Question of the day: Did you REALLY mean to order 96 bananas???

Yes, and 8lbs of oranges! Thank you AmazonFresh!

<del>I'm probably moving ...</del>

this blog to WordPress, which I didn't realize is also mostly free. It has some advantages over Blogger, like stats, the ability to break a post up with a jump, and most importantly the ability to migrate posts from old blogs such as this one and my old Typepad blog so I can resurrect my old posts in one pace, and save $40 by not renewing my annual Typepad membership for nostalgia's sake. I'll be posting simultaneously here and on Wordpress for a couple weeks just to make sure there's nothing on WordPress I can't work with. The last step will be redirecting my personal domain there. In the meantime check out my beta. Yeeeaaahhh, maybe not!

I hate video blogs

And most audio posts too. Example: Slate V. I keep seeing rss headlines for Slate articles I think I'd like to read but turn out to be videos. I don't want to load a video, or put my headphones on just to see something I may or may not be interested in. You can scan video or audio the way you scan text. I think Seth Godin blogged some time ago about this being the reason vBlogs and podcasts will not supplant text. But vblogs are popping up everywhere, and that's annoying.

Does this year feel longer to you?

With leap day successfully passed though, we are now back on schedule.

Gorging on 35 Dishes, Daily

Does Sullivan manage to post 15 - 35 times a day in part because he doesn't allow comments? I wonder. The other Atlantic.com bloggers take comments, and Yglesias post nearly as often, and takes comments to boot. One of the Atlantic bloggers (I can't find the post now) did mention that he or she mostly has to ignore comments to avoid the time sinkhole. And Sullivan's post are usually one hit: i.e. one idea, one snip, and one link max, with the occasional longer post. I find it very addictive. I probably check Sullivan more often than I check my own political blogs labeled RSS feed. So do many others, as Sullivan is on the Technorati 100. In fact, almost all the blogs I read daily are in the Technorati 100 -- which attests to how mainstream my web time-wasting is!

The what's-next-on-your-party-shuffle-playlist? post

...or the I'm-too-lazy-to-type-tonight post.

Pre-Holiday Feast: The Pleasure of Veganism

I haven't talked about it much -- not at all, really. You might read The China Study, if you are interested. Or read this.

Tags: vegan, food, holiday, vegetarian.

Design changes

Sadly, all the available fonts look crappy on Windows boxes. My advice: get a Mac, or run Ubuntu.

Away

I've been traveling in the Philippines the past couple weeks, visiting my Dad and his girlfriend here. I have a few pictures. I had a LOT of pictures, until for some strange reason I found myself on the memory card screen and managed to hit "reformat". No good, but not deadly. Clicking "Okay" after that -- now THAT was bad. So there went the record of the first half of the trip, including some interesting stuff shot in an isolated Muslim village (were the population is something like 70% children -- giving it at times the feel of a '60's sci-fi movie in which all the adults have disapeared), and also some shots catamarans crowding the ferry when we arrived in the port city of Zamboanga. We had a nice time, in that southern province, despite US State Department warnings not to travel there because of terrorist activity. Folks were nice to us, though they don't see as many foreigners there as in the rest of the country, so we prompted a lot of stares. There were armed military stationed, one per hotel to protect travelers, but that is about all. It's not exactly the Afghan hills out here. We were a couple blocks away from a McDonald's afterall.

But being on display like that gets old after awhile, so I have to remind myself that its only natural curiosity. What can you do.

Also Korean and Japanese tourists far outnumber Americans this trip, which was not true two years ago. There's your weak US dollar at work. Thanks for everything Mr. Bush. I've talked to a few Brits and Aussies here -- and the attitude toward to US is friendly, but not really surprised at the way we've handled Iraq. Most Americans I have talk to here seen pretty fed up with the States as well. This is true of the red-staters just as much as the blue-staters. I hadn't expected that, and I'm still trying to sort out the reasons for their dissatisfaction. My preliminary theory is that they are worn out by the political infighting as well. Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Rove, Cheney, Bush, etc, have so demonized the left that our public discourse has become distasteful to even their own supporters, dwindling though they may be. Though the way the Democratic congress continues to roll over to the White House, what's the point of putting them back in the majority anyway.

It would be nice not to have to go back. At least I should begin planning my own exit strategy. One thing that is especially tedious about walking down the street in, for example, Seattle, is the sheer smugness that drips of people. I notice this especially when I've returned from overseas. A little humility at home would be nice to see.

Now we are in a place called Bacolod, where we've got a chance to catch up on email, do laundry, and, since it has rained all day every day since we've arrived, it's also a reminder of Seattle.

Next is a beach town: Bacolod. If it is raining there too, we may head back to Manila early.

Novel Progress

There has been some. I'm not quite at the point I hoped to be here at the end of June (i.e. -- done) but I am close. So close in fact that I see the solution to one problem. In too add four chapters, and in know exactly where they go.

This is good.

Sleep ...

... didn't happen last night. I did some work this morning in preparation for tomorrow's big free content experience but now I'm about done in. I was thinking about catching "Hot Fuzz" or some other movie, but my limbs feel like rubber now, so I ain't going nowhere. So Plan B is to ...
ahh I forgot Plan B already ...

2007: The Year Green Tea Broke

Funny article in Salon about the newest panacea: green tea. I've noticed racks and racks of new green-tea products filling the supermarket shelves in the past few weeks. I thought GT was big already, but it got bigger. My favorite will probably always be green tea ice cream, which is extraordinarily tasty, though I guess that is not the point.

I'm still in beta

... needing to move all my free read links over to this page, as well as some other stuff. And I keep tweaking the font size daily.

Currently reading Guitar Manby Will Hodgkinson, a memoir of a thirty-five-year-old journalist in London who decides to take up the guitar for the first time with the goal of being able to play in front of an audience within six months. Pretty soon he realizes that's not a well-thought out goal.

Some decent self-deprecating humor in the vein of current light memoirs like, say,Candy Freakor Word Freak. It weaves personal anecdotes with some history of the subject and encounters with whichever contemporary musicians the author can score an interview with. A enjoyable read, and jibes really well with my own attempts to play.

Technorati Tags: books, memoirs, guitar

One more minor thing

that is annoying about Blogger is that post-dated posts appear immediately when they are saved, and not hidden until the date and time they are scheduled to appear. Another awesome thing about Blogger is no annoying drop-down calendars to select dates from. Just type a date in the date field like a sentient with reasonable motor skills and move on.

Oh and one more awesome thing about Blogger? Free.

One minor thing ...

that is annoying about Blogger is no strikethrough shortcut in the posting tool. There is, however, a lot of conveniences I'm loving, such as a handy revision link for the blogger after each entry (when logged into your account) not to mention a text color button, useful for making horrifyingly garish entries.

The handy Perfomancing Firefox add-on has the shortcut, and a lot of other handy shortcuts, like del.icio.us bookmarking, technorati tagging fields and pinging. It works well with many different blogs, including Typepad and Blogger.

And here's another thing

Good morning. I'm doing my taxes today. I previously posted this scintillating news weeks ago, but that plan was derailed by computer problems too tedious to mention. In the interim I happened to recall $80 I'm owed by a publisher who forgot to pay me last year. So I straightened that out, with a minimum of contact, which I gather is how this publisher prefers to deal with me. Anyway, eighty bucks. Cha-ching.

I need pants

Because I finally switched from cable internet from DSL, I ditched my land line. Because I ditched my land line, my blackberry is my only phone. Because it is bound to warm up outside around here one of these days, I'll need to carry my blackberry (which is further fattened by a maxi-sized battery and a rubber exo-skeleton) somewhere besides my jacket, and because I don't want to have to carry a messenger bag all summer, and because I need pants, I bought a couple pair of cargo pants with giant leg pockets.

If it were practical I'd buy another six pair.

Technorati Tags: pants, blackberry

Bad Blogger

*Sigh*

I'm still being a bad blogger. I set up some tools, now all I need to do is get back in the habit and start typing away again. I believe it was Robert Benchley who said something like: "Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment."

Awesome. He also said: "The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him." He fathered Peter Benchley, who wrote Jaws. That book was made into a movie. I read the book and saw the movie. The book was better, though Benchley fils had a little too much fun making up "Kiss Me Deadly" -type titles for boorish secondary characters to read, considering the general condition of his own work. Steven Spielberg made the movie, and the movie made his career. Spielberg took out the sex, smoothed off the rottenness of some characters, added special effects, and just look at what the cinema has become. It was, if not the first, probably the first, "adult best-seller" I read, and the film was the first film to cement the peterpanish holywood blockbuster we still know today. The '70's. Before Jaws: The Godfather. After Jaws: Star Wars. Hollywood has never looked back.


Technorati Tags: jaws, peter benchley, robert benchley, movies, star wars sucks

Welcome to my unused Blogger page

I'm going to play around with this for awhile, maybe make the move to cost-effective (read: free) blogging. But with the way things are going, if Google ever goes out of business, I will be out of business too. I do more and more of my work in a firefox browser, using google's ever expanding suites of tools.

Taxes Today

If I can any energy left for filing anyway. Just getting all the forms and gathering receipts, etc, is exhausting enough. I have it all in one pile now, a not inconsequential chore. Yeesh.
Technorati Tags: taxes, lazy