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We have 21 feeds
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| | Did Lois Lerner waive her right to invoke the Fifth Amendment? |
| I am as aghast of the antics of the IRS as the next person, may be more so, but I’m also a very adamant defender of one’s right not to incriminate one’s self. If I suspect you are questioning me in order … Continue reading → |
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| Girl Apologizes for Tweeting About Her Hit and Run With Cyclist |
| I don’t think an apology was necessary for the tweet but she ought to be bending over backwards in apologizing to the cyclist she hit. It sounds like she may just be sorry she got caught. A young driver at … Continue reading → |
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| Why Gun Control Measures Misunderstand America |
| Don’t understand guns and the gun culture? Read this: The Life Of A Beretta Man: Why Gun Control Measures Misunderstand America – Forbes. URL: http://www.forbes.com/sites/frankminiter/2013/05/20/the-life-of-a-beretta-man-why-gun-control-measures-misunderstand-america/ |
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| Supreme Court will rule on prayer at government meetings |
| All I can say is it is about time this was decided. Supreme Court will rule on prayer at government meetings. URL: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/05/20/supreme-court-prayer-new-york-government-meeting/2151385/ |
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| If you are going to quote my articles you can spell my name right. It’s “Burton” not “Burtan”.. URL: http://www.thelonestarwatchdog.com/beware-of-the-fair-tax-scam-solution-while-they-call-for-the-end-of-the-irs.html |
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| Dear @LivingSocial |
| Dan Lyke: Dear @LivingSocial: You sent me the link, why are you making me re-enter my email address and county to view the offer description? Grrr...
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| Death and medicine |
| Dan Lyke: Washington Post Opinion: Our unrealistic attitudes about death, through a doctor’s eyes |
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| What I learned from being a Boy Scout |
| Dan Lyke: Elf Sternberg — What I learned from being a Boy Scout.My experiences were not so negative, but I was a Life Scout well on my way to Eagle when I realized I didn't respect any of the youth Eagle Scouts in my troop. I went over to Explorers then, which is the same parent organization, but a lot less of the hierarchical posturing. |
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| Wikipedia And The Jews |
| Dan Lyke: Worth reading: Mark Bernstein: Wikipedia And The Jews.On how anonymous strangers with axes to grind are shaping our discourse. |
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| #!/usr/bin/perl |
| Dan Lyke: #!/usr/bin/perluse Lovecraft;Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn. |
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| Dear @HowAboutWe |
| Dan Lyke: Dear @HowAboutWe: If you haven't shown me anything yet that we'd enjoy doing together, pitching me on benefits of membership doesn't work.
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| What I'm Looking Forward To... |
| Dan Lyke: Some interesting notes by an American living in Ireland, a set of notes on the perils of grocery delivery, the desirability of the automobile, and kitchen gadgets. |
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| So |
| Dan Lyke: So, this I-5 bridge collapse: If we can't afford to maintain our sprawl, tell me again how building more will benefit us economically?
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| Economics of Tesla |
| Dan Lyke: Wall Street Journal gets pissy about what it really means that Tesla is repaying that half-a-billion dollar loan. |
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| Hypothesis |
| Dan Lyke: Hypothesis: Remaining land lines provide a rough approximation of the economic and societal cost of phone solicitation.
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| Dan Lyke: What to do with all that spare retail space in the new age of internet commerce? Sears Holdings has formed a new unit to convert unused Sears & K-Mart stores to data centers. Part of the thought is that food courts mean you've already got the amenities on-site for workers.“There are compelling reasons why this is a great model,” said Farney. “It used to be the business continuity centers were located in an industrial park. The customer has evolved to the point where they want a sexier location, where they can have access to a Starbucks and other retail, because it’s possible they may be there for weeks or months. Sears and Kmart stores are located in just such retail locations in major malls.”Via /.: Sears Is Turning Shuttered Stores Into Data Centers.Fascinating that as we start to realize how bad the planning decisions were that led to the creation of business parks, the market may be repurposing malls to fix some of those issues. |
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| Get it off! Get it off! |
| Dan Lyke: Ionian Dolphin Project: Naughty octopus. In which we see pictures of an airborne dolphin with an octopus hanging on to its genital area for dear life.Via jwz: Today in aquatic hentai miscegenation news. |
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| Discussion this morning about cycling |
| Dan Lyke: Discussion this morning about cycling & drivers with cell phones. Hypothesis: distracted drivers are less likely to deliberately run us down
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| Person in cube on one side of me is |
| Dan Lyke: Person in cube on one side of me is talking to person on speakerphone in office on other side. Reverb is like talking tech in a stadium.
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| Dear Google+ |
| Dan Lyke: Dear Google+: No (twice), I don't want a tour of new features, or other obscuring pop-ups, I want to read the article I clicked on.
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| | Appropriation Art and Walker Evans |
| Appropriation Art appears to be the topic du jour. Mike Johnston at The Online Photographer devoted two posts to what James Danziger had called “the biggest photographic mystery of the 2008 [US] election”: who took the original photograph that Shepard Fairey used as the source for the Obama HOPE prints? [edited for clarity] Reading the [...] |
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| Cotoneaster Berries |
| Campbelltown, 1984 |
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| Petals |
| Windsor, 1984 |
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| Travelling on Foot |
| In my teenage years, desperate to bridge the gap between hope and fear, I would walk long distances. When I “should have been studying”, I would walk for hours. Perhaps, if I had been more willing to participate in team sports, I might have been too sore and weary to be so deeply troubled by [...] |
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| 300 |
| As I sat in the theater a few nights ago with my friends, G and P, desperate for 300 to end, I kept thinking of John Robb’s description of the film as absolutely amazing… So unrelentingly great that it has earned a permanent place in my top 10 movies of all time. Wherein lay the [...] |
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| Hello world! |
| It’s been two years to the day since my last post. I’d intended to come back to weblogging before this–especially since Dave Rogers predicted that I would “post something” before the end of 2006. For, even though I wasn’t writing for my own weblog, I never stopped reading weblogs. In fact, weblogs have been my [...] |
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| | Book review: The Human Division, by John Scalzi |
| I’m an unhappy customer after reading The Human Division in its serialized run. It was clear by around episode 8 that Scalzi would not be able to wrap up all the threads of the story, but (no spoilers) the book ends with an epic battle and no resolution of the main plot, and with smoking [...] |
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| Michelle Shocked reaps her whirlwind, whines about it |
| After her bigoted anti-gay diatribe produced a backlash she didn’t expect, Michelle Shocked thinks she’s the victim. It’s a typical cycle for right-wingers and reactionaries: they spew hate speech, they receive pushback, then they whine about how they are being so terribly repressed. Color me unimpressed. Michelle Shocked staged a sit in outside a Santa [...] |
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| Twelfth Annual Oscar Blogging |
| Welcome to the twelfth annual Oscar™ blogging! Multiple Oscar winners: Life of Pi: 4 Argo: 3 Les Misérables: 3 Django Unchained: 2 Lincoln: 2 For those who are unfamiliar with me doing this, you can find previous year’s Oscarblogging at: 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 Updates will be (mostly) [...] |
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| State of the Union thoughts |
| I’ve seen a fair amount of convention wisdom chatterers (Morning Joe today, among others) complaining that Obama demanding a vote for actions on gun safety and other things “is too small,” and acting incredulous: “That’s all he’s asking for? A vote?” They’re inside the Beltway and pay total attention to politics. They forget most people [...] |
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| Enough, already |
| I’m fed up with the Aaron Swartz hagiography and subsequent bullshit garment-rending from people who didn’t know him well, or at all. I’m still reading fresh examples of anguished wailing and blogging and Twittering about the guy. But to me, he seems unworthy of the sainthood that’s being thrust onto his corpse. I don’t think [...] |
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| Civility doesn’t come for free; or, hammer the trolls |
| Normally I don’t claim to be an Internet graybeard, because I tend to hang in circles where there are many people who have been doing this online stuff even longer than me. Still, I’ve been using online communications since the days of 1200 baud modems, which is way longer than most people I run into. [...] |
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| Does Andrew Sullivan really deserve your love? |
| When Andrew Sullivan announced he was going indie, I saw many approving comments and excited commentary that he was “the future of journalism” and “pointing the way”. Has everyone forgotten? Why are so many dazzled by his current libertarian/pro-Obama stance, one that is so at odds with his many previous stances? I don’t get it. [...] |
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| How do they even survive? |
| In the “Jeez, people are stupid” category, I was reminded yet again today how many folks just make you shake your head in amazement. I had a minor surgical procedure done earlier today. No big deal, but I’ve had a bad reaction (agonizing pain) in the past when it was done in the doctor’s office, [...] |
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| We Voted |
| …and so should you, if you haven’t already. One of the things I’ve always treasured with Dori is how she values voting (and to a lesser extent, politics) as much as I do. Other than the very occasional elections where it’s only local judges or school boards where I don’t know enough to vote intelligently, [...] |
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| The Windows 8 report from the front |
| I spent yesterday at a Microsoft Dev Camp in San Francisco with sessions taught by Microsoft evangelists. The camp’s focus was on Windows 8 for HTML5 and JavaScript developers—in particular, creating applications using technologies these developers already knew and selling them in the Microsoft store. Those who’ve been around awhile might remember that this is [...] |
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| | KK with Weird Al at the Calgary Expo, A++ Would Do Again |
| Lots of Kirby Krackle action happening these days. We opened for Weird Al Yankovic at the Calgary Expo in Alberta CA last weekend. So that happened. My wife put together a cool behind-the-scenes post with photos for you to marvel at. I’m grateful, because I had no time or means to document it all myself. [...] |
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| The Amanda Palmer problem? |
| The Amanda Palmer Problem — Vulture The only “problem” is that Amanda Palmer is a narcissist who has learned to embrace her narcissism, which allows her the freedom to pursue her chosen lifestyle as an artist. We may dislike her music, or be jealous of her Kickstarter success, but on a deeper level we covet [...] |
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| Save early, save often |
| This handful of paper is all that remains of an epic text adventure game I wrote in the summer of 1984 in BASIC on an Atari 800 with the 64K memory expansion cartridge. It had two features I was especially proud of: a parser that could understand phrases up to six words, and the ability [...] |
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Eater of Worlds! |
| Thursday reading: Second Act edition |
| The Ivory Sofa: Is There Life After Fifty for a Songwriter?. The answer is yes. In fact, you’re largely better off once you’re out of your 30s. Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: 11 Lifetimes. “Because HOVERBIKE!” Doc Searls on Steve Jobs. Searls’ amazing predictions on the fate of Apple upon Steve Jobs’ return as CEO in [...] |
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| Dave Grohl on WTF? with Marc Maron |
| If you haven’t already watched that Dave Grohl SXSW keynote video that’s been bouncing around the web, skip it and instead listen to Dave’s guest appearance on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, which covers a lot of the same stuff but is way more fun, intimate and with even more swearing. Plus, Marc’s ad-libbed intro to [...] |
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| Bye, Google Reader |
| Google dumping Reader :: record label dumping artist after latest release sells “only” 500K units. — Scott Andrew (@scottandrew) March 14, 2013 I was bummed to hear Google Reader was shutting down, but mostly because I’d already invested a bunch of emotional energy getting used to it after the demise of Bloglines (RIP). I’m currently [...] |
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| Kracklefest 3 videos and general insanity |
| I wish I could write more about Kracklefest 3 than I probably will in this post, but it came and went in a giant blur and honestly I’m still exhausted. The Hard Rock had to go find a new roof after Nerds With Guitars, The Doubleclicks, and Paul and Storm blew it off in front [...] |
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| Tweet stats |
| I downloaded my Twitter archive today and went a’data-mining. First tweet ever, posted September 25, 2006: Confirming my hypothesis that the internet is a text box to complain into, most of my first tweets were overwhelmingly negative. Who is this downer guy? …but the tweets get waaay more upbeat and happy around the same time [...] |
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| New video from Explone, “Golden Ballroom” (or, hey lookit I made a video) |
| Behold, my first music video: “Golden Ballroom” from Explone’s Telescope and Satellite EP. We shot the entire thing using my iPhone 4 and I edited it together in iMovie on my Macbook Pro. We started filming this in Spring 2011, using a rough mix of the song. In the gap between then and the EP [...] |
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| On late-night upgrades |
| It’s a little crazy to do what I’m doing now, installing OS X Mountain Lion on my trusty MacBook at 10:30 at night. But the fact is, I want XCode. So Snow Leopard, it’s been swell, but you gotta go. I’m a recent Mac convert and I wouldn’t consider myself an Apple diehard by any [...] |
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| Dignity is the killer app |
| Man, the modern dentistry experience has changed a lot even in just the past decade. I walked in for a cleaning this week and was offered a pair of sunglasses so the overhead lights wouldn’t blind me. Then they offered me the option to watch a movie while that cleaning was happening. Wait, what — [...] |
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| Tuesday reads |
| The PA Report – Artists wanted: how Brian Fargo and inXile are revolutionizing asset creation for Wasteland 2. They’re crowdsourcing 3D items for their game. In another reality, I’m a 3D asset artist. (Wasteland is the inspiration for the Fallout games.) PVP Online: Happy New Year. What I’m trying to say is: let 2013 be [...] |
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| Favorite posts of 2012 |
| Presented without comment, found while digging through my site to create last Friday’s post. The new normal. The noise is all in your head. Where rock comes from. AFP and the cost of making things. Photo. Lunchtime Portal Comix 2: Scenery. A long way from Kinko’s. Graduation Day. DRM is a state of mind. |
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| 2012 Music Projects Roundup |
| 2012 wasn’t a banner year for solo music from me; a lot of my songwriting energy was focused on new Kin to Stars material, and most of that isn’t even included below because it hasn’t been recorded yet. I have a backlog of mostly-finished solo stuff I’m still deciding what to do with, but to [...] |
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| Useit.Com: The Power of Defaults. Users rely on defaults in many other areas of user interface design. For example, they rarely utilize fancy customization features, making it important to optimize the default user experience, since that's what most users stick to. |
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| | I'm Tom Sawyer and I have a great fence and some paint. |
| You know how they have all these methods of development, agile, etc.My method is whitewashing fences.I'm Tom Sawyer and I have a great fence and some paint.It's a beautiful day and I'm having the time of my life whitewashing this fence.My friends want to know if they can do it too.I don't know! I'm having so much fun... I'll have to get back to you. |
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| Idea for Hacker News: Add a waiting period before new accounts can post. Like registering a gun. |
 The other day I suggested perhaps adding blocking to HN, mostly as a way of starting a discussion. And it led to some interesting ideas that I think are worth considering.A lot of the personal attacks come from accounts created to post one message. The user has never commented before, or submitted a link to the site. So here are some ideas:1. Add a waiting period before new accounts can post. Like registering a gun. 2. Charge for creating an account. Maybe $5 or so. Not very much money, but perhaps enough to make someone think again. If they want to be anonymous, use Bitcoin. That's what it's for.3. Automatically downvote posts from accounts created within the last hour. Make it clear to readers that this comment was made by a new account.What made me think of this idea was yet another one-off flame from a user named redmarx who created the account 13 hours ago, the exact same time his post was created. Now what do you think is going on there? A courageous whistle-blower, or a coward who doesn't want to own his or her own words? :-) |
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| If you're developing web apps, you're nuts if you aren't using Font Awesome. Seriously. |
| Our users love icons. I guess most users do, but people who write in outliners need a little more graphic relief because our work is totally text and structure. Adding a bit of graphics is like adding spice to a sauce. And they're fun!We're lucky because Font Awesome is such a great collection of icons. And it keeps getting better. If you're developing web apps, you're nuts if you aren't using Font Awesome. Seriously.Anyway, until Fargo 0.65 it was a lot of work to add an icon to an outline. What changed is that we created an icon chooser dialog that makes it easy and fun. If you're using Fargo, you can try it out with the Icon Chooser command in the Outliner menu.If you're not using Fargo, here's a little demo app you can try. It doesn't do much but allow you to browse the icons. When you click on one, an alert pops up saying which icon you chose. If you're a programmer, the code is free to use under the GPL. That means any improvements you make must also be licensed under the GPL. And it would be nice if you said where you got it. :-)https://github.com/scripting/Icon-ChooserEnjoy! |
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| Scripting News: Hacker News is depressing. |
 Yesterday someone at Hacker News thought to point to my piece about Marissa Mayer. It was a story I wrote in about 15 minutes. The point was at the end of the piece. As a preamble, I told a couple of stories from my personal experience. I figured it would get a few comments, maybe a couple of thousand reads, and that would be that. But the torrent of abuse on Hacker News was something that I haven't seen in a long time.One of the main reasons it doesn't work is that people don't ask questions to clarify. They jump to conclusions, some of which are very wrong. For example, they assumed I was the only person who was concerned about the BlogThis! button. Not true. They assumed that I was being "egotistical" for thinking that Google ever cared what I thought, and arrogant that I think they should care what I think now. It's a fact that at one point, early-on, Google did care. Their chief PR person was from Apple, Cindy McCaffrey, a class act in every way. She would routinely send emails to me and Doc Searls asking our opinions. Whether anyone else there cared, I don't know. But I was invited to a meeting with engineers to talk about blogging, RSS and XML-RPC at one point. I can't imagine why they would ask me to tell them what I think if they didn't care. I suppose it might have been a big conspiracy, like Mission Impossible. Hey I wouldn't put it past some of the trolls on Hacker News to argue that. :-)On the other hand, I don't take it personally that Google doesn't care what I think these days, partially because I don't think they care what anyone thinks. That's a long story all by itself. Now, we could have had an interesting discussion on HN if people would have asked questions for clarification instead of just piling on the abuse based on their impressions. That's taking them at face-value, assuming they really want an informative discussion. Probably the trolls in the thread, and their upvoters, wanted nothing like that.There were some other ludicrous statements. Did any of them know that I started a new company in December, and we shipped our first two products in March and April? They said I thought JavaScript was a bad language. How funny, because I'm writing almost all my code these days in JavaScript. They say I'm old and out of date. Funny. They're the ones who are out of date! :-)And if you say someone's old as a way of hurting them, the joke will eventually come back to hurt you. As one of the characters of Citizen Kane, Bernstein, said so eloquently, old age is the one disease you don't look forward to being cured of. It comes to everyone. I was young once. Now I'm middle-aged. Truth. And the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. I don't see what it has to do with the point of my blog post. Now I think there's a solution to letting the assholes control the conversation...As discourse has moved to Twitter, its big contribution has been to push aside the abuse that's common with discussion boards and mail lists. A very simple feature in Twitter, the block command, enforces decorum, by empowering the listener to turn you off if they find you offensive. People learn that if they say abusive things, they don't have to listen. The only people I listen to on Twitter are those who can make a point without getting personal. I learn from disagreement, but I can't stand people who use their freedom to speak as a way of hurting others. Then I wondered -- if it works so well for Twitter -- why can't sites block Hacker News if the abuse gets too heavy? After yesterday's experience I probably would do it. I like the flow they deliver, but I hate the abuse. So I have a suggestion for Paul Graham, the guy who runs Hacker News. Give sites the option of blocking links from Hacker News. I honestly don't care what the HN trolls, and the people who upvote them, supposedly "think" about me. None of it is based on anything real. A lot of it is anonymous. Sometimes people create accounts just for the purpose of dropping a big smelly turd in the middle of a discussion. Let's learn a trick from Twitter, and cut off the trolls at the source. PS: I subscribe to the Hacker News feed, which does not include comments. It's very useful stuff. So the links themselves are good. |
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| Scripting News: I tried Google Glass. |
 I went to dinner last night with the two Scobles, Robert and Patrick.Robert is famous for the picture of him wearing a Google Glass while in the shower. Last night, he was wearing the glasses most of the dinner, but took them off. He said I should try them. I did.What you get is a sequence of cards, with recent tweets, emails, Google Now type stuff. You scroll through them by swiping on the stem of the glasses. It doesn't any time to get the hang of it.You can create tweets with voice. It happened so quickly I barely knew I had done it. I created a tweet on Scoble's account. It contained an expletive which they conveniently ***'ed out for me. It was nice. However I don't feel any lust for having one of my own. I carry an Android phone and an iPad with me most places. The UI of Google Glass, while interesting, doesn't seem to be an improvement over the phone interface.But it's early days. Maybe someone will figure this out. The Apple II wasn't much use before Visicalc, for example. The Mac came with a couple of demo apps, but didn't blossom until there were 20 or 30 useful pieces of software for it (it needed more of an ecosystem than an individual killer app). |
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| Scripting News: My one talk with Marissa Mayer. |
It was 2003. Google had just bought Blogger. On the acquisition, they said they wouldn't do anything to tilt the table in favor of Blogger. There was concern in the wider blogging community that Google might use its power in search to give people an incentive to use Blogger over other publishing platforms. They said this would never happen. But a few weeks after the deal they broke the promise. They added a BlogThis! button to Google Toolbar. It only worked with Blogger. It would have been a simple matter to make it work with any blogging tool. But they didn't see why they should do that.It would have been okay if Blogger was the default. But give the users a preference to set the address of our blogging platform. Back then Google cared a little about what I thought, so the result was a conference call between me and an exec at Google, Marissa Mayer. I was driving cross-country from California to Boston, so I stopped in Utah, in the parking lot of a 7-11 just east of Salt Lake City, and we had the call.  All I remember of it was there came a point in the conversation when Mayer had had enough. She just got up and left. I think the people remaining in the conference room were a little embarassed. Google didn't do anything to change the BlogThis! button.All this is to say that the promises execs make on acquisitions are meaningless. They own the thing, they will do what they want to with it. It doesn't matter how many nice sounds Mayer makes on the deal. At the core she cares not one bit what the users of Tumblr think. She's saying what she needs to say to make the deal happen. To avoid a PR crisis on Day One. To make the team at Tumblr feel like their work has value to the new owners. That somehow this acquisition isn't actually an acquisition.I have some intuition about this myself, because I sold a company. We were bought because we had a presence in the Mac market, which was highly coveted at the time. I negotiated for myself a role as the "Chief architect of Symantec's Mac strategy." A few weeks after the deal I made a presentation to the exec staff about what our Mac strategy would be. Only one person showed up, the president of the company, Gordon Eubanks. He watched a couple of slides and thanked me for the input. I asked What about my chief architect role? He told me that was something they told me to get me to do the deal. He left the room. What was I going to do? What could I do? Nothing, that's what. :-)Moral of the story: When you sell your company, no matter what promises were made, you sold it. It's theirs now. They will do what they want to with it. Promises don't matter. |
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| Scripting News: Google is the new MSM. |
 Last night watching the NBA on TNT, new commercials for the YouTube comedy fest. The production was distinctly not YouTube. It was professional in every way. Nothing amateur about it. Google is now MSM. All that talk about Burning Man is sleight of hand. That guy has as much in common with you and me as Rupert Murdoch does. It's not just Google, Twitter is also MSM. Facebook? Eh. Their presence on TV is mostly in URLs at the bottom of other peoples' ads. Their commercials are amateurish, awful imitations of other tech company commercials. Not to say they're the only ones with awful commercials, but theirs are awful in their amateurishness. A blog post on Forbes suggests that Google is going to bring RSS back in a MSM-type way. You'll be able to follow Blogger blogs in Google Plus. Maybe they'll make a deal with Automattic and Tumblr to make it possible to follow their blogs too. Me and you? Well we can be followed, but only if we use one of the silos. We have to be locked in someone's trunk to participate.The web is going to play the same role to all this crazy locked up stuff that it played to MSM in the 90s. We're going to be the oddballs. The ones with amateurish sites. We'll be the artisans, the local farmers of ideas. The ones that lack polish but speak from our experience. We'll do what Bulworth so famously did. I don't have access, and I don't want it. I'd much prefer to hear from other people who don't have access and don't want it.The web keeps moving. If your attention has shifted and you can't see that, that's not the same thing as the web being lost. Maybe you got lost? :-) |
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Scripting News: Why Dave Wynn uses Fargo. |
| Scripting News: What's new (or broken) with the Twitter API? |
| My linkblogging tool, Radio2, has a connection with Twitter. You can establish a link between your feed and Twitter so that every item in your feed is also posted to Twitter. Here's a screen shot. To create the connection you click on the blue bird. That starts an OAuth conversation where the user gives Radio2 permission to post to his or her Twitter account.I've been hearing, peripherally, that some part of the old Twitter API is about to be turned off, or maybe has already been turned off. I can't pay full attention because it's a small feature, used by just a few people, and I have my attention elsewhere.Late last night I tried clicking on the blue bird, and sure enough there appears to be some breakage. Twitter complains that there is "no request token for this page." Perhaps they changed something in their OAuth implementation?I should investigate.If you have any clues, please post a comment.Thanks! :-) |
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| Scripting News: We need a curator for the Apple river. |
 I did a house-cleaning on my river server on May 9. At that time some of the rivers stopped updating. Mostly the ones that no longer have tabs in the user interface because either I personally didn't have enough interest in the subject and not many other people were reading them. I didn't feel like paying for machine resources if only one or two people were reading the flow, or if there were only one or two new items a week. One of the rivers that I turned off is the Apple river. I use a Mac, several in fact. And I have an iPad and an iPod. I am a long-time Apple shareholder. I am an Apple user, but I am not a dedicated member of the Apple community like some people I respect are. For example, Brent Simmons, Marco Arment, John Gruber, Daniel Jalkut or Michael Gartenberg. I see a tremendous value in the river, if only someone rooted in the community would take an interest. It's also a potential money-maker, imho.It's really time for communities to spread out and become more inclusive. With a well-curated river, the Mac community can explore more niches, and grow in some interesting ways, perhaps.So I offer to keep running the river...1. If someone with a site with serious flow offers to display the river on their site, linked to from their home page.2. It can be rendered in their template.3. I will provide support on the technical process for getting the river to display well in another site. It involves using jQuery, something I'm not an expert in. But I got it to work here, so I presume we can get it working anywhere. If we need help I know where to ask for it. ;-)4. The curator has to have the ability to edit an OPML subscription list, and make it available at a public HTTP address. Fargo, my outliner, does this very nicely, in conjunction with Dropbox. But you can use any tool you like.5. The person doing the curating and the person doing the display can be different people, if you like.6. Curating here means choosing feeds, not stories. We're looking for good sources of Mac news and opinion. But it's up to those sources to decide what goes in the river. It's just an RSS aggregator on the back-end.7. All I want in return is a link from the page back to a page that shows people how to set up their own rivers, which I will write. It won't be hype-ish. I may ask for a little money for the software. I think the Apple river is a great place to start. Now I'm looking for one of the leaders in the Mac blogging world to step up and work with me on this. I may not be a Mac insider these days, but I go back to the beginning. I was onstage at the Mac rollout in 1984. I had an ad in the first issue of MacWorld. My product won the top Eddy in 1986. I used to go to WWDC back when it was in San Jose. I even spoke at WWDC one year. Ask Guy Kawasaki. ;-)Let's do this. I think it'll turn out to be an important step in the growth of the Mac blogosphere. |
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| Scripting News: Should the Community Feed be an RSS feed in addition to being an OPML feed? |
| This question came up in the Community Feed, which you can read in Fargo, by choosing the Community Feed command from the Docs menu. Or you can read it in the Small Picture Reader if you don't use Fargo. I wrote my answer there, but thought it would be interesting to also post it here. No I didn't use the fancy Blogging 2.0 protocol I described in an earlier post. Soooon!Well of course it would be nice to have everything, if there were no cost. It would take time to write the code and keep it running. It would be worth doing if there would be a lot of people using it. But right now the Community Feed a new feature. We're still at the point where we're introducing ourselves. If that's all it does it will have been worth it.I'm an investor in software, and I have to make decisions as any investor would. I can't buy everything. And right now there are other projects that I think need more attention. Also, and this is a key point, this is not something you need Kyle or me to do. The OPML feed is public. If you want to write the code to convert it to an RSS feed, you can do it. Read it once every ten minutes. Use the eTag feature of HTTP to conserve bandwidth. Generate RSS 2.0. How will you synthesize a title for each item? I don't know, that's a hard problem. RSS 2.0 doesn't require titles, but Google Reader did. That made generating RSS feeds a difficult process for data that doesn't inherently have titles. But Google Reader is going away, so we're free to do as we please, you say. Not so fast. The replacements are clones. I bet they're just as picky as GR was. At least until the dust settles, and that isn't going to happen this year even, probably. But OPML feeds? Ahhh that's easy. Since I'm writing both ends I can make it work. And if I want to change things based on what I learn, I can do that too. That's why the early days on anything are important. And why you should go slowly enough so you can feed back what you learn into the protocol. Anyway you see these questions sound simple, but when you actually start writing the code, they can become complex. Bottom-line: My bet is that no one would use an RSS feed of this content. That makes it a bad investment. I've been wrong before, btw. |
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| Scripting News: Blogging 2.0. |
| Georgia160%I wrote a piece in August 2012 which I posted on Medium entitled We Could Make History, in which I proposed that we get together and create a new API to connect authoring tools to publishing environments. At the time I thought it was a long shot, but worth putting it out there in case anyone was listening at Medium, or elsewhere. That's why I made it openly. And why I put the post on Medium.Today I'm writing this post on my own blogging platform, which is more or less some scaffolding I put together to hook my outliner up to the web, so I could publish, before we had something real that others could use. Now I can make a more concrete proposal because Fargo is visible, people can better imagine what I'm talking about.1. I don't like the idea of writing something to have it visible in only one place.2. Sometimes I find that a comment I wrote in one place is really a blog post, but why should it stop being a comment?3. Copy/paste is an awful synch protocol. It's 2013. We can do better! In fact we live in a time of great progress in sychronization, thanks to Dropbox. Publishing should make the leap into the future as well.4. Software now runs in the browser, written in JavaScript. It's indistinguishable from desktop software. So any protocol we come up with must work equally well with JS apps running in the browser.5. Meanwhile there are a number of projects underway to bring blogging up to date. But they're doing it without APIs and without feeds. Why? That's not really progress. 6. We were able to hook up Fargo to WordPress, largely to show what's possible. But we had to set up a proxy server so that our JS app running in the browser could call their server. This is a waste of resources and does not scale.7. We will have a for-real CMS running on a server. It will do things that are new, that none of the other publishing platforms do. But there will still be things they do that we don't. APIs are needed. But I'd prefer to work with others to come up with the API, rather than do both ends myself. If we do it that way we get there sooner, better.8. I'm pretty sure there will be APIs here. But I'd rather there just be one. We had that worked out pretty well in Blogging 1.0. But let's do it even better in 2.0.9. Who wants to go first? :-) |
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| Video: Demo of new Community Feed feature in Fargo 0.59. |
| More about Fargo 0.59. |
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| Scripting News: Levy on BigCo innovation. |
| Levy: "To really think big, you can't be at a big company."I was amazed that these words came from Steven Levy, former Newsweek tech reporter, and late of Wired. He's spent a career supporting the myth not just that big ideas can come from big companies, but that they only come from big companies. He was paraphrasing Evan Williams, founder of Twitter and Blogger. But it's still an amazing transformation.Now, I don't expect the press to all of a sudden start reporting on where big ideas actually come from. But it's nice to be able to point to the truth, just once, from such a source. BTW, we're thinking very big at Small Picture. :-) |
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| Scripting News: Q&A with Brent Simmons re River of News. |
| PalatinoOn April 11, Brent Simmons sent an email, included below. My words are indented beneath his in italic.truenoneitalicI like the river of news style of feed reading, despite having once written an RSS reader that doesn't use that style.But I'm not actually 100% sure what the technical definition is. I'm not trying to be obtuse about this -- I want to be sure I understand.I think it's something like this, but I'm not sure which parts are optional, and I might be missing things.1. It presents a list of articles from multiple feeds in a scrollable list.Yes.2. There might be multiple scrollable lists -- tabs of some kind.Not required, but you can do it that way (I have it with my mediahackers site). But each one is a river, not the whole thing.3. Items in the list are sorted in reverse-chronological order by arrival date (date the feed scanner saw the item) rather than by pubDate. (True?)True. By arrival date. pubDate is not important for ordering.4. Items are presented with title, link, and an excerpt. The excerpt should be just long enough to be meaningful (around 280 characters).You could leave out the excerpt and it would still be a river. The important thing is that the excerpt be of determinate length, and short enough so you can see a lot of items on screen at the same time.5. It handles edited items by ____? (I don't know. Does it show them again?)Does not show edited items again. 6. There is no notion of read/unread whatsoever, and thus no unread counts.Correct. No notion of read/unread. 7. There is no notion of starred (or flagged, or saved) items whatsoever. (Users can blog, send to a read-it-later service, etc. as they normally would for any web page.)Not true -- you can do whatever you want there. I include a RT link on my items. Just as long as it's small and doesn't interfere with skimming.8. A river of news feed scanner outputs river.js data. (Is this optional? Could it be RSS?)Not required. It would however be useful to have a standard here. I want to write all my displayers in JS running in the browser. 9. Do river-of-news readers have to be web pages? Could an iOS or Mac app qualify, if it met all the criteria?Of course it could be an IOS app. The main idea aren't the details, but the way its used. I can scroll back to the point where I hit something I seen. Quickly. My memory is perfectly capable of telling me I've seen something before. You can rely on it, people can do this. |
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| Scripting News: 11th hour for news nets. |
| Michael Wolff comments on the job ad that Twitter is running, looking for a manager of news. He suggests existing news execs, and that's probably the kind of person Twitter is looking for for this job.It's a head-fake. This guy is a figure-head. He or she will be working with media companies, speaking at conferences, talking about how Twitter is helping media companies succeed in the age of realtime Internet-delivered news. He or she is a feel-good ambassador to the news industry. A person handing out complementary samples of pasta and baked goods while the real action is elsewhere. The job is a bedtime story. News will be as it always was, with familiar faces and jobs, just with a new delivery system.Meanwhile, the news system of the future is booting up all around Twitter, which is and always has been a coral reef. They need a new shipwreck to build around, and this time the sunken ship is the remains of the news industry.Even at this late hour, I have a recommendation to any player in the news industry.1. Create a river of news and put it on your home page.2. Include all the news from your own organization, but include news from bloggers in your community. 3. Include the feeds of your competitors. 4. Deliver the best news product you can with today's technology. You can link from the river to stuff behind your paywall, if you must, but the river itself must be freely accessible. Think of it as a river of ads for full-length stories. 5. No 140-char limit. Pick a higher number. There should still be a limit to the length of a synopsis. 500 characters is plenty. Most NYT synopses are much shorter than that. 6. Make nice with Twitter. You can do a head-fake too. :-) |
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| Scripting News: Markdown and outliners. |
 I've had Markdown on my to-do list for a few months, and the other day, with a bit of blank space in my worklist, I decided to give it a shot. It was amazingly easy to integrate into our JavaScript app. I just downloaded the source for Pagedown, the Markdown interpreter used by Stack Overflow. I put it into a file on our server, and included it in Fargo. Added a command to the File menu, and came up with a simple way to generate it for users. The whole thing was done in a couple of hours.Now we need people who know Markdown and outliners to take a look at this, try it out and relatively quickly, before there's an installed base to break, figure out if there's anything special we need to do, because this is an outliner and not a straight text editor.Here are a couple of considerations:1. Should we generate one or two return chars at the end of every outline heading? At first we did one, then thought better and generated two, but now we're back at one. Pretty sure one is the right answer. We often think of a headline as a paragraph, but sometimes headlines are titles. Markdown views titles and paragraphs very differently.2. Indentation. I thought at first that we should generate a tab for every level, but backed out of that idea quickly because Markdown treats tabs as very special characters. Everything deeper than level 0 would be seen as preformatted code. Not the desired outcome.So I wonder if there have been any others who have integrated outlining and Markdown before? If so, what did they do here? See the Fargo docs for an idea how it works from a user's standpoint. I welcome any comments from Markdown experts (I am anything but that). |
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| Scripting News: The Knicks as a metaphor. |
 A number of Knicks players did something extremely stupid when they dressed in black for last night's game, saying they were dressing for the Celtics' funeral. These guys may be talented athletes, but they don't understand sports. Amazingly. How could they get that far in the NBA without understanding that you don't celebrate until you win. I know they're young. I wonder if they've ever heard about Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. Sports, if it teaches us anything, it's how to struggle against our folly. How not to tempt fate. How to manage our own presence.Look at the incredible baskets these guys make. But they only make them when they're grounded, in the moment, feeling the energy, whatever it is. So JR Smith started celebrating after they had a solid lead in Game 3. He got ejected, and suspended, and not only wasn't there to help in Game 4, he broke the bubble around the Knicks, that had been around the team since they emerged from an awful funk in February. Now we have to wonder if they can get it back. The Celtics, last night, walking off the court, may have helped the Knicks get back in the groove, repeating trash talk about Carmelo's wife. I'm just theorizing, lip-reading. But maybe he'll get angry and really want to win. That's probably all it takes.Meanwhile in Oklahoma City, the Thunder coach thought he could sneak by the Rockets with a trick. Oh how sad. Kevin Durant who I thought was a true fighter, is instead mired in self-pity. And the Rockets, a young, smart, admirable -- wonderful group of young men -- are pushing every one of their buttons, artfully. They might pull out the upset. Amazing parallels between the Celtics and the Rockets. One team old, one young. Both not going out peacefully. All this is a metaphor for my former friend Mike Arrington, who may be the JR Smith of tech. He was celebrating the demise of RSS while the body was still breathing. He had no clue that he had won, or that anyone was keeping score. Technology isn't all that different from basketball. There's teamwork, and bubbles of energy, and franchises. RSS is not something that dies, any more than the NBA dies. Players come and go, there are generations -- the Patrick Ewing Knicks and the Bernard King Knicks. Now we have the Carmelo Anthony Knicks. But RSS, like the NBA is bigger than me or Mike. He doesn't get to say it's dead. RSS just laughs, shrugs it off and keeps on going. |
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| Scripting News: The Fargo-WordPress connection. |
 My outliner is an authoring tool. I think of it as the hub of a wheel with lots of spokes. At the end of each spoke is a way to communicate. Some of the spokes lead to private places, for example, the worknotes I share with my programming partner. No one else sees those. But then there are blog posts, like the one you're reading now. At the end of this spoke is software I wrote that renders an outline in this form. I'm one of a small number of people, today, using that method of rendering. Yesterday we released a spoke that leads to WordPress, the popular open source blogging environment. You can now use Fargo to create and edit posts in WordPress. This works in two ways:1. You can use the outliner to organize a library of posts you want to be able to access quickly.2. You can use the outliner to structure each blog post. By default each level is represented in the blog post by indentation. But we also add CSS styles to each paragraph that indicate what level they are at. So a skilled CSS designer can set it up so that level indentation does much more to control the appearance of the text. I expect lots of interesting stuff to develop here.Here are the docs for the feature, and a list of recent new posts written in Fargo.Here's a homemade video demo of the new Fargo-WordPress connection.Over time you'll see us add more connection, and of course offer a general way for anyone to add new spokes to the wheel. And because we're using an open format, it'll even be possible to hook other outliners up to the same connections. For anyone who cares, this is how you bootstrap a new standard, a coral reef for authoring and rendering. PS: This is what the post looks like in WordPress. :-) |
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| Scripting News: A song I sing to users. |
| When users ask when a feature will be available, this is what I say.Software takes time. Good software takes even more time. We know that so we don't make promises about when software is coming. It'll be here when it's ready. |
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fase4 RDF Error: http://www.seabury.edu/MT/akma/index.rdf is not available fase4 RDF Error: Cannot write to: 3d8ffc979017dd237a55e55467926fb9
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fase4 RDF Error: http://webaccess.mozquito.com/features/index.xml is not available fase4 RDF Error: Cannot write to: 349b7741fd428e82f7c6897bcd7d039e
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| I am having a ton of trouble with even the idea of reducing my glycemic index. I love sweeter foods. I love strawberries and bananas and apples. I love most fruit, actually. One thing that the online food diary I'm using of late does though, is count sugars, and almost daily I go over the "allotment"I'm supposed to have. Even when I'm eating healthy foods with no refined sugar at all, I go over. Even my preferences in veggies often tips me over that balance, and if it's not that it's salt. Yes, the thing takes exercise into account and adjusts the allotment accordingly, I still go over. This is frustrating to me because as I age, I'm supposed to reduce my glycemic index. One of those things about croning, and I most certainly AM croning (either that or the gods are playing a tremendous joke on me, cuz I can't have skipped that last period due to pregnancy without one of 'em intervening).Oh well, I reckon if I don't reduce that glyecemic index I'll still live. I'll live and probably even enjoy life for having had my fresh strawberries and cherries in spite of it all. Cuz damn they're tasty! |
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| There was a dead gourami in my fish tank today. I think it was my favorite of them. This saddens me, as everyone seemed healthy, and in fact they do still today. I'll have to test the water toxicity, but it shouldn't be bad I don't think.So, last month I had a bad spell. A flare of temper followed by crying jags and frustration. I was a bit worried by the swiftness of the emotional boiling point. I've been getting crying jags and flares of over-loaded emotion from time to time, so I thought I'd ask the doctor if he could help out with some emergency "calm the fuck down"pills. I figured if I had just three in my cabinet, I'd be ok. I'd know I had a rope to grab. Instead he told me to talk to the therapist and ran some tests on my hormones.The tests came back as "normal."I tried to tell him my blood pressure was elevated by MY body norms, but since it was still well within normal range he didn't figure there was anything to worry about there. I tried to point out the fairly rapid weight gain of late, and he countered that the BMI was only a little over accepted norms and that recent studies indicated that meant a lower risk of heart disease, and then suggested a "Mediterranean diet"because other studies show it also reduces the risk of heart attack. I did not point out that a woman who normally has a blood pressure as low as mine typically is and whose cholesterol at last test is as low as mine is tends to have little to fear from heart failure. I was still in the midst of my attack of anxiety and frustration, and as so often happens at those moments I just heard "I am not going to help you, you must muddle through on your own. Only help you'll get here is someone to talk to."So, I visited the therapist for a bit, talked a bit, and headed home with a fresh sense of annoyance. I mean really, I wasn't asking for a life time prescription. Just a couple "throw me a rope"pills in case I had another day where I threw my chair at the wall and screamed at the computer, or gave serious consideration to the idea of quitting my job and running away to hike the AT. Since I wasn't getting that, I'd have to find something else to serve as an anchor rope for my free-climb.A week later the hormones from that cycle finished raging through. I considered my options. Top of the line to be dealt with, the creeping weight. If I got that down I'd feel physically better. That should help my mood. That decided, I started counting calories. I've lost weight already, and already I feel physically better. This has, so far, improved my mood. Next thing. Admit something I'm truly angry about.I admit I am truly angry still over my most recent ex's timing in telling me the relationship wasn't working for him and had no future. I'm equally angry at myself for not throwing him the fuck out of my house right then and there. I mean seriously, he couldn't have waited a few more days, he had to tell me a few hours AFTER I told him I'd just found out about an entire section of my family being killed? I think I'm allowed to be angry about that. Very. Angry.I'm not sure what my next step is going to be, but I'll work it out eventually. I know what it isn't though. It isn't learning self reliance. Seems that's the one thing I'm best at. |
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| It's been a while since I posted openly.So, let's see. It rained all damn weekend. So, I spent yesterday working on the doll house. All Day. I finally got the roof shingles completed, so all that's left to do is create floors and glue in the stairs. I picked up some self adhesive cabinet liner in faux wood grain to use for the flooring in most of it. I figured that'd be easier than getting spray adhesive and felt, but I'll probably still use the felt idea for half of it. It looks pretty good, but I'm about ready to call this project complete and get it out of my living room. Also started counting calories in an attempt to reign in the rampant weight gain. I figure a lot of the issues I've been having of late will likely clear up with about 15lbs off my frame. I know it seemed to do the trick before, so at the least I'd like to see if my theory is correct. Besides that, I'll feel better about myself if I can get back into some of the cute outfits I'd picked up back in the day. I had a fantastic time in New Orleans with Momma and Doc. We went to French Quarter Fest, which was incredibly crowded, and the next day took in the Strawberry Festival, which was much more our speed. Unfortunately, Doc didn't get to join us for either of those two excursions. Next time. Speaking of next time, I doubt I'll do the French Quarter Fest again. Too crowded now. I may try a different one a month or so later in the year, or try to return to the Thanksgiving time slot. Regardless, it was a good time. It always is, in New Orleans! |
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| Chickamauga Chase 5K |
| So, Saturday I actually got to participate in a race again. It was short, only a 5K, but to me it was just as long as a half marathon. Many of the others running were wearing stickers to show support for Boston.Two women at the start line that were running across the start line just behind and to the right of me were screaming "BOSTON!!"to the spectators. I kid you not, I nearly started sobbing right then and there. I had to try and just concentrate on running. Breath, don't think, just run.I got my emotions back under control and started to enjoy myself. I set a slow, easy pace. I'm out of shape and the past week's running had me realizing how much fitness I'd lost. I wanted to be sure I didn't have to walk any of this little run, and so "slow is beautiful"was my mantra. It wasn't long before I found some folks to chat with and keep my mind off the distance and speed, and soon we were half done and they stopped to grab some water. I kept going. I watched the other runners, most listening to iPods and seeming oblivious to anything else. A few were breaking down and walking. I just kept trotting. There's not a lot of hills on this route, but when we were about to hit the last one I found a girl walking and coaxed her into trotting up it with me. It kept me going though I can't say she was grateful. As I rounded to the finish line, I had to remind myself I couldn't run out the last 1/2 mile. I had to wait till a reasonable distance to try pushing for that last bit of energy. I turned onto that last stretch though, and I stretched, thinking I could overtake the girl just in front of me. I was wrong. A moment after I started to push a little harder, she sprinted off in front of me. I did not have that long a hard sprint in my lungs, so I settled for my moderately increased pace and finished strong. I have to say, though short going and doing it was quite cathartic. I needed it. Like air to breath and water to drink. |
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| I know, it's about time for a real post again. Right now I don't have enough time to really do it. I'll say this though, I finally got out to run again yesterday. The feeling of freedom from taking a slow, easy jog with the dogs was amazing. It was like a huge chunk of pain and sorrow lifted off of me. I'll probably have to stick to the street for running for a while longer as the ankle isn't "right"yet, but I could do the three mile jog without it screaming in pain like last attempt, so it is totally worth doing it. Thank goodness too, I was puffing up like with the crazy weight gain. This naturally causes even more frustration and depression. I do not do well when I feel this big. |
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| Dreams |
| Dreams. I have a dream, a home with property to keep my horse, dogs and maybe a few chickens. I'm taking steps to try making that reality.I also have fears. Fear I'll not be able to care for my horse properly, fear I'll not be able to keep up with a larger piece of land, fear I'll move and have NO support anywhere to help care for the animals when I have to travel for work or family. After all, I'm comfortable here, and while my horse isn't in my own yard he's safe now. We've gotten him fed properly and he looks fabulous. Where he is, I know if I have to leave town he'll still be cared for, get fed and let out at night. My dogs have a nearby place to board, or there's the puppy runner I can pay to pet sit for me. What if I can't find someone to house sit and care for horses and chickens?Some days, this fear nearly paralyzes me. Fear of failing myself is fine, fear of failing the animals is not. However, I've ordered installation of new kitchen counters and a stainless steel sink. It's yet another step on the road to fixing this house up for a possible sale. Fear or not, I've made a decision to get these things done. Now I am working to make it happen, if at a glacial pace. Perhaps I fear that my already limited human interaction will become non-existent as well. Maybe that wouldn't be all bad, but it isn't all good, either. |
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| Not much to say except that I'm about to go into a train wreck of a week next week. |
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| Once Upon a Time |
| Once upon a time, I had only a motorcycle to get around with. Actually, I went through a series of bikes, but one that I think of often is the little Honda 250CM. It was an unusual bike in that mine was the only year that model came as a belt drive rather than a chain, a fact that caused no end of confusion when I needed it replaced if I called ANY motorcycle shop except Sloan's in Murfreesboro.There were issues with it. One issue was that I had no title for it. The fellow I bought it from insisted he would mail it to me, and never did. I was unable to reach him either, so I suspected it was hot, but for the low price I paid I was willing to risk it. I had no extra funds when working part time temp jobs as I could get them, I just needed a way to get to a job so I could get some income going. I won't say what I did here. Suffice to say, I crossed my fingers and went merrily about my business of attempting to get to temp work opportunities, and from time to time escape the place I was crashing in.Once I rode it to Louiville, Ky. Another time I rode it north of Knoxville. In a car, these would be 2hr trips. On that bike, it took a little longer. It didn't get much over 70mph, and at that speed it sounded like a model airplane and shook like a jackhammer on the road. Passing trucks were a serious danger, just because their draft could throw that light little bike off balance and sick me up close to their tires if I wasn't paying attention. That might be why the Knoxville trip was made on back roads instead of the interstate.It was a fun little ride though. At easier speeds, it could be made to dance like you would not believe. Sometimes, I miss that little bike. I felt like Magilla Gorilla on it, but it took me many miles, and because it was so small it never let me ride enough over the speed limit to catch any unwanted attention from the police. If my Kawasaki ever sells, I might get a bike like that again. Small and nimble, fun and reliable but not so like to get me in trouble with too much speed. Just, next time I want to be sure of that title. |
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| I did some work on my story, but I'm not ready to share it. I needed to bring the story along a bit and jump perspectives. I need to look at it again and make sure I still like it.My home repairs are slowed down right now. A situation I want to see change and soon. I think I'm just feeling too pulled out of whack right now, and maybe a little nervous about the grand plan. Ankle is still messed up. I'm trying really hard not to stress the joint and give it the time it needs to heal. I'd say it's clear that I'm looking at tissue damage, which takes longer to heal. Of course, it takes even longer to heal if you keep stressing it with flexation, so I'm trying to not do major flexing activities like running (lots of flex in the ankle for that) swimming (hyperflex with toes pointed down) or cycling (lots of flexation both up and down). Naturally, half the people I know think it's all about weight and impact and completely forget that ligaments are like rubber bands. If you have a tear in one, the last thing you want to do is stretch it.I'm mostly just trying to keep my spirits up and plug forward. One. Step. At. A. Time. |
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| One year ago today, I got a phone call. It was family. My Uncle, Aunt and cousin had been found dead at their home. It was later confirmed, double murder/suicide. My cousin killed his parents, then himself. Later that same day, my boyfriend came over. I told him about the call, what was going on and insisted I was ok. So, he told me he had realized he was going to need to leave me. That night, he said it was because he wanted kids. Two weeks later when the final cut was made, he added other issues, but it was already over. I just needed the extra couple weeks for surface moral support and dog care while I went to the funeral. So, today I went to the barn and enjoyed some time with my horse, who never lies about love. I shared time with my dogs, who also never lie about love. Then I did something brave and showed my rather extensive (if faded) scars from my reduction surgery for a camera. A photographer is doing a project on the beauty in owning your scars, and I liked what his goal with it was. So, I agreed. He got my small pox vaccination scar too, since it's becoming rarer and rarer. Yeah. Fuck March 10. |
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| Still no story progress. Too busy with other stuff going on.On the good side, the Barn manager has taken a more active role in trying to help Hubby maintain weight. This makes me feel a bit better about him being there while I try to figure out about selling this house and getting something with more land. It doesn't help that the great pieces of property have sold or are out of my price range. I can only hope that when I AM ready, that there's a place that suits the bill. |
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| Yeah, I need to write again. I've just had other things on my mind.For instance, I'm still puzzling on getting heat and air to the attic. There's a vent that goes up there from the main unit, but it blows no air. Well, I figured I've been here ten years and never had the ducts cleaned, so I've got some guys coming to do that on Friday. They can do that one too. I'm hoping we discover a blockage and that they'll accidentally-on-purpose clear it and I'll suddenly have heat and air to that damn attic. Then I can start getting it fixed up.Since I have to wait till Friday, I've been feeling frustrated with lack of progress and decided today to do something about that. So, off to Lowes I went and I looked a bit at kitchen countertops. I spoke with one of the reps who gave me some nice advice. She also told me that if I bring in a sketch with measurements, however poor they might be, that she can enter it into the computer and it'll give an estimate on how much it'd be to get the countertops replaced. If I do it during the promotion, I get a sink with it free. This seems a pretty darned good deal to me. I also grabbed a circular saw, which I probably could have used last year when rebuilding the deck, some more insulation and two plywood wall boards. I will be fixing the exterior wall of the bonus room with these items, first re-installing insulation and then putting up the wall board to make a more finished look as well as provide something on which to set some lumber scraps to use as a base for organizing some of my tools better. Then I'll only have a hole in the wall and the floor on that room to fix.I still need to get an estimate on the roof. That will be my last action I think. Get the rest of the place nibbled down to size, then do the last big thing. So, tomorrow's project is to install the exterior wall down there. Maybe I'll make another trip to the store after and see about the materials to repair that hole. I'd just feel better knowing I've done something productive. |
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| After all those dreams of having to move this winter, is it any wonder I'm actually starting to contemplate doing so? I still love this house, but I am getting restless for a home that includes my horse. I have this dream of a place on about five or so acres, sufficient for up to three horses comfortably with more undeveloped for trails, or even just three acres on slow country road safe to go for a hack down. A modest home with a four stall barn, perhaps. Close enough for groceries and internet connection to not be problematic, but country enough to not see a car every minute. You get the idea, I'm sure. I want some chickens too, dammit. I want to be able to jog down the road for a couple miles and not have to keep the dogs leashed because it's just not that busy a road and the neighbors aren't right up on it.I don't need 20 acres or anything grand, but I want to be in control of my horses nutrition and care, not watch his weight slowly decline until I have to beg to get him on a supplement because the barn manager just doesn't think he needs more grain. If it means early mornings feeding and late nights running out to get them in from a sudden storm, so be it. I want Hubby on property where I eat, live and sleep. I can get him a pasture mate or two, especially if they're easy keepers and I have the pasture to support them. I learned a lot more than I realized from Laura in the Atlanta area. I am quite capable of managing to care for him on my own. The hard part is finding such a place and getting this one sold with the timing going right to use this house equity for it. I've got ten years paid on this house, always a bit over the principal. That means it's more than 1/3 paid. Surely that can leverage me into what I want without breaking my paycheck, right?I shall mull on this probably for a few more months. I'd say it's been there for a few leading up to accepting that this is something I want. Now I have to start considering how to make it happen. What to do to make this house more marketable and desireable so it leverages more for me. Also, I have to contemplate and reconcile with yet another move after so much turmoil over the past few years. I dont'want to move hastily. I've had enough of hasty moves.So, your comments are of course welcome, but dont'be surprised if nothing happens for another couple years while I get myself in order. |
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| A few more paragraphs... |
| “Then explain this” she answered, pulling down the collar of her shirt to expose a bruise darkening around the middle of her chest. “Explain how I managed to get a bruise here while sleeping in my bed?”“Ok, I give.” Walt handed her a cup of coffee. “Half and half is in the fridge.” He paused for a few minutes, thinking.“So ok, there's a creature of some sort that you've somehow stumbled upon in dream time. It wants the caverns to stay closed. So, I think the next step is to figure out what it is, and what caverns it means. Let's go with it being real, in as much as any of these things are real. We don't know why it wants the caverns to stay closed, so we don't actually know if doing as it wants is in our best interest or not. The only problem is, how do we figure all that out? I mean, I doubt there's a write-up in the library.”“I don't know, Walt” Jenny said, sinking into a chair. “I just don't know. I do know one thing. I don't want to come across that thing again. Not without the equivalent of a bazooka to protect myself.” Her eyes cast around the area. Walt's place was bachelor pad simple. A small couch with sunken seats that looked like someone's castaway salvaged from the side of the road, a plush chair with a few old cigarette burns on the arm, off-white walls with his artwork hung on most of the open spaces, an easel and chair in the corner with art pads and canvas scattered everywhere. Her eyes landed on the canvas he'd been working on when she came in and she felt her blood begin to race. “What is that?” she asked tightly.“What? Oh, yeah that's why I forgot the coffee. I hung up and it was just like all of a sudden I couldn't stop painting. Not my usual stuff. I prefer the dragons and water wights. Stuff like that. Fantasy things you could imagine being out in daylight. Not this thing. It likes dark places. It's hard to paint things in the dark. Hard to capture their shape. Not a challenge I usually enjoy, but this was downright cathartic.”Jenny stared at him as he wound down. “Walt” she whispered, “I think that's the thing I dreamed.”***********Putting this story together is hard. Seriously. I know the rough sketch of it, or I think I do, and then suddenly I realize it's not what I thought and have to rethink the whole thing. At least now that I've got the Libre going I can get to working on it again. |
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| It's been a while. So, to explain. My laptop died one day. Well, it was on it's way to dying and I thought it most likely was dying of a virus, so in an attempt to wipe that out and save it, I started cleaning. First, virus scans and adware and malware scans, and when those didn't work, a factory reset. I saved some things over to an external hard drive, but several programs were wiped out, including microsoft office which did not come with this computer. It was a gift from a co-worker.So, no MS office, no MS word and that's where the story is saved. On a word document on my external hard drive, and me with a computer that no longer has that program.As it turned out, I did not have a computer virus at all. When my friend Mark took it to see if he could fix it, he first thought I had shot my hard drive, then discovered that in reality it was a massive clog of pet hair in the heat sink blocking the fan. Once that was cleaned out, everything went back to normal. So, I lost MS Office for nothing. |
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| So, I'll have to reinstall office on my laptop to get back to writing my story. |
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| Where on earth did my initiative go? I woke up planning on a run, but wound up not doing it. Now contemplating a nap. Also can't seem to get my brain back to working on my dragons story. I've a few half finished projects I just can't seem to get to and I actually just caught myself contemplating another? |
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| Story Time |
| Hanging up, he looked another minute at the blank canvas. Suddenly, he saw a painting start to take shape in his mind, and without thinking reached for the paint. Slashes of dark colors ran over degrees of taupe and sand. If a painting conveys emotion, this one conveyed Dread. He kept at it until he heard the knocking at his door and, coming to his senses, remembered he hadn’t put the coffee on.“Come on in. I’m sorry, I still haven’t started the coffee. Got caught up in something” Walter said as he opened the door. Then he looked at her. “Wow. You look awful! I had no idea your skin could get that pale.”Jenny’s eyes, green in this light, were haunted. Her normally tan skin was pale, face stretched in tension. She’d taken the time to pull her hair into a ponytail, but that was all the attention paid to her appearance. It was almost a surprise she’d grabbed shoe by the look of her.“I’m so sorry, I’ve just never had so powerful a nightmare before” she said as she came past him, into the room. “I really just needed some company, I’m too freaked to go back to sleep.”“Well, come on and talk with me while I get the pot going. Tell me about this nightmare. It must have been a doozy!” Walt started for the kitchen, Jenny following in his wake.“I’m not sure what to say about it. I just remember feeling trapped, and then this… thing was coming towards me. It was talking to me and I was just so terrified of it I could hardly breathe. Then it told me I had to “keep the caverns closed” and hit me. I woke up then, but I tell youI woke up gasping like I’d really been sucker punched in the belly. I know it doesn’t sound that scary spoken out, but I tell you it was awful. It was like I was actually there, somewhere dark and with something huge and scary that would be just as happy to crush me dead.”Walt turned from the coffee pot. “What kind of creature was it?”“I don’t know. I’ve never come across anything like it” she answered.“Well, could it have been a dragon? I mean, they’re big, powerful, could crush you without a thought…. If they’re real then maybe this was one.” “Walt, for every dragon shape, every sense of a dragon-like ‘other’ I’ve felt, I’ve never come across something like this. If it’s a dragon, it’s not like anything I’ve come across before and don’t act like you don’t know they’re real. Just because we can’t touch them, wellwe can’t touch our own breath either but it’s real.”“Hey, I have to ask. It’s good to stay grounded, right? Well, maybe it was just a really bad nightmare.” He handed her a cup of steaming coffee. “I mean, that can happen. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”“Then explain this” she answered, pulling down the collar of her shirt to expose a bruise darkening around the middle of her chest. “Explain how I managed to get a bruise here while sleeping in my bed?” |
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| Some days, Hubby gives me a reminder of why he has no future as a jumper. Yesterday was such a day. His stifle locked when I tried to clean his foot, and he was unable to offer it to me. I could see him try, he just... couldn't. So, I tried to step him forward and back and... no. So I took him out and walked him around to try loosening it up, then tried again. Eventually, and with a loud pop, he was able to give it to me.I spent a good 15 or so minutes with him on the lunge line warming him up before a fairly easy ride, no canter. I asked him if he would at one point, and he thought about it but... no. I couldn't blame him. Now, he did just get his feet trimmed the day before and Betsy was convinced some of his seeming lameness on that leg was from stepping on the rocks, but I disagree. I disagree because he did it on the flat concrete as well. It wasn't till that loud POP that he stopped being quite so three-legged. I asked her to have the vet do a flexation test on him while at the barn over the next several days and to see if he thinks I should add a joint supplement. It scares me to know that no amount of strengthening or training has really helped this over the years. I hate to think what would happen to him though if he were to kick out at another horse and get it truly locked up. It seems he could easily lame himself even worse in the wrong circumstances. Maybe that's just me being a worry wart. All I know is, in our current economy a horse with any lameness at all is damn lucky to not be on a meat wagon. He's far too sweet for that. |
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| I was all ready to write more in my dragon story, but kept getting interrupted with phone calls, dog walks, work issues and other things. I got all of one sentence. A tad frustrating, but I guess that means I just have to wait for another time to get back into it.Last week, a friend's grandmother died. As it's a small family, she was asking her family friends (as in, people that knew her and her mother) for help serving as pall-bearers. So, Saturday I once again joined five others and carried a woman to her grave. I think they were the best, most peaceful family of bereaved I've ever known. No wailing, a few tears, but mostly acceptance and a sense that at last, their beloved no longer had a foot on either side of the veil. As I sat through the service, I started thinking about how I might like my own funeral to go and realized that I could have all the preferences in the world, but in the end I'd be ok if my death was unremarked entirely. No aggrandizement or huge ceremony required. If I've lived right, I can die peacefully no matter who or what is or is not there to extol virtue in my name. Deciding that brought a sense of peace as well.Yesterday, a couple came and met Snoopy and they loved him. He obligingly sat in the lady's lap on the floor, accepting love and cuddles and showing off the calm, relaxed dog he is becoming. He still doesn't like his human to leave the house without him, but at this stage if he's had a good 30 minutes exercise, he'll relax and be perfectly happy cuddling or laying in his bed most of the rest of the day. They said they fully understood he'd be wired for bear, nervous and upset for several months upon moving in with them, but that knowing what he was likely to even out to made it clear that he would be a fantastic third dog to even out their two rambunctious 2yr old pointers. I find myself torn between thrilled and sad. It's not the most active lifestyle for me, but I've kinda gotten to enjoy his company. In the evening when I sit to spend my relaxation time with the dogs on the couch, he's taken sometimes to coming and, if no other dog is there, climbing into my lap and finally settling himself to lay down beside me in such a way that my arm drapes naturally over his shoulders. There he rests happily. I think he'll gladly cuddle them though. THEY will let him sleep in the bed with them. I showed them the measures I've taken with his wire crate to keep him from busting out when I leave. All cheap and easy measures consisting of a few small zip ties and some cheap snap rings. The snap rings might not be necessary, the zip ties just make the crate less collapsible. They hope that, since he'll be in the laundry room with the other two dogs also in crates, that he'll be less upset. Also, they close the laundry room door, so if he does break out, his damages are limited. In the long run, it's an excellent match. I'll just miss him. On the other hand, not having a dog with separation anxiety might mean I start doing things in the evening again. Like, I really need to get back to the pool on alternate evenings for a bit. I must expend more energy to make up for the massive quantities of food I've found myself wanting. |
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| New Years Day |
| It seems now is as good a time as any to reflect on the past year. It can't hurt, right?It started out well enough. I was in love and stepped off a cruise ship on New Years Day after a week of experiences off of US soil. A job that doesn't suck, a dog that makes me smile every day and horse that keeps me humble. By early spring the warning signs that things weren't going so hot with the love came to a head, with him admitting he knew it wasn't working for him on the same day I found out about a horrible double murder/suicide in my family. He stuck around for a few extra weeks for moral support, and then I told him it was time and allowed him to cut loose from bonds he apparently found no interest in. I took comfort in a return to running, despite the setbacks that would crop up, cycling and swimming along with trying to work with Hubby. In the height of summer, my frustration and self doubt as an equestrian left me ready to give up on him and see if someone else would like to take him to another level. That plan was interrupted by a few breakthrough rides and a dawning realization that despite his occasionally fighting with me, that horse has built a trust in me over the past few years that I did not want to break. So, I agreed to compromise. If I couldn't have the trail horse I could ride out alone with, I'd accept working in the ring and just improving as a rider overall for his sake. It was soon after that I went floating down the Hiawassee with some friends and met another woman with horses looking for a trail riding buddy. It took a while to hook back up, but the gods saw to it we had the chance to ride together once, and Hubby loved it. It took a while to get him loading properly again, but we got there.Meanwhile, volunteering with the Southeast GSP rescue has been a new source of satisfaction. I'm currently fostering my third dog, and on New Years Eve had a conversation with someone very interested in adopting him. She and her husband are coming on Sunday to meet him. I also took in a second, permanent dog. Connor was going to be permanent, drove me crazy enough to look for a new home for him, and then settled in and became a loyal member of the family. Sure, we have our rocky moments still, but he's become a pleasure to have around more often than a pain, and Churchill loves having the company.One major blessing through this year has been the chance to reconnect with some incredibly important people to me. One was a random contact some time ago that would call, catch up, then disappear for a few months at a time. He finally disappeared for several years, only to suddenly reappear out of the blue. To my utter joy, he's stayed in touch this time, even meeting for lunch or dinner several times and going on one of my adventures with me. He came caving, bringing a few of his own friends. I cannot express how much that friendship has grown on me. He may yet disappear again, but I am very glad for the return.Also this year, Melody returned and became closer than before as she began a swimming, and then running program. Her quest to become the woman she wants to be is inspiring to me, and I cannot help but be amazed and impressed with her fortitude and energy. Also to my absolute joy, Sophia and I reconnected this year. We were so close for so many years, and then something changed. We both went through some rough times I think, and we both lost the energy and ability to provide mutual support through them. It was Melody and running brought us back together again, which fills me with joy. We've both grown over the years, and I like to think we're both better for our experiences. I hope we get to share more of them again, moving forward.So yeah, a few rough spots earlier in the year but overall I've been massively blessed this year. I cannot expect to see that much luck and blessing continue, but I can always hope. Mostly, I think if these recent blessings stay a part of my life, I should be able to take on anything. Even the zombie apocalypse or the end of the world. Or at least I should be able to take them on with a little more joy. I hope your 2013 is even more blessed as my 2012. A little salt, but not so much you can't taste the sugar. |
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| I realize that many of the things I do seem brave. I've been called brave in the past for doing things I saw no problem with, like driving across multiple state lines alone (apparently, lots of girls I met in college were terrified they'd be murdered at a rest stop or something), going to a college so far from family, doing my trail running or biking on my own... even going in with a catch pole to remove a dog that had already attacked another adult and threatened several children. Deciding to go hang gliding as the final step to dealing with my fear of heights (or more specifically, unstable ground near a drop-off). While that was an intimidating thing to do, I had control of how much I did and when at all times. That's the key. I had some measure of control, and hence I could put aside any apprehension and just do it.Being truly brave, for me, requires risk to my spirit, not my body. It really took almost everything I had to risk falling in love again last year. Once in, I was all in. As I slowly saw that crumbling under my feet, I couldn't feign surprise when the ground gave way. I'd had a little time to step back to the teetering edge. Still, it was a risk I'd only taken a very few times before and the crumbling earth under my feet in that place has made it even harder to willingly take a single, solitary step in that direction. I might stare in the direction of another patch of earth for a long time, just trying to figure out if it's inviting looks are based on shifting sands. I'm unlikely to want to stand on it till I've seen if a downpour causes a mudslide. I want to know before I stand fully on it, is there bedrock there, or is it limestone that's about to drop a sinkhole?I know a lot of folks have gone through far harder relationship woes and overcome them. Some of them would be terrified to drive 12 hrs across the country alone. Each of us has an Achilles heel, and upon reflection of late I admit that this is mine. It's one I cannot overcome so easily as a fear of heights. |
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| More in the story....+++++++++++++++++++++++++When the phone rang, Walter was staring blankly at a canvas, paint at his side and eyes glazed over, unseeing. He shook himself on the third ring and picked up.“What time is it?”“I’m sorry,” Jenny’s voice, “I know it’s late but I couldn’t think of anyone more likely to be up.”“No, I’m up, I just don’t know what time it is” he responded. “I was trying to paint and just kinda phased out. I can’t seem to get anywhere with this one. So, what time is it and what’s up?”He heard Jenny take a deep, shuddering breath. “It’s 2am. I’m glad I didn’t wake you. It’s just I had this nightmare and, I just can’t shake it. I guess I just needed to hear a real person. I guess it’s a bit silly.”It had been three months since that movie date, and while Walter had realized they had built a nice little friendship, he’d never have expected to be the voice of comfort or sanity for Jenny. He couldn’t think of any other woman so capable of taking care of herself. Sure, he knew she’d have some vulnerability somewhere, but he’d assumed it would be something more mundane. Like an inability to bake a ziti. Then again, there had to be a reason they’d been drawn together.“So, do you want to come by and tell me about it, me to come there, or just chat on the phone? I mean, do you need human presence, or just voice?” “I… do you have coffee?” Jenny sounded a little better, but he could feel the tremble in her voice still. She’s just buried it.“I’ll get some started. You like the Stone Cup French Roast, right?”“If it’s not that, gotta go Greyfriars…” He smiled at her gentle reminder that, while Stone cup was a closer walk for him, Greyfriars was her preferred coffee shop. He suspected it had more to do with their desserts than their coffee though. “I’ll be there in a few minutes. I really need to talk this one out with someone that won’t think I’m insane.”“No problem,” he replied, “I’ll put the porch light on for you.”Hanging up, he looked another minute at the blank canvas. Suddenly, he saw a painting start to take shape in his mind, and without thinking reached for the paint. Slashes of dark colors ran over degrees of taupe and sand. If a painting conveys emotion, this one conveyed Dread. He kept at it until he heard the knocking at his door and, coming to his senses, remembered he hadn’t put the coffee on. |
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| I'm being entertained by Magnum P I and remembering that it's this show that started my love of the Doberman breed. Zeus and Apollo were such beautiful dogs, and so incredibly well behaved and trained. Oh sure, they chased Magnum all the time, but they were doing their job!I also hadn't remembered that he had flashbacks. It's also making me want to go to Hawaii. |
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| Earlier in the evening, I heard a squeak from the basement. I knew Doug was outside and figured he must have a rodent down there. Of course, I'd also just let the dogs out, so I figured I'd look.There behind the old heat unit and under some metal flaps from an old parrot cage were Doug, Churchill and Connor. They were all quite intent and I realized the rodent must be under there, hiding. I left them to it, but soon returned as Snoopy had been roused by the activity and came to join the action.What followed was rather amusing, at least to me. Connor and Snoopy both were totally focused on the rodent. Churchill was interested, but not at their level of intensity. Doug left, not wanting to vie with the two very intent canines. They took turns digging at the flaps till Connor hooked an end and flipped them over. Then there was a general scramble of all three dogs trying to track where it went. Suddenly, Snoopy must have caught sight of it because he darted in another direction, pouncing and digging between wood slats and into the exposed pink insulation along the outer wall of the storage room till he caught it. All three dogs rushed out of the garage, Connor and Churchill right behind Snoopy. I chose that as my cue to go back upstairs. I had no desire to see who got to keep the carcass or what would be done with it. It's enough to have seen proof that two out of three dogs are intent on rodent eradication. |
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