Yesterday’s photowalk went pretty well, I think. I had fun, took a few photos I liked, and verified that the G10 is much better about noise than the G9 was, so that makes me happy.
But the thing that got me writing today is that I got an invitation to yet another of the many social networking websites out there, and wonderered to myself why there aren’t more anti-social networking sites.
Not that I’m entirely anti-social, but other than flickr, which has kept me much more interested in photography than I otherwise might be, I tend not to go to any of those sites unless someone has sent me an invitation that I need to respond to. It’s not that I don’t like people, it’s just that I’d generally rather see ’em in person than read things from them on some third-party website with lots of blinky crap.
But even that isn’t my real complaint with these sites. My real complaint (and I have a vague memory of having written about this before) is that these sites don’t support the nuance that happens in real life friendships. There are some people who I consider close friends, and they match up pretty well with what some of these sites have to offer. And then there are others, like a few of my high-school classmates, that while I wouldn’t mind gabbing with them for an hour or two over a few beers, I don’t want to share my entire life with them, and I suspect they don’t want to know that much about me. An hour or two every five or ten years is plenty for both of us.
I’m reminded of the saying: A friend will help you move. A real friend will help you move a body.
But try to express those different levels of “friendship” on one of the sites out there. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but I haven’t seen any site that’s done even a half-assed job of it. In most cases, if someone asks to be my friend, I go ahead and say sure, because if I don’t, they’re going to wonder what they did to piss me off. But then how do you flag your closest friends differently? Then again, based on the popularity of the sites out there, maybe most people don’t care about the nuance (or think about which friends they’d call on if they did have to move a body).
I don’t know. I don’t have any big answers here, just questions that wandered through my mind this morning.
Pretty good Thanksgiving Day for me yesterday. Slept late. Finished reducing the stock I’d started on Tuesday. Ended up with about 5 cups of glace, which will make a welcome addition to soups and sauces through the rest of the winter. Read a book. Roasted a chicken, potatoes and carrots for dinner. And watched five of the two-hour Planet of the Apes “movies” (made by basically sticking together two episodes of the TV show) that were showing on Fox Movie Channel yesterday. My next couch-potato day will get me the five original movies which they also showed. Ape-tastic.
The notable thing that I didn’t finish was the books. I looked things over, and due to bad planning, I’ve got to take all the books out of one of the cases, because there’s one big book that wants to live on the bottom shelf that’s about ½″ too tall to fit with the shelves the way they are now. That means I’ll need to move every shelf in that case up by one notch. Plus as I mentioned on Tuesday, I’ve got to do some other rearranging of the books so they’re grouped together more sensibly. Going to try and tackle that today before it’s time to head out on the photowalk. Definitely going to finish them up before it’s time to head back to work on Monday.
- In a Thanksgiving-related post, Dan linked to this photoset of How to Truss a Turkey. Umm. It’s not exactly what you might expect if you were thinking cooking. But it made me laugh. And I didn’t point it out to you until after you were done eating. [flutterby]
- There’s a bunch of folks who want to Reinstate Hank Williams into the Grand Ole Opry, but as this thread at metafilter points out, the Opry only has living members. [metafilter]
- And finally, it’s the day after Thanksgiving, so it must be time for the Third annual post-Thanksgiving twilight photowalk here in the Twin Cities. Sounds like the biggest crowd ever, but we’ll see what happens. At least the weather is looking better than had been forecast earlier in the week (when they were saying it was going to snow all weekend).
I’m taking this week off from work. Seemed like a good time to catch up on a bunch of things around the house. Yesterday I got almost all of the books unpacked. I stopped when I realized that I will either need to rearrange things a bit or have some books in piles rather than on the bookcases. I think all the books will fit, but to do so I’m going to need to jumble up the categories I grouped them into as I was unpacking to make things more efficient.
- Today’s a day of cooking. I’ve been working on beef stock since about 7am, and I’m hoping to have everything wrapped up by 5pm. Whether I’ll get it reduced all the way to a Beef Glace de Viande or not remains to be seen, but at the moment, it’s making the house smell pretty darned good.
- Bill Whittle went through mandatory sexual harassment Training Day and writes about it. I think I agree with the commenter who said that the most effective tactic is sedition, not complaining. [endwar]
I’ve been catching up on things over the past couple weeks. There was the ongoing catch-up after my vacation. I’ve finally finished posting the pictures from that to flickr. Check my Road Trip to Maine set if you’re interested. The picture just below this is the last of the lot, taken at the eastern terminus of US Highway 2 near Houlton, Maine.
 |
| End of the Road |
Then there’s been the catching up around home. It’s deer-season, which means I may be coming into some more venison if all my friends were successful in their hunts. And since my chest-freezer was getting empty, that meant it was time to completely empty it and get it defrosted and cleaned out before I start refilling it. Which meant that last Sunday I threw a bunch of soup-bones into a pot, and made up a few quarts of beef stock (which went into the freezer) for use later this winter.
Plus there’s been the inevitable pile of bills, projects I wanted to get done “before the snow flies” and just daily stuff around the house that I get behind on when I’m paying attention to other things. But this weekend, it finally feels as though everything is nearly caught up, and life is feeling pretty normal again.
Which is good, since it’s just about time for the holiday stuff to kick in. It’s less than two weeks until the third annual post-Thanksgiving photowalk that I organize every year. But at the moment, I’ve got time to update the blog, take a nap later today and feel as though I’m caught up for a few days. Life is good.
- This is pretty cool. Go to Multicolr Search Lab and pick a few colors. It’ll return photos from flickr containing those hues. [nack]
- Need another blog to read? Damn Cool Pics is a good one (and pretty self-explanatory). I find something to make me smile every time I think to check it out. [nack]
- I find it weird when an article like Be Friendly actually catches my eye. Then again maybe it’s just this sort of thing that has me down. [sportsshooter]
- Feel like playing with mud? Make a shiny dorodango. Probably not something I’ll try, but it sounds darned cool.
Well, that’s over. It’s nice to not be constantly bombarded by political ads, but it’s going to be a while before things calm down. There are still too many people who are pissed about the results (or lack thereof).
But it’s good to have this done. I’m not especially pleased with the results myself, but what’s a guy to do? I expect there will be a run on guns and ammunition as a lot of folks are convinced Obama’s going to ban everything. I expect it’ll make for some interesting chatter at gun shows over the next couple months if nothing else. And probably a shortage of bargains to be found.
And it may just be me, but has anyone else had Blazing Saddles on their brain lately? I’ve heard people pointing out, like Gabby Johnson, that the sheriff is, um, near. As if they’re just noticing that now. Dunno. People are funny sometimes, right?
In other news, I’ve finally finished posting the photos from the Fall Foliage Workshop I attended a couple weeks back. I think there are at least a few in there that I’ll end up printing out, but I still haven’t decided for sure which ones will make that cut.
- Time Magazine has a list of The 50 Worst Cars of All Time. You may want to look at the whole list, but among the highlights are the Gremlin, Pinto, Corvair, Pacer, DeLorean and Yugo, but they don’t include the G-Wiz. [top]
- Speaking of cars, in this story of Kraft durch (Schaden)freude on Metafilter, the story is told of how Porsche screwed hedge funds, briefly making VW the company with the largest value in the world. Information asymmetry indeed. [flutterby]