I just completed the Librivox public domain audiobook of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It is a good tale, plus it contains large doses of political science and social and political commentary.
Over at kottke.org, guest blogger Greg Knauss proposes that bloggers fall into two categories:
The referential blogger uses the link as his fundamental unit of currency, building posts around ideas and experiences spawned elsewhere: Look at this. Referential bloggers are reporters, delivering pointers to and snippets of information, insight or entertainment happening out there, on the Intraweb. They can, and do, add their own information, insight and entertainment to the links they unearth — extrapolations, juxtapositions, even lengthy and personal anecdotes — but the outward direction of their focus remains their distinguishing feature.
The experiential blogger is inwardly directed, drawing entries from personal experience and opinion: How about this. They are storytellers (and/or bores), drawing whatever they have to offer from their own perspective. They can, and do, add links to supporting or explanatory information, even unique and undercited external sources. But their motivation, their impetus, comes from a desire to supply narrative, not reference it.
I’m definitely primarily a referential blogger. The primary reason for this is that I’m introverted and am therefore reluctant to share my personal life with people whom I don’t know well.
But Greg’s observations are timely for me, as I wrote an experiential blog post just last night. Writing that post felt kind of strange to me. Now I see why. But, I do think I’ll try to write more experiential posts.
We had a crazy weekend. Katie’s mother and aunt had been scheduled to move on Saturday, so we had planned to go to San Antonio to help with that. However, their move got postponed until Tuesday, so we drove down to help prepare for the upcoming move.
On Saturday evening, we celebrated a belated Passover Lite with Katie’s dad’s cousin and his wife, Bob and Paulina Polunsky. Hannah spent the night at the Polunskys’, and Samuel, Katie and I stayed in a hotel (we’d planned for both kids to stay with Polunskys, but alas, that didn’t work out).
During the night, the Easter/Passover bunny visited the kids at the Polunskys, so after an Easter breakfast of fried matzah at their house, we wrapped up our work for Mawmaw and Allie and hit the road home. I have to return on Tuesday to help with the rescheduled move.
I’m in the midst of deploying a blog redesign (blue=old, purple=new). If you see any problems with purple pages, plesae let me know in the comments of this entry.
A while back, I read an interesting Fast Company article about how the manufacturer of Snapper power lawn equipment turned down Wal-Mart as a retail outlet. This interesting piece shows the muscle that Wal-Mart–and in this case, I think, the big home improvement outlets–can exert over their suppliers. Or not, in this case.
Today, there’s an article about the influence that Wal-Mart holds over video game developers:
Publisher sales reps inform Wal-Mart buyers of games in development; the games’ subjects, titles, artwork and packaging are vetted and sometimes vetoed by Wal-Mart. If Wal-Mart tells a top-end publisher it won’t carry a certain game, the publisher kills that game. In short, every triple-A game sold at retail in North America is managed start to finish, top to bottom, with the publisher’s gaze fixed squarely on Wal-Mart, and no other.
Crazy.
Whenever I spend time browing our ReligiousResources directory or reviewing submitted sites, I’m amazed at what I find. My latest find is TV Guardian:
TVGuardian® technology automatically filters offensive language from the programs you and your family watch. TVGuardian® is a device you plug into your TV and it removes the bad language (cursing and profanity). It works with Cable, Satellite, DVD players, VCR and over the air channels. TVGuardian® makes movie time, family time again.
So, you can watch shows and movies that contain offensive language but feel secure that you’re protecting your and your children’s fine sensibilities. Here’s an idea: if that stuff offends you, don’t watch it!
I’m happy to report that today I launched a new design for ReligiousResources.org. I’m pleased with the design, but visitors to the site will not see the biggest improvements: I’ve completely reprogrammed the admin functionality (managing listings, etc.). But that change should make life much better for Susan, and will hopefully make the site more useful.
This is the funniest Ask MetaFilter thread ever.
A while back, Norman started making pre-gacking noises while we were sitting in the living room with guests. He was on the carpet, of course. Katie was a little late on grabbing him to move him onto the kitchen floor. He completed the job right as Katie was turning around with him, projecting cat vomit across the room and down my mother’s leg.
When I was reading this ask.metafilter.com thread the other day, something I’ve been thinking about for a while finally clicked. What caught my eye was that a few respondents mentioned the volume of music, in gigabytes, that they had downloaded from emusic.com back when it offered unlimited downloads.
Researchers examined whether bilingual individuals showed different personality traits when communicating in each language. The short answer: yes. Unfortunately, you have to pay to read the entire paper.
As a bilingual person, that result doesn’t surprise me. I know I behave differently when speaking German than I do when speaking my native language, English. But upon reflection, I’d say the reasons for that are complex: relative insecurity with my mastery of German, different cultural conversational conventions and expectations, etc. I’d like to know how the researchers controlled for various influencing factors.
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