Category: ramblings

ramblings

Phase 2 Part 2

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I am happy to report that almost ten years after I first launched Sevensquared.com and almost six years after I first posted to WGTCTIP2 two major developments have occurred at the same time: I have changed my host (from Buzix to GoDaddy) and my blog’s content management system (from Movable Type to WordPress).   You may have noticed that I have not posted in over a month and wondered, “Why the radio silence?”  Well, backing up and moving all of my site files (as well as my blog with its 750+ posts) was a time consuming though relatively easy process that is finally complete. Sevensquared.com is dead. Long live Sevenquared.com!
These two changes (host and CMS) are big for a number of reasons:
First and foremost, I now have unlimited space and bandwidth (for a lower yearly fee no less) which means that large PDFs, images, music and movies all can be stored and served by my site along with a super stable CMS that I do not have to troubleshoot and/or maintain myself. The next time my blog weathers a comment spam attack, its someone else’s problem, not mine.
Second, its been time for a change for a long while now and I’m excited to finally freshen things up ’round the ole site.  Everything and I mean everything will be getting a redesign and/or refresh (aka a face lift) and right away you will probably notice that my beloved blog looks a bit different.  I have a new font (Georgia) and a new design theme (Thesis – which gets a lot of fan and hate mail on the web – for me thus far it’s what I was hoping for) .  Two current annoyances are that I cannot figure out how to move the next / previous entry navigation to above the post (not below the post where the nav currently resides) and that I need to learn how to code my header so that an image (and not text) appears.  Also,  search engine results will no longer take you to the entry that is indexed as I’ve moved from a static html archive system to a dynamic php based system so I’m looking into how I can resolve this issue.  In the mean time, I’ve added a custom error redirect that will take you the blog’s main page so at least you’re not stuck on a basic 404 error page.
So, look forward to lots of cool stuff happening through the end of the year and the start of 2010.   I cannot wait to see what takes shape.

ramblings

And the Pursuit of Happiness

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Maira Kalman has a blog hosted on the NY Times site called “And the Pursuit of Happiness” which is phenomenal. She is an illustrator, author and designer and the blog, which is a mix of content and illustration, is about American democracy. A new post appears on the last Friday of each month and after reading this month’s post about Ben Franklin I then read the June Thomas Jefferson post and now I am hooked – thus me posting about it.
Both of these posts really struck me because both of these men were so very productive in their lives and I feel often, and by often I mean on an almost daily if not more than once a day basis, that I simply waste days. While I may have fun each day, its not often that when I put my head to the pillow I am proud of what I accomplished that day. As each day brings me a touch closer to my own demise, and with a third of my life probably behind me (and possibly more depending on when my time is up), my tangible accomplishments are nothing when compared to these two giants. Sure, it’s stiff competition but I’m not going to compare myself to Dave from Yonkers. I’m going to compare myself to the best.
Kalman says that Franklin “was a genius, one of the great inventors of this country.” She goes on to say “I don’t think he was ever bored. He saw a dirty street and created a sanitation department. He saw a house on fire and created a fire department. He saw sick people and founded a hospital. He started our first lending library. He saw people needing an education and founded a university. He started the American Philosophical Society, where men and women shared developments in science. And then, by the way, he helped create and run the country.” And so on and so forth – if you want to learn more, read the post.
Moving backwards from July to June, Kalman says that Jefferson “was a scientist, philosopher, statesman, architect, musician, naturalist, zoologist, botanist, farmer, bibliophile, inventor, wine connoisseur, mathematician and and…he was the governor of Virginia, Secretary of State, Minister to the Court of Louis XVI, Vice President and then President of the United States, initiator of the Louisiana Purchase and its exploration by Lewis and Clark.” Again, its a “and so on and so forth” situation here because he did a lot more as well. If you want to learn more, read the post.
The part of the Jefferson post that struck me the most was at the very end, when Kalman talks about how when Thomas’s wife of 10 years Martha lay dying, “he never left her side and copied out their favorite passage in the novel Tristram Shandy. First in her hand. Then in his.”
The passage they copied together sums up how I feel, especially now that I’m closely watching my daughter grow up. First she learned how to roll over, then to crawl, then to walk and now is learning how to talk. The mystery of life is confoundedly amazing and it’s fast. Without further ado, here is the quote:

Time wastes too fast: every letter trace tells me with what rapidity life follows my pen. The days and hours of it are flying over our heads like clouds of windy day, never to return – more every thing presses on – and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, every absence which follow it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make!

Not my usual cherry and funny “Happy Friday!” type post but thought provoking and therefore worth sharing nonetheless. Have a great weekend – make it count!

ramblings

Wanna Get High?

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If Towlie ever had a park designed just for him, it would be the newly opened High Line which is located in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood.
This long-abandoned 1.5-mile elevated railway in Manhattan has finally been turned into a public park and its being unveiled to the public today. I love the fact that this park is 10 years in the making (back in 1999 two friends decided to fight to prevent developers from ripping the High Line down) and that it actually happened – sort of like how I conversely still cannot believe the West Side Stadium idea actually never moved forward.
I for one cannot wait to take a walk on the high side. I hope to do so soon while the wildflowers are abloom…
Via Erick P

ramblings

Subway Manners

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I read today on the NYT’s City Room blog about how Matt Muro has been riding the subway on crutches for the past few months and how he has been surreptitiously snapping pictures of those who wouldn’t give up from the seat marked “Priority Seating for People with Disabilities” for him. This post is just a snipit of a longer article that will appear in this Sunday’s paper titled Smile, You’re on Selfish-Jerk Camera.
Matt has posted all of the pics he took at People Who Sit In The Disability Seats When Im Standing On My Crutches.com Yes, the name of the site is really that long and yes, he has started a site just to vent about his subway frustrations (keep in mind though that he never asks for a seat, he just notes who automatically gets up for him and who does not).
I would suggest that you look through the photos and see if you recognize anyone (I didn’t). I think its now only a matter of tme before a copycat site for pregnant women pops us, just watch…

ramblings

Settle This Debate – Best Board Game Ever?

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I’ve always loved board games. I have been playing them for as long as I remember. From games of Chutes and Ladders to Candy Land to Monopoly to Clue to Stratego to Scrabble to RISK (my maybe current favorite) I have loved to just sit in a basement somewhere with friends or family and watch the hours roll on by while hoping to outplay and outsmart my opponents. I still love it. I just get to do it less.
RISK occupied plenty of my afternoons and evenings during my formative years. Each one of my friends played a certain role: one took Australia, one made an ill fated attempt to control Asia, one took Africa and could never hold it, etc. I was big on trying to take North America & Europe. Sometimes it was effective, sometimes not so much. The RISK themed Seinfeld episode – “The Ukraine is weak!” – is one of my favorites for the love that it bestows on my maybe favorite game.
I keep saying maybe favorite because a new game possibly has supplanted it for fav game status. The game to which I am referring to is Settlers of Catan the 1995 winner of the German Spiel des Jahres “Game of the Year Award” which over the past few years, through simple word of mouth, has become one of the most popular games in the world. It literally has sold 15 million copies. No joke.
If you’ve never heard of the game, let me tell you that it is flat out awesome for more than a few reasons. I could start with how each game begins with the random placement of 19 different hexagonal pieces but instead I would rather like to point you towards a Wired Magazine article in this month’s issue titled “Monopoly Killer: Perfect German Board Game Redefines Genre.” Here is an excerpt:

Settlers is now poised to become the biggest hit in the US since Risk. Along the way, it’s teaching Americans that board games don’t have to be either predictable fluff aimed at kids or competitive, hyperintellectual pastimes for eggheads. Through the complex, artful dance of algorithms and probabilities lurking at its core, Settlers manages to be effortlessly fun, intuitively enjoyable, and still intellectually rewarding, a potent combination that’s changing the American idea of what a board game can be.

The article is about 1000% true: after my friends turned me onto the game a few years back I’ve been addicted ever since. I regularly get together with between 3 – 5 friends to play both the Regular and expanded Seafarers editions and truly we all have become addicted – case in point, when a number of us took a trip abroad last year, we brought not one but two boards with us and played not one night but two nights in a row. Sick.
Net / net: I see no reason for this tread to not continue. I think 20 million copies is just around the corner…

ramblings

The Crisis of Credit Visualized

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Jonathan Jarvis has put together a super slick short and simple explanation of the current credit crisis. His goal? To give form to a complex situation like the credit crisis in order to quickly supply the essence of the situation to those unfamiliar and uninitiated.
As my friend Erik states, “Towards the end it gets a little inaccurate. For example, it never bothers to mention that throwing so many new homeowners on the scene is what pushed prices way way up and it blames the fall in prices on defaults and foreclosures, which isn’t entirely true. What it does do, though, is very clearly define all the pieces of the game, and it gets the story more or less right.”
The project was completed as part of his thesis work in the Media Design Program, a graduate studio at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. If I was his professor, I’d be giving him an A.
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For more on his broader thesis work exploring the use of new media to make sense of a increasingly complex world, visit jdjarvis.com.
Via Neu

ramblings

My Facebook Status Update

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I have been very torn about idea of social networking Facebook (FB) style since it truly caught the world by storm – an event which I think took place within the past year. I have been torn because FB is the first social networking site (sorry Friendster and MySpace) to truly break out, and by that I mean it is the first place that my family, friends, friends of friends, fraternity brothers, former classmates, co-workers and ex co-workers, along with old friends who’ve I’ve lost touch with over the past 5 – 20 years, all mingle together.
The site is structured so that this disparate group can see (and comment on) the details of my life that I put out there, however inconsequential they may be, and tonight I pruned my ever growing list, removing people I’m not friends with but for whatever reason added to my friends list and moving people I’m friends with but not that close to onto a limited profile list so that certain details of my life which I deem “intimate” will remain hidden from them. My email address and web site address? Fine. My birthday? Fine. My work history? Public knowledge due to the fact that I’ve posted my resume to my web site. A video of my daughter laughing and playing with my dog? Sorry – that’s for me and only a select “few” but wait, the video in question was posted to my wife’s profile and she does not care nearly as much as I do about FB privacy, plus she has about four times the amount of friends that I have so I guess the video in question is in fact out there. Man, this whole networking thing get complicated.
This scenario has made me remember how I know of someone who was outed as a gay man through FB. His profile gave no clues as to his sexual preference, one way or the other, and he never linked to his partner’s profile but he did link to the profile of a friend of his partner’s and sure enough, that friend was linked to his partner and sure enough, the partner in question had written extensively about their relationship and even had posted pictures of the two of them in various romantic poses. So, in the span of three mouse clicks, about thirty years of life in the closet was undone, all thanks to FB.
My primary critique of the entire idea of FB can be expressed by delving into one particular sentence that I wrote above in the second paragraph: “The site is structured so that this disparate group can see (and comment on) the details of my life that I put out there.” What fascinates me is not the amount of friends that anyone has but the information that they choose to share. Unless you have heavily filtered your profile, your entire network will see and receive announcements about most if not all of what you post. I just learned that my 18 year old cousin, who is a freshman in college and who chose his college in large part to be close to his high school girlfriend is now single and feel incredibly weirded out to know this fact via FB. If you dear reader is on FB, let me ask you, do you post pictures of your kids? Do you post super mundane status updates, like “waiting in line at Duane Reade and frustrated, again?” Does anyone care? Unbelievably, a lot of people do care and that caring is the true reason why FB is so successful: it takes advantage of the inherent narcissism in the human character. We all have become media companies of one who have a permanent 15 minutes of fame. Posting on FB screams “I am important! Pay attention to me!” The fact that I just got a bagel and a cup of coffee matters! No longer is our collective obsession about these type of details limited to the rich and famous – we all are now our own paparazzi: we doggedly post photos, videos and stories, all in the manner of an US Weekly “Just like us!” column. I can just picture someone reading my current FB status and thinking, “Jeff is frakkin addicted to Battlestar Galactica – just like me!”
My secondary critique of the entire idea of FB is about how it is just one outrageously enormous time suck. One can lose themselves for hours or days or weeks just looking at photos or comment threads or status updates of friends, friends of friends or people they have not seen or thought of in decades. For those that have given into this form of voyeurism, I ask how many great novels could have been read or great movies could have been watched in that time span? That being said, there are so many different forms of time sucks available that it is unfair to single out just one. Blogging as a form of journalism could be considered a time suck right? I’m not reading Anathem even though I’ve had it for over three months. Rather, I’m writing 1500 words on what I think about FB. Hmmm.
This secondary critique is not all together fair because if FB was truly a waste of time it would not be nearly as popular as it is – this voyeurism is not truly evil because it directly feeds into the site’s shining virtue which to sort of quote the FB homepage is to “help you connect and share with the people in your life.” As life continues to speed up, staying “connected” to those you care about has become more and more challenging. These quotes around “connected” are used because I still have not come to terms with what I feel connected truly means in this instance. Does connected mean “I know what so-and-so is up to”? Does the fact that I know that my cousin is single matter when I do not know who ended the relationship or why it ended in the first place, or that I don’t really know anything about their relationship except frankly what I wrote above?
Regardless, not only does FB allow you to stay “connected,” it allows you to reconnect with long lost friends and family, like for instance the people you went to camp with when you were 12. These are the people who you thought you would be friends with for the rest of your life but then separate schools and schedules pulled you apart. Now FB is helping to repair these severed connections. I blogged about this type of reconnection experience a few years back and while it was brought about without FB, it happened because of email. Considering that the Internet played a primary role in this reconnection process, I would make a serious case that FB is just the killer app for reconnecting and that it made this process as easy as pie. Who doesn’t love pie?
Now of course, one cannot mention the FB phenomenon without griping at some point about the “why are you contacting me?” person. We all have encountered this person more times than we ever would like. He or she is the one who, way back in 7th grade, we were never even friends with to begin with so why this person needs to send us a friend invitation now is beyond all comprehension. To me, these requests are more than a little odd – they are a delusional attempt at revisionist history. So, to those that keep sending me friend invites who were never really my friends, please know that I do check my queue and that I do not want to connect to you as we have less than zero to offer each other. In fact, my act of adding you as a friend only would feed your psychosis and of that I want no part. I am a nice person and cannot bring myself to block you, even though I have hit the “ignore” button more than ten times. Going back to the FB mission statement, you may think that you are simply reconnecting with the people in your life but you should re-read the statement for it actually reads “connecting and sharing” and considering we never shared anything back then, I have no interest in sharing anything now, period.
The last part of the entire FB experience that is challenging is managing that ever growing friends list. Mine after tonight’s pruning exercise is about 180 strong and of those, only about two thirds can only see my full profile. The NYT has a great article this week called Friends, Until I Delete You. It goes into detail about the etiquette of friending and defriending (or unfriending – I prefer the de but it seems the un is more popular) and is what made me in the end post these thoughts.
You may have heard me voice some or all of these ideas in private conversations over the past few months but the Gray Lady finally inspired me to finally put them down, all 1,500 words of them, in zeros and ones. So, there you have it – my view on FB. I think that my status updates will be solely reserved for only Battlestar Galactica related comments for the foreseeable future. The fact that I am in love with this show is something that I don’t care if everyone knows…

ramblings

Prefab Cabin Loveliness

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For the survivalist or minimalist in your family this holiday season, the MetroCabin a prefabricated livable 16 feet deep by 20 feet wide multi-use open plan space. It’s a livable getaway cabin, a studio, an extra room, a cabana, or a mountain retreat and starts at $32,500.
As the site says, “The simple and sophisticated design allows it to exist easily in an urban setting, while the quiet strength and sturdy attitude are comfortable in a more rugged environment.”
I haven’t been in one of these cabins myself but I have been in plenty of small studio apartments. At first blush, I would say that its a pretty fair comparison. Once you have the cabin, all you need is a small croft of land to plunk it down on and some plumbing to hook it up to the local water supply and you are all set.
Here are some pics below of the MetroCabin in situ:
Suburban setting:

Rustic setting:

Inside the MetroCabin:

Via Brian

ramblings

Not Famous? Be Happy.

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After watching Posh Spice attempt to leave LAX I am deliriously happy I’m not famous. I mean, seriously. Is this the life you want to lead?

Yes, she could have traveled in a private jet at a smaller airport and avoided this LAX nonsense altogether but at some point, she has to enter the public space, like by going to a restaurant, and I’m sure the above would just happen then. I think the only way to avoid this type of craziness is by not being famous. Then again, being famous but ugly might work. So, I guess the question is then do you want to be beautiful and not famous or famous and ugly because beautiful and famous sucks donkey!

ramblings

When Monks Attack

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When I was in Israel about two years back, I was lucky enough to meet Wajeeh Nuseibeh, the Custodian and Door Keeper of the Church of Holy Sepulcher. He was standing outside of the Church, giving out his business card to a crowd of excited people and in typical follower fashion, without even knowing what it was I just went up and took one from him. As I was reading what it said, my guide asked, “Do you know who that is?” and when I replied that I did not, he proceeded to tell me the story behind how this Muslim man ended up with the keys to one of Christianity’s holiest sites.

doorkeeper.gif

Basically, it was to prevent things like the recent Monk brawl next to the site of Jesus’ tomb from happening. In case you ever wondered (start humming Prince), this is what it looks like, when Monks fight.
The church is jealously managed by six competing and often disputatious Christian denominations — Roman Catholic (also called Latin here), Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, Coptic, Syrian Orthodox (sometimes called Jacobite) and Ethiopian Orthodox. Sometimes the tensions over the right to clean or to pray in a particular area of the church spill over into violence – which is exactly what happened last Saturday.
The keys are held by the Nuseibeh family because all of the sects fear that if one sect in particular holds the keys, it will just lock themselves in and all of the others out. To assuage this fear, Nuseibeh’s family has helped keep the peace since Caliph Omar Ibn Kattab first conquered Jerusalem for the Muslims in 638. The only gap was during 88 years of Crusader rule in the 12th century. According to family history, when Salah A-Din recaptured Jerusalem in 1191, he promised English King Richard the Lion Heart he would invite the Nuseibeh family to resume their role as custodians.
Out of all of my mementos from my Israel trip, I think I love Wajeeh’s business card the most. It is the story of Israel: both ancient and modern all at the same time. When I show his card to people, I love providing my card along with it and asking the person to read the job titles and company names out loud. If you were to do that with me right now, one card would read “Sr. Producer, IconNicholson” while the other would read, “Custodian and Doorkeeper, Church of the Holy Sepulcher.” I’ve been employed in my job for about a year and a half now. The Nuseibeh family’s had their job for 1363 years and counting.
Video link via Chris