I know I certainly need this advice. I effectively quit blogging for months before starting up again now. Yes, yes, I had reasons, good ones, but I still quit.
I am by nature, a lazy slob. I’ve quit more things than I can count, and seen through things in spite of that through direct application of sheer will. I guess I’ve always at some level known ths things in the article, but its nice to have them articulated.
Go read.
is here.
Forget your resolutions. Forget your plans to make resolutions. Never mind how crappy the decade was. Most certainly disdain the hopes and dreams the masses continue to spew on how great the coming decade is going to be.
Just follow this post. Learn it. Live it. If the photography specific stuff does not appeal, re-write it for yourself. But just do it.
Like another good blogger just said, “The professional shuts up. She doesn’t talk about it. She does her work.”
Lets do work.
After 12 years, after Audioslave, after the fall of Audioslave and the return of Rage against the Machine. Now even Soundgarden are back!
The news first released on Chris Cornell’s blog at Mysapce and on facebook. The only news so far seems to be that ‘The Knights of the Soundtable ride again’.
This is potentially pretty huge. The last time Soundgarden were around, they would be the herald for grunge and all the cultural (r)evolution that goes with that. I wonder what’s in store..both from Soundgarden and music itself..
Books will go…others will appear…my reading list stays about the same length all the time..here it is as we head into January:
The internet is going the way of real life. Forget those old notions of freedom and anonymity. The new internet will be a place of narrow public areas which get from 1 piece of ‘private property’ to another, and no more. Its just more profitable, in the same way a skyscraper of leasable office is space is more profitable than a public park.
Analyst James Governor at Redmonk toots that horn in a much more sober fashion, even ending on a positive note. (linkage courtesy slashdot)
The 3-strikes law is literally like sentencing a person to house arrest for jaywalking.
Cory Doctorow has his own rant. Makes perfect sense,but not good corporate-bottom-line economic sense. (linkage, again, courtesy slashdot.)
I was annoyed when the Iphone came out. I still am. A little. The hype and hoopla was just that. A marketing blitz that suddenly put this maker-of-all-things-cute in a consumer device segment that even the dumbest of dumb blondes and meathead-iest of meatheads could use with ease. 0mgz0rz!! Apple’s making a phone. How cute will that be!!
Yeah, well, it does say PHONE. and the phone part of it sucked. It still does, but not so much. But full, deserved credit where it’s due, Apple made sure people knew that the Iphone was never about the phone. and that they never forget that. From the actual product to the nice walled garden that is the App Store to the genius of tying up with AT&T to take the heat on mobile issues (in batttle parlance, AT&T is what would be called a meat-shield), Apple pulled it off.
And now we come to the ISlate. It’s on its way. The hype on the net right now is eerily familiar. It’s the Iphone. bigger. with no phone part for even me to crib about. It has absolutely no competition. at all.
MG Siegler has a similiar view on TechCrunch. He also makes the good point that the cool-factor of being like the dudes in Avatar with the portable screens will play its part here.
A last point I’d like to make here is that the iSlate may have enough horsepower to run the graphic design, audio / video editing applications which have such a strong home in regular Apple PCs. If Pro Tools, Final Cut and iMovie find a new home in iSlate, all I can say is: “Whoa”.
Old-ish news. But pretty cool.
NASA released a pretty massive report (PDF) with news article on science experiments at the International Space Station. From inane-sounding and yet basic research like ‘In space soldering‘ to topics that garner a universal response of ‘eh?’ like ‘Molecular and Plant Physiological Analyses of the Microgravity Effects on Multigeneration Studies
of Arabidopsis thaliana’, its a pretty varied and interesting list. The report itself is a mighty fine read, if you can wrap your brain around the intentionally dull style.
linkage courtesy Slashdot.
Sony and Last.fm launched a “Fantasy Music Festival” recently.
A conceptual rip of the good ole’ cult-status Fantasy Football run by / participated in by just about every bladder-following sentient and their dog, this one expects you to pick a list of bands to make a lineup for a fantasy music festival. It’s quite easy to initially think this is a make-your-own-supergroup thing, but its not.
Scoring is a nice opaque only-Sony-knows-how thing called “buzz”, which has some connection to the amount of talk about the group online. (Are they watching t3h t0rrentz?? o_O). Here’s the official blarb:
“We calculate *Buzz points by working out the amount of plays your acts get on Last.fm and, by using Yahoo! data, how many mentions they get on blogs or social networking sites like Twitter”
And whoever created the page for adding bands needs to lookup the concept of “user-friendly”.
So all in all, what this achieves is:
1. More inactive members on last.fm (oh yeah, you need a last.fm ID for this)
2. More emails to send spam to. (Apparently you should not end a sentence with a conjunction. Feel free to append a swear-word of your choice to the end of the sentence)
3. Kanye West ends up on every list.
Link courtesy RubbishCorp, which is a really good site.
When we stick to the core episodes. (via Facebook via FastCompany).
I wonder how that would look if we added Silmarrilion, Hobbit, Lost Tales and Children of Hurin on the one side and the entire Expanded Universe on the other. Star Wars ftw?
There’s a book running around Indian best seller list right now.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
I haven’t read the book. I don’t think I will. I’m not one of those chaps who reads books about other people’s take on life. My take on life works for me.
But I like the phrase. The first part. Hunger is a primal force. The metaphorical opposite of apathy.
I’m back. I’m hungry. Let’s stay hungry.
Soon: primal forces.
Facebook. Twitter. Friendfeed. Friendster. status messages. retweets. augmented reality. location based services. Everyone’s doing it. All the time. We tell people what we’re doing, when we’re doing it, where we are, who else is around and prove it with photos.
Does anyone care?
I am both a very early adopter of the whole social networking thing, and also very much the “average” user. I’m not famous. I do not have or promote a business. I do not work in / on silicon valley and report on the happenings in this industry. In short, I am one of the many many people worldwide who caught on to Facebook, orkut, dA, twitter et all simply because everyone’s doing it.
Initially, there was the fad of “OMG! Let mayke a prohfyle”; then the “ooh, lets look at other peoples’ profiles!”; then the “meh”.
Yes, meh. There was a long hiatus when the entire first generation of social networkers kinda fell of the map. Helped not in the least by the opening of facebook (our de-facto network, as it were) to the entire universe. What had once been a fairly exclusive club where everyone knew (or knew of) everyone else suddenly became more akin to a mosh pit of vaguely familiar faces.
Let’s not even get started on the whole application thing.
Then the status update thing happened. and the “creepy” news feed. and Twitter. and we all came running back to listen to the thought-streams of our friends and tell them ours.
Does anyone care?
Without being overtly a pessimist, the average user leads a fairly average life and so do his / her friends. There is very little I need to tell people on a constant real-time basis on the happenings in my life. I get up. I work out. I go to work. I blog. I meet friends and colleagues. I surf the internets. watch TV. read. Nothing special. Nothing to write home about. Or write on Facebook / twitter.
The same applies to all the numerous blurbs on data (I can’t bring myself to call it information) that flow onto my screen. I have no interest in who’s stuck in the rain, who is waiting for the weekend, who’s moving and hating the experience, who is moving and loving the experience, who’s happy because their team won, who drunk, who’s sober, who’s bored, who’s happy, who’s done with exams, who’s done with homework, who’s done with partying, who’s surfing facebook, who’s standing in line, who’s cutting the line….
STOP.
Repeat after me. MLIA. My Life is Average. Unless there’s something worth saying, don’t say it. Use the IRL test. If you would say something to everyone you see In Real Life, then say it on twitter. The only reason we feel this need to share is a strange voyeuristic fascination with seeing if other people are doing anything more interesting than we are.
Mostly, they are not.
Very very few people lead lives interesting and eventful enough to constantly talk about it. Even fewer can consistently write well in context-free 140-ish-character blobs.
Unless you’re that special, take it for granted that most people are not really bothered what you just said.
That’s not to say social networking is entirely crap. I have gotten back in touch with numerous old friends I’d have never seen again. It has been and still is a good source of storing and finding links to interesting stuff on the ‘net. It has, on the whole, been a positive influence. But some perspective helps.
Some may be tempted to apply this very same reasoning to blogs. I’ll beg to differ. A blog only contains things which cross the “too-much-effort-to-bother” threshold; and thus, eminently more worthy of publication.
