This category contains posts I wrote under the name of “anti-blog” prior to migrating the site to WordPress. If we are all exceptionally lucky, the post you’re reading may even approximate a prototypical blog post of the early 2000s, containing several random (usually unrelated) links and maybe a sentence or two on each. At various times, I have written “anti-blog” and “blog” rationales, but fuck it—I’m going back to my roots.
Today was a good e-mail day.
A site called Alexa, run by the kind folks who bring you Amazon.com, ranks gohlkusmaximus.com 5,278,249.
If you believe Zeldman’s claim that there are about 5 billion sites out there, my site ranks among the top 0.2% most popular sites!
But wait. My site is almost three hundred thousand sites behind the five millionth most popular site out there. That’s not so good.
I can see it now: “We’re number 5,278,249. We try harder.”
I am safely back from visiting my brother in North Carolina. It was a good experience. Upon my return, I (thankfully) discovered that all of Minneapolis’ April snow had melted. Let’s just get on with this “spring” thing, shall we?
I wrote an email message to a long-lost friend today. Actually, I emailed about 4 long-lost friends. Hi, long-lost friend! [The other friends I wrote today are only mildly lost.]
I feel some guilt for sending an uncomplimentary message to a newspaper columnist (see previous entry below). Writing to Alex Beam didn’t really accomplish anything other than to make me look like a bit of a jerk. If I could take it back and simply say nothing, I would. There are more important things, I always say but never act on.
More snow. More trips out of town. More later. Happy April.
To: “Alex Beam” <beam@globe.com>
Subject: A comment on April 2nd’s Boston Globe column
Cc: “James Lileks” <lileks@lileks.com>
Dear Alex:
I expect that I’ll be one of many to respond to your column on weblogs, so I’ll present only a few points.
James Lileks’ writing is far more amusing (and interesting to read) than yours. However, your writing is elitist, and his is not. It seems you’ve both achieved your (apparent) goals.
I especially like the way you’ve taken quotes out of context in order to strike the snottiest note possible. You’ve gotten so many things wrong in your column that I’ll refrain from pointing the rest of them out. (Evasive, to be sure, but you’ve probably received plenty of dissections of your column so far.)
By the way, I don’t think that weblogs present themselves as the ultimate authority on everything, as you seem to have inferred. (Perhaps you’re projecting your own inflated sense of importance onto them.) In my experience, they simply reflect a person’s individual (or a group’s collective) thoughts, opinions, and observations. When I don’t like one, I don’t write a nasty column about it. I simply stop reading it. (Of course, it’s not my job to write nasty columns; I think I understand some of your motivation.)
Finally, I realize this message may be overly harsh and not especially funny. I realize further that I’m judging you without a full understanding of your point of view. For that, I apologize.
(For a less sarcastic version of my opinion, see my comment at http://metatalk.metafilter.com/mefi/2038#32249.)
Gotta love this vote of confidence in our governments (from the readers of this article at CNN.com):
I, for one, am not surprised.
I think that Memepool linked to this anti-war site sarcastically, but I think it’s really powerful.
100 things not to do in Milwaukee brings me back to my childhood, but not as much as 100 Milwaukee memories.
I can’t believe I read the whole thing: Someone has reviewed Radiohead’s brilliant album Amnesiac song by song. His review is a nice example of what the web can do and a damn interesting read. Start with the first song and access the rest from his archive page. It helps if you’re listening to the album while you’re reading it. (It really helps if you have it and Kid A in your MP3 library.)
I am now officially old.
I just turned on the radio and heard R.E.M.’s “The One I Love”. At age 12, when that song was on the charts, I purchased a copy of it as a 45 RPM vinyl single. (I still have it.) That admission dates me somewhat, but here’s the real cause of my irrational angst: I heard “The One I Love” on Minneapolis’ classic rock station. Classic rock.
Wait—am I old, or does WLOL just have a screwed-up definition of “classic rock”? I always thought it was stuff like Foreigner, Heart, Fleetwood Mac, and Bob Seger. (The music of my parents’ generation.)
Oh… a station ID just informed me that they call their format “classic hits.” I guess that gives them license to play old alterna-indie-college rock alongside Grand Funk Railroad and Queen. It’s not bad; it’s just weird. And, undoubtedly, angst-inducing for twenty-somethings all over the Twin Cities metro area.
I’ve been spending way too much time on Metafilter. (It feels like I’m being unfaithful to you somehow, dear reader; I’m deeply sorry.)
But look what I found there:
Do you forgive me? (Sure you do.)
Today about 8 inches of snow landed on the Twin Cities with a thud and a few thunderclaps. I feel relieved (and somewhat smug) that I chose today to exercise my right to telecommute on occasion.
I did say no to something. That was necessary.
I haven’t quite finished anything, but no matter—I will. I did find The Emperor’s New Clothes.
Tonight I pledged to invest $100 in the Montreal Expos if my future co-owners can scrape $100 million together to buy the team. Hell, why not? It’s a small price to pay to be in the exclusive fraternity of major league baseball owners. Sign yourself up for any amount—be a part of history! Via Alan Schwartz on ESPN:
At its current rate of growth the kitty will crack $500,000 by the end of the month and hit the magic $100 million mark in late March.
See? It’s a foregone conclusion. Act now and earn the right to say you were one of the first 100,000.
We opened the floodgates today at work—we added a link to the “public preview” (i.e. unfinished version) of the new [former] DNR web site on the current home page. I’ll keep you posted as to my favorite comments, such as:
It’s obvious you folks have put a lot of time and effort into this. … [However,] [i]t seems like we lost a lot of information that was on the previous home page without a benefit gained in terms of a less cluttered look.
State e-mail is public information, by law; posting it here might be seen as inappropriate, though. Oh, well.
Chris Ware and Ira Glass were splendid Monday night, by the way. They conversed about their work in a very entertaining fashion for almost 3 hours; afterwards, they graciously signed autographs for an hour. The Breeders were pretty good on Wednesday night, too.
Tomorrow I’ve got a union thing—a strike debriefing from 7:30 am to 4:30 pm. Hope it’s better than it sounds. Actually, it’s important to record some lessons for any future rerun of last October’s unpleasantness.
Metacritic looks like a great movie review site; it compiles movie reviews from around the web and “averages” them. It’s even named accurately, since its average score for a movie is weighted based on how much they like the critic (implicitly criticizing the critics)….
By the way, there’s something new for me to deal with: “Rejecting contracts puts employees, collective bargaining at risk”.
Via Textism, I’ve discovered Ftrain. Paul Ford is a talented writer and a good read, if a bit too surreal for my tastes at times.
The previous entry is a weird place to keep you hanging. I ordered pizza for the meeting. It was fine, except 7 of the 20 pizzas I ordered didn’t get touched (I counted on the estimates of my more-experienced colleagues), so we donated them to the homeless shelter across the street.
Still haven’t been getting sleep, though. Soon (I hope) I’ll be rolling out gohlke.net, which will draw a clear distinction between my personal thoughts and my professional life, as I’ve planned.
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