ana ulin
” [...] Every day there are more sounds, and I’m afraid that, some day in the future, every sound that’s possible to make will be in the world at the same time. And since every sound has its opposite, they will cancel each other out, and at the end of the day there’ll be billions of machines with their percussive rhythms, and billions of words in a language that doesn’t work anymore, and billions of people trying to be heard, screaming their lungs out, hurling their impotent noises into a world so saturated with noise that it might as well be deaf, and dumb, and blind.”
Now it’s Astrid’s turn to say nothing.
“All the noises of the world add up to silence,” says Harold. “This world will begin and end in silence.”
I’ve been reading this blog by somebody I know from my knitting adventures. She hadn’t written for a while, but then at the end of December she started writing again. She writes about not writing, and about life. Mostly about life. And about how life gets in the way of making, writing.
It is inspiring. And humbling, very humbling. I sit in my (our!) studio, reading her blog, and daydreaming about writing like that. Writing openly about what’s on my mind, in my heart. That’s so very brave. I mean, somebody could read it! And then there is the Internet Archive and stuff. Sigh.
He didn’t know what to feel. It occurred to him that human emotion had not evolved quickly enough to keep up with what mankind’s scientific capabilities demand of it. Sometimes the tiny components that make up an experience just didn’t fit in to existing emotional receptors, and the result was simply numbness.
My first sock ever, knitted up as I start reading through Cat Bordhi‘s New Pathways for Sock Knitters. Took me about five hours to complete, in some leftover yellow mercerized cotton. Learned some new techniques, which is always fun.
Concealing the wraps was not as hard to grok as I had feared, but the wrapped stitches do appear to be larger or stretched, which is a little unfortunate. You can even see them in the picture above, at the edges of the heel.
It’s been almost 7 years since I registered this domain. Through the years I’ve often wondered what content should go in here. Which is weird, because my original plan was to have a personal site with some records of personal stuff, which some people who know me might or might not find amusing. But something odd happens when you put some personal notes where others might see it: you start wondering if you are annoying those “others”, or if there is something else you should be posting that would amuse them more. Annoying.
In the past I’ve experimented with having separate blogs for specific topics. I’ve also experimented with funneling the bits of content I generate elsewhere into this site. From those experiments I’ve concluded that: (a) running separate blogs is too much trouble, given how little content I generate; and (b) that funneling things like a tumbleblog into this site has little value, and creates a certain din that I dislike. And I still want to use this site for a personal record of whatever I am interested in recording at the moment.
The reason why I am telling you this is because changes are afoot. In particular, I intend to start posting the occasional note related to my knitting. I was meaning to put those in a (gasp!) paper notebook, but that’s just annoying (guess how many used-up paper notebooks I have lying around?). There is also the hope that if I share my notes on the web, they might be useful to someone else, someday.
I am also going to stop piping the contents of my tumbleblog into here, which means there will be only the occasional entry. Which might or might not be about knitting, the web, or how the cat is super-cute (and I hope to be that cute at her age).
If you are following this blog because you think I am a Silicon Valley programmer and I might post something interesting about that, you are most likely out of luck. Though there’s no telling when you give me a keyboard.
“It’s still messy and garish, like disco humped by a Day-Glo monkey tripping neon balls on paint fumes.”
– Samsung Fascinate Lightning Review: When Greedy Carriers Ruin Decent Phones
“The renovated Stanford Theatre quickly became America’s most popular place to watch classic Hollywood movies. More people saw Casablanca here on its 50th anniversary in 1992 than anywhere else in America.”
“During rush hour, men have long been barred from a third of the carriages of metro trains. Some see that as offering a blessed sanctuary from wandering macho hands; for others it is a backward step on the march to equality.”
– Gender politics in Mexico City: Pink cabs rev up | The Economist
“I know some people think that blogs are conversations, but I don’t. I think they’re publications. And I think the role of comments is to add value to the posts. If you want to rebut a post, then you can create your own blog and post your rebuttal there”
– Scripting News: Proposal: A new kind of blog comment system
“There is a lot of diversity there, different from its beginning in 2004, where there was a pretty homogenic group of people there (almost like Facebook today). This certainly bother hipsters, fashion kinds and other high-income groups. There is even a neologism: “orkutificação”. In English it would be something as “orkutization”. It’s used as a negative term to refer to this “here comes everybody” feel, in which orkut has become full of “strange” people. Nowadays, there is even people saying that Twitter is becoming “orkutized”, because it is gaining popularity in Brazil and is becoming more diverse as well.”
– danah boyd | apophenia » social divisions between Orkut & Facebook in Brazil
“Here’s the other problem with Facebook and Twitter and even The New York Times. When you expose yourself to those things, especially in the constant way that people do now—older people as well as younger people—you are continuously bombarding yourself with a stream of other people’s thoughts. You are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it’s yourself you’re thinking about or anything else.”
– Solitude and Leadership: an article by William Deresiewicz | The American Scholar
The basic premise of Lytro’s technology is pretty simple: The camera captures all the information it possibly can about the field of light in front of it. You then get a digital photo that is adjustable in an almost infinite number of ways. You can focus anywhere in the picture, change the light levels — and presuming you’re using a device with a 3-D ready screen — even create a picture you can tilt and shift in three dimensions.
In an e-mail to one of its clients on Tuesday afternoon, DigitalOne’s chief executive, Sergej Ostroumow, said: “This problem is caused by the F.B.I., not our company. In the night F.B.I. has taken 3 enclosures with equipment plugged into them, possibly including your server — we cannot check it.” Mr. Ostroumow said that the F.B.I. was only interested in one of the company’s clients but had taken servers used by “tens of clients.” He wrote: “After F.B.I.’s unprofessional ‘work’ we can not restart our own servers, that’s why our Web site is offline and support doesn’t work.” The company’s staff had been working to solve the problem for the previous 15 hours, he said.
Myth #1 – Introverts don’t like to talk.
This is not true. Introverts just don’t talk unless they have something to say. They hate small talk. Get an introvert talking about something they are interested in, and they won’t shut up for days.Myth #2 – Introverts are shy.
Shyness has nothing to…
A quick and simple service for getting pictures of kittens for use as placeholders in your designs or code. Just put your image size (width & height) after our URL and you’ll get a placeholder.
National Doughnut Day is on the first Friday of June each year, succeeding the Donut Day event created by the Salvation Army in 1938 to honor the women who served doughnuts to soldiers during World War I.
