loose ends

IIS, not DNS!

…as he is going through a deeper circle of hell ;)

But I too am spending a good few hours at work over the weekend. Tons of things done. Everything coming together.

Funny, as both his and my deadline are Tues. the 26th.

case(s) in point:

• Art School Confidential
• I ♥ Huckabees

they both suck.

Picture yourself in a boat on a river
With tangerine trees and marmalade skies
Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly
A girl with kaleidoscope eyes
Cellophane flowers of yellow and green
Towering over your head
Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes
And she’s gone

Coffee, Brie and Winegums do not a good breakfast make.

• Siemens [Brick-like] (GSM) ~1996
• Ericsson [The first with colored faceplates] (GSM) ~1997
• Gradiente [White transparent plastic one] (TDMA) ~1998
• Gradiente Neo (TDMA) ~1999
• Siemens (TDMA) ~2000
• Samsung Dream (CDMA) 2004
• Nokia 3200 (GSM) 2004
• Motorola RAZR (GSM) 2005
• SonyEricsson K750i (GSM) 2006

The truth, which many fail to grasp, is that in life you do exactly what you want. Nothing and nobody rules or directs you more than are willing to. You have limits, of course, but they do not influence what you do, or why you want to do it.

Knowing this changes everything.

I’m stressed but you’re freestyle
I’m overworked but I’m undersexed
I must be made of concrete
I sign my name across your chest
Give out the same old answers
I trot them out for the relatives
Company tried and tested
I use the ones that I love the best

i can’t sleep
not tired at all anymore
must be because i took a nap a few hours ago
going to the IND in six hours and a half
get registered
not tired at all anymore
worried, concerned, powerless
thoughts racing through
can’t breathe. nose stuffed
stomach hurts. must have eaten something wrong
was not sure whether i should get the computer or not
or stay in bed
your eyes still work when your eyelids are closed
the senses never shut down
at least not when you’re like this
millions of ideas
keys buzzing away at midnight thirty
i’d rather be asleep than here

Olha que coisa. Um amigão meu, colega de PGE e pessoa de gosto musical imcomparável, com site e tudo. Visite, e confira o reel dele. Você não vai ser arrepender.

» felipemacedo.com

PS. I hate it that Google Video defaults to showing me their homepage in Nederlands all the time.

hand-kerning ensued.

Do you test your websites in Lynx?

mindless fun ensued.

two line breaks != paragraph

Vladimir:
That passed the time.

Estragon:
It would have passed in any case.

Vladimir:
Yes, but not so rapidly.

According to the economic theory of moral philosopher and political economist Adam Smith, when the demand for any given product or service (in this case: apartments) outstrips the supply for said product or service, a particular condition arises: called lazy fucking landlords.

Amsterdam is unbearably crowded. Just like New York, Amsterdam has no space to grow. But unlike other metropolises, such as London and Tokyo, the city of Amsterdam does not grow vertically. No buildings are demolished, no “new” space is claimed. I am a fervent supporter of this. Central Amsterdam is beautiful, unique and charming. It has it’s share of run-down weirdoes and a seemingly endless supply of clueless tourists, but it still retains its particular beauty.

However, the housing issue here is critical. Organized squatters, rent-control, no increase in supply, and a constant influx of expatriates make this curious condition. You can’t find a place to live.

And when you do (after having bothered the friends of your friends for a month and having sent a hundred emails to potential renters and disguised maaklars on craigslist), the place is expensive and generally not what you were expecting.

But I love our place. It’s well priced and well located and has a touch of dutch charm. The only problem here is the inefficiency of our landlord (or rather, the company that rents out the apartment, called RWM Beheer). They’re slow and generally unwilling to collaborate in fixing the simplest of things.

The lock on our apartment door, for example, broke down the day after we moved in. It had been acting up back when we were still being shown the place, and decided to eat the key the first time we ventured outside. That was in early April, and our landlord has still not sent somebody to fix it. Numerous calls, emails and pointing of fingers has taken place, but they have still failed to actually to something.

The necessary apartment fixes are obviously not limited to the door lock, and include such fun things as a temperamental water heater and a moldy green bathroom ceiling.

(Slight update): They did ask the fixing company, called Everything, to send somebody to the place today. They were to show up at 8h00, but yesterday Everything called and told me there had been a double booking and that somebody would come at 9h30. At 10h00 I call them up explaining I can’t sit around the house all day waiting for the repair person to show. They explained that there had been a little delay and that person would show up at 11h. I asked him to come tomorrow. Still don’t have my hopes about finally getting the locks on my door working up.

• uppmärksamhetsstörning/hyperaktivitet
• transtorno do deficit de atenção e hiperatividade
• aandachtstekort/hyperactiviteit-stoornis
• sindrome da deficit di attenzione e iperattività.
• athyglisbrestur
• trouble déficitaire de l’attention / hyperactivité
• trastorno por déficit de atención con hiperactividad
• aufmerksamkeitsdefizit-/hyperaktivitätsstörung
• hyperaktivita s poruchou pozornosti

You live and learn.
At any rate, you live.

(some proper context here)

Alla vill veta vad mitt nick betyder.

kom och slå sönder min värld

Och konstigt nog har alla en teori på vad det igentligen står för. Dom fattar tydligen “min värld” och “kom”. Sen måste jag förklara varför det låter mindre våldsamt på svenska än på engelska. Kul.

(Nu borde jag gå och lägga mig. Tydligen vet alla om min blogg. Och jag är inte trött alls.)

I have on average 180 feeds in NetNewsWire. Add that to a handful of link-happy friends on Messenger, tons of non-feed-read sites and some offline media consumption. Getting in to the whole “info overload! the world is ending!” thing feels redundant, given it’s already the main topic of loose ends half of the time (together with Radiohead lyrics I guess).

But I developed a theory (hypothesis? assumption? framework?) called convergence theory.

It just means that for any given [link / CD / movie / video / article / site / city / book] referred to from any kind of source only receives a small nugget of attention. And that nugget of attention keeps getting smaller.

But, when I run across a reference to that same piece of information at a later date, the likelihood of going after it increases tenfold.

In other words, if you tell me to watch Battlestar Galactica, and I’ve never heard of it, I’ll probably reply “Uh-huh. I sure will”. However, if you tell me to listen to the Raconteurs CD, and I’ve already run across a good review about it on Pitchfork Media (I know, I’m predictable), odds are I’ll actually check it out.

It’s not a perfect system. But it reduces the amount of noise to something far more bearable.

You have a blog. As your readership goes up (in other words: more strangers reading your stuff), does the quantity of posts go up or down?

How about intimacy? Does your writing become more or less personal? Do you care about who’s reading?

Where do you draw the line? After the first loony comments about where you went during your weekend in the comments?

If you’re reading this it means that you too have a home on the web. Or at least works with someone who does.

I was adding links to my oh-so-useful sidebar blogroll and realized how many of my friends actually do have personal sites of sorts nowadays. Granted, I drew the distinction somewhere between fotolog and blog, obviously having excluded orkut profiles and flickr pages. Of course there are a few loose ends in the blogroll, such as people who contribute to group-blogs, or even a few dinosaurs, but I decided to still let those people in.

What I’m wondering is how this landscape will change in the next four years or so. In 2002, for example, most people I know did not even have representative pages for themselves on the web. No profiles, no fotologs, etc. Ego-google-searches were useless. Had I done a similarly extensive exercise for Dreams, a good half of the pages would be artist profiles from inspira.art.br. (That’s only partly true, as a handful of friends did have now defunct blogs).

But imagine 2010. Will your significant other have a personal page? Will you have been hired as a result of stuff you’ve concocted on the web?

In a field of work such as mine, the distinction between work and non-work is diffuse. The fluidity between doing something obviously work-related and that of simply informing myself is felt every day.

With the exception of periods of crunch time, it is not only tempting, but also crucial, to widen my scope of information intake and read about nonsense and cruise the web for curiosa. Finding that odd startup or weird linked article slowly add up to something bigger, more important. It creates the insights and serendipitous connections that oriented, formal research can never give you.

But the argument goes both ways. It is easy to feel guilty-ish for scouring strange stuff on the web on work-time, but the time I spend with real work-related infoconsumption at home is huge too. It’s reading about CSS during breakfast, fixing a bug on a page in the background when watching a movie or, more commonly, reading & replying to email at any time of day.

The question is whether I (or you) should feel the least bit guilty for this strange work/life distribution. I, for one, embrace it. I don’t feel particularly bad about doing work-y things at home as little as I feel it’s wrong to, say, blog from the office.