We just finished remodeling our basement and I had my buddy Shane from SED come over and punch everything down all pretty. I don’t even need to show you pictures of my basement, this very nicely organized phone/cable/network box is all you need to see!
Journal
Support OLPC
I decided to support the One Laptop Per Child project. You buy 2 and they send you 1 and the other they send to a child somewhere in the world who needs one. I think it is nice that I can make a donation of technology to the third world and still get a nice little toy for my own child.
The laptop arrived today and it is really, really cool. It’s small, capable and fun! I think Myles is going to have a lot of fun with it and I’m going to make sure he knows that there is another one out there somewhere with a child using it who wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity.
The Ultimate lolife RSS Feed
Thanks to Garrick I can now offer you what I’ve always wanted to offer you: an RSS feed of all my blogging across all the blogs I participate in.
This include lolife, starhouse observatory, slacker astronomy and raintribe. You can also view this aggregated feed as a pretty web page.
Here it is!
The Ultimate lolife RSS Feed
Two drivers, one death
Their vehicles collided head-on Monday afternoon on snow- and slush-covered Hwy. 14 in Winona County, killing the 17-year-old Stiehl, the State Patrol said today.
As for the Rusert, 54, of Utica, Minn., he had “no apparent injury,” the patrol report said.
Airbags deployed in both vehicles. The patrol described both cars as severely damaged.
This is a pet subject of mine. How could any intelligent person drive a car in snow and slush covered roads and not wear a seatbelt? There is no rational reason to ever not wear a seatbelt. Driving is the most dangerous activity you participate in.
Rich cry babies summed up succinctly
Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.
Dear Movable Type: You Suck
Sorry, I’m very pissed off right now because a long and thoughtful blog post was just deleted by Movable Type (MT) when I tried to save it. Literally, it was there when I hit save and gone from then on. It was very helpful that MT had an autosaved version that it deleted, apparently, as it saved the freshly erased content. There is nothing more annoying than having to rewrite something that you were perfectly happy with. Even the “back” button couldn’t save me (another pet peeve for another time).
But I’ve been unhappy with MT for other reasons. It is ridiculously slow on publishing. My blog is not that big and it took hours and hours of waiting as I tweaked the design and republished the site over and over. Literally it took 5-20 minutes to publish the blog per time.
The UI is also goofy. Everything is just slightly-non-intuitive. The design interface has index templates and template modules and widgets and archive templates and system templates. The rich text editor (which deleted my post for me) is sucky (so is Word Press’s).
I’m calming down now but I still have plans to transition this blog over to Word Press. A friend was kind enough to make a new (sweet!) design for me and he is getting it ready for WP, so sometime in the next few weeks I’ll be leaving Movable Type behind.
And micadelic, you’ll have to wait until I get the energy back to rewrite my “35W — engineered to be inevitable?” post.
The Best of lolife.com 2007
According to my Google Analytics reports, here were my most read posts in 2007:
Note these posts were not all posted in ’07. In fact most of them weren’t.
It looks like I posted 177 times in 2007, or about once every 2 days.
Blog refresh
I have updated my instance of Movable Type, updated the theme a bit and changed the comment policies a bit. It should be easier to comment now. I’ve even turned on anonymous commenting but that will probably go away unless the anti-spam measures are really good.
The location of the feed XML file has changed. I’ve put in a redirect so that readers with the old location should still work. The change has also rendered useless my old permalinks, so links from Google may go to old and screwy looking pages. I am going to work on smoothing that out.
Anyway, let me know if you have any problems.
Be Kinder
I totally don’t believe in the concept of New Year’s resolutions, but I have been kicking around something New Year’s resolutionist lately. But first a little background. Email and online discussions are an interesting venue for human beings because we are alone physically but not alone when it comes to the discussion itself. So psychologically we are influenced by both those contexts at once: we are alone yet we are speaking, often, to a larger audience. I call this “alone together”.
An in-between example is when you are in your car. You can scream and holler if you want, sing like an idiot, vent your every frustration, and only you hear it. Alone. Yet you are not alone when you are in your car. Your actions are part of a social fabric. So you can scream at the top of your lungs at that mother fucker who cut you off, but you are doing so knowing they can’t hear you. You would never say those things directly to them in person.
Something similar occurs online. This has been often noted. People say things online they would never say in person. They say things in manners that they would never use in person. We are, in a sense, different people when we are online. The other side does this, too. The recipient of our communications interpret what they read with an overlay of what they perceive and invent, basically, in terms of the tone and attitude of the message.
I have been a major participant in this. I have written emails I shouldn’t have, posted messages I shouldn’t have, used the wrong tone, provoked, condescended to and antagonized.
This is my news years resolution. I am a fairly nice person in person. I am generally very diplomatic. I abhor negativity and for the most part avoid conflict. I look for win-win situations and try to get people on the same side of the table.
So it’s a weird thing, to a) “misspeak” online and b) to have innocent things over-interpreted in terms of tone, always, it seems, to the negative. Taken together, I can be a bit of an asshole online.
When I think about this, on the one hand, I don’t mind rustling feathers. I like giving people shit. I like debating and I don’t mind if it gets rough. But I do think it is important that the general vibe of conversations be respectful. With intellectual debate, the point is not that it be a punching match. Ideas have to be the focus.
I heard on the radio that Aldous Huxley was asked on his death bed if he had anything to say to the world and he said “Be kinder.” That sounds like good advice to me and I am going to try to put it into practice.
The other quote I am going to attempt to take to heart is from Serenity.
I should tell you, so that you don’t waste your time… you can’t make me angry.
lolife 
You must be logged in to post a comment.