Clay Shirky’s “Cognitive Surplus”
May 5, 2008 – 9:39 pmA brilliant talk made by a brilliant man on the key changes coming in our society due to what he calls “cognitive surplus.”
I Feel Great! Again!
April 16, 2008 – 10:05 pmI’m closing on my first house in two days, but no, I’m not going to write about something meaningful like that. Not tonight, anyhow. The thing that has compelled me more than any other to sit down and blog tonight is the discovery of a commercial. But not just any commercial. A commercial I already blogged about four years ago. Excited yet? Yeah, me too!!
Last time I wrote about it, the ad was apparently taken offline due to the fact that it was becoming too popular for the host’s bandwidth bill. I haven’t seen it in four years, and I rediscovered it today. It’s just as funny now as it was then. Enjoy, and feel great.
Gas Station & The Flip
April 12, 2008 – 1:42 amI got Steph a Flip video camera for Mother’s Day (yes, somewhat early) because I wanted to be sure we had something easily on hand to record all the little moments in life that don’t quite merit pulling out the HD behemoth, and many of those moments are soon arriving. Plus, now we can capture stuff from two angles. Clearly, this is not excessive. No! Perfectly reasonable.
Then, this evening as Steph went inside at the gas station to grab something to drink for our trip home from Maplewood, I couldn’t help but pick the little thing up and start talking to it. It is truly a delightful gadget. The lighting conditions here are not ideal, but if you want to see a video produced under more proper, normal conditions, clearly Stephanie can provide such things. I am bound to disappoint you in those respects.
Gas Station from Josh Lewis! on Vimeo.
Really?
April 8, 2008 – 1:17 pmTweetClouds.com is a tool you can use to visually analyze the topics you talk about and words you use most on Twitter. I ran the tool on my tweets, and apparently I use the word “really” too much. Linguistic crutch alert!
Caleb’s First Words
April 6, 2008 – 9:21 pmA few weeks ago, Caleb said what we consider to be his first word. It’s a bit of a cheat, since it wasn’t exactly correct in definition or pronunciation, but I’m willing to count it. The word was, “mamamamamamamama…” and he says it whenever he is distressed, upset, or uncomfortable. We think he knows it’s connected to Steph, since when he says it, he invariably wants her to come and pick him up or fix his problem, whatever it may be. It’s as though he believes her name to be synonymous with “Help!” or “Comfort me!”
Friday or yesterday (I can’t recall which), he said his second word. It was “Lella-ella-ella-ella-ella”, which is what he calls Ella. He doesn’t use the word when she’s not around. He doesn’t babble it. But he says it when she first enters a room or comes running up to where he is. We’re pretty sure it’s purposeful.
This afternoon, while at Dairy Queen, he said his third word. And I’m proud to say it was “Dada.” He looked up at me from across the table and just said it. Steph and I paused for a second, like, “Did he just say that?” Then he said it again. We encouraged him about it. Then Steph took him away for a minute and brought him back, and when he returned to the table and saw me again, he said it again. It was really exhilarating for me! I know I came in 3rd place to Mama and the dog, but I’m OK with that.
The thing that I’m pretty amazed about is that only yesterday he turned seven months old. I don’t know anything textbookish about child development at all, but people who do know tell me that’s pretty early for him to be picking this stuff up. So I’m excited about that too. We’ve got a real talker on our hands!
Now I’ve just gotta work on “iPhone.”
Upgrading to WordPress: the Good, the Blog, and the Ugly
April 6, 2008 – 1:45 amWordPress 2.5 was released about a week ago, and it looked absolutely delicious to me. Seriously, I salivated. I was using Movable Type at the time, but it was extremely old (Perhaps four or five years old! Software! Web software!) because I had neglected to upgrade it. I should also point out that, having worked for years in a group whose sole purpose was to facilitate the updating of software, this is the height of irony. And yet I trudged along with MT 2.64 (or whatever) for years.
May I tell you what I’m getting out of this upgrade? Please? That would make me happy. Note that these aren’t necessarily new things in WordPress 2.5, they’re just new to me in terms of blogging software. These are mostly older ideas.
- Blogging via email. I did this post almost entirely from an email message! It’s like the blog software just disappears and I’m just writing email. That means I’ll probably post more frequently, and it’s more likely I’ll do so while I’m on the road or away from a regular computer. I can do email on the iPhone just fine, but I don’t want to write 500 words in a textarea in Safari Touch.
- Akismet spam blocking. Anyone who followed my old comments feed knows that while I often crowed about blocking so many thousand comment spams, quite a few still got through every day. For every fifty I would block, five or ten would sneak through and hang out for half an hour before I noticed and removed them. Still, I’m not one of those people who wants to moderate every comment and only show comments I approve. This is the Internet. It’s supposed to be a little Wild West. That’s a strength, not a weakness. I want you all to be able to have a little comment party with each other when I’m not around. I can’t do that if I’m playing monitor. I’m hoping the algorithmic brain in Akismet will work its magic so I won’t have to, and we can all feel satisfied knowing our comments are published immediately.
- Friendlier archive URLs. When my tracking software tells me someone went to /archives/001545.php, what does that tell me? Nothing. That’s what. And that URL doesn’t tell you anything either. But if I see someone visited /2008/03/26/bus-etiquette/, I know exactly what that is. And so do you. It’s nice.
- The rotating tag line is back. See, up there at the top? Yeah. Don’t get too attached: it could disappear just as easily. Just enjoy it for a little while. Also, it doesn’t change every time you reload the page. It’s something like every 5 minutes. So don’t drive yourself nuts. Just read early and read often.
- No more “rebuilding.” Movable Type 2.whatever always made me rebuild my blog. Perhaps because it was created before the widespread dissemination of PHP and MySQL on small-time hosts? I don’t know. Either way, rebuilding is a dead concept. Yay!
- A huge plugin repository. If I want to augment the functionality of my blog in any way, it’s likely someone else has already written it, and it’s up there now. Sometimes the quality isn’t what you’d want, but it’s all open source, so I can geek out on the code and fix it if that’s needed.
The design you’re seeing on this blog (shown here for posterity) is temporary. It’s really just a half-hearted attempt to get things looking somewhat normal (without looking identical to the default, that is) before I have time to redesign the thing. Hang in there. I don’t like the way it looks now, but I’ll be making tweaks over the coming weeks, and steering it towards where I want it to be. I’ll keep the archives and search functionality this time.
Enjoy! And thanks for reading.
Bus Etiquette
March 26, 2008 – 8:12 amMany things have changed drastically for me over the last few weeks, but one of the bigger changes in my day-to-day life has been in my commute to work. Previously, my commute was only a 10-minute car ride, and parking was always free and usually plentiful. There were even times at which I walked or took a bike to or from Apple because I lived only 3 miles away.
Now, it’s a 35-mile trek each way, no matter how you slice it. What used to be a total of 20 minutes a day is now over 100. However, I don’t want it to sound like I’m complaining! My commute has become one of the most peaceful parts of my day.
When I first started commuting, I assumed I would drive. Then, being the cheapskate I am, I looked at what it was costing me. When I realized it was about $11 in gas each day and added the $7 in daily parking on top of that, I knew something had to be done. (Note to Al: if you want to make people passionate about their carbon footprint, don’t appeal to their morals or sense of eco-justice. Appeal to their wallet.) I discovered that a new “express” bus route had opened in Forest Lake only a few weeks ago, and a round-trip fare was only $5.50. Bingo! The travel time is almost identical to driving, but I don’t pay for parking and I don’t have to watch the road. I try to ignore the fact that my commute to the bus stop is now three times longer than my entire commute used to be.
I’m enjoying my bus time far more than I thought I would; it gives me a little while to read news, listen to podcasts, and write blog entries. Like this one! Which was mostly written on the bus this morning. I don’t have to disconnect from the Net if I don’t want to (Yay iPhone!), but it’s pretty easy to do so if that’s what I need that day.
The interesting thing so far has been learning about bus etiquette by observing the other folks on the bus. These are a few things that are totally new to me:
- Greet the bus driver when you get on the bus, and thank him when you leave. Almost everyone does this. Part of this could simply be the local “Minnesota nice”, but I think another part of doing this is purely functional: you want him to recognize you and not drive right past you. If you’re not at a standard bus stop, but at one of the in-between ones instead, it could easily happen.
- Speaking of non-standard bus stops: if you’re not at one of your route’s pre-scheduled stops, you have to be pretty aggressive about stepping out and waving an arm to flag down your bus. Mine almost left me once. On the flip side, if your bus isn’t the one approaching, step several feet back from the curb and look disinterested, or the driver might stop for you. And then you’ll feel dumb.
- When you’re paying for the bus, a non-obvious rule is in effect. In the morning, you pay as you board the bus. In the evening, however, you pay when you get off the bus. I have no idea why. It might have something to do with tracking each person’s point of origin and final destination. That’s all I can guess.
- The strangest / stupidest rule of all: when an express route bus stops at its final destination, the bus is still 95% full. In this case, do not stand up and prepare to disembark unless you’re in the front row. Wait for the row in front of you to stand, get their stuff together, and step into the aisle. Then you can stand. The first day I rode the bus I ignored this completely, treating it more like an airline. I just grabbed my stuff (assuming all the while that everyone was just being really slow), walked past a dozen or more rows of sitting people, and got off the bus. I probably cut three minutes off my commute just by doing that! The second day, I began to do the same thing, noticed absolutely no one else was standing up, got creeped out, and went and sat back down. Only since then have I bothered to notice the rhythm they’ve got set up. No one enforces it. No one has ever spoken of it. It’s just what everyone does. Honestly, I’d prefer we all treat it more like an airplane and just get our stuff and stand up, but apparently that’s somehow bad or foolish, and I don’t want to be a jerk, so I’ll play along. Perhaps that’s what everyone else is doing too.