Posts from the ‘aside’ Category
Instead, here’s a plea to car-having readers who do not wish to live as I do: understand that your car is a luxury. Understand that when you get in your car to run a ten-minute errand, the same errand might take someone without a car two hours on the bus. When you turn your key in the ignition, please feel the same sense of wonder and good fortune that I feel every time I take my dirty clothes down to the basement instead of hauling them to the laundromat: what a lucky person I am to not only live in a world where someone was smart enough to invent this thing that makes my life easier, but that I, by some additional happenstance of good fortune, can have one.
via Not Crazy Just Resentful: On Being Car Free by Choice in Cleveland | Rust Wire
There’s a similar pattern here in Calgary (without the 30% poverty rate, and depopulated city – we’re on the other side of that curve, in a booming city that’s growing faster than anyone can keep up), where it’s normal to hop in the car and drive at 110km/h on a shiny new ring road, to travel 50km to walk around a sprawling rural shopping centre. We take cars (and the way they make distance and sprawl seem normal) for granted.
Now that I’m not driving (again), this is all coming back in a hurry. Things I can’t do with Evan on the weekends, because it’s not feasible to get there in time, without dedicating the day to travel via public transportation. Now that spring is nearly here, we’ll be able to ride our bikes to more places, but even that won’t get us to many of the places he needs to get to…
got this awesome spam comment overnight, in response to my brief post describing why I’m trying comments again.
flip flopping like a politician. I just posted about an idea I had for visualizing discussion data, and realized that having comments disabled would be harmful. discussion would likely still occur, via twitter or email or whatever, but the thinking-out-loud collaboration would be lost.
so… flip-flop, the 5th? 6th? comments are now enabled for posts, but they close automatically after 14 days. that gives lots of time for shared thinking-out-loud, while still providing mitigation against trolls and spammers and those who use blog comments as places to vent their spleens.
You make my rain pants sweaty.
Best bike-related pickup line evar.
25 Pick Up Lines for Cyclists and Bike Lovers | EcoSalon | Conscious Culture and Fashion
via Bow Cycle
On why he won’t be posting stuff to the new Branch semi-private conversation thingy (the one I linked to earlier )
Anyway, I can’t just use it, because then I would be breaking a rule, one that keeps me from using services like Quora and Google-Plus. I’m not going to willfully put my writing in spaces that I have no control over. I’m tired of playing the hamster. The business models of these companies, if they become successful, keep them from being part of the web. And it’s not in my interest to support what they do, that’s the broad reason I don’t use them. Further, I am creating an archive of my writing, over many years. And if I scatter my writing all over the place, even if these services were part of the web, it would be against my interest to do that. Having it all in one place is value, to me at least.
the sensor is still covered with schmutz, but I started lugging it around again. feels good…
I was asked to turn in the iPhone last month. Due to the contract setup, it couldn’t be cancelled right away, so I was able to borrow it for an additional month. That month is up, so now I just finished nuking the iPhone again so I can turn it in. I’ve likely saved the University hundreds of thousands of dollars by advocating and using free and open source software for nearly a decade. But that $50/month will probably be what finally saves the University from budgetary destruction. Phew. Disaster averted.
I was planning on reverting to my iPod Touch until iPhone4 is available in Canada. But The Boy™ accidentally smashed the screen while we were fishing a couple of weeks ago. oops. Now I’m IOS-deviceless for awhile, until I can pick up my own phone sometime this month. I’m starting to twitch already.
“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”
-Plato
The Big Dog passed away yesterday. Her health was kind of shitty for the last year or so, but she seemed to be getting stronger. Yesterday afternoon, she didn’t seem herself. She seemed weak, lethargic. She refused food. In her 11 years with us, I had never seen her say no to food. She knew something was up.
She went quietly, just after going to bed. Apparently, without pain, probably as a result of internal bleeding due to massive organ failure. She was a good dog. She was a pain in the ass sometimes, sure. But a good dog, in every sense of the word. She craved human contact, and would adjust her 75-pound frame to lean against a hand that wasn’t petting her, or wasn’t petting her just right.
Now, the Little Dog can eat her supper without having to worry about Big Dog finishing it off for her. But she misses her, too.
I just got this phishing email. You may have received a copy of it as well. I normally delete them without much thought, but actually read this one. It’s got a new angle I haven’t seen before. Here’s an image of the email (not using the plaintext, to avoid attracting phishers and spammers etc… wait. too late…)
Update: Microsoft just nuked the account used in the phishing scam.