February 1st, 2005
A Slew of Miscellany
Some shit:
- I have signed up at the venerable Montreal superblog, the YULBlog. While I haven’t quite figured out the “YUL” thing, the blog makes for a wonderfully random read at any time of the day. All the Montreal bloggers ping the YULBlog mothership whenever they make a post, using TrackBack I suppose, and everyone’s post is mashed together into an amalgam and left to set into a goo, much like a warm poutine. A modest proposal, though: since this is Montreal, shouldn’t the technology employed by the YULBlog be called “Tabernackback”? Just sayin’.
- Comment spammers continue to drive me to an early grave.
- I’ve got a trip to San Francisco next week. I’d like to say it’s for a glamourous vacation and some hobknobbing with the who’s who, but alas, it’s for work.
- I’ve started using the full version of VoodooPad as the official Place Where I Write Text. Productivity software and personal databases seem to be the current vogue amongst the OS X set, which is great for a casual observer like me, since there are hundreds of waving hands vying for my attention in this particular arena. I chose VoodooPad because it happened to be the first usable application I found, truth be told, but it has served me well and I had no reservations about registering. Clearly this genre of software, with the amount of attention being given it, will attract a lot of attention and thus developer hours over the next year or so, and I am all for it. We have a severely underdeveloped relationship with the computer as a place of meaningful storage, of context, and of codependency; for all the processing power, we still feel like we’re doing all the work. We shuffle our playlists and dig through forgotten folders for scraps of text. We have an idea and fumble with a text editor to get it down. Applications are everywhere but they sit at an arm’s length most of the time. This article about one man’s personal collection got me thinking about what I’d like to use. Ideally there would be an optimal path connecting an idea, its conversion into text, and the storage of that text in a useful way, and optionally, the publishing of that text to the external world. Zero clicks to perfection. Later, I’d like to be able to find what I wrote by slamming down some words and letting the system deal with it. I should not have to care much about file types, formatting, or basic organization. Also, I’d like a transparent file format so that if you go out of business, I don’t get stuck with a pile of binary slop. This is all I ask. Make this and then we can move onto the next hotness.
- I witnessed a guy smoking in the grocery store the other day. I was pushing my cart around a corner to the freezer section in the back of the Provigo, and he was carefully putting out the cigarette on his pack. He was a tall guy, young with mussed dark hair, spoke an incomprehensible language. The aisle smelled like smoke. I could only laugh. Montreal, ladies and gentlemen…La Belle Province.
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(4 comments)
YUL is the airport code for montreal (YYZ, immortalized by Rush on the 1981 album moving pictures, and 82 runner-up for Best Rock Instrumental at the 1982 Grammys, is Toronto’s airport code-lester pearson airport). You can find a free mp3 download here.
Hugh, my man, you’re a scholar and a gentleman. Tell me, have you been to any of the YULblog meetups?
Also, you use some variant of WordPress on your site, right? I can’t seem to get Trackbacks working on this puppy. Any tricks I should know about?
i have not yet been to a YULblog thing, but might try tonight (?) not sure, I have an increasingly busy computer-related life, an odd development for a luddite, and I don’t know if I can add the blogging meet-ups to my plate. i’ve been doing some cool stuff with http://ilesansfil.org, and trying to turn http://www.atwaterlibrary.ca into a free software/socialtech mecca.
re trackbacks, I use http://www.blogsome.com, which uses wordpress, so I don’t host anything, or do anything other than fiddle with templates occasionally. so I’m afraid I can’t help ya w trackbacks, have you posted for help on the wordpress forum?
Sounds like a good gig you’ve got there…what kind of stuff are you working on with the Atwater Library?