It’s another morning where I overslept. I was up late reading again. This has actually been kind of fun. I’ve got a decent fiction book that I’ve been pouring most of my spare time (and some not-so-spare time) into. It’s not a great book, but it’s unrelated to anything I’m doing for work, and is, as they say, a page-turner. Beats the hell out of watching the tube. I think that even though I’ve got a stack of almost a dozen books in my “to-read” pile, I’m going to try and stock up on more brain-candy fiction. The other things in the pile are things I think I ought to read, and I need more things that are just fun to read in the mix.
- I don’t suppose this should be a surprise to anyone in the age of photoshop, but a picture is no longer worth a thousand words if you don’t know how it’s been doctored and the story that goes with it. This isn’t anything new, though. The Soviets were erasing people from photos during the cold war, and Kevin Kelly wrote Digital Retouching; The End of Photography as Evidence of Anything for the Whole Earth Review back in July of 1985.
- In Monetize THIS we’re offered a nice suggestion for dealing with postal-mail spam. There was a while when I would stuff the envelope with the payment full of all the crap they’d sent with the bill, but at least once that burned me because they signed me up for one of those valuable offers, even though I hadn’t filled out the form. But I accumulate a (standard, paper) grocery bag full of crap from the mail every two weeks, and it would be nice to find something to do with it other than letting the city burn it for energy. [doc]
- Yesterday I took the bus downtown to have lunch with Steph. After lunch, I stopped by the Office Depot in City Center to pick up some stuff to try and get organized around home so I wouldn’t have a huge pile of papers living on my dining room table. I was kind of amazed as I walked through there back out to Hennepin Avenue, since over half the storefronts on the ground level were boarded up. Apparently this isn’t big news but I hadn’t realized the extent of the problems in there, since I haven’t been in there for a while. Apparently I’m not the only one who’s been shopping elsewhere.
- While riding the bus downtown, I talked with the driver. She wasn’t super-enthusiastic about the new contract, and is just hoping that things are quiet between now and when she can retire in three years. Meanwhile, other people are looking at How Not to Repeat This Process 15 Months from Now. I think that’s an important question, since the real problems behind the transit strike haven’t been solved, and without some changes, a strike in summer 2005 could be uglier than this one.
- For some lighter Friday fare, check out The Men Commandments. They’re not just good ideas, they’re commandments. [holy schmoly]