard Marjan died. He held his own through the worst abuses and as soon as he felt loved, nurtured and respected again he was safe enough to die.

    • At

fi-del-i-tie

Looking back from the perspective of 30 minutes later, I think I have a new verse for “Blowing in the Wind” – something about how long one poet can go. I won’t bore you with the rest – host makes nice comments; hairdresser reads; host lies nice comments…

    • At

A Step into the Mind of an Insane Lunatic

Can you dream a wish so high as to see it touch the sky and on the eve let it slip into the sea and off to shores unknown and far until the morning comes and offers to loan reality for the dream and real for the unseen?

Down on the wind.

Beautiful music and a web of discovery — it doesn’t get much better than this, does it?

Categories
Weblogging

January 28, 2002

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Bribes! Bribes! What’s this about bribes!

Dearest, the mugs were nothing more than party favors at a Blog Party. Best kind of party, too. I didn’t have to clean up after any drunks, or end up with someone reflecting a whole lot of bad taste or an advanced state of inebriation — or both.

Wait a sec…are you another Australian?

8:27pm

TX Meryl turned me on to a posting she knew I would like. Wrong. I LOVED it!

Gretchen Pirillo — whatever she says, is ditto for me. Double ditto. With fudge sauce. Tim Tams on the side. This posting made my evening!

Oh, and BTW, regarding having comments for weblogs: The only reason I write to this weblog is the joy of meeting all of you. I’ll trade 100 hits for one comment from you, my weblogging readers, any day, any minute, and second.

Now, excuse, I have to go think of a really good zinger back at Jonathon. Something realllly good.

6:22pm

I need to stop screwing around and get back to work, but wanted to drop in apologies for the slight down time earlier. I followed NJ Meryl’s suggestion about adding a little more variety to my comment counter and had the hardest time remembering that this was PHP, not Perl or Python. Crash and burn.

Speaking of coding: Garth are you playing around with someone’s closed source code? Tsk tsk tsk.

1:13pm

Per Jonathan – female orgasm pill. He thinks it will outsell viagra.

Sweet heart, whatever gives you the idea that we need a pill?

10:47am

And did you all notice that I now have a thought for the day, listed after the Blogicon items? Hmmm?

10:13am

Categories
Weblogging

My Thanks

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I forgot to extend my thanks to all the folks who are providing me with Radio 8.0 feedback. Phil Ringnalda went so far as to post his very in-depth review online. Another person who asked to be NAMELESS also spent considerable time pointing out gotchas and work arounds and other interesting tidbits. All of the efforts are an enormous help in my effort to provide a populist viewpoint in addition to my own of the product.

I’m finding that the News Aggregator was, by far, the biggest item of interest. I also found out that my habit of changing the name of my weblog every time I post to weblogs.com is causing problems with personal weblogs.com lists, as the list runs off of weblog name rather than the URI (naughty. no-no.) I’m now torn as to whether I should be consistent or have fun. My predilection is to have fun.

Documentation’s also another issue that has generated comments. If Radio 8.0 isn’t open source, the effort to document how it works and what people have done is. What’s needed, now, is a method of pulling these disparate pieces together into a unified whole.

During this whole process, I’ve been asked about my own personal RSS feed, which I don’t keep updated. As an example, a certain someone (Garth) went looking for Tim Tams in my RSS feed and didn’t find the term. Promise: On my to-do list. Really. Honest. Cross my heart.

Finally, I had some very good news about one of my current book efforts for O’Reilly. I don’t want to divulge the news just yet as I’m afraid I’ll jinx it. However, my publication date is moving up as a result, which means I may not post my usual 5-10 postings a day. I’ll probably have to settle for 2 or 3 times a day. Will you all miss me?

Again my thanks for the help with Radio 8.0. Webloggers are such great people.

Categories
Places

Krispy Kreme

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I had this most horrible nightmare last night.

I dreamed that I was on a deserted tropical island, and the only thing I had to eat and drink was blueberry bagels slathered in Vegemite, with room temperature, flat Foster’s to wash them down. And it was in color, too. Shudder What does it mean?

I’ve heard enough about Tim Tams to know that I must try them. I live in one of this country’s most sophisticated and urbane cities; only 8% of the population that live here can afford to live here. Surely there must be some shop somewhere that sells a cooky labeled as “sexy mass-market”. That description fits San Francisco so well!

I kept trying to think if there was a particular food item that has similar universal appeal and fondness in this country. One that can also generate the same wistful thoughts, prolonged discussion, and copious drooling from even the most hardened weblogger. Just before I went to bed last night it came to me: Krispy Kreme.

I have seen weblogs devote an entire week to nothing but postings about a new Krispy Kreme that opened in the neighborhood. Cars can line up for blocks waiting to get into a Krispy Kreme outlet. Little old ladies with blue hair will run people over with their shopping carts in a mad scramble to get the one remaining box of Krispy Kreme’s.

Why, in certain parts of this country, if you come between a Man or a Woman and their Krispy Kreme, they’ll shoot you.

And on that bit of cultural exchange, I think I’ll sign off and get to work for the day. Beautiful clouds across the Bay today, as shown in this photo snapped with my handy Nikon 995 digital.

P.S. Just joking about that shooting part. Really. Honest. Cross my heart.

Categories
Places

Australian Food

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Within comments that arose in the last Blog Party (see previous posting) a little cultural edification:

Tim Tams are a sweet that the Australians seem to universally love, at least from my understanding. I found an excellent write up that says “They’re a sexy mass-market product, available at supermarkets, service stations, convenience stores and corner shops nationwide.”

I’ve not had the privilege of having a Tim Tam — yet — but I have had the next item, Vegemite. What is vegemite? Well, I don’t know. Not sure I want to know, but I do know it’s healthy.

Vegemite is an acquired taste. You can acquire this taste quickly by laying some out on bread with butter, licking your finger, inserting said finger into electrical outlet, and eating the vegemite smeared bread while enjoying the tickling charge of the electrical current. There’s a fun looking site devoted to the stuff.

I jokingly mentioned Foster’s in the comment list, but EVERYONE knows that Australians never drink Foster’s, they leave it for the tourists. I think one of the more colorful descriptions was “piss water”? Is that it? I’ve had Foster’s. I’ve tried muddy water, too, when I was child. The water had more flavor … and more roughage, too. Foster’s web site.

Now, any readers from Oz (JonathonAllan, and Garth) you be sure to correct me if I’m mistaken with any of this.

And that leads us to a new song in BurningBird’s repository — the Vegemite song!