People!
Every where you go there are huge numbers of them. And most of them aren’t paying attention. So they walk into you. Literally. I’m not kidding. Every day someone walks into me. Even though I’m working my ass off to avoid them, sooner or later someone finds a way around my defenses, and wham — football size hit.
From A tale of the grass being greener, by Dave Winer, a big guy in a big city.
]]>From It’s the Autonomy Stupid, by Anna Rascouët-Paz.
]]>From Why I Love Mlkshk - And You Can Too, a detailed, well-written guide to getting started with Mlkshk by user tonyb.
]]>I’m still reading it but somehow the audiobook of Lord of the Rings wormed its way onto my iPhone. Recorded by Rob Inglis over the course of just six weeks back in 1990, its my favorite version of the book. Tolkien’s meandering prose and exhaustive descriptions can get a bit much on the page, but come to life in Inglis’ narration. And the individual voices he developed for the major characters are a perfect match.
I like the book, and I like the movies, but I love this version.
]]>So I went back to square one. This time, though, I made two changes in my approach:
More Typing
Instead of using the in-browser editor I fired up TextWrangler and typed everything in. It took more time but I got much more of a feel for the syntax by typing it out myself. I made plenty of mistakes – missing colons, extra parentheses, and the like — but finding and fixing them were lessons in themselves.
More Play
Instead of just sticking with the tasks set by the course I started making up my own variations and trying to make them work. To practice if-else structures I made a script that asks for my weight then encourages me to eat either more or less based on the answer. To practice loops I wrote a script that goes through a string capitalizing each word in turn. It was incredibly rewarding and a lot of fun.
I’m making slower, but more solid progress. When I got back to the lesson that had previously stumped me I knew exactly what to do. It took a couple of tries to get it to run but I eventually worked it out. It’ll be a long while before I’m ready to pick up my ninja throwing stars but when I do I should be able to at least hold them without cutting my hands to pieces.
]]>Terrence Malick:
- Days of Heaven
- The Thin Red Line
Errol Morris:
- Gates of Heaven
- The Thin Blue Line
What were you watching last night?
Lord of the Rings.
Was it interesting?
Yeah, it was great. But, you’ve seen it, haven’t you?
But I was a kid. I thought it was real so I didn’t like it. It was too scary.
Well, we can watch it again, if you like?
Ok. Can we watch it together.
Sure.
A few years back my daughter went through a stage where she found it difficult to grasp that what she saw in plays or films wasn’t real and wasn’t actually happening. This wasn’t really clear to us until we took her (by request) to USJ (Universal Studios Japan).
The day got off to a bad start with the Shrek in 4D experience. While other kids laughed it up, she shreiked. It was understandable. The spiders were pretty creepy.
Next up was the ET ride: probably the most kid-friendly thing in the whole park. She was fine until we took off slowly into space. I distinctly remember her screaming “Take me back to Earth!”. She wasn’t kidding.
We’ll give Fellowship a watch this weekend and see how she goes.
]]>Whether I’ve bought a book made of dead trees or encrypted bits doesn’t really matter, and I don’t think my experience suffers when I choose the bits.
This is true of books that are intended to be read straight through from start to finish: novels, biographies, and most non-fiction.
Last year, though, I bought a few ebooks that I think would’ve been better, for me, on paper: a guide to using my camera, one on how to use Lightroom, and Ethan Marcotte’s excellent Responsive Web Design.
They would’ve been better on paper for practical, not romantic reasons. I tend to read these kinds of technical or how-to books by first glancing through the whole thing, reading bits here and there. I get an idea of what the thing is, then attack different parts, rarely in order. If what I’m reading in chapter ten mentions something that I haven’t read (or something I’ve forgotten) in an earlier chapter it’s usually pretty easy to just flip through the pages to find what I’m looking for. And often I’ll pick up the book and start reading at completely different places.
Last year I bought no books on paper. I’ll continue to buy all my fiction and most non-fiction as ebooks. For any guides or techinical things, though, I think I’ll go for paper.
]]>What I’d love, though, is to be able to use more than one service at a time. Flicking through my timeline I’d be able to send texty things to Instapaper and everything else, videos, pictures, sites, app recommendations and the like, to Pinboard.
Something like this:
Neat, huh?
]]>]]>Choose Your Own Adventure. Books where you can select which path the story should take, making decisions so you’re more involved in the narrative. Previously, we did this by conditionally turning to one page or another.
Skill-training. Whether it’s genuine (like origami) or humorous (“100 things every man should be able to do”), it’s a lot easier to learn by watching and replaying rather than simply reading and looking. I could do with a bowtie-tying guide. This also has strong possibilities for martial arts, crafts, public speaking, law enforcement and more.
Cookbooks. Recipes, with interactive how-to videos for those tricky souffles or macarons. Or even for the non-tricky bits, to help those who are clueless in the kitchen.
I really enjoyed the latest episode of Let’s Make Mistakes.
This is the first time in ages that I’ve listened to a podcast all the way through for three weeks in a row. It’s not epically long, so I can listen to it in one sitting without feeling that I’m neglecting my kids, wife, job, or health. And Mike and Katie are, for me, fresh voices. I don’t really know know who they are, what they do, or what they care about, and it’s fun to find out about smart people.
]]>The repeated failures have done more than raise concerns that some Japanese may have been exposed to unsafe levels of radiation in their food, as regrettable as that is. They have also had a corrosive effect on public confidence in the food-monitoring efforts, with a growing segment of the public and even many experts coming to believe that officials have understated or even covered up the true extent of the public health risk in order to limit both the economic damage and the size of potential compensation payments.
The Japanese government’s handling of food safety in the wake of the meltdown in Fukushima is like an inverted version of the boy who cried wolf. They’ve told us again and again that everything is okay, that they have the situation in hand, only to reveal later that perhaps things weren’t as okay as they thought but that now, for sure, things are okay.
Things are not okay.
]]>But…
I did a clean install of Lion yesterday and, even after I got my settings all in a row, something seemed wrong. Every step I took was slower and more cumbersome.
Now I understand why: I’d been tapping to click all over the place.
It seems that I never disabled tap-to-click after all, and that I actually use it all the time. As far as I can tell, there’s a certain class of things that get clicked with the button and another that gets clicked with the tap. How my fingers make that decision is something that I’m okay not knowing, for now.
Now I’m wondering what other things I unknowingly do? Am I a close talker? Do I spit on the ground in public? Do I unconsciously listen to one Eagles song for every ten indie-rock songs? The possibilities are terrifying.
]]>It’s a difficult question because water is impossible to describe.
One might ask the same about birds.
What are birds?
We just don’t know.
]]>