So as was fairly noticeable, we had a hard drive crash here at Innocence Central a couple of weeks ago. Recovery is in progress, nothing was lost, etc. So not very traumatic. On the other hand, it did get me thinking about what I wanted to do with my blog, my LiveJournal, and so forth.

After a bunch of said thinking, I decided to shut down this blog. It’s been around for five years or so, which is probably about enough time. Somewhere back there I got distracted from writing about culture and into politics, which was fun for a few years, but yeah. I’ve lost my zest for that.

For the time being, personal stuff will wind up on my LiveJournal. Chances are very good there’ll be a new blog at a later date, which will feed into my LJ. My LJ will, under the current plan, wind up having posts that the blog doesn’t have. I could draw a Venn diagram but it’s not that hard.

So, good night, Popone! Comments are closed; the archives will stick around for the foreseeable future.

• Posted by Bryant at 07:17 AM

Getting Things Done. Anyone tried it? Does it work for you? Tips and/or tricks? Do I have to drink the koolaid?

(Regardless of the answers to these questions, my next PC will use GTD as an organizing scheme. Possibly this promise excludes Jess’s Exalted game, but I’m not sure.)

• Posted by Bryant at 12:22 PM | Comments (0) | Followups (0)

Quote from the weekend, from S.: “It’s like cow-tipping, but with endangered species.”

• Posted by Bryant at 08:46 AM | Comments (0) | Followups (0)

Hey, are you hiring sysadmins in the Boston area? Do you have a NOC position for someone with a few years of experience in desktop support and NOC work (first-tier monitoring and response) or a position for a solid mid-level Windows sysadmin with a ton of hardware, EMC, Veritas, and Windows work under his belt?

Let me know; I might know people who would fit your needs.

• Posted by Bryant at 08:14 AM | Comments (0) | Followups (0)

Seoul’s defeated me. Ten San Franciscos, a dozen Bostons, the third largest urban sprawl in the world. I’m in the megacity, and it has no reason to bother speaking my language.

Coming in from the airport, driving at sixty miles per hour, it wasn’t more than half an hour before the apartment buildings began. Buildings? High-rises: concrete masses rising fifteen or twenty stories into the sky, with three story high logos painted on one side. Samsung, Hyundai, others I don’t recognize. We pass high-rise after high-rise in rows along the highway, stacked close together and stretching far back from the road. It’s another twenty minutes before we get off the highway and enter the district where my hotel is. The apartment buildings continue the entire way.

New cities delight me. I want to smell the streets and eat the food and touch the landscape. Seoul hasn’t blunted that, but I fear that my senses would slip off the skin of the city without so much as a glimpse of its heart. I’m jetlagged and overwhelmed.

The hotel sits at a junction of roads. There’s a bridge crossing the Han River, and a ten lane surface street spearing into the middle of one fashionable shopping district, and another ten lane surface street paralleling the river. There may or may not be wider streets in Seoul, but there are many as wide. Surface streets, not highways.

Behind the facades of the main streets, there are tangles of tiny byways, barely big enough for two cars to pass. There aren’t blocks; there are turns and curves and angles intersecting unexpectedly, with business signs hanging overhead. Cars park where possible.

Is this Seoul? I have no way of knowing. It’s the tiny piece I’ve seen in a few days of transit from hotel to office to other office to restaurant and back again.

And I’m jetlagged, and I have no time for anything but business and sleep. I want a month with no responsibilities to wander around Seoul. I want more time to research.

I’m leaving tomorrow, and I haven’t got the faintest idea where I’d begin again.

• Posted by Bryant at 03:55 AM | Comments (0) | Followups (0)

Hey, Greg. I guess the accurate way to say it is that our lives intersected around MUDs, and I liked knowing you, and — this is trivial, but every time I pruned my friendslist over on Livejournal, I never wanted to remove you despite the fact that I hadn’t talked to you in years.

The world’s gonna miss you.

• Posted by Bryant at 08:53 AM | Comments (0) | Followups (0)

I’m not generally prone to this kind of thing, but…

Oh, this will have no meaning unless you’re playing the same MMORPGs as me. Also, it is one big giant image.

• Posted by Bryant at 01:21 AM | Comments (1) | Followups (0)

Brick is playing tonight down at the Kendall. 7:10 show. And I might just hang out after for the 10 PM showing of Thank You for Smoking. I’m fairly sure that there’s some inherent value in the concept of a high school noir flick. Plus it’s got the chick from Lost, no not the evil one, the other one. Plus Shaft as a high school principal.

Possibly that last is stunt casting.

Possibly I should see it at the Coolidge instead. Hm.

• Posted by Bryant at 12:09 PM | Comments (0) | Followups (0)

Someone in my family who will remain nameless for soon to be apparent reasons got me a T-shirt for Christmas. Kinda. It looks a lot like this. Except he didn’t buy it from threadless.com.

He downloaded the image, printed it onto transfer paper, and ironed it onto a blank T-shirt.

So I’m horrified, right? Intellectual property, the ability to profit from creativity, etc. I’d buy one except that design is sold out. But I’m also tremendously amused. Talk about your remix culture. This particular family member is like fifteen years old. He didn’t even think twice about getting the T-shirt that way. Immediate satisfaction, no wait time.

If people want to be selling intellectual property in the future? Better figure out a way to get it into the hands of consumers immediately, cause people are gonna be doing their own pre-fab. Culture’s changing. It’s probably not going to take Lawrence Lessig to get rid of our current problems with copyright; that stuff is all going to seem silly in twenty years or so.

Well within my lifetime. The rate of change gets scary.

• Posted by Bryant at 09:33 PM | Comments (0) | Followups (0)

My lovely sweetheart is going to be in Boston from January 20th to January 30th or so; the first weekend we’ll be mostly down on the Cape, but other than that we’re free. I’m still gonna be working that week, which means offers of daytime company would certainly be appreciated. Also we probably oughta do a dinner Monday night or something like that.

Who’s in?

• Posted by Bryant at 04:36 PM | Comments (1) | Followups (0)

Long distance relationships have gotten a lot easier since I was in college.

It’s all technology, right? But I cast my mind back, and I remember when phone calls were a huge deal. You had to ration them, because there’s nothing you want more than to talk to your girlfriend for a long, long time, but an hour of phone conversation is awfully expensive. Ramen or voice contact. Hard choice. So you get a call a week, maybe two, and you have to keep it reasonably short, and letters are very nice but not quite the same.

Email letters, not paper letters. I’m not that old. And fortunately, by the time I got to college, AT&T had already lost the monopoly so competition had driven prices down. But still, man, phone clutched to ear and distance audible in the phone lines and yeah. Plus the sizable phone bills at the end of the month. You don’t really want to feel guilty about talking to loved ones, but when you know you’re spending their money, it can suck.

Well. If the big romantic revolution of the 60s was the Pill? The big revolution of the 00s is night and weekend minutes. Free phone calls make conversation what it ought to be; easy and fluid and without impediment. If you want to talk every night before bed, you can. It makes a difference. No guilt about two hour phone calls, time to talk things out, time. Time’s a gift, right?

And this isn’t even getting into Vonage and Skype and Google Talk. Those get you free conversation any time, at the cost of being tethered to a computer. (But think Bluetooth headsets.) Life gets a bit easier. But really, night and weekend minutes make the big difference; that’s the practical leap. I imagine in the next five years or so, voice over IP (aka computer telephony) will come closer to being consumer technology. Right now, cell phones already are consumer technology, and it doesn’t count as a revolution until my aunt can use it. Disclaimer: as far as I know, my aunt isn’t having an LDR.

It’s just another facet of the Information Revolution, obviously. Decreased difficulty of communication, which has all the same effects you’d expect from decreased friction. (Including the whole “decreased difficulty of pissing each other off,” in the general case, aka flame wars. But that’s not what I’m talking about here.) It makes any form of communication easier. You could write a thesis about it. One of Rob’s students probably will. Relationships are one of those forms.

Which is not a surprise, if you think about it. Go read a self-help book about relationships. What’s key? Communication. So of course, LDRs are hard because it’s hard to communicate; and of course, they become easier when communication becomes easier. Obvious in retrospect.

Long term secondary effects, eh. I wouldn’t make any sweeping predictions. I do kind of think that sense of place, like sense of identity, will become more fluid in this century. Location is a state of mind? Maybe. But I’m not completely sure of that; the technology isn’t that disruptive yet. Yet.

Tell you, though. Voice is great; it removes much of the confusion and mixups you can get from the lack of inflections in text. Add webcams to the mix, for easy visual cues? Two out of five senses is luxury, especially when I compare it to the hour or so a week of free voice I got back in college. I like the Information Revolution.

Also: “You can’t solve social problems in software,” my butt.

• Posted by Bryant at 06:38 PM | Comments (0) | Followups (0)

Huh.

• Posted by Bryant at 12:12 AM | Comments (0) | Followups (0)

Here’s the plan:

FanTasia 2005 takes place from July 7th to July 24th of this year. I’m going for either one or two weeks of that period; haven’t decided which yet, won’t decide until the schedule is out, which will be sometime in June. I’ll be renting a furnished one-bedroom near the venues, and anyone who I know and don’t mind sharing space with is welcome to come crash there for any or all of my visit. I figure it’s my God-given duty to inflict weird and fantastic movies on people, see.

My coverage of last year’s FanTasia begins here. If you’re interested but not sure if you’re invited or not, drop me a line. I’ll post more when the schedule is out, including recommendations.

• Posted by Bryant at 08:34 AM | Comments (0) | Followups (0)

With the arrival of the Doctor Demento Show Archive, I can now point to show #91-19, from May 12th, 1991. The number one song on the Doctor Demento Funny Five that day was “Give Peaks A Chance,” from DJ Glazed Donut and The Knotted Cherry Stems. “Give Peaks A Chance” was on the Funny Five for four weeks straight, beginning the week after it was played for the first time. It was #12 on the year-end rankings.

This has meaning to me because I’m one of The Knotted Cherry Stems. The song was recorded back when I was living in Iowa City; a bunch of us were serious Twin Peaks fans, and were very unhappy about the show being cancelled. We all joined the Committee for Opposing the Offing of Peaks and made as much noise as we could. I dunno if we helped, but the show did get renewed for another season or so after all, which made us happy. Also, the show sent out Harry Goaz (Deputy Andy), Frank Silva (Killer Bob), and a publicist for a visit. In retrospect I notice that they didn’t send us any of the actual professional actors on the show, but both Harry and Frank were very cool and fun to talk to. I got to drive everyone around a lot.

You can retrieve an MP3 of show #91-19 here; our song starts about 6:15 into the MP3 of the show’s final segment. You’ll need to register to get download access. I’m part of the chorus, plus I also sing “James Hurley on his hog” in the third verse.

• Posted by Bryant at 07:19 PM | Comments (2) | Followups (0)

More gratuitous photos of my vacation follow. Follow links for bigger versions, etc. Warning: warm blue water ahead.

• Posted by Bryant at 11:55 AM | Comments (1) | Followups (1)