So, I plan. Nothing crazy obsessive-compulsive, just a rough idea of 5-6 main meals we can make, plus various things for breakfasts and lunch. Rob and I both work from home, so we eat in the vast majority of the time and only go out for lunch or dinner two or three times a week.

As an example, here’s the menu plan I cobbled together earlier today:

• Soba salad with spinach + edamame (dinner, leftovers for lunch)
• Beef curry (dinner, leftovers for lunch)
• Saag aloo (to have with beef curry)
• Ramen (w/ pork, scallions & bokchoy — dinner)
• Beef & mushroom stirfry with noodles or rice (dinner, leftovers for lunch)
• Leek & potato soup (dinner, leftovers for lunch)
• Chana masala & rice (dinner, leftovers for lunch)
• Bacon & Eggers (breakfast, weekend)
• Muslix & yogurt (breakfast, 2-3 times)
• Cereal w/ berries (breakfast, 2-3 times)
• Steel-cut oatmeal (breakfast)

And that pretty much gets us through the week, with a few cheese & cracker or toast snacks here and there, and enough produce to throw together an extra side or snack if needed.

The shopping list, not including stuff we already have on hand looks something like what’s below. I do organize it in order of where stuff is in the store because that just makes life easier:

• Limes (3)
• Spinach (lg pkg)
• Green onions
• Ginger
• Garlic
• Bokchoy or napa cabbage
• Shitake mushrooms
• Eggplant
• Onions (3lb)
• Potatoes (5lb)
• Leeks (2 pkg)
• Celery
• Carrots
• Blueberries or raspberries
• Bread for toast
• English muffins
• Bacon
• Beef brisket/flank
• Pork tenderloin
• Stewing beef (2 pkg)
• Milk
• Yogurt
• Frozen spinach (2-3)
• Sugar
• Tomato paste
• Basmati rice
• Beef stock (2-3)
• Coffee beans (2)
• Muslix

And there you have it. My grocery list for tomorrow. Exciting times.

The Rules

• Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post. (see above)
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post. (see below)
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs. (see below)
• Let them know they’ve been tagged. (you’ll just have to trust me)

The Seven Things

1) I figure skated for many years as a kid and was pretty good at it. I quit when I was 17.

2) I haven’t driven since sometime in 1994. Until this year I just never lived somewhere where I needed a car. My license has since expired, so right now I find myself in the interesting position of owning a vehicle (a second-hand van I got for a song) but not being able to drive it.

3) I used to collect comic books. I still have two decent-sized boxes, most of which are old X-Men and related mutie titles. I am an annoying person to watch the X-Men movies with.

4) I didn’t get interested in food until around 2001 and didn’t really start cooking at all until 2002-2003. In 2001 I was living in Montreal, and it was there that I discovered that food can be f&*%ing incredible. The combination of cheap rent, high salary, and a city full of insanely awesome restaurants expanded my epicurean horizons by several orders of magnitude. Until then I’d largely lived on ramen, kraft dinner, and boiled potatoes with butter. I am not joking.

5) I was addicted to the Asheron’s Call MMORPG (an early precursor of World of Warcraft), and played it with obsessive-compulsive fervour for two years. Funnily enough, the game is still going, having recently celebrated their 100th monthly update. I hope they leave it going forever, if only so I never have to completely say goodbye to Dereth. Holtburg, represent.

6) I was a total goth in highschool (more of an early precursor to goth since goth wasn’t goth then). There is no photographic evidence of this that I am aware of, and I would like it to stay that way.

7) I really love camping, but never get a chance to go any more. I’ve even gone winter camping, which is crazy fun although your feet are basically wet the whole time.

Seven People

• Shaver – Because he introduced me to Asheron’s Call.
• Lilly – Because he’s fun.
• Melissa – Because she’s awesome.
• Mary – Because she’s also awesome.
• Zab – Because he’s Zab.
• Peter Rukvina – To get this meme over to PEI.
• Nicholas McDowell – Because I’ve known him since something stupid like 1994 but haven’t actually met him yet. Yay internet.

• Time (magazine)
• CF-105 Arrow
• Pong
• Yellowstone Caldera
• Tricorder
• The Ant and the Grasshopper
• Five elements (Japanese philosophy)
• Fibonacci number
• Caraway
• Fiddlehead fern
• Teleprinter
• George Eliot
• Swamp Thing
• Black Stone
• Blipvert
• Chartreuse (color)
• Pomelo
• Charles Rennie Mackintosh
• Maltose
• Aircraft flight control systems
• Hadrian’s Wall
• Katherin Hepburn
• Abraham Lincoln
• Letterpress printing
• Shuswap language
• Nehi
• Sagrada Familia
• House Hippo
• Civitas
• The Education of Little Tree
• Clifton Cathedral
• Isobutane
• Vashti
• Oregon Death with Dignity Act
• Ashanti mythology
• Ozymandias
• Gecko (layout engine)
• Japanese map symbols
• Persian Empire
• Eurotas River
• Schrodinger’s cat
• ARM architecture
• Chaordic
• The Wire
• Kubler-Ross model
• Chac Mool
• Standing Stones of Stenness
• Chimay Brewery
• Brownie (camera)
• Gallia Narbonensis
• River Phoenix
• Molcajete
• Pelagic zone
• Containerization
• Horse archer
• Roger Tory Peterson

Spending a full two weeks offline turned out to be more interesting than I expected. Like many of my friends, I believed that I’d be itching for some connectivity or email or news or Twitters within a matter of days. But I wasn’t. I thought I’d end up feeling cut off and isolated having no access to Web feeds, news sites, email, or TV. But I didn’t. I thought that, by the end of my exile, I’d be relieved when I was finally able to get back online. But that didn’t happen either.

Instead what I discovered is that being online all the time is profoundly fragmenting, stressful, and distracting. It turns out that I really don’t need to be incessantly jacked into the Matrix, that having constant, up-to-date information about all the myriad details of global, economic, political, and technology news doesn’t make me better, stronger, faster, more knowledgeable, or better informed. What it does make me is more scattered, erratic, stressed, edgy, and flighty.

Yes, flighty.

During my two week exile from the Intarwebs, I rediscovered my ability to read long, complex pieces of writing in a single sitting. I regained a sense of calm and an ability to focus of which I had forgotten I was capable. Without the constant distraction of email and IM and IRC and Twitter and Growl and SMS and Web feeds and the telephone and everything else, I found myself more present than I have felt in a long, long time. By contrast, the constant barrage of interruptions and distractions feels very much like a system that appears stable only because all the subsystems are equally unstable. Let just one of those subsystems get out of whack and the whole mess comes crashing down. This, I’ve realized, is neither wise nor healthy.

I also discovered that the lack of a clear line between “work” and “not-work” makes me insane. Now that I have regained some tenuous grasp of my sanity (which I hadn’t realized I’d lost until I stumbled across it again), I’m going to try to hang on to and strengthen it by being very, very disciplined about establishing and maintaining work/not-work boundaries. I’ve been working from home for four years now so this could be a bit tricky, and I’m bound to backslide now and again (and crunch-times are fair game, of course), but it’s a worthy and necessary goal. So far it’s working out.

It’s just time to slow down. I’ve spent the past eleven years continually ramping up my information consumption and communications channels, while gradually blurring the lines between work and not-work to the point of invisibility. I’ve been boiling that frog so unbelieveably slowly that I really had no idea just how stressful it had become. But now I do, so now it’s time to start fixing it.

Vacation lesson #2: Slow isn’t just for food.

Parchment Moon

Parchment Moon is a weblog about books, writing, language, and other literary things. Mostly books, tho’. Anyhow. There you go.

All that aside, I did make something yummy for dinner tonight that I would like to eventually recreate. Here’s the recipe:

Chunky Sausage Pasta

Ingredients

• 3 hot Italian sausages, cut into chunks while raw
• 1 red onion, chunky chop
• 1 large green pepper, chunky chop
• 3 cloves of garlic, minced or pressed
• 1 jar Classico Spicy Red Pepper sauce
• Fresh ground black pepper
• Fresh grated parmasean cheese (get the good stuff, really)
• Tortiglioni pasta (or ziti)

Procedure

Heat a good sized sauce pan to medium or medium hot. Drop in sausage chunks and let brown well on one side, then stir/shake. Keep doing this until sausage is cooked through. Some sausage bits will stick to the bottom, and if you’ve got the temperature at the right level, they’ll get nice and brown. Don’t worry, they’ll unstick later.

When the meat is cooked through, toss in the peppers and onions and stir well. Cook these for a little while until starting to soften. Add minced garlic and black pepper and stir, continuing to cook until the veggies are cooked but still a little crisp. Pour in the full jar of sauce, stir well, and turn heat to low. Let this simmer for a while, stirring occassionally.

Boil a large pot of salted water. Cook pasta. Tortiglioni is a nice big fat chunky pasta that goes well with the chunky sauce. Drain (don’t rinse).

Pasta goes in bowls, sauce goes over it, and top with grated parmasean and some more fresh black pepper. This is a little spicy and would go nicely with a fairly bold red wine.

Feeds two with leftovers for lunch.

As it turns out, however, that’s OK. The reason I was even looking at it is because I’m replacing it. Posting individual photos was simply turning out to be a pain in the butt, so I just stopped doing it. I’m going to be using Lussumo Filebrowser instead. This is an extraordinarily slick little piece of php coding (no database) that basically builds a gallery of images (or whatever other file types you have), including, if you so choose, thumbnail previews. It’s…just neat. And tiny! Those Lussumo guys seriously seem to know what they’re doing.

Anyhow…the existing photo site is going away and will be replaced in the nearish future. I think I’ll start going through and organizing my photos right now, in fact…

• Sitting in front of a computer for more than four hours/day is potentially dangerous, according to experts. Averaging at 12+ hrs/day, I’m clearly wicked Xtreme.
• Exercise is good. Also, fun. Also, it requires actual athletic footwear, or it will wreck your ankles. I will be getting a new pair of Nikes this afternoon.
• Massage therapy hurts. Like someone poking you under your shoulderblades with an icepick sort of hurt. I’m sorry, but seriously, if I’m gonna give someone $70/hr for a massage, it’s going to be at a spa, thanks. What the hell?

Anyhow, that’s the end of physio yet again. I’m continuing on with the gym, of course, since a) it’s fun, b) it gets me away from the computer for a while, c) it’s good for me, and d) it’s not expensive. Hoorah.

Later I’m going to the dentist. On the way, I’m gonna buy a (muchly belated) present for my dad’s birthday and a pair of sneakers. And maybe a book. Such fun. (It’s really nice outside.)

The issue is this: there is always more that I want to do than I have time. I suspect that the vast majority of us are in the same boat. On a slightly related topic, there also seem to be things that take up a disproportionate amount of time, attention, energy, or personal sanity than they’re worth.

I’ve been trying to address both of these issues lately, in two ways: First, I have started to reduce the sheer quantity of things I do (ostensibly in favour of quality); Second, I have started to simply drop things that cause me more stress than they’re worth.

An example of the first is that I have reduced the amount of time I spend playing video games in favour of spending more time reading, writing, and working on work-related things. This is good. I’m not saying that gaming is bad, because it’s not — gaming is a perfectly valid hobby of which I am a long-time fan. It’s certainly a far sight better than rotting your brain watching reality television, for example. For me right now, however, gaming has just dropped off the bottom of the priority list. This will likely change when Spore is released, but for now gaming is largely out.

The second is best exemplified by the number of forums and mailing lists I’ve been dropping. For a long time, I’ve spent a lot of time reading and posting on a variety of web forums and mailing lists, most of which are either game-related or peripherally work-related. A while ago I realized that some of these, for various reasons, were wasting too much of my time and energy without really returning any sort of real value. So, I’ve been dropping them like hot rocks, dumping, unsubscribing, or debookmarkifying them en masse. The sporadic nugget of useful information to emerge simply wasn’t worth the overall cost.

The end-goal of all of this stuff-reduction is to regain my ability to focus. Once upon a time I used to be able to sit reading a book, utterly rapt to the point where people had to actually yell at me in order to get my attention. This is not the case any more. I have what appears to be a (mild and) acquired form of Adult Attention Deficit Disorder. Not actual ADD because I’m fairly certain that I can control the situation if I try, but ADD for all effective intents and purposes.

Some of the symptoms are:

• Inability to focus on any one item or task for more than 15-30 mins (or, often, less) without my mind drifting.
• Inability to maintain interest in a single item or task for more than 15-30 mins without having to switch over, even just for a moment, to another application or task.
• Inability to actually finish a book-length piece of writing without starting another one halfway through.
• Inability to complete tasks without switching at some mid-point and doing something else for a while.

These aren’t all the symptoms, but they pretty much cover the major issues that annoy me the most.

I blame a number of things, of course, but primarily I lay the blame squarely at the feet of these infernal machines: modern desktop computers.

Back in the day a typewriter was a typewriter, a radio was a radio, a television was a television, a telephone was a telephone. No longer. Now I find myself sitting in front of a machine that can effectively emulate all of these machines and more, all at once, all on the same screen. My TV picture is sitting to the top left of my typewriter, the radio interface (the playlist of which I control) is a mere button press away, I have four different personal communication clients open, monitoring (and taking part in) dozens of different, ongoing conversations. I have news feeds coming in at a rate even the big news agencies could not imagine a decade ago. And that’s just this one screen, during the course of a regular work day.

I have completely lost my ability to focus because there are simply too many things constantly clamouring for my attention.

It needs to stop, and I have started to take some steps towards more deliberately managing my own attention. I, like all people, can only really effectively focus on one thing at a time. Anything else, even a single simple interruption by email, IRC, the radio, or what have you, splits that focus. I’m starting to believe that it’s harmful — not only to personal productivity, but also to a person’s sanity. There is no possible way that everyone I know who is my age actually suffers from real Attention Deficit Disorder, but it sure seems like it some times.

Me, I just can’t keep it up, so I’m beginning to be very deliberate in what I pay attention to through the course of a day. So far, it has been an interesting exercise.

That said, I have 1000 words of writing to do.

The food was so good, in fact, that we repeated the entire process on Sunday, except starting earlier (4pm) and skipping the 2 hour seasoning smoke-a-thon. Just burgers, potatos, and corn on the cob this time, but still excellent. More so because we managed to eat while it was still light outside. After this weekend’s festivities, I am absolutely sold on charcoal grills. Gas is easier and more convenient, of course, but food grilled over charcoal is just tastier. Yum. Double yum.

Of course, having spent most of the last two days sitting in a lawn chair tending a grill and drinking (fulfilling my duty as a Canadian on a long weekend in summer), I’ve totally failed to do anything else. No reading, no writing, no cleaning, no working out, etc etc. And, really, that’s OK by me. Regularly scheduled silliness will begin again tomorrow.

I really don’t have a whole lot to say beyond that. It was neither an exciting nor particularly insightful day. I worked, I went to physio, I made nachos, I did my writing (2750 words, all total garbage), now I’m writing my weblog entry. I didn’t have time to do any reading, unfortunately, but I’ll make up for it on the weekend.

Speaking of which, it’s a long weekend, but only in Canada. I’m not sure whether I should take tomorrow off, actually take all of Monday off (which is complicated given that I work for a primarily-US organization), or split my holiday between Friday and Monday. Probably the latter, particularly if the weather holds.

The first part is that I have started writing again. The plan is this: one thousand words per day, minimum, outside of weblogs and personal journals. The trick here is that the subject matter has to be different. No blithering on for one thousand words about the random crap with which I filled my day. No talking about websites or games or other random crap I found on the internet. This is supposed to be more exploratory stuff — fiction, non-fiction, whatever. Exploration into realms about which I do not normally write. Delving deep into memory and self to carve out pieces and put those on paper. It’s actually a lot less cliche than it sounds.

I’ve been on this new regimen for three days now. The first day I managed to get twenty-one hundred words out before I faltered and fell silent. Day two was seventeen-hundred words. Day three (just now) was another seventeen-hundred. I’m not allowed to cheat, either. If I do two thousand words on one day, it doesn’t mean I get out of the one thousand words the next. Minimum one thousand words, every day. Maximum: unlimited. No carryovers. No touchbacks. Tag.

It has been interesting so far, in that I’ve already found myself thinking about what I could write about at various points throughout the day. I could write about my childhood heros, perhaps, or my recently acquired love of cooking. Maybe I could put out a thousand words about Zen and what it means to me, or at least how I interpret it (which, for what it’s worth, is probably quite unlike what any real Zen student would tell you). How about how I learned to love reading and language? Maybe a piece about my utter disdain for current advertising and marketing and how they’re missing the boat by trying to lie to us incessantly, bombarding us with blipverts that we simply Do Not Believe (seriously, guys, your audience is smarter than you think). I could easily churn out one thousand words about joining a (women-only) gym and starting a new workout regimen (don’t let anyone tell you for even a second that women are less competitive than men). A thousand words about the death and secret rebirth of television as a medium for storytelling. A thousand words about my first trip to the local library (which I haven’t yet done). When I think of it, I jot these ideas down for later retrieval, but haven’t needed to use them yet.

When I actually sit down to write, of course, all bets are off. As yet, there has been no pre-planning. Tonight’s Daily (I’m calling them Dailies) started off with a somewhat vociferous rant against Margaret Atwood which churned itself into a thousand words about Canadian Culture. Yesterday was about cooking, food, dinner parties, and some reflections thereupon. The day before was (quick pause while I go check) about embracing change, later turning into a bit about the strange clash between horror and beauty that we all endure every single day. None of these topics were preselected — they just happened to be what poured out of my brain and into the keyboard while I had the word processor open to a blank page.

Naturally, the vast majority of what I’ve written is utter trash. Breathless at times, totally disorganized, wholly unrevised. Just raw. But that’s ok. For now, that’s all I want — I just want to get into the habit of producing a certain amount of raw content on a daily basis. Writing, you see, has two phases. Generating raw content is, by necessity, the first. The second, which can only happen once the raw content is available, is revising. Unlike sculptors, writers don’t start with a block of material and just spend their time taking away the parts that don’t belong. We need to create the block first, and only then can we start chipping away at the edges. Right now, I just need to produce giant chunks of rough marble.

The second part of my new writerly regimen is this, my weblog. In addition to the one thousand word not-for-other-people minimum, I intend to spend ten to fifteen minutes churning out an entry for my weblog (not including revision and additions). This has two purposes. First, it will mean my weblog gets updated daily, which I’m hoping will draw in more readers. Behind this interminably timid exterior, I really do crave an audience. Second, it will get me used to the idea of actually writing for an audience every day. The one thousand word minimum is all well and good, but if I don’t get used to the idea of having other people actually read my writing, I’ll eventually end up cheating by typing the word “house” a thousand or more times, until the word itself becomes utterly nonsensical and loses all meaning. So, yeah. The weblog entries are intended to keep me at least partially anchored in reality. Writers write to be read. Anything else is just intellectual wanking.

The third and final part of my new regimen involves reading. I used to read a lot. Books upon books every week. I had no TV, I wasn’t caught up in the whole gaming craze, I wasn’t yet jacked into the Matrix (read: Internet). I had a lot of hours to fill, and I gleefully filled them with books. In bulk. When I lived in Montreal I would spend $300-$500 every paycheque on books, often going downtown daily just to browse the bookshops.

Then I stopped reading. Not entirely of course, but from a diet of three or four books per week, I ended up down to about one per month, usually read in ten page increments right before bed. That’s no damned good. I love reading, and so I’m going to make time for it again. I don’t have a minimum daily allotment, but I’d like to be able to spend a couple of hours every day, on average, just sitting on my butt with a book.

And with that, I think I shall.

(43 mins, including revision. 1056 words. So much for 10-15 mins.)

Our day was relatively sedate, but that was largely because we began our celebrations Thursday evening, finally crashing at around 2am. Today was mostly sleeping in, eating bacon & eggers for breakfast, having a nap, cleaning some, and doing laundry. Dinner was garlic-ginger pan-roasted pork tenderloin with asparagus. After dinner we did what we usually do (gaming, reading), and watched an episode of Deadwood. Now it’s time for bed. All in all, not a bad day off.

I’ve set up reading spot in my office now, with a comfy chair, a table for my tea, a reading lamp, and an ottoman. I’ve finished On Writing Well, and am now rifling through the shelves trying to find something to read next. Oddly, the next book about writing I picked up — Getting the Words Right — isn’t terribly well written. The Invisible Computer, while interesting and written by someone I’ve admired since I did my thesis (Donald Norman), isn’t quite what I feel like reading at the moment. In the interim, I’m poking my way through the collected short stories of Roald Dahl. I haven’t yet gone to the library to get a library card and a book, so maybe I’ll do that tomorrow.

Also on the topic of tomorrow, I think I’ll use the leftover pork to make ginger pork fried rice for lunch. Yum.

The biggest change is that it’s finally flexible-width rather than fixed width, which I much prefer. It seems to work fine in Firefox, Safari, and Camino (on Mac), and kinda-sorta mostly in IE on Windows. I haven’t tested it in any other browser/OS combos at this point, so if you’re seeing problems with it anywhere, let me know. Oh, the photoblog archive pages are still messed up in IE, but I’m starting to not care. I’ll fix it eventually, I just mostly can’t stand browsing in Windows because it renders fonts like poop.

I’ve also dreamed whole books, including one during my thesis that I really wish actually existed because it was perfect for what I was working on.

Anyhow. I have seriously bizarro-world dreams sometimes. Sometimes they get too scary tho and I wake up screaming. I hate when that happens.

2) I would play, to completion, in no particular order: Neverwinter Nights (all three campaigns); Diablo II + Lord of Darkness expansion pack; Dungeon Siege + Expansion pack; Bard’s Tale (maybe…it looked a little weak); Morrowind: Game of the Year edition; Thief 3. There are several others.

3) I would read the ridiculously massive pile of books that I own but have not yet read. I would also bum a few books off some select friends and read those, too. I would sit on a patio somewhere with huge pitchers of iced tea and an unending supply of popsicles, and I would read my way through an entire summer. I have fond memories of doing just that during summer holidays when I was a kid. Popsicles and the entire Hardy Boys series, for example, on a lawn chair in the backyard at my folk’s house beside the pool. (There’s something in that story that probably explains my current love for crime drama.)

4) I would sit down and finally learn all this DOM and CSS and JavaScript stuff properly. CSS positioning still makes my brain hurt as often as not. I have lots of ideas for cool web designs, I just never get around to doing anything with them. I’d like to do a bunch of WordPress themes, for example, and a few dozen MediaWiki skins. This is something I’m more likely to get to than some of the others, however, so there is hope here!

Well, there’s four things I’d do. There are others, but now my head is getting all filled with cool ideas and vague frustration, so I’ll stop.

2) There are a lot of people on the internet who seem to care way too much about really stupid things. The examples of this are endless, so I won’t bother going into specifics. Mostly I just want to say that a lot of folks just need to get a grip.

3) There are a lot of people on the internet who care a great deal about things that aren’t so stupid. Sifting these few delicious grains out of the deluge of chaff is hard. I’m becoming increasingly impatient with the internet and the content it provides. We need some sort of system that can help with this. Google is good at what it does, but it does not help sort by quality. Technorati and Blogdex and other similar services also suffer from the quantity-over-quality disease. There has to be a better way.

4) House M.D. is a good TV show. You should watch it. Hopefully it won’t get cancelled.

5) The new Battlestar Galactica, I’ve decided after long consideration, is the best sci-fi television series in history. I’m not kidding. It blows all the Star Treks clear out of the water, and I actually liked some of those. Firefly is the only other sci-fi series I can think of that even comes close.

6) I am sad that Enterprise has been cancelled, but not nearly so sad as I was about Firefly.

7) I wish the Max Headroom Show would just come out on DVD already. Come on, people.

8) Over the past couple of years I’ve realized that geek culture is now mainstream. Games, Comic Books, Bad TV Shows, Computers, and all that. I guess there were a lot more of us holed up in our parents’ basements playing Space Invaders, reading X-Men, programming NPC-generators on our Commodore 64s, and watching Kung-Fu than I thought. I wonder what constitutes “geek culture” now that will become mainstream when today’s young geek hits her 30s? I bet I wouldn’t recognize it if it hit me in the face.

9) I like ecto.

10) RSS feeds change how I use the internet. I am not entirely sure I like these changes. With RSS feeds, I do not browse, I scan. I also find myself relying on them, when there are a large number of sites out there that do not have them or to which I haven’t subscribed. Push technology just ain’t all that, no more now than it was in 1997. There’s a lesson in here somewhere about quantity over quality again, and how the sheer quantity of poorly-filtered (it’s not really unfiltered any more) information forces us to skim reams and reams of garbage simply because we don’t have time to dig through it all to find the stuff that’s actually worth reading.

11) We need much, much better filters. Also, librarians.

My previous job, I’ve come to realize, was really draining me more than I thought. Between the daily rush-hour commutes on the gawdawful busses, the spirit-sucking and somewhat grimy cube farm, and the sheer powerlessness of my position within the organization, I was just burnt. I like being able to do good work. I like being busy. I like having the ability to solve problems and to put those solutions into action. Take those three things away and apparently I turn into a zombie drone like so many other people.

I wonder how much more we could accomplish, collectively, if we were a whole lot better of matching good people with useful work.

In other news, I got a new mouse for my laptop today. It’s a tiny little three-button bluetooth doodad with a scrollwheel. It’s very, very nice. It’s a Rad-Tech BT500, and it seems like a pretty solid purchase. Cute case, too.

I also paperworked like crazy today. Filed filed expenses, filed current expenses, sorted out travel insurance for my next trip (Apr 4-8, back in MV), made a doctor’s appointment, filed business purchase receipts, filed personal paperwork, and headed downtown to renew my health card. All of this inspired by the new stapler I bought this morning. I tried to find a red Swingline, but settled for a black one. Also got paperclips, staples, some envelopes, and a filing…er…box. Case. Thing. Anyhow, it’s all in order now. Just have to keep it that way.

Other than that, not much is going on. I’ve got a birthday coming up, at which point I’ll be 34. For some reason that seems sort of old. 33, not so much. The only other birthday I’ve felt like this was 27. I have no idea why. The “milestone” birthdays — 19, 20, 25, 30 — have all just blown by like nothing. For no apparent reason, 27 and 34 stick out.

That’s it. New mouse, new stapler, busy busy, birthday. My life is like partying 24 hours a day.

1: The Puffin Group was an Open Source consulting company I joined in 1999. My boss then happens to be the same guy who is my boss now. I guess I did something right.

3: No job is all fun. As my dad says, “that’s why they call it ‘work’.”

Travel tends to stress me out. I don’t mind being other places (although I do miss my boyfriend and kitties), but the process of traveling always makes me a little edgy. I just don’t like airports, mostly. For the most part I find them to be poorly designed, and bad design (particularly in situations where there are tight deadlines and overwrought processes) just annoys me.

For example, when I got to the Ottawa airport to come out here last weekend I was a little tired, clearly undercaffeinated, and carrying slightly more luggage than I could comfortably manouever on my own. The result? First, I got into the wrong check in line. Then I ended up filling out two forms that I didn’t need. Then I figured out that I was in the wrong line, and went and found the right line. The right line was much, much longer than the wrong line, and was full of people going on vacation with ridiculous amounts of luggage (usually including skis). Cranky, undercaffeinated families with cranky kids in a cranky situation. Someone dropped (and shattered) a glass bottle of orange juice. Good work. I got to manouever my stuff around a sticky puddle full of broken glass. Yay.

After check-in, things simplified a great deal because I basically sprinted to beat several overladen caravans of people heading towards the security gate. Woo. I’ve long since masterd the art of having nothing metal on my person, so never have problems with the metal detectors. Score. One quick bag check (keys), and I was on my way. In spite of pre-planning, I got to my gate only a few dozen minutes before boarding. That’s cutting things a little close for me, so I’m overshooting tomorrow.

So, there. A little story about me and airports. I’m looking forward to being home.

In other news, it’s been an interesting week. I’ve discussed a lot of ideas about a lot of things with a lot of people, and I think there’s a good foundation in place (at least idea-wise) for getting the project up and running in a minimal amount of time. As always, consensus building is going to be the most challenging part, but that’s pretty much how it always is for these sorts of things. We’ll see how that goes.

I’m in California this week to get started at my new job with the Mozilla Foundation. I’m now solidly equipped with a laptop and a mission. I’ve met a bunch of good people, seen my first Apple store, and am still struggling with jetlag. Work has been interesting so far, and the rest of the week is shaping up to be more interesting still. Right now, approaching the midnight hour, I’m mostly just hoping that the duck (over whose residence my hotel room hangs) doesn’t actually quack its little head off every day from 6:30am until 7:00am like it did this morning. It’s a mallard, for the record, and is cute enough as duckies go.

Two things I’ve noticed about California (that I somehow didn’t notice before): 1) Everyone drives everywhere, and 2) Getting a taxi in downtown Mountain View is more difficult than you might expect. I suspect these are related. I walked 15 mins from the office to a pub for dinner and didn’t see another pedestrian. I think the sidewalks are a symbolic nod to some simpler, non-space-age. Also, the cherry trees are in bloom. That in itself is sort of blowing my mind, given that back home it snowed this morning, and Ottawa won’t see flowering things for a handful of weeks or so.

Apple store quickie review: overrated. They did have Things in Stock, but when actually confronted by the $150 USD pricetag on the Shuffles, my inner-penny-pincher kicked in with a bit of sticker shock. I got a pack of iPod Socks and a laptop bag instead. They didn’t have any bluetooth mice. They didn’t have too many mice at all, really. All in all, I think the online Apple Store is the way to go. The Future is Now for ecommerce, I guess. I think maybe my patience with malls and retail storefronts in general has simply worn to transparency. Someday I’ll post a rant about modern megabookmarts and the quality of customer experience they provide.

That’s really about all the news I have at the moment. I’m here for the rest of the week, then back home very very early Saturday. I’m a bit of a homebody, you see, so I’m already sort of looking forward to getting back, even though the palm trees around here are pretty hella cool. Must remember to take some photos before I leave.

“Keep fighting against the uninformed who think writing – here or anywhere – is a waste of time and effort. If anything will save us, it’s the imagination – and there’s no way better way to keep the imagination alive than to write or to read. My mentor, Thorton Wilder, once said that cruelty is nothing more than a failure of the imagination — and all I can say is that there’s a lot of that going around these days…”

If you’re out there with a drink in hand, give a silent toast to Hunter, TIFF, and Elliott Smith tonight, would you? So much brilliance, too soon taken from us.

I don’t consider myself a “blogger” in the mainstream sense of the word — I have a website of which the core is a diary-like text (you’re soaking in it) which I happen to update more-or-less daily. I too have an intense dislike of “the ugly neologism blog“, and refuse to use it in reference to myself (Merriam Webster bedamned). I also do not, in any way, think that this website makes me a “journalist”, a “columnist”, or really anything that could be accidentally or otherwise confused with some sort of professional, peer-reviewed writer.

Now, that said, Mr. Gorman (the ALA President in question) has penned this article which honestly has the feel and quality of an average “blog” entry. Here are some excerpts (for those of you who cannot read complex texts more than 2-3 paragraphs long):

The Google phenomenon is a wonderfully modern manifestation of the triumph of hope and boosterism over reality. Hailed as the ultimate example of information retrieval, Google is, in fact, the device that gives you thousands of “hits” (which may or may not be relevant) in no very useful order.

Here problem is the statement that Google is “hailed as the ultimate example of information retrieval”. Google is a search engine. It is, by far, currently the most efficient means of finding data and information on the web. It is nothing more than that. It is not a library. It does not do anything at all to help us organize, synthesize, or make sense of this information. I don’t know nor have I read about anyone who thinks that Google is anything more than just a really good tool for finding stuff on the web.

There is a difference between information and knowledge, and the keepers of human knowledge shall, I believe, always be human. If anyone thinks otherwise, then they’re wide-eyed fanatics who really don’t understand this sort of thing. Until we have proper AI, forget about replacing librarians. When we do have proper AI, we’ll all be holed up in glowy red bubbles generating electricity for our new robot overlords, so we won’t have to worry about it anyway.

All that said, I’m not really sure what bloggers have to do with Google in the first place.

It turns out that the Blog People (or their subclass who are interested in computers and the glorification of information) have a fanatical belief in the transforming power of digitization and a consequent horror of, and contempt for, heretics who do not share that belief.

Another sweeping overgeneralization written in anger and intended to paint “bloggers” in a bad light. There is nothing in this sentence that is a) true, or b) not intended to be a direct and ire-rousing insult to the blogging community. This is a combination of a troll and a flame, and not a very good one at that. How is this particular piece of intellectual discourse any better than what we see on blogs every day? (Hint: it’s not.)

Mister Gorman continues with this loaded bit of bait:

Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts. It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs.

The fact of the matter is that Mr. Gorman wrote something in the past that “The Blog People” disagreed with, and now he’s lashing out. The article he has penned here accomplishes nothing, being little more than an obvious flame and a clumsy troll. It’s already a week old, so maybe I just missed it on its first run through “the blogosphere” (where stories burst forth and die like stars in a time-lapse galaxy), but right now it’s the top story on Slashdot. It’ll peak on blogdex again, I’m sure.

For what it’s worth, I’m somewhat off-put by the growing sense of wide-eyed breathlessness surrounding “the blogosphere”. I’ve found my inner curmudgeon grumpily reading about bloggers suddenly referring to themselves as journalists, or about the strange mob-effect that has caused at least two real journalists (and one fake one) to recently lose their jobs. Dan Rather (and his team) made a mistake. Later they admitted to that mistake and apologized. The man resigned his post, proudly held, in disgrace. The “blogosphere” counts this as a victory.

I do not.

Personally, I’m still working out why I’m being curmudgeonly about blogging and the “blogosphere”. I’ve been reading about journalism and accreditation. I’ve been reading about journalistic ethics and responsibilities. I’ve also been reading about Hunter Thompson and the “New Journalism” that emerged from the 1960s. Reading a lot, and thinking. Thinking about gatekeepers and elitism, about peer-review and “many eyes make all bugs shallow”, about writing and editing, research and fact-checking.

Lots of thinking, trying to formulate a sensible opinion backed up by reasoned thought before writing it up. When I publish it, does that make me a journalist? No. A columnist? No. It makes me a woman with a website and an opinion, nothing more.

More science!

Q. Are the files in e23 copy protected?

A. No. That would interfere with your use of them. We just have to hope that we can sell enough to honest people to make up for what gets stolen by the kiddies and cheapskates.

Sadly, life is such that pencil + paper gaming is never likely to become a serious hobby for me again. When I was a student (highschool, dropout, and university) I used to play all the time. For the full length of one glorioius summer we had 5-7 people playing at least weekly, if not more often. From these times emerged such things as my love for King Crimson, and such strange insider funninesses as “Grope the Mega”.

Ah, me. Good times, good times.

Now, however, I’m a grown up and all my friends are grown up, and most of my friends don’t live anywhere near me (distributed, for the most part, evenly across North America from Nova Scotia to California and back again). Scheduling is nearly impossible, even for the local crew (all, like, 4 of us), and so forth.

Games like World of Warcraft sort of fill that gamery urge for me, but it’s a different animal than P&P gaming on almost every level. It wears a thin mask that makes it look a little bit like a “role playing game”, but it’s not. There’s no role playing. There’s no creativity. There’s no bending the rules. There’s no chance to stock your rogue’s pack with thin wire, chalk, packets of the Dust of Disappearance, thin bladed saws, silk rope, fine lockpicks, a bag of marbles, tiny caltrops…and other such “just in case there’s an emergency” items. Quests are static and unchangeable — everyone who runs a particular quest does the exact same thing — there’s no opportunity for a Dungeon Master to tweak the details to fit the party.

I miss proper P&P gaming. Even if Never Winter Nights had managed to deliver a module creation/editor system that wasn’t eye-stabbingly difficult to use (in other words, one that regular creative DM types could pick up and actually do something interesting with in about, oh, 2% of the current time it takes), it wouldn’t have been the same. As soon as you add graphics and sounds to this, it stops being a vehicle for imagination.

There is only one generation of gamers who grew up pencil and paper gaming. The original Dungeons & Dragons (Chainmail) was produced by Gary Gygax in 1971. The year I was born. Zork (arguably the first mass-market CRPG) was released in 1980. The Atari 2600 (for many of us, our first home game console) came out in 1982. Now the world is saturated with XBoxes, PS2s, GameCubes, high end gaming PCs, Game Boys, and an ever growing collection of other new gaming devices.

P&P gaming is a fringe thing, relegated again to the nerd world of back rooms at comic/game shops with big folding tables, bad chairs, too much Coke, and huge bags of chips. Video gaming is mainstream. In the end, however, will anyone think back, 20 years from now, and fondly recall that one time in Halo when they were the Master Chief and blew up hundreds of The Flood to finish the level? Will there be the same warm nostalgia I feel when I think back today to that time when my not-too-bright but hellishly-strong fighter (nicknamed “Slay” by the rest of the party) hauled out her gleaming bastard sword (shields are for pussies), ran through that guarded jail, and killed everything that moved before the mage could even get his wand out?

I bet not.

World of Warcraft is a good game, but it’s not a collaborative piece of interactive fiction. It’s fiction, and it’s interactive, but it’s not a collaboration. I miss that part most of all.

Ah, good times.

Game Review Excerpts

• Delivers more onscreen pyrotechnics than a Kiss concert.
• The new mech designs with new weapons also give a strong presence but it’s the addition of the battle armor and VTOL that makes the biggest impact.
• There is still a bit of linear gameplay in the single player mode which could be a bit more in depth and dynamic, but as it is, blowing stuff up has never been more fun.
• It’s the perfect mix of old school mech action with an arcade feel to it.
• While there’s occasional pop-up and clipping, those glitches are trumped by smooth animation and incredible explosions. When an enemy Mech is trashed, the bright blast lights up the screen and ripples the surrounding terrain in the most satisfyingly way.
• The sheer joy of destruction, variety of mechs and plethora of game types result in a fun if slower-paced online action game. This giant robot might not save the world, but it’s still a pretty good pal.

Book Review Excerpts

• More than a trifle but less than a masterpiece, the novel is an entertainment, and as such it seeks first to amuse and second to inform.
• So: sermon, melodrama, dystopian vision — I Am Charlotte Simmons partakes of all these, and does so stunningly. But it’s still as much polemic as novel. One closes the book feeling soiled by its cloacal vision and emotionally manipulated by its author.
• Mr Wolfe’s gifts for sartorial detail, verbal tics and all the tiny gestures that define place in the social pecking order are on hyperkinetic, at times tiresome, display.
• If it shares some Dickensian virtues, such as exuberant, lovingly crafted grotesquery, it also has Dickensian vices, such as long-windedness, and a fundamentally unbelievable heroine.
• The proportion of rant overload to silky observation has much increased.
• The problem is that Wolfe, whose writing has always been grossly adjectival and chic-specific, has failed to capture any news of interest about American youth, and comes off instead like one of those horrible professors who tried to make you listen to Imagine while simultaneously getting off on his status as a pedagogical errant.

The world, I think, needs a blending of these. At very least, we need book reviews written by people who sound less like annoying college professors who have never learned how to write for a non-academic audience. Less intellectual wanking, please, and more actual communication. Thx!

Addendum: This is not to say, of course, that I like most game reviews. I don’t. I find the authors generally untrustworthy and usually under-informed. The only game reviewers I actually trust and rely upon are the Penny Arcade guys, but that’s because 1) I know they’re not on the take, and 2) I know they actually play games. Tycho also writes well.

So, I’ve always been a bit of an Ikea fan, what having moved some 13-14 times in as many years. If you include a couple of interprovincial moves (Ontario to Nova Scotia to Ontario to Quebec to Ontario), you might start to understand the appeal of disposable furniture that’s more than milk crates and recycled bricks.

But now it’s a little scary. With 145 million copies, the Ikea catalogue is rumoured to be the second most-read publication after the Bible. That just bothers me at a pretty fundamental level. Here’s the article.

I used to be an absolutely voracious reader. Maybe “read a book a week” should go on my New Year’s Resolution list (which, in itself, is new) along with the other well-intentioned things I’ve got on there (which are none of your business).

I know exactly why I don’t read as much as I used to. When I was in Montreal I used to easily read 2-3 books every week. I didn’t have a TV, and a huge amount of my disposable income got spent at Indigo Books. Then I made the mistake of looking over shaver’s shoulder one night when he was playing Asheron’s Call. Everything sort of started on a downward spiral from there.

I did manage to quit MMORPGs entirely for a while, but then I recently made the mistake of picking up World of Warcraft. It is, by far, the current shining pinnacle of the genre. It’s just plain old fun. But because of this alluring funnessity, it tends to suck up far more of my time than it should. Reading books is good. Running around chopping up zombies with big glowy swords…is really a helluva lot of fun, but less “good” on the “good vs waste of time” scale.

I should start reading again. Before my brain turns completely to Jello.

(This post got a little off track…)