8 posts tagged “me”

I find myself having a hard time coming up with the energy to write full blog posts lately. Take this story about Time Warner offering DVR boxes for free that don't have a fast forward feature in them so you can't skip ads. I was going to write an entry about how corporations try to spin copy protection as a feature, and tie it to this piece commenting on this piece about how Universal Music isn't offering its DRM-free music files over iTunes. I would then tie that to a comment by Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing about how music companies really want to be able to sell you different versions of the same song, like how Microsoft has different versions of Windows Vista. You'd "get" to choose whether your album plays in just one stereo, or also on your car (for an added fee), or also on your iPod (for an added fee), and so on. They try to spin the idea by saying that people with only one stereo will appreciate being able to pay less than people who need the rights to play the album on multiple stereos, but of course no consumer really thinks like this. Referencing the Time Warner article, Jeffrey McManus says, "Has any customer in the history of DVR technology ever stepped up and said 'you know, this DVR thing is terrific, but what I’d really prefer is to lose the ability to skip commercials so that I can satisfy the needs of businesses in every stage of the value chain?'" (via).

So anyway, I was going to write this whole article about that (which I sort of have in the process of writing this), but then I got lazy and just linked to the original story with del.icio.us and added a few comments. The internet can breed laziness this way. Why write an article and expend actual effort and thought when I can just link and add a few comments? If you read my weblog, you might already know my position on the matter, and reading my comments might be redundant. Indeed, if you read my weblog, you probably also read Boing Boing and a few other like it, so you've probably already read people talking about the same thing more eloquently than I. Sure, if I put forth the effort to research what I was talking about, you'd get some value from reading what I write, but if I'm just going to regurgitate what other people have already written, why bother? If a sentence or so will do, a link is good enough, and you can make the connections yourself if you feel like following the link.

My post frequency has dropped considerably over the years, but I'm not sure the quality has. I'll frequently start a post, realize that a few sentences attached to a link are good enough, and just go with that instead. I am fairly proud of the assortment of links I throw on del.icio.us. I sort of prefer the idea that in running a blog you're as much an editor as an author, and mostly my blogging time is spent coming across articles and deciding which things to link to rather than coming up with new ideas to write about. I think you get as good of an idea of what I'm interested in by what I link to as you would if I wrote long posts less frequently. (Aside from the rare, more personal stuff, which I put up only for Vox friends.)

Movable Type 4 looks attractive, and over the weekend I spent some time trying to decide if I wanted to move from blogging on Vox to running MT again. The "pro" side has lots of bullet points, chiefly flexibility and having everything under my control, while on the "con" side are just two things: not having to manage a web host, and having to pay someone for hosting. Vox is free, offers only a few set customization options, and doesn't let me map my domain to it. But, it lets me restrict posts to just my friends, which is a huge win. Kwc and I exchanged some emails recently about how many free services there are now which do stuff you used to have to configure yourself on a web server you pay for. Having everything on your own server is great, and knowing that you own it is important, but for the moment, I don't mind separating stuff between Vox, del.icio.us, and Flickr and hoping that Six Apart and Yahoo! are trustworthy enough.

Counting from when I started using LiveJournal, I've been writing online for about five years now. Thanks for sticking around, even if I'm too lazy to write full posts most of the time. You probably had lots of other stuff to read, anyway.

I spent a few minutes today looking through Netflix for movies to watch while Katherine's away on business next week. The last time she went away I rented Stealth and The Tuxedo. Katherine hates Jennifer Love Hewitt. I'd secretly love to have The Ghost Whisperer on my TiVo, but she wouldn't abide it. Anyway, I had selected a few horror movies to watch next week when I realized that Harry Potter comes out on Saturday. I think Hermione really might die this time.

You may have noticed that I’ve changed domains. Mostly just for kicks, but also to provide web and email space for what I will soon be able to call my family, I’ve registred the ely.fm domain name. All links to davextreme.com should redirect here quite safely, but please report any problems you come across. All of the images have been copied over, but there are some missing links whilch I’ll repair when I get around to it.

I’ve taken the opportunity to, once again, switch back to Movable Type to run the content. When inspiration strikes I’ll probably do a redesign, but in the meantime I’ve made a few content changes. A book and movie log will now appear inline with the main entries and links. I’m going to try to take the time to write short reviews of things that I watch/read, or at the last provide a rating from 1-5, expressed in stars. All reviews are marked up in the hreview microformat, just for kicks.

Having used Vox a good bit, I’ve gotten used to using WYSIWYG buttons for applying formatting and links to text and, while that approach is very elegant, I’ve found that I still prefer writing my HTML in Markdown format. The format is clean enough that you can read the text you’ve just written, unlike when writing in straight code, but still leaves me the option to reverting to code when I need to use a specific tag or entity.

So for the moment I’m happily tinkering along with Movable Type, thoguh I’m still experiencing the aging blogger problem where I’ve somehow lost my online voice. I don’t share many personal things online, and when I do I usually use forums that let me restrict the readship to people I know IRL. I still enjoy linking to other pages very much, but I don’t find as many topics to post full entries about. Hmm, that paragraph, now that I think about, qualifies as “writing about how I have nothing to write about”. Ah well.

I chipped a tooth today. Actually I chipped it a few years ago and a piece of popcorn this morning took out the plaster. Now I get to spend the day focusing on not making the problem any worse until my appointment tomorrow morning.

I always put two pillowcases on my pillows, one facing one way, the other the other way, so that the zipper is never exposed, nor is any part of the real pillow. Having two cases on there makes me feel like the pillow is protected enough that the fact you can’t wash pillows isn’t a problem.

Saturday morning I woke up and my pillow only had one case on it. Somehow, during my sleep, I managed to pull off one of the pillowcases. The inner one. At some point in the night I was able to pull of only the inner pillow case but leave the outer one on. WTF?

Imported comments:

Thank you for posting just so I can show my girlfriend that I’m not the only person on the planet that doublebags pillows. Congrats on your Houdini.

Off to Florida for a few days.

I never knew my paternal grandmother. She died at age 32 when my dad was five. A few years ago he started going through and collecting her poetry. She had always wanted to become a published author, but only got one small work out before the leukemia set in. For my dad, reading her poetry has been a way to get to meet the mother he never had a chance to get to know.

Over the past few months I’ve helped him set up a website so that people can read about her. Though I’m sure internet publishing isn’t what she had in mind when she wrote the poems, it has at least let me get to know her. Much of the work is dark, referring to a failed romance, fear of getting involved with my grandfather, and sadness over knowing she was going to die and leave two small children.

The site is up at www.marieely.com. There’s also a collection of black and white photographs and low-res scans of the Sacred Paintings she wrote about, her only published work.

Imported comments:

Wow Dave. That’s a really great project. My maternal grandmother died very young as well. It was always difficult for my mother, but it became much worse once she built a family of her own and realized what she had missed. That logic may seem strange to someone on the outside, but it is a common psychological phenomenom. Since my grandfather traveled a great deal, she wrote him everyday - no matter what. From the letters, my mother was able to receive the same kind of connection that your father found and it helped her immensely. I can’t really explain the peace she found, but I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.

words…they’re pretty cool! shooting star

Dear Sir:

You’ve been laying around in bed doing nothing for an hour. Don’t you remember that secret project you’re working on? You know: the one that’s almost ready to launch. The one with the really excited client who’s dying to show it off. You could have been about halfway toward finishing by now, but instead you’ve wasted your time trolling around the internet having very bad luck at finding things to hold your attention for more than two minutes.

At this point I’d like to remind you that you also have three more projects you want to work on after this one. And need I mention the paid gig you simple forgot to follow up on while you were preparing to vacation in Europe? That nice man just wanted a little bit of help on his page, and you didn’t write back like you said you would.

Yours truly,
Yourself.