The last post on this blog was written on March 14th, of 2010. Yet, I still get notices of signups. Bless your hearts, all of you who aren’t just mere bots. I hope someday soon there will be something here worth reading. There just might be in a few months…
The other night I couldn’t sleep so I went downstairs at 2:00 to watch some TV. Our cable company is offering a free preview of a number of multicultural channels, and one of them was covering a cricket match between New Zealand and Australia.
I’ve only watched cricket once before, during the World Cup years and years ago. I sort of gleaned some of the rules from listening to the commentators and watching the action. The whole thing looked interesting enough, but I just didn’t get it. But this happened before the days of Wikipedia.
This time, I had my iPhone and I fought through a lousy writeup to get a sense of what the players were trying to do. And I found I could enjoy watching some of the game. I have questions, such as “why don’t they seem to run very hard?” or “who thought it was a good idea to design a game this long?”, but I know who I can ask about it. We’ll probably have a good conversation about the Mumbai Indians beating the R-something Royals by 4 runs.
Sometimes I dislike how technology has taken away the natural pauses in life… those brief moments in which you could catch your breath while something physically needed to move from one place to another. Like cheques in the mail, or documents to be stored away in a cabinet or taken to someone’s desk. Tech made many of these pauses obsolete, but also quickened the pace of life in the same stroke. When we talk about life being so hectic, there it is.
And yet, I like how certain things are more efficient now. I like having information at my fingertips. I like instant gratification when I want to know something. I really couldn’t have enjoyed the two matches I’ve sampled so far without access to technology and information. As usual, I suspect the key is managing the balance.
My free preview will be over soon, and I suspect I won’t be watching anymore cricket after that. Still, I’m glad a little new tech helped me learn to appreciate a very old game.
For the first time, I’m participating in a fantasy football league. It’s hosted by the NFL on NFL.com and I believe our league was started by my softball coach.
I’ve enjoyed football for a long time, but being in a fantasy league really causes you to scrutinize the players as individuals. My buddy at work is right: when you play fantasy, you can’t just enjoy the games anymore.
There are two questions that I’m wrestling with right now. The first is whether Wes Welker is going to play or not this weekend. I got burned last weekend by starting Welker and not hearing that he missed the game until it was too late. At the moment, it’s believed he’ll play, but is a mostly-injured Welker going to be more productive than a somewhat-injured Steve Breaston? Are both better than Torry Holt?
The other question relates Brady vs. Flacco. Who’s going to have a better game – Brady versus the Falcons or Flacco versus the Browns? I still think Brady’s getting over his knee injury and facing a lot of pressure. The Browns are 0-2, but their pass defence hasn’t been as shabby as the record might suggest.
I suspect I’ll have to wait until almost game time to lock in my answers, but I’m open to suggestions.
I recently got a notification that someone has signed up a new account on the site. When that happens, I usually say “what site? Oh, yeah…that one…”
The last post on here was dated back in April, so I thought I should make a quick update on what’s going on with the site. In a word, nothing. At least, not now.
There is no commercial purpose to my blog. It’s really just another outlet for my writing, but my main outlet is a Moleskine notebook that’s become some sort of journal/scrapbook hybrid. Pics to come someday. I think you can look for more writing on the site when football season starts to come around. Not that there isn’t comment-worthy football news happening now, but I’m not one of those guys.
Since April, there has been a lot to talk about. I’ve had some opinions on things like the Tamil protests, the Iran protests, Twitter, Michael Jackson. A lot of that is old news and not very fresh anymore, so I’ll try to get my two cents in as things happen in the news.
As if anyone is waiting to hear what I think anyway…
After the kids go to sleep, after any pressing chores are done, and before I turn in for the night, there’s a moment of calm and silence. Just like right now.
I just like to sit in my chair, catch up on my Twitter and Facebook, and start decompress. Muscles, shoulders, arms, legs just unclench and my body melts into the seat. The house is very, very still now. All I can hear is the hard drive on this Mac softly spinning…
whirrrrr…
Once the runaway train of thought slows and pulls into the station, some of the issues I normally press into the edges start to move into the forefront. Did I take of this? When’s that due? Did the power bill get paid? It’s not on the bills magnet so Wifey must have taken care of it. Did I put away the food? What about the laundry… Being a worrywart is probably in my genetics.
whirrrr….
I like Twitter because it serves well as “background” noise for my sessions on the computer. There’s a rhythm and a variety to the Growl notifications that pop up. Sometimes a tweet catches my attention and draws me in, but normally it’s all there just to make web-browsing a little less sterile. There are occasions, however, when I want to turn off the noise and get back to a still pond. Just like right now.
whirrrr…..
I’m ready for bed.
I just went to go check on my daughter, Princess. She fell asleep hanging on to a white hotel towel she calls her “blankie.” She always has her blankie with her when she goes to bed. Being a towel, however, it’s not warm enough so I usually put another blanket on her. Later, she will kick it off of her in her sleep and I’ll put it right back. Repeat ad nauseam.
Every single time I put the blanket on her, though, it reminds me of my paternal grandmother. When she passed away, part of the grieving process included a private ceremony for the family in the funeral home. After my Dad spoke, the funeral director brought a couple of very fancy blankets to the podium. He said (in a poor summary of a beautiful speech) that when we’re little and our blankets slip off of us in our sleep, it’s our parents who come in and put the blankets back so that we keep warm and stave off the cold. At this time, it was pretty much our last chance to be with my grandmother’s casket before it was sealed for the long trim back to her burial in Vietnam. Our last opportunity to say thank you and that we loved her and would always remember her. Also, these blankets he had with him, there at the podium, were for us to put on my grandmother to keep her warm for the long journey home.
Now, part of me thinks it feels a little weird to think of the deceased while I’m with my daughter. The rest, however, really just goes quiet and watches this tiny pink soul breathing under a pink blanket in a pink room full of princesses.
She just turned five. We (should) still have a lot of time left on this world together. For all the things I might do for her or that she might need from me, this blanket stuff seems like the simplest thing. Yet, ever since that speech by Mr. Lee, I feel like even these are some of the most important moments I’ll share with her.
And she’ll probably never know.
My wife is going to be away most of the weekend accompanying her brother in New Jersey. They’ll leave in the dead of night around 4 or 5 AM and be back on Sunday night.
The kids, Princess and Permasmile, finally fell asleep about half an hour ago so the wife and I are spending some quiet time together before we pass out from exhaustion.
I never like to be separated from any of the family by so much distance. Not that I feel afraid that something terrible might happen, but I tend to feel the absence, the sense of someone
missing and I abhor the vacuum even more than Nature does.
It also doesn’t help that a fairly sizable portion of me really wishes we could all go together. I live for long road trips in unfamiliar territory. With two kids and no time to get all of our ducks in a row, however, I know things are better the way they stand.
Now I’ll just have to figure out how to keep the little ones entertained tomorrow.
Just as I got started into writing on the blog, I got hooked on Twitter. Following other people’s feed and tweeting into stream just seems to fill in that silence.
No matter where you go, you need some background noise to give your space some texture. The web is still a very sterile place and browsing it is still an artificial experience. Twitter and Facebook may or may not change the world, but at least it gives you the feeling that there’s some life or movement under the surface.
If you want to follow my Twitter feed, look me up: http://twitter.com/grenamier
I promise you that it’s getting updated much more often than this blog does.
Fighter planes could be much faster and agile than they are now, but their limits exist in flesh rather than steel and composite materials. Human pilots turn into peanut butter if the plane goes too fast, so a jet designer has to take this into account.
Apple announced the new Shuffle today and it’s really, really small. I have to reserve final judgement until I physically hold one in my hand, but I wonder if Apple’s gone too far.
The Shuffle is now too small to hold buttons that human fingers can press, so Apple did away with them on the unit. Now you have a control on the headphone cord and a voice to announce the song titles.
As far as the headphone cord controls go, I can’t imagine you’re happy if you have a favourite pair of headphones that lack the controls. You’re going to have to get used to the Apple buds or hope that some good third-party replacements are available.
The voice worries me. I’m a fast reader so I prefer to read text over listening to a voice message. When you listen to something, you’re stuck waiting until the whole message gets read. I hope that this feature doesn’t become intrusive, especially on long song titles.
All that said, I can’t wait to see these at my local Apple Store.
Part of why I don’t blog much is that sharing what I think of isn’t an action that comes naturally to me. Another big reason, is that this blog has to compete with my Moleskine.
If you’ve read my little profile blurb, you know that I love classic low tech stuff. Like fountain pens scratching out lines in a paper notebook. When I have to get something out of my head and into text, my weapon of choice for the past few years has been a Moleskine notebook. Yes, they’re expensive, but something about the paper, and the bookmark, and the handy pocket in the back is like crack on the fingers. I’ve gone through a bunch of them, scribbling thoughts down whenever on a whim. Of course, a lot of whims happen at work when I have little to do.
There are some problems with recording my thoughts this way. First: the ink gets all over my hands because I’m a lefty using a fountain pen. Second: the notebooks aren’t very searchable without a multitude of Moleskine hacks to overcome the limitations of non-digital paper. Third: everything I write is hidden away under an elastic band, never to be shared or debated.
I’ve gotten over the first problem. In fact, I like the “lived in” look that the ink smudges give the paper. The second doesn’t really bother me too much either. After all, notebooks are what they are. People who spend a lot of time and effort in maintaining systems to make their paper behave like binary bits seem unsure of what year they’re living in.
The third problem, however, does bother me. Although a lot of what I write in the notebook is private and should never be shared (screw all you “radical transparency” types!), there’s a lot there that needs to get out and seen by others. Not just because I’m a narcissistic jackhole, but because a lot of these thoughts need the benefit of perspective and cross-examination. I’d like people to read what I write, give me some feedback, and hopefully I’ll learn things I didn’t know or see things I didn’t see before. Perhaps the people commenting might also come away a little different.
The blog can help me with this. I’ll keep scribbling in my Moleskine, but when I hit on something worthy of a closer look, I’ll look at it a little more closely. Shine it up and throw it on the blog for all of my 0 readers to see.
<sarcasm>I can just hear the anticipation now!</sarcasm>
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