Just a Gwai Lo - fun within prescribed limits

A little more on the caring for your introvert article. Jason Kottke has some good comments. His comments remind me of this quote:

Social commentators sometimes worry that the Web is making us more isolated. In the picture these pundits paint, tortured introverts peck out desperate messages in dark, lonlely chat rooms. We take a different view. In ordinary life, extraordinary people often feel terribly isolated because no one around them can understand them other that superficially. The Net and the Web offer real hope and true companionship for those willing to express themselves and seek out like-minded souls. This, we think, is a good thing.

That quote appears in Jeffrey Zeldman's Taking Your Talent to the Web on p. 34. (Note that I'm not under the pretense that I'm 'extraordinary'.) That article that I linked previously has given me some courage to tell people that I need days off from people to recharge. We'll see how it goes tonight, since I'm invited over to a friend's to watch the hockey game, when all I want to do is stay home and watch The Wedding Singer.

Jonas Luster on the outside reflecting the inside, even if you have to alter the outside to do so.

Jonas elaborates on his thoughts from last night: “Online, aside from the at-large setting of basic benchmarks, smaller groups exist by standards, means, and goals different from the unwired world. The acquisition of capital, the achievement of goals, is possible only through those means or through deviant acts unrelated to acts that might be perceived as deviant in other social settings. In fact, perfectly acceptable and normal behavior online might appear deviant to outside, offline, observers.”

He links to Darren and Betsy, both of which I have commented on. Betsy has recently clarified her stance on personal blogging: “your blog shouldn't make some cipher in Human Resources afraid of getting in trouble if they hire you.”

Makiko: “suddenly, I've realized that I was feeding my mind the equivalent of junk food, and my mind wasn't appreciating it. And it really did hit me during the Oscars, of all things, during the brief retrospective of the movie people who had passed away during the last year, starting with Gregory Peck. Gregory Peck is one of my favorite old-time actors. Yet, I realized with horror that I have never actually seen his two most famous movies, To Kill A Mockingbird and Gentleman's Agreement.”

While millions of people were watching the Oscars, I was watching shows that had some comedic value (two episodes of King of the Hill, a really funny show that is hitting its prime, and The Simpsons) and Solstrom. After watching a documentary series on Cirque, I've been wowed by the majesty of the performers, who effortlessly—with mistakes in the live shows, but "flawlessly" due to the advantage of takes on the TV series—and fluidly do things that I don't even have the ability to dream about, much less imagine in my waking hours. The TV series shows a world that is very sensual, in that human touching, between men and women, children and adults is a prerequisite not only essential for the stunts they pull off but, it seems, to the world's inhabitents' peace of mine. Since reading it, I've been thinking a lot about James W. Prescot's article on the inverse relationship between pleasure and violence [commentary/summary], and the key argument of the article is that human touching is absolutely necessary, and the people of Solstrom understand this perfectly. While many millions of people were watching millionaire overactors competing for award statuettes but $32,000 gift bags just for being nominated (!) I was watching something that made me laugh and then something that amazed and continues to amaze me.

Makiko says that reality TV is the junk food of the medium, and she's right. It's the one genre of TV I never cared for. I still think that TV is drugs and that less is better. Because TV is drugs though, I haven't fully kicked the habit (not having cable has helped tremendously), and sometimes—rarely, but sometimes—the drugs work.

Mark Pilgrim: “It's a big world, and blogs aren't even close to being the center of it.”

Eric points to something I'll never need to know: how to do a heel and toe downshift in a manual gear-shift car. Eric reports that he “went from 5th to 3rd, blipped it up to 2500rpm in between and got a slick, jerk free downshift.” It just reminded me of the second-funniest part of Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (the very funniest being the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God), when Ford was mistaken that Arthur had never met Zaphod Beeblebrox:

Ford was not going to be outcooled.
"Zaphod," he drawled, "great to see you, you're looking well, the extra arm suits you. Nice ship you've stolen."
Arthur goggled at him.
"You mean you know this guy?" he said, waving a wild finger at Zaphod.
"Know him!" exclaimed Ford, "he's ..." he paused, and decided to do the introductions the other way round.
"Oh, Zaphod, this is a friend of mine, Arthur Dent," he said, "I saved him when his planet blew up."
"Oh sure," said Zaphod, "hi Arthur, glad you could make it." His right-hand head looked round casually, said "hi" and went back to having his teeth picked.
Ford carried on. "And Arthur," he said, "this is my semi-cousin Zaphod Beeb ..."
"We've met," said Arthur sharply.
When you're cruising down the road in the fast lane and you lazily sail past a few hard driving cars and are feeling pretty pleased with yourself and then accidentally change down from fourth to first instead of third thus making your engine leap out of your bonnet in a rather ugly mess, it tends to throw you off your stride in much the same way that this remark threw Ford Prefect off his.

It turned out that Arthur had met Zaphod at a party while the latter was on a visit to Earth and stole the girl Arthur was talking to, Tricia Macmillan, better known in the series as Trillian.

Nothing profound. That's just what Eric's entry reminded me of.

On January 1st, I published my new year's resolutions. Here is my update.

1. On Day 1, I enacted comments on the site, the lack of which was the #1 complaint about the site. After two months, 52 comments, on at least 100 posts. (That just counts Just a Gwai Lo. I got less than 10 total of all my other sites.) Not even close to what I was expecting. That said, the sites I know of that receive a lot of comments generally seem to have the following three properties: they have very faithful readership, or at least a small but very faithful subset of their readership take time out to comment; they almost always ask questions at the end of what they write; and they tend to write exclusively, where I tend to quote exclusively. Maybe some more consideration and original writing is in order.
2. My resolution to "date more" has stalled at the implementation stage. So far I cannot claim that any dates took place between the days January 1st and February 28th in which I was involved in some way.
3. Reading only one book, a quarter of another and 20 pages into a third do not qualify as spending more time reading offline materials.
4. I get an F on the score for spending more quiet time away from the computer. Nobody to spend it with is one reason, but mostly laziness is to blame.
5. Finally subscribing to less than 250 feeds is a success. That said, I still too much time spent staring at my computer screen, and possibly too much time spent on "the dark web", which means weblogs that talk significantly about non-technical matters or that don't belong to the "blogger blogosphere" (that is, weblogs that talk about weblogs).
6. If by "sane workout regimen" I meant "no workout regimen, then hooray, I've succeeded in my last resolution! But seriously, my sleep schedule of late has been a lot more sane lately than December or January, so I claim real success on that front.

Darren: “My head is swimming slightly as I type this, because of the caffeine high off my first Coke in a month. I've cheated a bit, with a few iced teas and rootbeers, but I managed the entire month without that super-sweet acid touching my lips (or my stomach).”

Today was my first day without a Coke, first of 31 days as I try to one-up Darren by going a longer month—by three days—than him without drinking one. In the past week I've had a lot of orange and apple juice, so anybody that says I'm going to save a lot of money by having healthier drinks doesn't know that Coke is relatively cheap.

Finally the domain for improvident lackwit, my lower-case-titled weblog about The Simpsons—or, rather, how stuff I see reminds me of bits on The Simpsons, i.e. stuff the TV show has already mad fun of—is live at improvidentlackwit.com. It may take a few hours after posting this announcment, but that is now the permanent URL for the site. Anybody who has a weblog should probably get a domain of their own, so that if they need to switch hosts, they don't have to rely on someone else's domain when they move. Yes yes, in the future, URLs won't matter, but they do now, and having a TypePad subdomain meant that if for whatever reason I want to move the files to another server in the future, all the links would break. Since TypePad still hosts the site, all existing links still work, so there is no real need to update bookmarks or RSS feed locations.

Up until about 2003 or 2004, I read up to 20 books a year, mostly on my way to work on the bus or in my copious free time not working, since my job was less than half-time. Since working full-time and on salary—meaning no set start or quitting time—priority given to dead tree editions of pretty much any written text went to reading digital ink in the form of weblogs and the delicious articles they link to.

Already this year I've read three books: The Presidency of Gerald R. Ford by John Robert Greene, [Amazon], Buddhism Plain & Simple by Steve Hagen, and most recently, Social Acupuncture: A Guide to Suicide, Performance, and Utopia by Darren O'Donnell. I am currently working my way through Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, and have purchased Dreaming In Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg, which sits patiently on my coffee table.

All the books have reasons why I either read them or bought them: the book about Gerald Ford because he had recently died; the Buddhism book partly on the recommendation of Web Worker Daily but also partly because my girlfriend is a practicing Buddhist (I was reading the book as a Valentine's Day gift to her, but I was afraid she was on to me when she published that); Social Acupuncture on Karen's recommendation; and Wikinomics because Will Pate attended the Wikinomics book launch in Toronto and made note that some consider Tapscott to not be a citizen of the community he writes about. Will calls him a translator and diplomat, but popularizer might be a better term. at about the same time as the Internet, and therefore. He has it right, and those that don't yet understand it or know how to benefit from it, particuarly in the business sense, are the target audience, not people like me who live it. (I bought Dreaming in Code because I have a weak tie to one of the book's protagonists, Ted Leung.)

I intend to write and publish reviews of all books mentioned, but as you can tell I'm already two books behind with a third book soon added to the queue. But this is the year I read book and review them. For now, though, that's a window into what I'm reading and thinking about these days.