loose ends

i have 6871 photos taken in 2006 in my iPhoto. four cameras (k750, g5, fz7, d50), numerous trips, several countries and a few continents. lots and lots.

happy new year and 2007.

The precise moment in time when something new and exciting ceases to be both new and exciting.

Sort of the day-after-christmas-feeling.

I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump. I ran over and said: “Stop. Don’t do it.”
“Why shouldn’t I?” he asked.

“Well, there’s so much to live for!”
“Like what?”

“Are you religious?”
He said, “Yes.”

I said, “Me too. Are you Christian or Buddhist?”
“Christian.”

“Me too. Are you Catholic or Protestant?”
“Protestant.”

“Me too. Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?”
“Baptist.”

“Wow. Me too. Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?”
“Baptist Church of God.”

“Me too. Are you original Baptist Church of God, or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God?”
“Reformed Baptist Church of God.”

“Me too. Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915?”
He said: “Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915.”

I said: “Die, heretic scum,” and pushed him off.

(I was looking for this joke the other day and found a version of it on the django weblog just now. managed to locate the original by googling the punchline. serendipity.)

nobody ever figured that the 21st century would be ruled by people video ichatting while playing super mario kart online on their ds’s.

(update: also gears of war on the xbox360 and metroid prime: hunters on the ds)

(update2: “is this how you spend all your saturdays?” — “pretty much” ;)

not sure when it happened, but somewhere along the line i passed the point of jaded-ness for the daily-fixes-new-media-news-of-the-day-web- two-oh-secondlife-launch-cool-hunt-new-google-features-iphone-rumor-digg-this-now- metafilter-broken-wii-strap-japan-times thing. not that i was ever terribly involved, but i’ve always taken great pride in already having seen the article you just sent me.

andy said something about webhide, and i believe that to be part of the truth. the rest lies in how bloody bothersome it is to keep up with your 191 feeds and two dozen daily newspapers front pages, and to always have the little » arrows showing in your browser because you have too many tabs open.

i am complaining about a hole i myself have dug, of course. complaining about that which I myself admire in others… but it has gone over the hump.

i could write a kick-ass blog about all interesting things i see that have not been reported in the other kick-ass blogs. i could invest another hour per day in making better use of all these feeds and channels. but it will add up to absolutely nothing.
i will not learn anything from it. i will not make any money off of it. i will not even enjoy it.

what to do, then?

where do I distract?
can i take a media-free month? drop the feeds and hit ‘mark all as read’ when i come back?

does the 80/20 rule apply; can I eliminate 80% of my blogs and still be left with 80% of the content? or is it a long tail of information?
if so, where do I draw the line? is boing boing ok? china times? hemfeber? should i read josh rubin? salon?

is it whining with a silver spoon in your mouth?

do i take that time off to go outside and takes pictures in the jordaan every day? do i stop and read a book instead of updating my feeds?

i don’t dare throwing away my Reading 12 file that’s already bordering on 100 pages. what if there’s a life-changing nugget in there? what if that NYT article about ‘China Shows Signs of Shedding Its False Modesty’ will finally open my eyes and make me move there, or if the article from BusinessWeek that talks about Bezos’ plans will make for an impressive dinner-conversation with a friend of a friend who will decide to invest in some odd project of mine because he was so impressed i had read it.

i have the luxury of being allowed time to keep track of all of this (it borders on a responsibility in our business).

it makes me more productive.

it does not induce stress, but is rather quite soothing.

why should I throw that away?

[this is a post without a conclusion.]

I don’t care if it’s by Michael Bay, I’m still dying to watch it.

It’s not that I get paid to play the Wii and Xbox 360. It’s rather because of that immeasurable learning you get from actually playing the next-gen consoles rather than only reading about them.

Live vs. Mii parades, etc.

One has to know these things.

The feeling of patriotism toward a country to which you do not belong in any way, shape or form..
(Note: this excludes cheering for the team playing against your rivals during the World Cup).

It’s indians wanting to live the american way of life.
Or that friend of yours who loves britpop and british indie rock and knows that his life would be oh so much better had he been born in london.

the question is not how you buy gifts to those who have everything, but rather how to buy it for those who have no time.

i put together a little welcome email for switchers. ten or so applications that I can’t live without.
i’ve sent it to five people in the past 10 days.

the amount of people on my buddylist using iSight shots for images is growing by the day.

something is happening.

For the geeky crowd, zappa.cc is now OpenID compliant (not that you care, because I’ll be the one using it) and features a crafty hCard (if you ever need to add me to your address book).

To do: OpenID enable my WP comments.

The web and design communities are abuzz with Adobe’s new CS icons. They decided to use a system that resembles a periodic tables blended with a color-wheel. All icons will be square and differ only in hue (much to the dismay of color-blind people. [who might not be designers anyway?]).

At any rate, I disagree with all the complaining. The icons look neat, organized and make a lot more sense than butterflies and feathers. Somebody compared them to Macromedia’s Dw, Fw and Fl icons and I agree that they will be a slow success.

why did nobody tell me?

In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.

Been at it for about a month and intend on keeping the diet until my birthday (24/03):

• No buying magazines
• No buying books (exception: Är svensken människa, which I picked up last week)
• No new music
• No buying DS games
• No buying Wii games (except Twillight Princess)
• No senseless printing of articles

wii://4008.7085.7815.6421

…but I would never.

a Cafe Mocca and two kanelbullar in the airport lounge paying (against my will) for wifi.
this is internationalism and patriotism at once!

nothing wrong with sitting at home on a saturday, in stockholm, with your friend, developing, listening to michael jackson.

after a week separation between work things and non-work things, I can happily tell you all that the experiment is working out.

buying an iMac for the sake of doing mind-tricks is not a cheap ordeal, but you can just as easily argue that sanity and focus are invaluable and immeasurable. all my photos and torrents and personal projects are now stowed away on the iMac, and thankfully Carla is being very protective of my spare time by hogging the keyboard and always having one more thing to do before I can use the computer. ;)

every language has a set of unique and untranslatable words. português has saudade while nederlands has uitwaaien. svenska has two that come to mind; both of which could never exist in any other culture:
- fjantig: silly and weak at once. perfectly describes the state of all swedish males without viking blood.
- lagom: sort of translates into “enough for everyone in the party” as well as “just as much as i need”. it’s a state of non-opinion and non-exception.

in an after-the-fact kind of way, once the pain and nausea is gone, i enjoy having been sick.

it’s a rare situation where you are forced to disconnect for a whole day. someone takes care of you. time rushes by faster than you can imagine. you think about nothing except ways of making the pain go away.
and the next day you wake up dizzy and still weak. it sucks because you lost work and you had tons of things to do. but were it not for this forceful departure, you’d never have taken the time off.

• airport-literature reading swedish couple next to me.
• god, i’m tired.
• cheese sandwiches for everyone.
• where’s my coffee?
• svenskar have a strange sense of privacy, if any
• it’s 2007 and we still don’t have personal teleportation devices nor decent coffee on airplanes

later:

• hooray, row #26 is empty and I have three seats to myself
• damn, that’s a *lot* of turbulence. i wonder if it’s because my laptop is on.

Flickr eliminates the moment of surprise when seeing someone for “the first time” in a few years.
You already know what they look like.

You even know what they had for lunch yesterday.

i’ll be here between tomorrow (thur dec 14) and sunday morning (dec 17).

For the uninitiated.