[ Posted by kevin
Sun, 07 Jan 2007 23:39:00 GMT ]
When I was in high school and an undergrad in college, I would find a passage in a book that really spoke to me in a special way. Something that I swore was written just for me. I'd read it to someone, and they'd say 'heh', and not be that interested. I dare you:
"This is obscene. How dare we be standing around,t alking about nothing, not running in one huge mass of people, running at something, something huge, knocking it over? Why do we all bother coming out, gathering her in numbers like this, without starting fires, tearing things down? How dare we not lock the doors and replace the white bulbs with red and commence with the massive orgy, the joyous mingling of a thousand arms, legs, breasts" - page 134
I love the poetic-ness, the feeling that there must be something bigger, some grander purpose to socialization. That feeling you get when the conversation is just a bit too dull, and you're like "why am I here?" When you're looking at the girls and wishing you had the nerve to say something, the wit to think of something clever that would make them love you, that would make the whole room recognize your genius. OK, well maybe a bit less ego-centric than that, but one giant shared-love experience, that we're all ok. We all crave that attention, that acceptance, isn't that what an orgy represents anyways? One giant community fulfillment?
In case you couldn't tell, I've been thinking a lot lately about what makes a community, and why we bother finding or joining one. I'm not sure that I ever really have - certainly friends, and groups of friends, but never neighbors in a very real way, or any other physical or ideological grouping. I yearn for that grander purpose to start fires and tear things down - I had a taste of it in the WTO protests in Seattle 1999.
Yes, it's been awhile. Welcome back, Kevin.
Technorati Tags: religion, purpose, sex, social interaction
Posted in Society, Ambitions | 3 comments
[ Posted by kevin
Wed, 16 Aug 2006 20:40:49 GMT ]
Ebay has always pissed me off, even though I use them quite a lot lately. They basically have no competition, and are the catch-all advertising for selling anything on the internet. It’s a stupid system that needs to change, but how do you redirect all those searchers that have “ebay” imprinted on their forehead as the only place to shop online besides amazon?
They also just charge too damn much. 6% on large listings, plus $6 for each item you post (whether or not it sells).
From http://pages.ebay.com/sell/announcement200607/overview/index.html
And, when you compare our operations costs for an average Store Inventory listing and an average core listing – factoring in the duration of each – our cost to host a Store Inventory listing is more than 50% higher than for a core listing. In fact, current Store Inventory insertion fees don’t cover eBay’s costs for hosting them.
Bullox! It’s run by a bloody computer, buy a few more servers and show us the revolution of computers. You should be able to host kazillions of auctions with no noticeable speed decrease. Google shows us how easy it is to scale… This is such a “I don’t understand how computers work and I’m a marketing person” response…
Technorati Tags: ebay
Posted in Society, Ambitions | 2 comments
[ Posted by kevin
Wed, 19 Apr 2006 18:03:35 GMT ]
I hate dealing with multiple screen resolutions. Can’t our socialistic welfare government just give everyone a 30” monitor and designers everywhere can rejoice?
I really miss tables. They were evil to use in design, but they worked so well! if you gave each cell a width, but not the overall table, the cells would collapse smaller if the screen was too small.
I’d use this in my current project, except that each cell needs a #pixels width, which then means that the spaces between cells vary, as it’s the cells themselves that are the same width. Which, for a navigation bar, look strange.
I’m continually amazed and inspired by the changes web2.0 has brought us, in terms of scriptaculus, delicious, ruby on rails, open design, and so many other things. We’re able to get so close to the programming power of a local program, but with the decentralize and social aspect of the web at our fingertips.
But just because we’ve been able to layer javascript and html so well, I still think we need a better underlying layout and programming platform. How long can javascript/CSS/HTML last? We outgrow everything, it’s just a question of how long…
Technorati Tags: css, delicious, design, javascript, rails, ruby on rails, web design
Posted in Society, Coding, Ambitions | 4 comments
[ Posted by kevin
Sun, 16 Apr 2006 19:58:04 GMT ]
I’ve been working with ruby on rails for over a year now, and I couldn’t be happier with how well it’s done.
There have been frustrating times—just far fewer than there would have been using any other system (including my own I’d written, which I obviously knew back-to-front).
Interestingly enough, development hasn’t been any faster than it was previously! Crazy! The truth is: I expect any site I create to have so much more now, to be so much more well designed, to write test cases, for crying out loud. These things take time. Quality takes time.
I’m convinced it’s one of those “Murphy’s law” sort of things – any increase in productivity of the tool will be made up for by an increase of ambition in project design.
Anyways, here’s to Rails, the software pattern that makes me want to get up each morning, and change the world one community website at a time.
“Agile Web Development with Rails : A Pragmatic Guide (The Facets of Ruby Series)” (Dave Thomas, David Hansson, Leon Breedt, Mike Clark, Thomas Fuchs, Andrea Schwarz)
Technorati Tags: lighttpd, ruby on rails, social interaction, rails, web design
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Posted in Coding, Ambitions | 7 comments | 1073 trackbacks
[ Posted by kevin
Thu, 08 Dec 2005 16:50:32 GMT ]
I like posting this, because it’s like it’s some secret insight into my deep psyche. And I want to share that with you. Maybe I’m just an exhibitionist.
- Microsoft Office for Mac with Virtual PC 7 (or separately. I don’t need the version that includes windows xp). Because my cracked version doesn’t work :)
- Pittsburgh Entertainment Book, because I like to spend twice as much saving 10%
- LOTR Trilogy set ($75, for tara and me)
- Piano music books, improv, melodies, etc
- 30×60 frame for my big swirly lightscape photos (two?)
- moleskine notebook
- retractable leash for taking bailey on walks
- anything fun for the car
- heated seat kit
- remote car starter
- grand piano music-stand lamp, some expensive on ebay ($200), maybe elsewhere?
- exotic liquors, because everyone needs grand mariner
Books:
- Poetry books, perhaps latest “Best american poetry”
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – Dave Eggers
- The Zen of CSS Design
- Everything Is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
Technorati Tags: christmas
Posted in Ambitions | no comments
[ Posted by kevin
Fri, 09 Sep 2005 03:18:00 GMT ]
Mostly in order. We read these out loud as a family.
- Treasure Island – Stevenson
- Tom Sawyer – Twain
- Huck Finn – Twain
- Robinson Crusoe – Dufoe
- A connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
- The time Machine – Wells
- Lost Horizon
- The Three musketeers – Dumas
- Red Badge of Courage – Crane
- Of Mice & Men – Steinbeck
- Shane – Schafer
- (tried) A tree grows in brooklyn
- Captain Courageous – Kipling
- (tried) House of the seven gables – Hawthorne
- Great Expectations – Dickens
- Ender’s Game, Speaker of the dead. Xenocide – Orson Scott Card
- 20,000 leagues under the sea – Verne
- Call of the Wild – London
- Brave New World – Huxley
- 1984
- Old Man & the Sea, Short Happy life of Francis Macomodon, Snows of Kilamanjaro
- A wrinkle in time – Madeline Llangle
- Alice in Wonderland, Through the looking glass
- (half) Pride & Prejudice
- (tried) Kim – Kipling
- Invisible Man – Wells
- Jayne Eyre
- A portrait of Dorian Gray
- Don Quixote
- One flew over the cookoo’s nest
- Stranger in a Strange Land – Heinlein
- Out of the Silent Planet – Lewis
- To Kill a Mockingbird
- Animal Farm
- Grendel
- Farenheight 451
- Player Paino
- Dead Eye Dick
- Sherlock Holmes
- Poe
- Trustee from the Toolroom – Shute
Want to have successful children? Read to them! :)
Technorati Tags: family, reading
Posted in Society, Ambitions | 8 comments | 184 trackbacks
[ Posted by kevin
Wed, 29 Jun 2005 16:53:01 GMT ]
Last year I decided it was time to ‘get professional’.
For me, that meant buying a bunch of books on usability and studying ‘experts’ and the big web sites like amazon, etc.
Short rant: I hate amazon’s design. It’s always been hideous. The new one is a bit better, at least they realized having 300 tabs was confusing. But now there’s none! And they advertise movies + free shipping on their front page instead of books, talk about losing your perspective.
So I read ‘don’t make me think’, and several other good books. I’ve learned a lot. I think I’m pretty good at it.
Except now, when I design something, it seems like there’s one ‘right way’. I’ve gotten used to this using a programming language ‘ruby’, where we refer to it as the ‘Ruby way’. But design is supposed to be a creative and artistic process. Now making things simple enough seems to lead to one specific design that I like, but I don’t think is flashy or pretty enough. But I can’t change anything, because that would break my usability guidelines.
I’m looking forward to hopefully hiring someone in Pittsburgh to help with the design process. Except now that I’ve read all these books, I’m going to know way more than them. Hopefully it will work out, I really need someone to bounce ideas off, and to come up with creative color schemes and layouts themselves.
I’ve never been an amazing programmer, but now I’m not a good designer either! Uggh, this is progress?
Technorati Tags: design, usability, puppy
Posted in Art, Coding, Ambitions | 4 comments
[ Posted by kevin
Fri, 10 Jun 2005 17:05:54 GMT ]
RealRhapsody is something of an interesting case to me. I’ve been using it for a good year now, and looking at previous reviews, it’s obvious that their design hasn’t been updated in 3 years.
They have a great selection, but the user interface was written by a programmer who hadn’t seen the light of day in years. It’s not terrible, it’s just not usable. Which should be important.
I’m more and more frustrated when I see things like this, that seem like an obvious ‘free money’ situation to the business eye. Given their popularity among the top-something subscription music services, staying ‘cool’ and being usable need to be top priorities, or they’ll fall by the wayside.
I fail to see how a company that sells and makes several million (or hundred million, whatever) can’t even do a good enough job to keep their lead. Is anyone being creative in corporate America?
I’m also frustrated by the lack of releases for other systems besides windows. Given that NONE of the subscription services work on mac, whichever one releases for mac will enjoy fairly good ‘forced’ subscription numbers. It couldn’t take them more than a week or two (which becomes a month with testing) to port it to another system. It’s written mostly in flash, for crying out loud (I think). Shoddy.
Technorati Tags: music
Posted in Society, Ambitions | no comments
[ Posted by kevin
Tue, 07 Jun 2005 05:20:00 GMT ]
With a small worry of being scary, I'm going to share my birthday list. I think it might be an interesting way to know me better ;)
- $16 Creative Whack Pack (@ Barnes and noble too) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0880793589/ref=pd_sxp_f/002-4625205-6627234?v=glance&s=books
- These creativity cards look cool too, but they're $100, hmmph: $100 http://www.solutionpeople.com/kbtool.htm Mini usb keyboard for garageband. Prob. nearly any fairly small usb midi keyboard would work, but this one looks goodtoo:
http://store.yahoo.com/macyummies/maga.html ($129)
http://thinkdifferentstore.com/product_info.php/products_id/963
These give you a good idea of the small size + style.
- A new book holder, like I stole from mom years ago (ergonomic thingy)
- Money Clip
- http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=money+clip
- Subscription to 2600 magazine. It's a fun hacker magazine.
- Plaster & Board for art experimentation. I don't know much about it, but look forward to picking it up sometime.
- VR glove
$25 + $2 shipping- http://www.overstock.com/cgi-bin/d2.cgi?PAGE=PRODUCT&PROD_ID=703652&cid=25608&fp=F
My birthday is Wednesday! :) I'll keep you posted on what I get...
Posted in Ambitions | no comments
[ Posted by kevin
Thu, 26 May 2005 22:02:00 GMT ]
I think one of the major ‘lessons learned’ in the blogging world is that blogs are like businesses – 90% fail.
Most people don’t update them. Why? I can spectulate – their lives get busy, and they don’t get enough feedback that people are actually reading what they say. So tell me you like my posts!
I’m going to pledge to update this blog at least 4 times per week. I think it sounds reasonable. We’ll see how long I can keep it up!
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think my life is decently interesting. I’ve been getting that ‘hey, I should blog this’ feeling much more often lately. I just need to make it part of my routine…
Posted in Society, Ambitions | 10 comments | 324 trackbacks
