Blogs at 11

I guess I’m easily amazed, because the blog phenomenon continues to amaze me. We all know about the blackouts that occurred yesterday (and are still occurring somewhat today) in New England. And we’ve probably read news from professional, reputable web sites or heard it on the radio, saw it on TV or in a newspaper.

But what about blogs?

Personally, I think blogs hold enormous potential as an informal news source. Sure, you’re not going to get the big picture, but you get a very interesting person-specific view of it, which is something you can use to put a piece of the picture together. I’m not suggesting you get all your news that way, but it’s an interesting exercise.

When you combine it with a GeoURL listing (which I’ve mentioned earlier) of all the blogs within a 500-mile radius of New York City, for instance, you find quite a few blogs that report on the incident.

Like this one.
Or this one.
That one.
One over here.
Here.
Or here.
Or there.
Eight.
Nine.
Ten.
Eleven.
Portuguese! (With translation.)

Obviously it just keeps going, but it’s an interesting way to find information, isn’t it? No spin. No agenda. Personal bias still exists, but there’s no corporate threat of “If you say that I’ll fire you,” or even usually “This is the opinion we want the viewer to come away with,” to taint your picture of what’s going on. I like how raw it is. I pulled most of these last night, so I’m sure there are a lot more up right now than before.

Geekery

This is why I love geeks. I think the best word to describe a geek is "eager." Eager to what? Well… that all depends on the geek, but they’re eager nonetheless.

Oh, start here for a little bit of back story, if you like.

Leather?

Stephanie Lewis is my favorite person in the entire world. She has been for quite some time now, actually, but I figured since today was our third wedding anniversary that it’s a sensible time to announce that fact to the world without all my friends retching at the cheesy, mushiness of it all. (Mmmm… mushy cheese…)

When I look at my wedding pictures today, I see a worried, puffy-looking man, clad in white, getting married to my wife. Honestly, I was quite stressed out that day. As August 12th, 2000 approached, I became more and more anxious, both because I really loved Steph and couldn’t wait to be her husband, but also because I had all sorts of odd feelings zooming around in my head. “This is a big deal! Am I really ready for this? Am I sure that I’m ready for a life-long commitment? Maybe I should’ve waited another year…” and so on. To be honest, the wedding day wasn’t that great. But marriage is absolutely wonderful.

It turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life.

I love being married. I can’t stress that enough. I come home at night and Steph is there, and I can talk to her, and have fun with her, and play games and see movies and share life with her, and it just gets better and better every single day. Sure, we have fights sometimes, but I can’t stay mad at her (mostly, she’ll tell you, because I insist on resolving all arguments immediately no matter how inconvenient). She is one of the most loving, giving people I’ve ever met, and the cool part is that she loves me back. And forgives me when I’m stupid. And likes The Simpsons, Cowboy Bebop, Beck, and web design. She even lambasts Microsoft at every chance she gets. What more could I ask for?!?

Steph, it’s been a pleasure being your husband, and I can’t wait to see what the next three, or thirty, or sixty years will bring. I love you.

And please don’t get me anything leather.

QotD – Who would you sound like?

I’ve apparently been missing a large chunk of the blog phenomenon by not picking up on this earlier. There are apparently folks who sit around and think up questions somewhere, and then daily post these questions to the web (thus Question of the Day, or QotD for short), and then other bloggers see these questions and post them on their blogs along with actual answers this time, and the cycle goes on and on percolating across all blogs in the universe until the unity of higher blog thought reaches an ultimate pinnacle of spiritual multidimensional existential… well, you get the idea.

I figured that I would defeat the point by making up my own questions. Jaunty!

QoTD: If you were a professional musician and had the ability to be musically super-awesome, what other artist(s) would your music most sound like?

This isn’t to imply that you would be unoriginal, but I think we can all tell that if we made music there would be strong influences from this, that, and the other thing. So who are they? Me? I’d be a mixture of Beck, Daft Punk, and sometimes Harrod and Funck. Oh, and Nintendo (somewhat like Freezepop–be sure to check out their song T DJ). Seriously. It would be wild stuff. I have no idea how I would get it to fit together.

Oh! I almost forgot to mention that part of the point of QotD is that you respond in the Peanut Gallery. So go forth and fill mein database, freunde!

Blog upgrade

I changed a few things in the code for this blog so that it would hopefully display more correctly in Internet Explorer on Windows, and I also added a little “tag line” that randomly generates each time you load the blog. See it on the left there? Hopefully I’ll eventually have a few hundred of those. That should be fun.

Oh, by the way Windows users, I’d be very interested how close I’m actually getting on Windows to how it’s supposed to look. I know the “jeans” background doesn’t show, but I’d like to know what else is different. Post in the Peanut Gallery or email me, okay?

A World of Pure Imagination

The end is near. The movie to end all movies is scheduled to go into filming and production sometime in 2004, and I am so pumped!

Stephanie pointed out this link to me a few days ago, and when we saw that Tim Burton would be directing Charlie and the Cholocate Factory, we couldn’t help but discuss over and over who Willy Wonka might be. At first I thought that no one could out-do Gene Wilder’s performance, and that Burton could get away with re-casting him. But then I realized that was a totally unoriginal idea, and not something Burton would ever do. Plus, Wilder is probably too old now.

So Steph and I got to talking. Who would Wonka be? We threw out a few names. Dustin Hoffman (being that he can play anyone perfectly). Johnny Depp seemed to be a strong player since he’s about the right age and has a strange magical sparkle to him. Then Steph said, “What about Christopher Walken? He could even do a dance number since he’s a pro dancer.” My first reaction was, “No, Christopher Walken is too dark for Wonka.”

Then I thought about it some more. And more. And more.

Christopher Walken would be perfect. I forgot that Tim Burton is directing this film. It’s going to be dark no matter what, but still have that certain sense of innocence and magical playfullness that Burton puts into all his films. And Walken could pull that off perfectly. Not that I would disagree with Depp being cast. I would love to see that too. But the idea of Walken as Wonka really appeals to me. Steph agrees.

Then Steph found this just a few minutes ago. Take a look under the “technical details” section. Johnny Depp. Christopher Walken. Michael Keaton? Well, okay, I didn’t see that one coming, but still. It seems Burton agrees with us. Granted, these are rumors, but I’m very interested to see how this all plans out.

That’s gonna be one great movie.

Shopping

Funny spam subject of the day: “In 60 seconds we’ll start shopping for you”

Oh no! I’ve only got 60 seconds to stop them!!! I must hurry!

I can just picture a group of people standing outside Target or something, empty bags at the ready, running shoes tightly laced, watching a giant stopwatch count down until I’ve missed the deadline to tell them not to shop for me. Maybe they would all shout, “Five! Four! Three! Two! One! Shop for Josh! Whooooo!” and go galloping into the store, quickly selecting items which might garner my favor.

Well, now I’m glad I didn’t tell them to stop! Hey, as long as I don’t have to pay for it.

That reminds me, there’s only four more shopping days until my 25th birthday, August 8th. Timely spam, at that.