Feb 2005, 48 entries

On Big Bad List of Things

What do you like more: a dollar bill or the potential to purchase that it represents? What do you like more: beer or drunkenness? Your cat or the feeling of unconditional love from a soft animal? What do you want more: to make a difference, or the difference itself? I think a lot of confusion in my own life comes from not being able to separate value from the thing that carries the value. Can I really separate the taste of coke from the packaging and the branding? After that, can I separate the euphoric effect of caffeine from the taste of coke? After that, can I separate happiness (however momentary) from the effect of caffeine? Or do I just bundle up the whole thing in a chinese doll and say something like “I love coke”. These small slips of meaning and association really bother me more than they probably should. It makes me think that I’ll never be able to keep things straight in my head… that I’ll always give credit to the wrong thing, strive for the wrong thing, and end up getting the wrong thing. I’ll worship Coke rather than happiness. I’ll worship the storage mechanisms instead of the things that are being stored inside. Of course, to get obsessed about these things does no good… I might as well be a chicken pulling its feathers out because it can’t drive a car… such a chicken is no better off than the one that attributes the red light that goes off with the satisfaction of hunger and sadness.

Some people think that in the future we will be hired based on our blog. Jason Kottke, in a brilliant and crazy move leapfrogs the future and shows that he’d prefer to simple get paid to have a blog. I like anyone that tries crazy experiments that lead to trying to do the things that you’re most passionate about, and I wish him the best of luck.

I also got a chance to take a look at the new project that Evan Williams and crew are working on. I’ve never really understood podcasting as they call it, but I’m beginning to think that that was simply because there wasn’t a great app to prove the concept to me. Their beta is beautiful, easy to use, and makes me want to start subscribing to people’s audio content, and even creating some of my own. My one request (that I assume will be available at launch) is that an RSS feed of my channel be available so that I can add it to all the others. Syncing with my iPod will be nice, but that’s certainly not the primary use case for this product, in my opinion.

Buster Butterfield McLeod posted a photo:

Buster Butterfield McLeod posted a photo:

Buster Butterfield McLeod posted a photo:

On Big Bad List of Things

On Big Bad List of Things

Buster Butterfield McLeod posted a photo:

Buster Butterfield McLeod posted a photo:

Buster Butterfield McLeod posted a photo:

Buster Butterfield McLeod posted a photo:

Buster Butterfield McLeod posted a photo:

Buster Butterfield McLeod posted a photo:

Buster Butterfield McLeod posted a photo:

Buster Butterfield McLeod posted a photo:

Buster Butterfield McLeod posted a photo:

Buster Butterfield McLeod posted a photo:

Buster Butterfield McLeod posted a photo:

Buster Butterfield McLeod posted a photo:

It was a pretty crazy week. Started off pretty nicely with a good article on Salon about tagging, and it included a pretty nice section on 43 Things. Then I got a call at 7am the next morning from the reporter, and I was completely unprepared for the slew of questions that came at me (I was in “the site must be broken” mode, which is the only reason I’d normally get called at that hour). Needless to say, I was incoherent, groggy, unprofessional, and nervous, and ended up making a pretty big fool of myself. Woohoo! My new tagline is “Nobody’s supposed to know about that.” Yikes. My coworkers had a good laugh about that one, but for a while there I was feeling pretty low. At least now I know not to answer unrecognized phone calls at 7 in the morning… and I have a good “embarrassing story” to put in my Nerve Personals profile. Not every day that one gets publicly humiliated on the front page of a big news site. Good times good times. Thank you to everyone that stood up for my lameness.

A lot of discussion over on the Robot Co-op blog about the Amazon investment in our company. I don’t really have much to add at the moment other than that I feel like I’ll be happier if I remain blissfully unaware of the traps and strategies of publicity and the media. Part of being an amateur is about staying focused on what you love, and not getting distracted by trying to appear effective and professional to the outside. I’ll trade a bit of ineffectiveness for happiness any day. But if anyone will take the word of a dumbass… I can understand why people want more information, but I hope it’s enough to know for now that our intentions are good, and not evil.

Part of my continued obsession with outsourcing as many things as possible, from books to music to movies to cars, has now moved to outsourcing my blog. I used to write my own blog/wiki back in the day. Then I moved to Movable Type. But blogging turns out to be so much more than a single blog can handle. My online presence is scattered across a dozen different sites, some which can post to my blog, others that can accept pings from my blog, but for a while now this hasn’t felt good enough because I actually end up using different sites for different audiences and experiences.

Since all of them seem to be offering RSS feeds, I thought I might just use those as a way to collect the rain drops into a bucket and pour the aggregate into a little shot glass every hour… I’m not describing this well. I’ll just say what I did. I made a folder in Bloglines that has all of the RSS feeds around the web that have stuff that I’ve written/done. Then I used the Bloglines Web Service to get an aggregated, normalized feed of all my content in one stream, and used Ruby On Rails to easily store and display this content over here. Of course, it only makes sense to then roll all of this stuff up again into a new feed, pass it through FeedBurner, and offer it up again as a pretty pretty feed with stats and everything. Currently, I have zero readers, so if you want to have access to way too much Erik Benson than is healthy, subscribe to this. In any case, now, all of my stuff is being stored on other peoples’ servers, and yet I’m still pulling it all together on my own server. This is probably only exciting to very few people. There’s a list of all of my sources on hello.erikbenson.com.

In the meantime, I’ve also integrated more of my Morale-O-Meter stuff into it as well. Now, I’m displaying my monthly and daily averages alongside all of the other content. For example, check out February’s In-progress Report. I want to make an RSS feed for these monthly things too, but it’s a bit too computationally expensive to compute averages for 12 months on a single page load at the moment. I’ll have to refactor a bit and get back to that later.

Anyway, so a pretty nerdy end to a fun week. I wanted to write about taste tests, Aeron chairs, and brainwashing, but that’ll have to wait until later I think.