Yearly Archive: 2008

I’ve wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember. More or less. Sometimes I pursue other ambitions, but I keep coming back to the desire to write. Or at least, the desire to have written something. It would be great to have already written something brilliant and enjoy the attendant love and praise, but the writing itself is so hard. The work at hand is so imperfect and wanting. I continually resist and avoid practicing the craft. It’s much easier to idly read blogs for an hour or two.

Is This My Dream?

It makes me question my desire. Is this really my dream? Or do I just like to fantasize about being that successful author? I believe in the idea that you should do what you love. You’re probably not going to like everything about what you do, but you should generally want to do something you love, right?

So why not write? Am I just plain lazy? …

I’d never heard of Ray LaMontagne until Amazon recently confided in me that people frequently bought his latest album together with Martin Sexton’s Solo. People that buy Martin Sexton albums obviously have the finest and most discerning tastes, so I sampled Gossip in the Grain and liked what I heard. Now I own all three of his studio albums.

He has an amazing voice; the music is quite moving. Much of it is sensitive and melancholy, along with a representation of good rock and roll. It’s all good. Given my extreme limitations in the art of music review, you might want to see for yourself: Here’s a BBC performance of a song from his second album, Till the Sun Turns Black:

Ray LaMontagne: Empty

I just wanted to state publicly my whole-hearted endorsement of the “wrong” use of the phrase, begging the question.

Have you heard this phrase? Do you have a self-righteous opinion about it? Then this post may make you angry. Please look away. If you’re a potential new user of the term, read on to see how you can help corrupt it and do your part for the evolving English language.

I started seeing it more in blogs and articles, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. And even though today’s entry says “This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia’s quality standards,” let’s freeze the wikimoment on begging the question:

In logic, begging the question has traditionally described a type of logical fallacy (also called petitio principii) in which the proposition to be proved is assumed implicitly or explicitly in one of the premises. Begging the question is related to the fallacy known as circular argument, circulus in probando, vicious circle or circular reasoning. The first known definition in …

I did an hour and a half on the Nordic Track this weekend. One hour yesterday and a half hour today. In between the two sessions, I got this image in my head of a giant hand placing the ski machine in my basement, and me skiing in place for the amusement of some entity, as a hamster runs on a wheel for a child’s entertainment.

Running outside provides a little more sense of freedom, although that’s over for now with the arrival of a persistent snow cover.

Is my cage any different than the glass walls of the pet hamster’s home, and am I any more aware of what goes on outside its confines? Do I really care more than whether or not I get my next meal, and fresh cedar chips once in a while?

Should I be worried about the large cat perched on the screened lid overhead?

More from “The Real Tuesday Weld” (Stephen Coates):

The Real Tuesday Weld: Kix

(Doh! Embedding is disabled as of 29 November 2009. And as of 15 March 2010 I’m updating with a new embeddable version. Hopefully this one keeps working for a while.)

Love the music and the video. This one has nine people listed for the animation. (Previous was by Aleksey Budovsky.) I don’t know what it is about these videos. They’re just so whimsical and strange and fun.

For more “welding” in the Budovsky style, with more nonsense singing, there is Last Time in Clerkenwell.

And another good Weld/Budovsky, this time with lyrics: Terminally Ambivalent Over You….

Thanks, Dave Winer, for drawing my attention to this:

The Real Tuesday Weld: Bathtime in Clerkenwell

(Bummer. Embedding disabled as of 29 November 2009. No, wait: as of 15 March 2010, there’s a new embeddable version. We’ll see how long that lasts. And you might have to watch a short ad first, but it’s totally worth it.)

It’s so delightfully weird.

(I think by 30 seconds in, you’ll either be hooked or can safely dismiss it.)

(Update: Should note that The Real Tuesday Weld is a band led by Stephen Coates. And the animation is by Alexsey Budovsky.)

Related

More Clerkenwell: Kix, Terminally Ambivalent Over You

In a post about the relicensing option from the GNU Free Documentation License to Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, Richard Stallman writes:

If a wiki site exercises the relicensing option, that entails trusting Creative Commons rather than the Free Software Foundation regarding its future license changes. In theory one might consider this a matter of concern, but I think we can be confident that Creative Commons will follow its stated mission in the maintenance of its licenses. Millions of users trust Creative Commons for this, and I think we can do likewise.

Sounds like a strong endorsement from someone with demanding standards.

<SALES_PITCH>

And seems like an opportunity to shill for donations to Creative Commons. They are running their annual fundraiser right now, and for $50 ($25 for students) you can become a member of the CC Network, which allows you to sport a button on your web page to proudly show your support (and link to your CC Network profile page):

And, I think …

I was excited yesterday to hear about a new book, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. (Also mentioned in a Creative Commons blog post.)

I wasn’t familiar with James Boyle and his work, which is disturbing, because it seems like I should already have been a fan of such a free culture luminary. He has lots of good things to say on the topic. (I’ve since tried to remedy my negligence by adding him to my “Free Links.”)

The book is available for free online under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial ShareAlike License. After downloading it and reading through part of the first chapter, I ordered the paper copy from Amazon.

I fully expect it to reinforce my beliefs and give me some good talking points about the value of free culture and the public domain. I think it will also challenge me to think about the subject in a more rounded …

That way lies madness.

Grapes

I rejected the first bag of red grapes I picked up at Cub yesterday. I don’t know why. Visual inspection indicated possible lack of freshness, we’ll say. It’s not unusual for me to pass over one collection of grapes for another, but this time I got stuck in a loop, critically evaluating about a half dozen bags. They just didn’t seem to be bursting with excitement. Once I’d rejected a few for vague and uncertain reasons, I felt that I owed it to myself to find one that was significantly better-seeming than the rejects, but none of them inspired me. I became worried that I might have to walk away with grapes that failed to meet my stringent quality requirements. (Namely, that they should appear to be bursting with excitement.)

I knew I would walk away with some grapes. They were free grapes with this week’s coupons, and even without that incentive, red grapes are a core item in my …

Ran in my first race today, the 5th annual “Turkey Trek 5K.” There were 700 people registered. I don’t know how many people actually ran, but there was definitely a teeming multitude present. Temperature was agreeable at about 35 degrees F. (For you strange people on the metric system, that would be 1.7 degrees C.)

I didn’t know what to expect. I had heard it was a tough track. It’s on a trail system around my company’s headquarters, mostly paved but some unpaved and a number of small hills. With my entire running experience on my own around the neighborhood, I wondered how the pacing would work. My best 3 miles solo had been 29 minutes, but I haven’t pushed myself for speed. I figured 27 minutes would be good, although I hoped with adrenaline and matching the pace of other runners that I might go lower.

I maneuvered to be at the front of the pack for the …