Now, raucus festivities in celebration of blogging would be nothing more than shameful without a few blog posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) about them, would they? My contribution follows.
I found my way to the Bainbridge Blogger Bash by a fortunate Flickr coincidence: I can’t quite remember how, but I discovered Julie Leung’s photostream and marked her as a contact. Soon enough, she had noticed our geographical proximity and had extended a kind invitation to the meetup for webloggers on our rock that she was planning at the end of the month.
I showed up late and nervous, having minutes before pulled banana muffins out of the oven. (Please feel free to skip these parentheses if you are not interested in the muffins; all of the sentences they contain are on the subject of muffins. First, for attendees of the Bash, the muffins were vegan. I neglected to inform you of this, but it seems like something you might like to be aware of. Second, I modified the recipe slightly to great effect. Notes on these modifications are on the recipe entry.) I expected to know none of the attendees personally and further that they would all have at least a generation on me. I was approximately correct on the latter point, but the former was disproved when I encountered Dave Henry, whom I can’t recall having laid eyes upon for upwards of seven years. He’s moved on to bigger, better, and appropriately more ambitious things since then. Namely, he’s scaled to international trade.
From there, I began to get a sense for the group as a whole. With some exception, the guests were not as technically oriented as I had led myself to believe that they would be. Dave and Philippe Boucher noted that their interest in the phenomenon of the weblog was decidedly non-technical in nature — the general focus of the group was on the social definition of the weblog as opposed to the technical implementation.
This is not, of course, to give you, dear reader, the impression that the gathering was devoid of nerdiness. Geekery was present in abundance. To illustrate this, I need only observe that our name tags, whose materials were graciously provided by the hosts, contained two items of information: or names and our URLs. The practice of identifying oneself by one’s Web address was inspiring. My name tag has found its temporary home on the door to my room, but may eventually make its way back to my shirt in the near future.
While Ted Leung, the drive-by spammer who knew my software before my name, interjected witticisms, I got to know Philippe and Chip Gibbons. I briefly discussed the obligatory college matter with Ed Hager and considered with the disgracefully English and clever Chris Holmes swapping my given name for that of my photo-sharing service. Others (like Mike Houser and Molly and Walker Willingham) I had to observe from a distance — two hours, it seems, truly can fly.
To paraphrase my logorrhea, I had a surprisingly and relentlessly good time. Next time, Gillon, Sarah, Sean, et al?
Domain names are becoming cheap. Really cheap. They should try selling them from the impulse-buy racks at grocery stores.
In order to illustrate how impulsive a domain registration can now be, let me tell a story. It’s short.
I registered radbox.org yesterday. (The end.)
That said, I have no idea what will happen to it. If any of you have an idea for what radbox.org could be, please let me know. Also, if you’d like to be you@radbox.org (look deep inside yourself; you know you want to), just leave me a comment and I’ll get you set up with a forwarding address. As it stands, adrian at that domain joins the ranks of addresses that will effectively reach me.
Other people (that’s you) probably will not share my fascination with the subject of this post. Please consider yourself forewarned.
Recently, while in Boulder, Colorado, I had a chance to visit the headquarters of the Celestial Seasonings tea company. I took a tour of their offices and factory, and was asked explicitly not to take any pictures, please, while I was on the tour. I could not, however, resist the temptation to take a shot or two from behind pillars and such, especially of a contraption referred to as the robotic palletizer. It was an autonomous machine responsible for picking up sets of boxes of tea and employing a camera to place them onto pallets for delivery. For some reason, I was struck by how awesomely futuristic and even slightly creepy it managed to be. I took a short, haphazard movie clip (728k MPEG-4) of it in operation, which some like-minded people might enjoy as much as I do.
My sincerest apologies to the person the back of whose head features prominently in the clip.
Found on a slip of paper curled up and discarded in a parking lot. The font is pseudo-handwriting and looks like it’s something an elementary school teacher would create. Not famous, but also not original.
Love is the fire that burns inside us all,
the inner warmth that prevents our souls
from freezing in the winters of despair.
It is the love of life itself.
Is it just me and my old pessimist side, or is this extraordinarily contrived and intentionally, disgustingly inspirational?
Two items recently found and treasured for their enigma. Confidentiality? Who does that?
The first is a typewritten note printed on the bottom half of a sheet of paper. The sheet has been folded in fourths. (Names have been censored.)
Dear XX,
Happy 17th Birthday! Wow, I’m speechless. I have so much to say… it’s just hard to put into words. I have enjoyed every minute we have spent together…even if I haven’t shown it at times. You mean a lot to me, XX, and I really hope that we can either work things out, or just stay friends. I feel like in the time we have been together, I have learned a great deal about relationships and about life in general…and I owe it all to you. You are a great person with a great personality and any girl would be so luck to have you as a boyfriend. I know that you will go far in life and I hope tat we will keep in touch in the future. Until then, I would like to spend as much time with you as possible. I love you as a persona and as a friend and even if this relationship doesn’t work out, that will never change. Happy Birthday Babe! I hope it’s a good one…
Love, YY
I was unexpectedly touched by finding this particular item. It sends a very strong message even while we’re completely ignorant of the details alluded to by the author.
The second, and the final for now, consists of six handwritten lines near the center of a square section of a sheet of loose-leaf notebook paper. The paper is folded in an unfathomably creative and orderly way; it appears to have been used for origami or something.
I think that I shall never see
A poem as lovely as a tree.Which is pretty freakin ironic,
considering I’m just about to totally
waste this piece of paper, for
which a tree gave its life.
To the originator of this gem, because I may or may not know who you are, thank you for making my day. Something tells me it may not be entirely original, but I’m willing to forgive that.
Two words that sum up my evening: best ever. They Might Be Giants was far cooler in performance than I could possibly have imagined and remained on the side of relative sanity preceding the show.
I would gladly have paid full admission even if I’d only been able to tell John Linnell my name, shake his hand, and hear him say, “Hi, I’m John”. Forget making of one’s day… this has made my year.
An encore. It confused me, but was also of unspeakable joy. On an afterthought, I can’t say truthfully that I was never before confused by They Might Be Giants.
…and the world sings, “Kiss me, son of God!”.
It’s not often that I am so disoriented and shaken about that I feel like throwing up, and it’s even less so that something on my PowerBook’s (admittedly grandiose) screen can create such an effect. But when my finger strays from the “delete” key to F12, the most disturbing effect takes place.
I’ve assigned F12 to the Exposé “hide all windows” command, which is positively deathly when you’re not expecting it. Suddenly, everything that your mind is connected to leaps to obscurity and hides in the margin of reality.
It’s quite similar to what I imagine it would feel like to be standing on a existentially-volatile skyscraper. Or perhaps to have one’s platform shoes stolen out from under oneself while attempting to perceive the illusion in a “Magic Eye”-type stereographic pattern.
Hibbs versus winn winn versus killian united status supreme court court of appeals for the ninth circuit district of arizona tax injunction act 28 usc § 1341 arizona revised statute § 43-1089 credit for contributions to school tuition organizations definitions petition for writ of certiorari principles of comity constitutional supremacy checks and balances jurisdiction plaintiff-appellant defendant-appellee docket counsel oh, dear merciful generic diety, make it stop!
My day today was very masculine.
Oh, and then there was Panther.
