From Jeffrey Zeldman, A Little Death:
To avoid pain, we began to feel less. The price is a wall you build around yourself. At first the wall protects you; then it merely shuts you off from the light of experience and the warmth of love.
Category Archives: Personal
It Feels So Good to be 3
A birthday present from Google: I have overtaken that other guy and I am now the #3 Matt in the world. Go look at it now, because Google can be a harsh mistress. If things continue to go well I might reach #1 and have to take down all my sites, like I promised.
For those of you commenting on the phantom ping from yesterday, I actually posted something and took it down. Don’t worry, a little editing and it’ll be back.
Return of the Posting
The hiatus is over.
Peace and blessings manifest with every lesson learned
If your knowledge were your wealth then it would be well earned
The holidays could not have been better, a delightful mix of friends and family that I will remember fondly for years to come. Presents, the least important part of the holidays, were notable this year in quality and thoughtfulness. Thank you. Presence, friends I have not seen in some time have been in town, and the new place has been somewhat of a hub. I consider myself lucky and blessed to be surrounded by such great people.
Just as writing is a habit, not writing is a habit. In my quest for relaxation over the past weeks I have developed this bad habit, and now it’s time to break it.
I have been extremely busy as of late. I always say I’m busy, but now more so. I’m doing my best to catch up before school starts, and software helps, but there are still personal notes to write, 614 photos to optimize and upload, countless emails to respond to, clients to work with, and incidentals like eating and sleeping.
Most importantly, I turn 20 in 5 days.
Happy Holidays
I am enjoying the holidays immensely, just keeping too busy to post much. I’ve got a couple of things in the pipeline, stay tuned.
Happy Birthday Sarah
Before it’s too late, I wanted to wish the wonderful Sarah Michele Williams who plays trumpet a happy 18th birthday.
Birthday Wish
On your Birthday,
Stretch for a sunbeam…
Reach for a star,
Go for a beautiful dream…Pick out some wishes,
no matter how far,
or how hard to reach
they may seem…Cherish some hopes
that are dear to your heart…And as a new year comes in view,
Treasure & keep them,
and know from the start,
that this year,
you can make them come true
I hope your birthday was as special as every day deserves to be for you.
New Child in the Meyer Family
I’m sure everyone is going to be making #eric_meyer :first-child type jokes so I’ll just link to the announcement, and say congratulations. 🙂
Something Else
I’m not sure what it is, but Paul Ford has done something amazing.
Breaking the Mold
Leonard does things different:
Hey, it looks like I’m the ‘Feed of the Day’ over at Feedster. Just goes to show that you don’t need things like ‘regular updates’ or ‘finished templates’ or ‘permalinks’ and ‘date stamps.’
I would link to the post, if I could. (Poor man’s permalink: scroll down on his homepage to just above the pictures of the Treo 600 and the Sidekick.)
Some Progress
More and more people are searching for an answer to typing problems and finding Dvorak. My Dvorak keyboard layout post continues to get interesting comments every couple of days, including this latest one from someone who apparently has a keyboard that is designed to switch between QWERTY and Dvorak, something I assumed existed somewhere but I’ve never come across. Maybe that’s the keyboard I should give away as the prize? The prize no one has claimed yet, by the way.
A Thousand Resolutions
For the next two weeks I’m going to try to write at least a thousand words a day, every day. Some of these words will be here, others may be other places, and some might not even be destined online. (Gasp!) When I met Tyler Cowen he told me that writing every morning is just about the best thing you can do to improve. We’ll see how this goes. I’ve always thought lots of reading was crucial to good writing as well, however my reading time is currently monopolized by John Locke. And thus if I start to write like him, it is within your rights to slap me upside the head.
One thing that’s making it nicer is WordPress has an option to make your posting <textarea> as big as you want and I already know all the quicktag shortcuts by heart so posting is as easy and pleasant as using a good editor like Dreamweaver or Topstyle. My textarea is currently 50 rows high, which is growing on me.
I would like to have more links in entries.
On Compliments
A compliment from someone you respect is worth infinitely more.
On The Matrix Revolutions
It was a really, really great movie. Go see it. No spoilers here. 🙂 We were the very first people in the movie theatre, which was nice because we got the best seats. One of the times I saw Reloaded I had second row seats way too close to the screen and it was pretty miserable.
If you’ve seen it already, let me know what you thought. Spoilers are open in the comments.
Descartes Joke
I just heard this gem:
Descartes walks into a bar.
The bartender walks up to him and says, “Would you care for a drink?”
Descartes replied, “I think not.” and disappears.
Opera and Hallowe’en
Haven’t been around here much lately, though I have been posting to the WordPress blog, coding like crazy, and generally keeping busy. However there are two recent events I wanted to highlight. The first was attending the opening night of Julius Caesar with the lovely Elissa. The performance was excellent, though longer than I am used to, and I would recommend it. I saw several people I know from school there, which doesn’t happen often, but they all seemed to disappear after intermission. Did we miss the party or something? We stayed in our nosebleed seats all night, but apparantly the thing to do is scope out empty seats during the first act and grab them after intermission. Noted.
The following night was the first official “party” I hosted at my new place, and it went well. Hallowe’en is my least favorite holiday, which isn’t to say I don’t like it, because it’s still a holiday, but as far as holidays go it’s the one I tend to enjoy the least. Anyway the party went well with food and candles and costumes and people I liked, and we ended up watching Ringu (the Japanese movie that inpsired The Ring), ordering pizza, and then by popular demand (with one dissenting vote) following it up with its American cousin, The Ring. Everyone had told me the Japanese version was supposed to be scarier and better, but I actually prefer the American version for a couple of reasons. Though things are less tidy, it’s more interesting and engaging. I hear a sequel is in the works. I didn’t dress up, but we did have one or two interesting ensembles.
Microsoft Embraces Blogging
It is always sad to see someone lose their job due to blogging. Shurely this matter could have been resolved amicable manner.
Chilly in Dallas
My goodness Scott Roman keeps his house as cold as I used to keep the classroom. I woke up this morning to the thought that “Gee, it’s cold,” and just dealt with it for a while, however eventually the air constantly blowing became too much and I got up to look at the thermostat to see where it was. It was set at 60, which I’ve seen before but what surprised me was that the temperature actually was 60 degrees. Insane. It’s woken me up though.
Ongoing
I usually write entries in my head before I put my fingers to the keyboard. The problem with this is that the longer I go between entries, the more that I try to cram into my mental post and inevitably the more that’s lost.
When you last left your Author he was gearing up for the second night of the Kemah Jazz Festival. It was fantastic, as expected, and he had good fun with the company. Tim Hagans made a guest appearance on Woody Witt’s set and it was the highlight of the night. Ended up leaving a little bit early due to tiredness, and slept well.
Saturday started with leftover pizza from Star Pizza, which, in hindsight, was most likely bad. Your Author was very, very hungry and ignored the fact that it tasted a little funny (it was vegetarian “gourmet” pizza anyway) and he was already on the way to rehearsal. By the end of the dress rehearsal with Steve Fulton things were queasy. But not too queasy to miss Kathy and Christine‘s birthday party that night, to which he was accompanied by Elissa. Too queasy to eat much there save a taste of really nice meat stick from Coffee “BBQ” Mike and a slice of cake, both of which were sorely regretted later.
Saturday night and Sunday morning were very harsh, and will not be discussed. Many thanks to my angel of a mother who helped smooth things over.
Sunday the Author was still sick, but knew he couldn’t miss the gig at Kemah, so went and played anyway. It went well, and many thanks to those such as Cody, Elissa, Greg, Sarah, and the others that attended. Food was still a bad idea though, and the trip had an early end. That night the fever came back strong and not much sleep was had.
Monday was a day of recovery. Tuesday was a return to normal affairs and catching up with things.
Which brings us to today. Things are very busy with many projects, but that’s par for the course. Tonight is the Radiohead concert which I’ve been looking forward to for months it seems. The weather is gorgeous. Can’t wait.
When Jish Comes to Town
It seems lately that the prolific Jish can’t get enough of Houston. He was just here last month and this Wednesday he made another appearance. (It’s even rumored he may be back next month.) Last time we all met at the Crazy Cantina and that was the plan for this month but apparently they were a little too crazy over there so the Cantina is no more. Christine luckily found this out last week and moved the party down the street to Cabo’s. There still wasn’t quite enough air conditioning (or maybe the company and conversation was just too hot) but it was all in all pretty cool as we got an entire room to ourselves. (For better or worse, some people had trouble finding it.)
There was just too much going on that night to even begin to cover it all but I’ll add that my photos from the night are now online.
Other posts about the night:
Note: I posted the first of what I hope to be many stealth disco movies to that album, but it’s too dark and I can’t figure out how I could adjust the levels to lighten it. If you have any suggestions regarding this please let me know.
New Business Cards
Nothing brightens a long day (or night) like fun new business cards. If you’re in to this sort of thing, here’s mine:
If you’d like one (or two, one to pass on) let me know. In other news I heard a rumor that there may be navigation at the top of the page sometime soon. We shall see.
Athenian
It’s appropriate to write about this topic as so many changes are happening all around the world, but particularly in my own life. A child of the web, weaned on ADSL, at some point in my development I developed an insatiable thirst for change, newness. Whether this was an inherit quality magnified by the hyperlinked nature of the web or whether it was actually developed as a result of my exposure, I don’t know.
My desktop is a randomly generated fractal pattern, changing every two minutes. Before that it would rotate between about a hundred random photographs from my photolog. When listening to music at home I’m more inclined to put my entire collection on random (a virtue of having them all in electronic format) than pick any one CD. Anything that doesn’t constantly change loses my interest over time until I’ve moved on.
Now this isn’t true of everything in my life, though it may be more than I like to admit. The design of this site, after changing every month for several months, has remained relatively constant over the past year or so. When driving I’ll often attach to a single CD and listen to it repeatedly for anywhere from a day to weeks. (Fiona Apple comes to mind.) My tribe of friends has settled down more than it has in the past. I’ve settled down more.
I saw my friend Alex Jones today and one thing I like about him is that he never looks the same twice, every time you see him his hair in particular can be completely different from the last time you saw him. (I should find some pictures.) That’s a quality I’ve tried out myself, but I’ve never been successful to any significant degree.
Most of all I’m curious how this chaotic thirst affects the things I do. This current design, once finished, will probably be around for a while. However at the top of every page is a randomly rotating thumbnail drawing from no small corpus of photos. If I didn’t touch anything else on the site, you could refresh every minute of every day for the next week (roughly) and never see the same thing twice. Is it too much? Am I alone? Looking back at every significant website I have created for myself since I began, there has always been an element of controlled chaos, a random rotator or quote or time or weather or timer or whatever the technology would permit me at the time.
Why am I so afraid of the static?
Getting back to the web at large, it keeps me content. There is a constant stream of new information coming in, and I don’t even frequent traditional news sites or use a RSS aggregator. First there are stats, thousands of referrers every day to dozens of sites, each referring URI representing an avenue of exploration. Technorati is an extension of this, cleaning things up and alerting you to something you might have otherwise missed. The WordPress Support Forum has frequent traffic, and represents hours and hours of possible diversions not only in itself but also in the actions it elicits. I’ve shunted all but a few of my subscriptions to lists, procmail keeping them out of inbox and out of mind, but still there is a constant stream of new communication, beautiful in its asymmetry; I can address it at any time, and do. Let’s not even touch instant messaging, the killer app of online communication and singly the greatest timesuck of anyone overly connected.
There aren’t enough hours in the day.