Year: 2002

Writer

It’s intimidating to discuss writing with someone who’s been doing it for more than 15 years, particularly when my recent experience in the field is limited to less than eight months of short blurbs like this one, but I had another chance to do so tonight with my new writer friend. I love to hear the pleasure in her voice when she talks about her craft. Even her frustrations have a quality to them that says she loves what she does.

Were I any good at thinking on my feet, I’d have told her that. Perhaps I just have.

Taxonomy

I think it’s time for two new categories, Personal and Writing, but I don’t want to call them by those names. I’m now accepting suggestions for pithy quotations for each category and a short excerpt for the name. (Even I found Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature’s chief masterpiece is writing well–category title Nature’s chief masterpiece–from the Duke of Buckinghamshire Sheffield’s Essay on Poetry too pretentious for my little chunk of cyberspace.)

Come together

SONICblue and TiVo have dropped their mutual patent infringement lawsuits: We believe our energies are better spent expanding the market for Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) rather than fighting each other… the overall success of the DVR category is what is most important to the companies at this time.

I was all ready to post some snarky comment about how DVR will never go anywhere because the competitors just aren’t partisan enough, but my heart’s just not in it. Instead, bravo to two companies who recognize that cooperation can be more productive than litigation.

Not gonna do it

For those who’ve asked, only one thing last Friday was work-related. (And thanks much for all the kind words.) I’ve stayed away from posting about goings-on at my place of employment, not because they’re particularly bad (they’re not, unless you look at the stock price) or uninteresting (they are… and I’m aware that that can be interpreted a couple of ways) or because it’s against some sort of policy (it’s generally not, as long as I don’t discuss what I’m making), but basically because this is a place that I don’t post about work.

Circular logic… you know, for kids!

Lemonade

Friday sucked.

Saturday didn’t. Sunday was pretty much the opposite of suckage. And almost all’s well since.

I wrote previously that perspective is a good thing, and Saturday proved it. Where on the day before I was ready to throw in the towel and just-finally-move-to-Albania-and-raise-goats-dammit, I decided Saturday to turn my little crisis into an opportunity. Perhaps I’ll post the core of the resulting manifesto here one of these days.

But the event that really inspired me was this: I met a writer on Sunday. Actually, I’d met her several times previously–as recently as a live-radio performance on Saturday night, in fact–but really had a chance to get to know her a bit better after we saw Bowling for Columbine with a mutual friend. She’s got a great attitude, a wicked sense of humour with timing to match, and she would very likely flay the first person to refer to her as sweet (which they’d do, ’cause she is… kinda). Naturally I lent her my copy of the torso-sized 35-year edition of The Essential Ellison (the paperback, but only because I haven’t finished the hardcover 50-year edition yet), not least of all because she gave an appropriately-horrified reaction to my friend when he dared to suggest that she might dog-ear the pages or break the spine.

Now if I could only find out her last name….

Perspective

In the past week I’ve been yelled at, told that my pet projects aren’t worthwhile, sick for three days, ignored repeatedly, and generally made to feel worthless, and I’ve realized that I sit on my ass eight to twelve hours a day making products that will–with any luck–encourage millions of others to sit on their asses more than they already do.

Tonight I saw Bowling for Columbine and was reminded that there are other people with worse problems.

This doesn’t make me feel better–quite the contrary–but it does add perspective.

Og words sound funny

It amazes me that (according to Google) no one has ever posted an article called The Secret World of Ogg about Xiph’s digital audio format, or The Secret World of Blog about the web-based journals (like this one) that have cropped up everywhere. Then again, Pierre Berton’s book was published ten years before I was born; the kids working on and writing about all this newfangled technology have probably never even heard of it, which is a shame.

Soviet Canuckistan

My brother sent me a note on a recent comment by a (failed) politician from the U.S.A. who calls the country we live in Soviet Canuckistan. I thought it was funny–yet another crackpot trying to get in the paper–but then I looked up the phrase on Google to see the various coverage.

I used to think Pat Buchanan was just a blowhard. I still do, but I’ve recently realized that he’s a dangerous blowhard… and that there are dangerous people in this country who not only don’t have a problem with him, but revere him as the unerring voice of sanity and rightness. I’ve looked at the websites: these people are just this side of skinheads, and will be angered most that this post doesn’t go so far as to actually put them in that category.

I’m not a political person–on the whole it’s a topic that doesn’t interest me in the slightest–but I’m ashamed to share a country, let alone a continent, with people like this.

First They Came

First they came for the Communists.
I was silent.
I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews.
I was silent.
I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists.
I was silent.
I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me.

There was no one left to speak for me.

Pastor Martin Niemöller [adapted from various sources]