one of . . .

760b.jpg
Originally uploaded by keaggy.

. . . the Unspectacular Doors of St Louis

beautiful photographs of unsuspecting doors, doors which seem to have been abandoned long since

gravestone

honouring Lynn 1
Originally uploaded by Cos.

Cos took this picture, maybe on the Stura river in Italy. I like it. The figure trapped inside the gravestone shape trying to get out.

Reminds me, indirectly, of the Elvis Costello lyric - "living a life which is almost like suicide". Not sure which song that's from but I'm pretty sure it's from the 1980 album "Get Happy!!" which I bought from the record shop which used to be in the middle of Town Hall station. Can't remember what the shop was called, I'll have to ask Deborah or the other DT.

contributing to wikipedia

I've decided I'm going to start contributing to wikipedia. It's such a cool thing, an active encyclopedia, with links. I want to start with the William Sharp Macleay entry - he was a very interesting figure - he was a junior diplomat in Paris after the defeat of Napoleon, he was a judge in Cuba on the Mixed British and Spanish Court of Commission for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, he collected plants and insects, he came to Australia to visit his family and ended up living as a recluse in Elizabeth Bay House. His life links with the main events of the early 19th Century. He's perfect for Wikipedia.

really know you're alive

The Improvised Empathetic Device - a US soldier dies in Iraq, you get a needle stab in the arm.

(via Matt's list at del.icio.us)

a regulated life

This morning I dreamt I was living "on Her Majesty's Pleasure", ie I was in gaol. It was an odd kind of gaol, men and women, no bars, cages or panopticon, just a suburban bush setting, and trips in mini-buses. But it was a gaol never the less. I had to be there, I wasn't earning a wage, I had to participate in the group - looking after small animals, doing some bush regeneration.

I woke up and thought vaguely "that's pretty much like my life now". I do things because they've been set up that way - go to work, do my job and interact with people there, come home, eat, sleep, pay bills with the money I've earnt at work, walk the dog, on Saturdays go and do the photocopying for church, on Sundays go to church. Nothing is very surprising. Nothing much is happening. My relationships with people seem to have stalled . . .

How do I make things happen? or, How do things happen?

I've just finished reading Haurki Murakami's "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle" - it starts out with a man looking for his lost cat, and it goes on from there. One thing happens after another. The book seems to be about life and fate, trying to take action while you are bound up by circumstance. It also touches on the power one person can have over another, or many others. And methods for avoiding that power, trying to side-step, slip out from, a grasp.

obsession

This morning reading about good and bad procrastination (found it via del.icio.us). The article is more about doing the main thing, being focused on the big, important things. It's not really about procrastination at all. The author, Paul Graham, refers to the article about you and your research that I also found via del.icio.us, and bookmarked . . .

So I've been thinking about this, this urging to do the big thing, to look for the important questions and try and solve them. And I've been thinking about the discussion with Dan about obsession, thinking that maybe it is men that can afford to be
obsessed because other people do things for them, eg cooking, cleaning, washing, paying the bills and so on

Thinking that it's difficult for me to work in this house, because the computer is in the dining room cum kitchen cum living room, so people can see what I'm doing, or not doing. And to get around that I have to mentally seal myself off, put up a conscious barrier between myself and what is going on around, the sound of a spoon in a cereal bowl for example. Always, unless I get up at 5:30 am, which I could, I suppose.

Here, just for interests sake, is part of Dan's rave about death metal drummers:

D N /... If you go to www.georgekollias.com there's some great stuff there; clips of him warming up and playing at clinics and stuff.
D N /... There's also (naturally) a www.tonylaureano.com and a
www.derekroddy.com - incidentally, Derek Roddy was committed to Hate Eternal and couldn't rejoin Nile.
D N /... And for a more jazzy, loose, headspinningly fast
approach, check out Cryptopsy's drummer; www.flomounier.com
(they're from Montreal).
L C/... okay, so I've checked out George, he's got long hair too . . . must be just like you and Tim C
D N/... This is all total drumnerd stuff, of course; if you're
not interested in the finer points of bomb blasts, it might all
be a bit too detailed.
D N /... Wow, I can't believe we have access!
D N /... Another wunderkind is www.timyeung.com who was Hate Eternal's first drummer (and was nicknamed "The Missile" in the credits of their first album).
D N /... On their second, when Derek Roddy took over, he was
nicknamed "One Take".

You see what I mean about obsession?

the way we do the web

Reading 10 Web Trends That Should Die in 2006 I got to point 6: "Let's do a traditional homepage for our company" and I started thinking about Monkey Baa.

I tried last year to get them to ditch "the egg" ie the graphic index page, but they love it too much. And why did I want to get rid of it? because it's declasse? daggy? makes me look like a bad web designer? probably, in fact, yes, those would be the reasons. But I didn't come up with anything simple and warm to replace it. And if I made a blog style homepage for Monkey Baa with offers of RSS feeds and updates it'd stay the same way for the whole year . . . and I'd be the one updating it anyway. Maybe very small companies, people that want to offer some information on the web are allowed to have a "traditional" web presence.

After thinking about this for a bit I went on to read some of this: the cluetrain manifesto

It's interesting, (once you get past the line "Markets are conversations"), worth discussing, but who would I be discussing it with? It started me thinking about the ABS and its approach to the web. Very old school. Very unwieldy. But about to change.

The question for me is "what are people doing when they access the web?" When a punter goes to the ABS they may be looking for some stats, but they might also be looking for an idea of what's being researched across Australia, what other people and organisations are doing with figures and facts, what's being enumerated and why. Very interesting.