You can almost feel it's icy grip...

"Want a death stick?" =>
Things are coming to a head cigarette-wise. First there's how I feel, which is crappy. It's just not as fun to smoke as it once was; smoking is now more a burden than a pleasurable leisure activity. Then there's all those people dying suddenly, like baseball player Darryl Kile, who seems to have died of heart failure due to blocked arteries, or those who were lucky enough to treat their illness before it killed them, like Dave Winer, who got a bypass operation a little over a week ago.

All the warning signs are there. I smoke, eat fatty foods, don't get enough aerobic exorcise, and am stressed out by trying to accomplish too much during the course of a day (or at least worrying about what I'm not getting done). I am the proverbial heart-attack waiting to happen. Let see if I can keep this distinct possibility from becoming a reality.
jkb at 10:42 PM

From the "What-A-Country" Department:

Border Conflicts =>
"We're U.S. fans but we're Mexican fans first,'' said Jorge Magdaleno, a U.S. resident for 20 years. "We've got to stay true to the homeland. The U.S. pays the bills, but our true roots are still in Mexico.'' (from ESPN)

That's one thing I love about this country. You don't have to love this country to be part of it (which is why the "Love it or Leave it" school of thought is such a bunch of bunk). If you just provide something of value to someone else, chances are you'll do okay.

I for one would love to see Mexico advance to the next round of the World Cup, mainly because I think Team Mexico fans would appreciate it more than the average US fan would. Soccer (see, we can't even call the sport by it's correct name) in this country is for the young, with most Americans not continuing to play much beyond collage. However, you go to any elementary or high school around where I live in San Diego on the weekends and in the evenings and you see playing fields populated almost exclusively by Mexican and Central American immigrants. These men in their 20s, 30s and 40s may be mostly laborers and service workers during the work day, but are "footbol" stars by night, maybe recapturing some memory or feeling of their beloved but impoverished homeland that is years and miles away from their new life north of Tijuana. Their sons may grow up to play basketball or baseball and listen to hip-hop, but maybe their grandsons will be cheering on the latest US soccer stars from Barstow and East LA and Phoenix and Brownsville, the sons and grandsons of immigrants who were absorbed by this country then, in turn, changed it from within.
jkb at 12:00 PM

I'm working on a new template, I hope to have it done in a day or two (hard to get more than an hour of work in at a time (I know that's just a justification for lack of productivity, but hey, it's the only one i've got now (reminds me of that Jeff Goldblume quote from "The Big Chill": "A good justification is more important than sex ... When's the last time you went a week without a good justification" (Ohmygod, did I just quote The Big Chill? That's possibly the lamest thing I've done all week (I should really cut down on the use of aprenthesis as well (but they're just so gosh-darn useful! ;)))))).
jkb at 7:13 PM

From the department of obviating observations:

Keeping this blog thing going is harder than one would imagine when they're lost in the initial rush of blogger-living. Then real life comes back to try and reclaim some of it's lost real estate. You get bogged down creating a new template or some such thing when you should be writing your blog.

Whatayagonnado?
jkb at 12:20 AM

On the perils of good radio:

Prairie Home Distraction =>
The absolutely worst tool for blog productivity yet invented is the streaming feed for A Prairie Home Companion (I prefer to listen live via my NPR affiliate, KPBS - show schedule here). I type badly enough as it is. While I'm able to get some creative work done while the music is playing, but during streches of their patented nouveau Old Time Radio™ banter, I just can't focus my creativity while I'm so engaged in experienced in someone else's.

jkb at 12:37 PM

One thing I know for certain is that my cat loves me unconditionally. That is, when I have food in my hand.
jkb at 12:32 AM

My son Jacob's addition to today's blogging:

"jacob, bkk9jighggh8tlhjgk, khnikukjhjmhhhhhhy, jllnijiojuttgologgth,huuunh,,,,,k;liiiiiiyyin, mmmmmmmmmmmnnn,ighjghghj wgfwehewtheok ijlujkukihhhgh gbghygbjd;l giofgjghj"

[Translation of the words above, which are, of coarse, in a secret language]:

"The queen is so powerful because she has a dumb hairdo (ha ha ha ha ha). You are big, fat and ugly, said the queen to the aliens." (at least this is what he tells me, I wouldn't know myself)

Death on NPR =>
Driving back from work in overcast coastal North [San Diego] County, I'm having a cigarette and listening to ATC at around 5 PM, unwinding after a day of stripping bituminous roofing and inhaling termite droppings. I hear a story about Caroline Knapp, who wrote Drinking: A Love Story, who in many ways lived a very sad yet fulfilled life as a functional alcoholic writer, and married her partner of many years when in the terminal stages of lung cancer, in part as an pretense to have one more joyful event in the lives of her family and friends. This strikes a chord with me because this is precisely what happened to someone in my band. She married her partner after he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He died a few months later.

The next story is about NPR commentator Mike Harkins' Who recalls how his Scottish mother would sing with friends at get-togethers, and how she was eventually robbed of her ability to even speak due to emphysema, dying a year ago June 5th. After her death he found a box of old reel-to-reel tapes, one of them containing his mother singing like an sultry angel. The arc of the story is so compelling that I'm on the verge of sobbing uncontrollably about 5 minutes from my house. Listen if you can (requires Realplayer)

It seems like the universe has been dropping a lot of hints lately that I should quit smoking, lest I end up a statistic like the two women above. After nearly16 years of on-and-off smoking, I'm inclined to agree. You can only use your head as an ashtray for so many years before it starts to feel like one. Maybe I just have an increased awareness of my on mortality precipitated by my 36th birthday this past month. I can rationalize why it would be hard to stop all I want, but there will never be an easy time to quit, just as there probably will never be an easy time to die.
jkb at 11:39 PM

Blogs, apples, doctors: you make the connection.

What's it all about? =>
So why am I doing this? Is is to communicate to others, or is it purely a vehicle for personal expression, to hell with what other people may think. Why I'm blogging is going to influence the UI of the blog. Why bother having an elaborate list of links and searchable archives if no one else is going to read them?

I'm sure that blogging for me is equal parts curiosity, narcissism, free expression and a desperate search for approval. Sounds like life.

Anyway, I'm still trying to figure out the basics of my blog's UI: basic page layout, headings, separators, searching, meta-flags and such. I still don't even have an email link. Miles to go ...

Hello, Olo Chubb =>
Here' a link to the Hobbit Name Generator. Yours truly was given the name above. The resemblance is quite scary :(
jkb at 8:48 AM

This is an experiment in high-speed blogging. I've got 20 minutes before going to work, let's see if that's enough time for an insufferable windbag such as myself.

Links Etc. =>
Just of couple of pointers to send you on your way:

Life in the universe:"Is life a highly improbable event, or is it rather the inevitable consequence of a rich chemical soup available everywhere in the cosmos? Scientists have recently found new evidence that amino acids, the 'building-blocks' of life, can form not only in comets and asteroids, but also in the interstellar space."

(Oy, my daughter wants me to dive her to school, can't she see I'm blogging here?)

slam - Site Logging And Monitoring: Very cool interface for people who like outliners.

Statistics of Deadly Quarrels: "The same inflamed passions that give war its urgent human interest also stand in the way of scholarly or scientific understanding. Reaching impartial judgment about rights and wrongs seems all but impossible. Stepping outside the bounds of one’s own culture and ideology is also a challenge—not to mention the bounds of one’s time and place. We tend to see all wars through the lens of the current conflict, and we mine history for lessons convenient to the present purpose."

Interesting chart showing connections between nations in conflict.

Time's up, I'll try some more later.
jkb at 8:06 AM

Note to self: blog, blog, BLOG!

Blogs and the Memex =>
I imagine the genesis of my years-long fascination with blogging, or, more generally, the recording of experiences for sharing across a distributed, heterogeneous network, is reading Vanavar Bush's seminal essay "As We May Think", first published in 1945 in the Atlantic Monthly

The concept of the memex, a massive hyperlinked database encompassing the totality of a person's knowledge, appeals to my interest in narrative history, as well as providing an answer to the problems of organization and storage that have plagued me since I first used computers a decade ago. I am overwhelmed by the ocean of data I must wade through, and spend more time than is necessary organizing and archiving my data, time that would be better spent making the connections between data and datasets that produce useful, wealth-creating knowledge (wealth-creating in the more Fullerian sense, and not merely money producing, which is in a convenient abstraction allowing us to store wealth over time). I think blogging represents a method of experience recording that more accurately represents the way people think on a day to day level, as opposed to a well thought out essay, scholarly paper or other work of structured writing. Ideally, one would write about a subject multiple times in ones blog before writing an essay about it, possibly incorporating feedback from the previous iterations in the final work.

A few years back there was a company that made a product called "MyBrain" that created a visual framework for organizing bits of data, text, images, hyperlinks, programs, etc. into a structure that looked like those high school molecule models. The UI was intriguing, as you clicked on an item it would shift to the foreground and all the connections to related data would fan out around the particular item, seeming to fade into an imagined distance as the connections between items grew more remote. The program was still a little rough around the edges when I tried it years ago (it has since disappeared off the face of the earth for all I can determine, though I still might have the installation binary in an old disk image I have lying about), but it showed the very early stages of what a memex's UI might look like. In real life, we create meaning for objects in part relative to their relationship to other object. The MyBrain proto-memex software created meaning for data objects relative to their spatial orientation, distance and number of connections to other data objects. Not a perfect model of cognitive processes, but a useful step in the right direction.

To my mind, a good memex would combine aspects of blogs, address books, photo albums, reference works, archival software, interactive tutorials, search engines and the like, and access them via an intuitive yet highly customizable UI that uses an open API that allows all kinds of tools to manipulate and interact with the main object database. Maybe, if I'm lucky, I'll have the chance to use one or even help create one before I shuffle off ye olde mortal coil (which may not be that long, depending on whether not I can quit smoking).

For now I'll just be happy to blog away for now, and worry about making the connections later. Much, much more about Memexi later.
jkb at 12:47 AM

Hello World =>
Are you happy, Caleb? (We have a little thing going about this)

So, the question that anyone who's known me for any length of time should ask: Why didn't I start this nine years ago, five minutes after learning my first scraps of HTML? Caleb thinks it's some psychological impediment (like fear of failure or success, take your pick), whereas I think it has something to do with an evil galactic plot to stifle the one man in the universe who'll finally put all the pieces together and make sence of the whole big mess, or something like that.

The important thing is that the first post is in the can, and now I can move to more important tasks, like writing, redesigning the template, choosing a blogging tool (I'm using Blogger for convenience for now, but there are lots of tools out there, not to mention roll-your-own solutions), laying my plans for world domination, etc.

My daughter's at the prom, so you'll excuse me if I'm pre-occupied.
jkb at 11:43 PM

---

About me and this site =>
My name is John Bordage. I grew up in Maine, went to college in Boston, then moved to San Diego county, where I live with my wife, two kids, a cat, a roommate and his dog. I divide my attention between my family, my steady day-job as a carpenter, my freelance work as a tech consultant, playing drums in two bands, and staring at a computer screen for amusement and edification.

This site was developed using Dreamweaver 3, though the code was mostly writen by hand or cut-and-pasted from other examples. Work was done on both a Celron PC and a Mac G4, depending on which one my daughter was using at the moment.

Disclaimer =>
All opinions writen by me on this site are mine alone, and not those of my employer, my clients, my family, my bands, my mother, my pets, or any other person or entity that is not me. In fact, some of the opinions stated within are not even mine (sometimes I just like to say crap to see what it sounds like).

If you are easily offended, ill humored or just plain ignorant should avoid this whole affair, as I will probably say something to offend just about anyone at least once, unless of course you like to be annoyed, in which case read all you like, see what the fuck I care. Asshole.