Category: Miscellaneous

An intesting look at categories of blog posts from BoingBoing’s Guest blog:

Informative: short, sweet, linked. Makes a quick point and backs it up with a link to another site. Boing Boing has made this into an art form.

Blisdom (blog wisdom): can be short or long, relies on a narrative to make a subtle point. Often pulled from a life experience. Here’s an example from a conversation with my wife:

Wife: I just had the strangest dream. I was on a train…

Me: Coach or First Class?

Wife: Honey, I don’t dream in coach.

Vanity Post: Often inane. Represents everything that journalists like to point to and say, “See, blogs are worthless.”

‘While the unexamined life may not be worth living the overexamined life is not worth reading.’

–Scott Simon of NPR on “inane weblogs”

That doesn’t mean these blog entries aren’t interesting when read as part of the whole blog…it just means that if there is a point, it is often missed by the casual visitor, like going from Sopranos series 1 to series 4.

Fiction: There is a lot of emerging fiction popping up from blogs. Harder to find, but worth the journey.

Then comes the post that has had the biggest affect on my life. I don’t have a clever name for it, so let’s just call it the “shoes” post…as in walk a mile in another’s shoes. Sometimes it has a clear point, and other times it just resonates inside you. Whatever the author’s point behind the post, it takes on new meaning in your own mind. Sometimes you learn something about someone else, but often you learn something about yourself.

I like to think of my posts as a combination of Informative and Blisdom, giving a tiny slice-of-my-life to readers while at the same time posting short sweet links along with my thoughts on the matter.

BitTorrent is the greatest! For example, even though I went to Calgary to watch the BareNaked Ladies last Thursday and Anna forgot to set the VCR, I was able to download her a copy of the newest episode of ER and we could just watch it on the computer. But using BitTorrent gets even better when you use RSS. With an RSS feed you can use your news aggregator to let you know whenever there is a new episode of your favorite show available for download, this way you’ll always be up to date on whatever Tony Soprano and/or Homer Simpson are up to. It’s the greatest!

What a movie! Magdalene Sisters takes place in the 1960’s in Ireland. It’s about the Catholic practice of taking unwedded women who were accused of being sexual active in some way or other and placing them in a kind of laundry slave labour camp. Based on a true story, the last of these asylums was finally shut down in 1996.

The IMDB description:

Ireland in the sixties: Four women are given into the custody of the magdalene sisterhoood asylum to correct their more or less sinful behavior: Crispina and Rose have given birth to a pre-marriage child, Margaret got raped by her cousin and the orphan Bernadette had been repeatedly caught flirting with the boys. All have to work in a laundry under the strict supervision of the nuns, who break their wills through sadistic punishments. Some of the inmates develop countermeasures, while others perish under the treatment.

This is one of those movies that you hate to watch because it’s such a miserble fate that has befallen these women. It was a huge relief to see (and while not wanting to ruin the show for you I think it’s worth saying) that in the end at least 3 out of the 4 main characters make it out of that place and return to living a somewhat normal life. Very intense show not one that I would recommend to most people, but it’s definitely a good independant / Irish production.

I missed class today because I didn’t remember to set my clocks an hour forward. That and I slept in. It was a combination of the two, really.

I guess I’m going to be doing homework all day today. Only about a million more projects to do and then I’ll be done for the semester. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel – unfortunately it’s probably just the metaphorical headlights of a train because I still have another year and a half of school to go. Cest la vie.

Anna points out that this picture is edited because it’s cropped. It’s true. So maybe it would be better to call this, Jeff Cropped. But it’s up to you. Oh, I almost forgot to mention, I just got my haircut. What do you think?

Canada’s Federal Court has ruled that the Canadian Recording Industry Association was not able to prove copyright infringement by the uploaders it sued. The judge also said that under our country’s copyright law, downloading is not illegal.

I have really let my homework add up. I don’t want this to come off whiney because, number 1 there isn’t really THAT much that I have to do, and number 2 it’s my own fault for not doing these assignments sooner, but for the record this is what I have to do in the next couple days/week. I have 5 abstracts (short one page papers) for New Media Seminar to do, a 10 page Art History paper with a ton of specifications (like 5 sources and a million citations), 2 three page long concert reviews to write, and 2 concerts to attend (so that I have something to review). I wonder if my Music History Prof. would count the BareNaked Ladies concert? After all, the songs from “Gordon” are getting old enough to be classics.

Time to replace your old Periodic Table. …a joint American-Russian team has found two new elements-numbers 113 and 115 on the periodic table-hinting at an impending breakthrough in creating novel forms of matter that will test our understanding of atomic behavior.

Penny Arcade forums presents Bohemian Rhapsody for the Deaf. But in the event that you are not deaf, I recommend playing it in the background while you translate it.

Update: It appears this link has been removed from Penny Arcade. I don’t know of any mirrors – sorry.

I can’t say I’m ready to publish my blog, but when I am I will think of Blogbinder.com. “Blogbinders.com helps you turn your blog into a bound book – great as a gift, an archive, or even to sell to your readers!”