Tuesday, February 07, 2006

Spring cleaning.

I will be moving this blog to Wordpress during this week. Please pardon F & I's appearances if things look somewhat awry for a while. Let's just hope I don't lose all of my entries. It will be better for it in the end, and there's nothing worse than just being satisfied with the subpar status quo. Blogger has served me well these past five and a half years (whoa!), but I have talked about moving onward and upward for ages, and it's finally time.

:: posted at 6:00 PM | link | | | email this post

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Nothing to see here.

My life is busy; my apartment has no internet; and my eyesight is failing.

But fear not... you know I always bounce back.

And if you're really looking to kill some time, try some "delicious" procrastination.

:: posted at 5:59 PM | link | | | email this post

Monday, January 02, 2006

Happy New Year.

I like New Year's. I like the contrived opportunity it provides to reflect on the past year and look to the one ahead. I like reading other people's resolutions. I like thinking about what new things the world has learned this year.

Advice is plentiful this time of year. It seems everyone has an opinion on which resolutions to make, how to keep them, and even how to fix the ones you couldn't keep last year.

Just remember that goal-setting and reflection are no subsitute for action. Roethke cautioned us: "Self-contemplation is a curse / That makes an old confusion worse." In fact, recent studies have shown that too much self-analysis can do much more harm than good, and that we should try to go more with our gut feeling on things. This goes against conventional wisdom, but echoes the main drive of Malcolm Gladwell's argument in Blink: "There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis."

If we really should trust our instincts more than logic and deductive reasoning, then maybe we should resist the urge to over-analyze how we've done this past year. As Timothy Wilson recommends in "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right": "If we are dissatisfied with some aspect of our lives, one of the best approaches is to act more like the person we want to be, rather than sitting around analyzing ourselves."

:: posted at 6:41 PM | link | | | email this post

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Yahoo! on the rise.

Google is the darling of internet lovers everywhere. First they gave us a search engine that delivered what we were looking for, then they gave us Image Search, Google News, maps, Gmail, and more -- not to mention the addictive Google Labs.

But old Yahoo has been around the block and back, and they weren't about to just roll over and take it, as they became nothing more than the search engine of moms who still signed on to AOL.

Check out the new Yahoo, and question whether loyalty to Google -- which becomes more like Microsoft everyday -- will be hip for much longer:

Upcoming.org: Evite is for ninnies. Upcoming.org is a social calendar for all of your events that shareable and syndicate-able.
del.icio.us: In case you hadn't heard, this one's a Yahoo property too now, and it's pretty much the hottest thing on the internet. Browser bookmarks will go the way of gopher -- so saith I.
Flickr: I never knew online photo sharing could be so satisfying. Yahoo snatched this one up too -- smart move. It could make services like Snapfish and Ofoto obselete. Once you try it, you'll never go back.
Yahoo Maps (Beta): Well, it's a lot like Google Maps, but there are some additional features to try to win some converts. And maybe their driving directions won't suck as much as Google's.
Widgets: With their purchase of the already wildly popular Konfabulator, Yahoo is bringing the mini-apps ("widgets") native to Mac OS Tiger to everyone -- for free (unlike Konfabulator).
Farechase: Yahoo must be so pleased it thought of something so useful before Google did. This tool searching dozens of travel sites and airline sites at once to find the lowest fare with one little search. (If I were Google, I'd be thinking long and hard about buying Kayak.)

Yahoo! did not sponsor this. Honestly.

:: posted at 3:12 PM | link | | | email this post

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

State of the Art.

In case you missed it, there was an epic article tucked into the middle of Sunday's New York Times Book Review, a treatise on the state of the art world and how we got here. In this essay, entitled "State of the Art," Barry Gewen uses eight new books -- a diverse collection addressing performance art, postmodernism, antimodernism, "extreme art," art theory, and art criticism -- to try to distill something solid about what art means, what art signifies, and what art should aspire to be. I don't agree with him on all points, but it's a scathing and thoughtful critique that everyone in the art world should sit up and pay attention to.

:: posted at 4:40 PM | link | | | email this post

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

America's Next Top Pedestrian.

I've long been fascinated by the rules that govern the sidewalks of Manhattan. One of my favorite occurrences while strolling through the city is the old speed-up/slow-down game that begins when you suddenly realize that you are walking right on pace with the person next to you. You both realize that you're walking right next a complete stranger, your steps in eerie unison. Usually, you both speed up at the same time, thus maintaining your side-by-side gait. Then you both slow down, keeping time with each other of course. And so forth. It's amazing the crazy dance we do just to protect a feeling of independence from the other pavement pounders who crowd the space around us.

:: posted at 7:58 PM | link | | | email this post

Monday, December 05, 2005

Generation 'net?

After reading this article about internet addiction, I started thinking about whether people who spend a lot of time on the internet have a problem, or if it's just a sign of the times.

Consider this:

87% of all teens are online
Online shopping is up 24% this season
In October 2005, 20.6 million people used social-networking site MySpace
Teens spend an average of 1 hour and 22 minutes per day using social networking sites (a threefold increase from the year 2000)

Clearly, the internet has embedded itself in our daily lives — and especially in the lives of the 12- to 25-year-old set — in more ways than I could list. But the question remains: is that a bad thing?

The NYTimes article on internet addiction is the first to point out that it might not be:

A report released during the summer by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that teenagers did spend an increasing amount of time online: 51 percent of teenage Internet users are online daily, up from 42 percent in 2000. But the report did not find a withering of social skills. Most teenagers "maintain robust networks of friends," it noted.

The problem, it seems, is not with internet use itself, but in the context of that use as part of one's offline life. As a five-year-old article from Monitor, a publication of the American Psychological Association cautions:

Considered by some to be the ultimate identity tool, the Internet allows us to explore other facets of our personalities. The danger lies in failing to integrate online and offline selves.

All data seems to suggest that the so-called "MySpace Generation" has learned to integrate their online and offline lives so well that sometimes it's difficult to know where one ends and the other begins. "Today's young generation," the Business Week article claims, "largely ignores the difference between online and real-world interactions."

I don't know if I buy that, but &mdash if it's true &mdash what does that mean? Will we ever reach a time when knowing someone in the flesh is no different from knowing someone online? The over eight million LiveJournal users, many of whom pour out their hearts and souls to people they've never met, might say yes, and that time is now.

:: posted at 11:52 PM | link | | | email this post