Linking to this post is becoming another annual blog tradition…
I don't know if the Army was where Grandpa got into the habit of wearing his hats just slightly askew but it was something he did for the rest of his life. And without guidance or instruction from us, Pace has picked up the same mannerism, always wanting to wear his hat just slightly cocked to the side. My eulogy for Grandpa Peet, given just a week after Pace was born, talked about biology and genetics so who knows, perhaps there's a gene for “hat-tilting” too?
Lots of good, thought-provoking stuff in this 2005 commencement speech by David Foster Wallace. The following section especially jumped out at me knowing how Wallace would eventually kill himself a few years later:
“It is not the least
bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost
always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master.
And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long
before they pull the trigger.”
Does anybody know why a company would prevent embedding of their YouTube clips? Just to maintain control of how their content is presented I guess? (This is also the first YouTube clip I've seen with a short ad embedded in front of it as well – hmmm, is that a new Google initiative or did the record company put it in there?)
In my quest to have a designated theme for every day of the week, maybe I should start a “Sappy Sunday” one if I keep finding touching articles like this one? Man, every librarian should have a story like this.
My best attempt so far was a failure – in my last job, I found out about a teen patron who'd been caught using the library phone to dial 1-900 numbers which charged back about fifty bucks to that line from the online game, Runescape. We suspended him for the summer but after handing down the suspension, I was feeling guilty about taking away the library privileges of a youngster, especially in the summer months and because he's protested so strongly that there was no way he could afford fifty bucks. So a few weeks later, I asked for and received permission from my Director to offer him a deal to have his suspension lifted if he would pay a portion of the fine, write a letter of apology to the local library board and pay off the rest by doing a few hours of volunteer work at the library.
I called his house to give him what I thought was the good news. “Oh, I paid off the fine already. I wanted to keep playing the game. But don't worry – I won't charge anything back the library anymore. Promise!”
Tonight, the Riders clinched the CFL's Western Division for the first time in thirty-three years. (We won't spend time contemplating this level of futility in what has long been a four-team division – yikes!) Anyhow, since I used my most current Rider-themed photo last week, I thought I'd dig in the archives for one from 2007 when the Riders won the Grey Cup. Hopefully this is a good omen!
I helped coordinate/facilitate/organize a gathering of RPL's professional librarian staff this afternoon. In the course of planning the un-agenda for this session, one of the ideas I came up with was to have a series of library-related trivia questions that I could ask through-out the afternoon to keep things lively and light.
Being a Web 2.0 kinda guy, I realised I didn't have to do all the heavy lifting myself so I posted a request for ideas on AskMetaFilter getting a few good suggestions and ideas. (I'll have to go back on Monday and post the full list of 30 questions I came up with on the site so others can make future use of it. I also have to figure out if there's a way for me to remotely log-in to my computer at work – if so, I could do that right now!)
The Pop Songs blog was set-up for the author to do an analysis of every song in the R.E.M. catalogue. This led to Michael Stipe himself contacting the site and ending up answering numerous reader questions about R.E.M.'s songs and their genesis – how cool is that?
MetaFilter has a thread titled “What is 'Try Not To Breath About?” which has lots of good discussion about what I think is R.E.M.'s best album.
I can't find it anymore but way back in the day, there used to be a really cool site where someone had made a bunch of atmospheric graphics with excerpts from R.E.M. songs attached. (In the early days of the Internet and as a big R.E.M. fan, you can't imagine how cool I found this!)
I happened to have a couple on my hard drive but unfortunately, didn't save them all (and can't find the site again – assuming it even still exists.) Here's a sample…
The third most favourited, “What Childhood Moment Most Contributed To The Person You Are Today” is one I've featured on this blog before – coincidentally when the concept of “Favourites” was first introduced a few years ago.
This post is also timely because the site's now trying an experiment during the month of November to turn off counts on Favourites as it's a long standing debate on the site as to whether this is a useful feature or whether it just encourages people to post funny/snarky comments in an attempt to get lots of favourites rather than constructively contributing to the site.
I'm not a fan of the move (though you can apparently opt out). I know people use Favourites for various reasons – from placing bookmarks as they read long threads to a way to say “me too” without reiterating comments over and over to marking well-thought out posts, even if they don't agree with the sentiment – but ultimately, it's a great way to quickly find comments and threads that, for lack of a better term, resonated with the most people for whatever reason.
“Reaching the Moon was certainly a highlight for our civilization,
but it was a singular accomplishment. The one technological thing that
most blows my mind is the one which made that lunar landing possible,
is the civilization's greatest technical achievement of all, which is
repeated every single day, and which is remarkably overlooked.
I refer, of course, to the computer, but not the computer itself as
an artifact. Rather, the industrial nature of the computer. The
computer is, far and away, the single-most sophisticated artifact human
beings have created to date. But that's not the amazing bit. The
amazing bit is that, in a span of one generation, this machine went
from being a big as a house and costing as much as -and being made in
much the same way as- the Space Shuttle to a ubiquitous mass-produced
device you can put in your pocket, has increased exponentially in
performance as it shrank, is so simple in composition that you can
teach a child to assemble one in an hour, and is so cheap that even
people who can't afford a home or a car can afford a computer more
powerful than the ones that put men on the Moon.
And that's just the half of it. This is the first whole-world
industrial product. With a just a little information, anyone can
mail-order the parts for an entire PC, with no two parts coming from
the same company or even the same part of the world, and you can put it
together and -at least 9 times out of 10- it will run the first time
you switch it on! There is no other device or product in the world you
can say this about, though as a trend many other types of products are
today heading in this direction.
But none of this is the mind-blowing part. The mind-blowing part is
that few to none of the people running the major corporations that
contributed to this astounding feat have more than a very rudimentary
comprehension of how this happened or how the industry today actually
works -which is why they keep making many of the same dumb executive
decisions over and over again. They don't see the forest for the trees.
This radically different industrial paradigm -this vast interdependent
'industrial ecology' of otherwise competitive international companies-
evolved almost entirely ad hoc, driven by a near-religious conviction
in the potential of the technology by a small community of technorati
and the need to cope with a technology too complicated and expensive
for any one company alone -not even IBM- to develop in isolation. This
is the single greatest accomplishment of the Industrial Age -and it was
largely accidental.”
This song always reminds me of one of my all-time Top Ten favourite movies “Stand By Me” – a young middle class type with an artistic bent writes about hanging with the town lowlife(es).
