Categories
People Weblogging

Dishma-what?

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I was catching up on all my weblog reading when I noticed the photos of dishwashing aids at Mr. Delacour’s home. At first, I didn’t think anything of it until I realized that the photos were taken by Jeff Cheney here in San Francisco. In fact, there’s a good chance I’ve passed these same little scrubbers in my own Safeway trips.

And then it hit me — not only is weblogging changing the way we write, it’s changing the way we behave.

Think about it. Jeff reads Jonathon’s posting on Dishmatiques, notices something similar at his local store, captures said images with a digital camera to forward to Jonathon. We as webloggers see nothing out of the ordinary in this.

However, to the average Man or Woman on the street, here is this guy with a camera standing in the middle of a Safeway store taking photos of scrubbing brushes. To them, this is not normal behavior. Not even in San Francisco.

Continuing this same theme: How many of us go out for a dinner, movie, walk, or trip and come rushing home at the end of the experience knocking kid and cat out of the way so that we can get to our computers and record the event?

Now confess, when you’re out and about in your “day life”, don’t you find yourself reacting to events throughout the day with thoughts about how you’re going to write about said event in your weblog?

How many of us own a weblogging related mug? How many of us have our own little Cafe Press stores featuring our own little *weblogging mugs?

Then there’s weblog speak, such as:

“Oh yeah? Well Dvorak’s your mother!”

“Wear that dress and you’ll get a lot of buzz.”

“Come on, baby. Link to me!”

I was talking to my ex-husband on the phone, jabbering on about this weblogger and that weblogger and dropping terms such as blogging, buzz, Daypop, and Google, when I realized that Rob had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.

I was no longer speaking English.

One day people will be able to pick webloggers out in a crowd because we all share the burden of the Weblogger Mark — looking deep into the eyes of a friend or loved one while saying the deceptively simple words designed to lure them into the silken threads of the trap:

“You should get a weblog, you’ll really have fun.”

We’re a virus, and there’s no cure.

*BTW, anyone want a Burningbird weblogging mug?

Categories
Just Shelley

Decisions decisions

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

There is nothing more implacable than a decision waiting to be made.

It can shake you out of sleep, pulling the covers off, forcing you out of bed and to your feet. It can hover around you during your waking hours, beating at you with tiny, subliminal fists of frustration.

As time passes the decision grows and swells and bulges and puffs out and enlarges and stretches and expands. Your attempts to fend it off become weaker as it smothers you in it’s soft folds, pushes you against the wall, rolls over you as you try to run.

Poets write of Decision. In The Road Not Taken Frost wrote:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler

The poem ends with “…and I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

In this poem Frost sees Decision as noble — Man choosing to follow his own path rather than following the crowd. Compare this to Dorothy Parker’s caustic and brutally direct ‘Resumé:

Razors pain you; Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you; And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give;
Gas smells awful; You might as well live.

No nobility here — life as a lesser of evils.

Not all decisions are the same. Whether to choose strawberry ice cream or chocolate is but a moment’s thought; after all, one can choose chocolate tomorrow when choosing strawberry today. There are an infinite number of these decisions made in a life; exercise to keep your decision making capabilities from getting flabby from disuse.

Some decisions can only be made after sleepless nights and days spent in thought, little scales in your mind working overtime. To have a child or not. To marry or not. To make this move, buy this house, take this job, follow this path. Or not.

Regardless of the magnitude or its impact, once the the decision is made, you’re free of the weight, the monster has rolled on. This leaves plenty of room for Decision’s younger brother, Regret.

Categories
Photography

The wonder of it all

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

The Washington Post created a small but nice animated photo display, with music, showing some of the latest Hubble photos, caught with a new advanced camera system.

Take one minute — just one minute — to lose yourself in wonder.

Categories
Photography Places

Don’t breathe!

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

 

Today, four cranes made their way underneath the San Franciscan Bay Bridge, necessitating closure of the bridge temporarily. The closure was to prevent the weight of the cars from lowering the bridge span, an undesirable effect considering that clearance between the cranes and the Bay Bridge is only 22 inches — a very squeaky fit, indeed.

Since San Franciscans are always on the lookout for a good party, several folks showed up to witness the crane passage, and the sky was full of helicopters.

Luckily, no one breathed and the cranes made it safely through.

(See related story in SF Gate.)

Categories
Technology Weblogging

Self-hosting continued

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Considerable discussion related to my assertion that Radio and Blogger are centralized web publication systems.

First, a caveat — the use of decentralization that I made yesterday had to do with web publication without dependence on a centralized tool-specific server that you can’t, personally, control. It had nothing to do with the P2P concept of decentralization, and it had nothing to do with the fact that you can host your individual pages on your own server. It was specifically related to the web publication tool, itself.

Based on this, further clarification on my statements from yesterday:

Any publication system that requires that one aspect of it be centrally located — such as Blogger — is a centralized publication system. Yes, you can host your published pages on your server, but you still have to use the centralized Blogger system to publish these pages. This makes Blogger a centralized rather than a de-centralized solution.

From my understanding, Radio also requires access to what Userland refers to as a “cloud” to manage part of the publication process. And my understanding is that all or part of this cloud exists on the Userland servers. It is very simple to post pages to an individual server using Radio; I’ve done this myself. However, you’re still dependent on a Radio cloud.

Am I incorrect in this understanding? In other words, if I host my Radio pages on my own server and Userland’s servers all go down, will any part of my publication process be impacted? I’m not talking about weblogs.com — that’s not the point. The point is, is a centralized Radio cloud necessary at some point for the publication process?

I have to think it is when I read something such as this:

Radio UserLand implements a powerful feature called upstreaming which mirrors the contents of the user’s www folder in a folder on www.ourfavoritesongs.com, which is a 24-by-7 public Web server at a fixed location. When a file is changed it’s automatically copied to the server through XML-RPC. This makes it easy to publish static content to the Web even if you don’t have a full-time net connection, or if you move around. The url of each user’s folder is included as an attribute in the users.xml file.

and:

When Radio UserLand launches and as it’s quitting it sends a hello or goodbye message to OurFavoriteSongs.Com. This sets the user’s signed-on flag true or false and records the users TCP/IP address and port, so that it knows how to communicate with Radio UserLand. (The chat facility is an example of the use of the IP address and port.)

However, perhaps all these centralized aspects of Radio — aggregation, upstreaming, logging on, etc — can be turned off to the point where you can totally decentralize your publication process from Userland. If this is so, then I apologize to Userland for making the statement about Radio having centralized tool dependencies.