Julie Leung: words have power This is something that I’m struggling to grasp. Which is not that I don’t “know” it, but I do not practice this as much as I should. In effect, I don’t know it. I’m especially critical of those closest to me. Even more-so of myself (I think), but I have to be careful that I communicate a lot more of the approval I feel and a lot less of the criticism.
My co-workers threw a shower for Alexis last month. Surprised the heck out of her. Especially since my mother flew up to personally deliver a baby quilt she had made. The morning before the shower, my mother and I snuck out with the kids and went Christmas shopping. I had in mind to pick up a couple of gifts for the kids — things that I remembered were fun when I was a kid. My mother had the same idea (we don’t just look the same…), and so when she showed up at the cash register right after me, I had to point out that I had already purchased UNO and Sorry!. These games are simple and relatively popular. They’re good games to play with the kids and probably a better introduction to board games than Monopoly (which is the first game I played with them) because they don’t require so much addition, calculation, and strategy. My four-year-old can have fun with with the almost-eight-year-old. Basil’s favorite game remains Chess, of course, and I hope that this means well be able to move on more complex (not to mention esoteric) games like these.
Jon Udell wrote that it’d be nice if vendor’s put up Wiki’s for their products — that way, we, the users, could fix and add to the documentation. Poof! Anticipating this, we have Mozilla’s Wiki, which appears to have been started two days before the column.
Brad Fitzpatrick (LiveJournal creator/owner) posts his thoughts on the 6A/LJ merger. From what he says and what Mena Trott writes about the merger, it looks like my instincts were right: Ben&Mena (and SixApart) are getting Brad’s technical skills, Brad (and LiveJournal) are getting the business and asthetic sense that Ben&Mena have. Mena writes that they wanted LiveJournal because of ” the infrastructure that LiveJournal knows how to build, the talent of Brad and his crew”. Brad says “I love technology and designing the LiveJournal architecture but I hate running a business. … Six Apart has a lot of staff that we don’t… marketing, designers, usability people, etc.” I expect only good things will happen for both LJ users and 6A users as a result.
My friend in the Arkansas DEQ sent me a webpage maintained by the EPA about the Teris plant explosion.
This can only be considered weird:
I have learnt exclusively that Six Apart, the parent company behind hosted blogging service TypePad, and Moveable Type is about to acquire Live Journal, for an undisclosed amount. — Om Malik
I’ve not spent a lot of time looking at MovableType’s code, but, from the reputation it has, I can only say that they will benefit greatly from the talent they are getting. The people behind LJ have a very robust server system. They’re behind the development of memcached (an in-memory object data cache) and mogileFS (a distributed filesystem kind-of like Google’s GFS). LiveJournal serves up 4,000,000+ user’s weblogs every day from their server farm. They have about 20,000 new posts per hour. They beat Google-owned Blogger in the reliablity department. MT (the personal version of Six Apart’s TypePad service), in the meantime, has a reputation for bringing servers to their metaphorical knees when it rebuilds pages. Six Apart, however, has done a better job of pushing their vision of weblogging into the mainstream. They seem to have more visibility. The really interesting thing (to me) is the code. What will become of the LJ code? I’m using it now, so this is a concern. LJ is GPLed, so I’m not worried that its going to disappear. But, are the people at livejournal.com going to continue to work on it, or will SixApart take the talent there and focus it on beefing up their TypePad service?
My interest in Bollywood films is paying off. Coca-Cola, Absolut, and others are now producing ads that spoof Bollywood.
I just found out that there was an explosion at the toxic waste plant in El Dorado, AR. About 6,000 people were evacuated from their homes. The church I attended when I lived there didn’t have church today. The pastor and a nursery worker were calling people when there was a second big bang. At that point, the pastor said something like “Tha hell with this!” and left. The plant’s stacks are visible over the trees from the church. My grandfather was staying at a nursing home near the plant. When my mother called the nursing home to ask that they get him ready to go, they said “Can’t. We’ve got an emergency here. Come ‘n get ‘im.” My mother said that the place looked like the twilight zone when she arrived. As if they were preparing for or had just been hit by a nuclear blast. The EPA is now flying planes around the area, taking regular samples. (Above is summarized from an IM conversation with my mother.) continue reading »
+Seraphim‘s writing evokes a sense a beauty. Often he writes in a sort of prose poetry that helps me mediate on what he is saying. He’s been posting some beautiful pictures and poems, but I thought I’d encourage you to go read the link by reposting the following poem that he gave by David Athey. Read the poem…
Had I known it was this much fun, I would’ve started sooner. I was barely out of college when Ginger arrived. Well, “barely” is stretching it a bit. I graduated in ’95 and Ginger was born in ’97. 
And, I began to enjoy them. As they grew out of the “lay there, scream, and look cute” stage, I began to enjoy and even value the time I spent with them. The rewards are sometimes subtle, but they are there. For example, I gave my oldest daughter a very rudimentary understanding of multiplication. This past summer, she was learning addition and i tried some things like “what do you get when you had two tens? How about three sevens?” Now, a few months later, she surprises me by telling me different multiplication facts. In school, they’re still learning addition. It’s great fun to see that she has a real interest in learning — and that she isn’t getting worn out by repetative multiplication tables. Its things like this that make me believe this story:
He had everything, I thought. He was the father of three children, and he was happily married. When he turned sixty, I asked him what he would do differently in his life if he could do it again. What would he become or have? His response overwhelmed me, since it had little to do with wealth or fame. He said, “I would have had more children, even if we had to adopt them. My children have been my greatest joy and fulfillment in life.”
Nowadays, more and more people are choosing to be “child-free” and more power to them. Still, I can’t help but think, like this father who thinks back over fatherhood, that my children “made my mistakes moot.” This goes back to what I wrote about New Orleans: children are the celebration of humanity. They are an admission of imperfection. They are a hope for something better, but an acceptance that life is not totally in our control. Conventional wisdom says that men feel more imprisioned by their kids than liberated by the experience of fatherhood, but I’m beginning to find fellow fathers who don’t just want to be around their children — they fight for them. Not all men feel this way, of course. Not all fathers have taken a chance to get to know their kids. But, those that have love their children dearly. Not only that, but I would venture to say that, of the fathers who become involved, they would surprise their pre-child self. I know I would. 10 years ago I had no clue what it meant to be a father. Probably because I was just growing out of being an angry son, I couldn’t understand the frustration, joy, amazement and humilty that my own father must have felt. Children teach us our limits, but that is freedom, not oppression.