$disanpoter

dispatches

Malcolm Gladwell, in the Tipping Point, extends a hypothesis of productive human inter-connectedness as a result of the combined contributions of three types of people - one of which is the Connector. For the other two, read the book. This is a role I make no claims of inhabiting. My aunt is a Connector, and an amazing one and person at that; I merely have a brain that inherently seeks to match-up incoming information not immediately relevant to me with the person(s) i know of who might find it most useful or valuable. It's a just a spin-off mechanism. That said, if i've tagged you on this post, for at least on of what follows, I had you in mind [feel suitably appreciative here]:

• thursday 23 Aug (tomorrow!): McNally Robinson (independent bookseller with stellar selection and equally exemplary attention to interior design and layout) hosts authors in the up-and-coming literary magazine New York Tyrant. check it out. live the dream or just talk the talk. the wine they'll be serving is sure to help with the latter.
• also of note at McNally Robinson,
  
  • book group focusing on International Literature (tell me, does this surprise anyone?)
  • spanish language discussion group, for those of you who have the good fortune to read borges, cortazar, and the others in their original words. every saturday at noon. led by the former owner of a bookstore in Montevideo.
  • 9 Sept 7pm fiction writing workshop: standard gotham writer's workshop free seminar. i may have attended one when i interned there; either way i remember them being fairly solid.
• intersting tidbit on evolution: in his foreword to The Deep Hot Biosphere, Freeman Dyson mentions a hypothesis extended by the author of the book and ultimately confirmed, that at one point in the history of the world the poles flipped by 90 degrees. This event corresponds with an explosion in the diversity of evolution. niftiness, no?

That's it for the dispatches. There was another, but i've forgotten it. I've had to finish this up at work, too, so i'll have to add the rest of my thoughts on the things i've been reading later.

howsit

it's odd having occassional readers here. this used to be essentially a publically accessible but virtually unknown place for me to record my thoughts and feelings about the things that happened in my life. now i find myself turning away from here as a place to explore my more private thoughts, especially those i have some uncertainties about. this is not a bad thing. in fact, this morning, i merely find myself appreciating the organic way in which, contrary to the typical exhibitionary drive of blogdom, maintaining this blog is enforcing boundaries between what i want to keep private, what i want to keep relatively close, and what i want to share.

for one thing, i find it interesting to see the ways the need for these boundaries and for negotiating between them can affect my writing style. I think i'm more attuned to this this morning in part because of the contemplations i left out of my last post on the events of last week and in part because of the concrete and authoratative language i've had the pleasure of employing in the instructions to the user interfaces i'm working on. some posts are like lattice works, the unweildiness of the syntax growing in direct proportion to my impulse to control how much of my own feelings i reveal. it's not a particularly brilliant or unexpected observation, but its thought-provoking nonetheless.

more so though, sitting with myself after posting last night was an eye-opening experience. i realized there were reflections i very much wanted to put some expression to, numerous discrete events from the past week, both minor and more significant, that were valuable to me but in a way that is oddly personally - oddly because there's nothing about them i would necessarily hide, but because i don't feel the need to share them to validate them or to prove to myself that i am okay with the lack of certainty and omniscience they involve. it's hard to explain - and plus, it's new this being okay with imbalance and uncertainty - but here's an example: lately i haven't been depending on my friends assessments of behavioral interactions i relate to them to either confirm or moderate my assessment of the situation. this while scary, is a good thing for me. but last night, instead of trying to mitigate this by placing greater confidence in my own reasons and assessments, i kept returning to the idea that i simply can't know. however much a given situation appears to me to be a certain way, it's possible - even probable at times - that it feels entirely differently to other people involved. there are always times when one is confident that they can judge someone's enjoyment or displeasure, but really, there are just as many times when these aspects are not apparant. it's not that this is such a new concept for me, but usually this inspires a desire to take decided steps to push away or completely cut out the people in my life i feel such reservations over. that instead, last night i simply lingered on how much i had enjoyed the company of just about everyone i spent time with last week, from the people i'd just met to the good friends i hadn't seen in weeks, today seems huge to me.

sustainability

in this post: facebook interests, website for starpower program, french sociology book, housing works orientation, run in with the office hall monitor, possibility of sustainable relationships, possibility of sustainable activities, architecture and support beams, g-tech, kai and the winos, hallelujah ...

[so i'm adopting this new blog form, mostly to help me remember my thoughts as i come back to this throughout the day. my posts have diminished on this temp assignment, and that's not good, since a significant part of its purpose is the delayed value of me rediscovering my own thoughts months later. the downside is y'all might actually have to look to my blog to see the actual contents of the post. :{ ...not to assume that you necessarily want to or anything like that]

so...starting with hallelujah...A.Ho and I got a drink at the Bourgeois Pig last night since Tuesday are half off bottles all night, and while we were there a particularly stunning rendition of Cohen's "Hallelujah" came up on the playlist, which reminded me how much i like the song and especially the part "i heard there was a secret chord that david played and it pleased the lord but you don't really care for music, do ya? it goes like this, the fourth the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift, the baffled king composing hallelujah..." to begin with there's the overtone of isolation - not any generalized sense of isolation, but the particular isolation of being one among many. it's the implicit significance of the aside "but you don't really care for music, do ya:" here the singer is considering the possibility of an essential truth that could reconnect the lone person with the divine and it's irrelevant to share because the very vehicle one requires to share it cannot be accessed by the person the singer is trying to connect with. then on top of that there's the allusion in 'the baffled king composing' to our capacity to create thing greater - even more human - than ourselves, and the doubly poignant aspect that very often we can experience being profoundly touched, we can create that which touches us profoundly without having access to the why or the how it manages to do so. there's so much hope in that for being human. i guess that's what i love about the song, it's this poignant bundle of the yearning and the hope and the weakness and the tragedy of human experience. [i'll rewrite this so it's not as fumbling, i promise]

curious L goes to school!

so i've pasted a VERY rough draft of my personal statement for my application below. if any of your are
a. feeling altruistic
b. in need of procrastination
c. motivated by a perverse desire to laugh at me

and would like to give me some feedback on the general ideas or efficacy of it. that would be much much much appreciated.

Programmer's Desktop

It was a bit nippy at 70 degrees (not so much for the temperature as for the impossible to locate (apparently/incidentally neither unlocatable nor unplaceable are real words) draft in my apartment this afternoon so I put on a duraflame log. It yielded much comfortable warmth before collapsing forward suddenly into a heap of flaming ash at the front edge of my hearth, causing wave upon wave of smoke to escape the draw of the chimney and permeate my livitchen / kichingroom with a visibly grey haze. Fortunately, I'd been diligent earlier about spritzing the Caush [?] whenever he tried to climb the screen so neither of the kittens were nearby. So that was a bit of an event.

Meanwhile, I've been returning to the thoughts i was working out at Random House regarding more flexible information architectures [this space left intentionally to represent the long winded extrapolation on exactly what needs such architectures would respond to]...gotta run...

anything and everything

Today I have not thought. I have done greeting cards and mailing labels and attempted to ignore the headache growing continually more annoying each passing hour. Now, with the greeting card project over, I can return for a few minutes to the cotton candy world of object I have complete certainty will exist/belong to me someday. That latter includes a barcode scanner. If I had a barcode scanner I could make a proto modules that scans in personal possessions, pulls down product information and permits the user to tag, catagorize, and otherwise make notes on said item. This module would then integrate with another shopping modules that could import batch sets of products from a web order. The module could also provide tools to chart usage. yummy. i wish i had a barcode scanner. then i could scan in all my books and not only would i have their textual information, i'd have their dimensions and I could sort by size to create the most logical sets to stack them in. speaking of books, I've relocated the Deviant's Advantage. too bad i can't read it until I finish Zadie Smith's On Beauty.
There were more objects before i got started on that, but now i've lost track of them. i'll just have to update this later.

no play

[this space intentionally left to preserve forever reference to the rant on ineffectual technology guides and lack of big-picture perspective]
I have much to get done today, not withstanding these bloody greeting cards i have to finish printing by the end of the day: I need to...

• get together a survey of popular web services to practice integrating in a clean and relevant way.
• start in on an AJAX based javascript library to have ready at will for potential freelance opportunities.
• write some more on Hadley, including some background action for the class Person bit, per feedback from my gracious readers.
• organize my job search leads
• think about what it is i want to do with my life
• write up briefs on the modular settings concept, iFrame for content iteration, and essential forms model (not to be confused with core objects). also, briefs on the user space device,  distributed content framework, and anything else that comes to mind.

mmm...mmm...good

i've had a headache for going on 4 days now. i don't mean that as a complaint -- just as an explanation for why i've permitted myself this friday night to mouse together ('draw' just doesn't quite work, you know...) pretty layouts in lieu of more serious work. Plus, Numbers was a rerun, we all know i can't watch the same thing twice unless i'm studying it or it's simply beautiful to watch or it's one of my very favorites. Plus, it's the one where they determine that a painting is a forgery based on samples of brush stroke textures, which just isn't as cool as, say, last week's where they were studying traffic flow of people in a banquet hall (which reminds me i haven't actually watched that one yet - eh. whatever).

anyway. so i've made myself freelancing business cards. they're kinda hokey, but the colors are alright. I've been on a chocolate and dinner mint colors kick recently. that really soft yellow, the fresh and minty green, that peculiar sherbert shade of pinkish orange. okay, not really the pinkish orange, but the others yes. if i ever make that unevenly distributed line patter program, chocolatey brown, pale yellow and minty green will feature strongly in the design i paint on my wall. For tonight, I'm satisfied with business/networking cards and perhaps some stationary (sorry hadley) , which the daring and the curious can see here:

ban does best but...

it's not my underarms that need freshening up; it's my familiarity with these...

Web Technologies I need to cozy up with:

• .Net
• SOAP
• XML
• AJAX
• DOM, yes the dom. (dom da dom dom DaaaaaaOM)

Platforms, Projects, Concepts I need to fool around with more often:

• the Wikis, not to be confused with the Wookies, young master.
• Movable Type
• Proto/ mash-ups
• there's another somewhere - oh write, that storytelling scripting language

Companies I need to get familiar with:

• Coghead
• outside.in
• ThinkMap
• hmmm...one that will hire me, perhaps.

I'm feeling a bit swamped
...and my battery's running out.

i'm going to pull a classic avoidance move here and not work on any of these. instead i'm going to return to the Hadley story and get her out of that post-party breakfast she's currently in the midst of.

more to chew

Recently I've been working of putting myself 'out there,' making connections social and professional, and i've had some successes in this. I've struck up conversations and joined neighborhood groups. I've made some acquaintances; I've won some interviews and reviews. Unfortunately, my increased ability to convey confidence and competence has sped me more quickly along to that point where one must provide proof of one's skillset and to realize once again that I've left all samples of my work in half-baked states. Contrary to what potential employeers might think, my blog is simply not a suitable example of my aptitude in composition. I need a portfolio, and quickly.