I find pragmatism to be an attractive quality, assuming that’s the right word. Today at IKEA, I observed this petite blonde with a tape measure clipped to the right back pocket of her jeans. There was something unwomanly about it that I find really appealing.
I feel the same way about women with cell phones clipped to their front jeans pocket; and to think so many women wear earrings! I’ve never had much taste for girlie girls that wear more makeup than frosting on cake. But this…
Geek Entertainment TV has an interview with Lawrence Lessig: Mr. Creative Commons and champion of reasonable copyrights. I’m a big fan of both. Lawrence’s work supports the spirit of the the early Web.
I am fascinated by marketing and how it is filtered through culture. This morning, I clicked through to a news story from Express India, for which RSS feed I subscribe. A banner ad for Indian matrimonial site Shaadi.com piqued my interest, because of its emphasis on matchmaking. There are similar services in the U.S., but they—even match.com—focus on dating or personal ads.
Shaadi.com’s marketing pitch is about finding the right match, utilizing the company’s eMatchmaker technology. The service’s focus isn’t about dating, but I would be shocked if the technology turned out to be dramatically different from other “singles” services.
While I wrote the next post, my daughter pleaded for some attention (poor girl has had the stomach flu). She made her point, by sending IM: “OK, I shall leave and shrivel now”. I got […]
December 8, 1980, I was volunteer fundraising in New York City. I beat the street until late and beat to bed around midnight. I lived in a group house a few blocks south of Columbia University on the Upper West Side.
I crawled out of bed around 8:30 a.m. on the 9th, a Tuesday. I recall bouncing down the stairs, laughing as I moved along. In those days, I was skinny and bushy blonde and always bubbling optimism. To a fault. I drove people nuts with my energy and enthusiasm.
The overnight snow was a bust, just 10 cm as measured on my porch. So, I’ll remember another snow day, in March 1999, when my wife and daughter made a snow heart for me in the […]
This afternoon, on what turned out to be an uncharacteristically summer-like day, I walked toward the veterinarian’s office to see if Mittens the stray survived her fender bender. Turns out the real bender—chug-alug-lug—was the man who first came to our door about the car-struck cat. He walked back from the direction of the vet’s, in socks. No shoes! Sure the day was warm, but not for going down the street in socks.
Turns out he drank up overnight and someone stole his shoes and jacket, or so he claimed, during a blackout. “Could you help me out?” he pleaded. I felt somewhat entangled because of yesterday’s goodwill with the cat. The guy said he couldn’t go back to his “woman” without shoes. I decided to be generous, and gave him a good pair that I don’t wear anymore. He took the shoes and disappeared. I had my misgivings, because sometimes some people take advantage of generosity.
Last night, while washing supper dishes, I saw that someone had left a steak knife point-side up in the strainer. I saw it more as stake knife, as I would never let the point standup like that.
See, when I was a third (maybe fourth) grader, a knife accident left an indelible mark on my psyche and on the body of my youngest sister.
It’s mixing-and-matching time—pulling together elements of the last post (on digital prints) and the next-to-the-last (about my father-in-law).
I have used digital cameras for a long time, at least as far back as 1997. The photo of my daughter and her grandfather was taken in late 1998 with a digital camera I can’t recall. I suspect that it was Kodak’s then top-of-the-line 1.6 megapixel shooter, which sold for more than a thousand bucks. A year later, I moved up to Canon’s PowerShot S20, a lightweight (for the time), full-featured 3-megapixel digital camera.
My father-in-law visited over the last two-and-half days. I didn’t spend as much time with him as I wanted to, because of my work schedule. That’s too bad, because my wife’s father is an amazing man.
He’s 83, still spry, alert, and interested in continuing to grow and mature his character. He flew out to Philadelphia and drove down to Washington for the visit. Later, he braved the pelting rain (more than five inches fell in the Washington, D.C. area over the last two days) to drive back to Philadelphia, before going onto New York and then back to California.
I witnessed the clash of the old and new worlds while driving the other day. The cause: lol. To my 11-year old daughter, lol means “laughing out loud,” because of her use of instant messaging. […]
Work blogging has sapped my personal blogging interest, so things have languished here. But I’m looking to generate renewed enthusiasm, and so more posts.
Big week here in Washington, with the presidential inauguration. My wife got a free ticket from the church leader to one of the events, on Tuesday; Bush and Cheney families in attendance.