Turns out the US has been going to hell in a handbasket for a while:

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

– Isaac Asimov

(via Goodreads, attribution veracity unverified.)

I’m at a loss of words for what to say. Even though I had followed his health trials and knew he had been doing poorly, I didn’t expect him to pass away so soon.

The word ‘visionary’ seems insufficient to describe him.

Rest in peace, Steve. You were nothing short of spectacular.

Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

Here are some links from Twitter and Google+:

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This is what happened on the blog this week:

Commentary

Links

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This is what happened in the rest of my life this week:

Oh, also, I’m helping out at Habitat for Humanity in November. You should sponsor me.

Rest in Peace, Troy Davis. I’m so sorry your country failed you.

That’s all I can say.

The fight has to go on.

(Posting suspended for the rest of the week because posting anything else just seems….wrong.)

Last week, I leveraged my not-inconsiderate internet resources and begged anyone who had any sympathy for me to take a survey for my consumer behaviour class. I promised everyone I’d write up the results after everything was done, and after having spent my entire weekend (I was stuck in a meeting room with my group for a total of 12 hours) doing data clean-up and analysis, I figured I might as well make a blog post out of it.

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Thank you for your indulgence! We’re back to our regularly schedule programming. I didn’t waste the five weeks off that I had, don’t worry – I’ve put up a new site, gotten two new blogs off the ground, figured out a direction for my career, gotten caught up in my art, and rewritten 2 chapters of a novel-in-progress. Not bad, considering I also wrote six midterms and made three separate trips out of town.

Here’s what’s new for the blog:

1. Email notification. If you want to get an email from me every time I update my blog, leave me a comment and I’ll add you to the list. Updates will happen about 3-4 times a week – I’m going to aim for 3 main posts and one link dump.

2. New design & “about me”. For those of you that visit the site through Google Reader, I’ve put up a slightly new design for the site, and I’ve also written a more succinct, less cutesy “about me” for new visitors. I’d love to hear your thoughts on both.

3. New Feature. I’m starting a new feature in addition to my weekly link dumps that I think I’ll call “everything else”. This will probably be every month, and it’ll be a summary update of what I’m doing elsewhere on the internet, including writing, art, photography, and just general life updates.

Here’s what’s new for me:

Life & Love: This is my new writing Tumblr. I try to post vignettes as often as I can. I’m working on a longer-term writing project, and this is my way of getting back into the habit of writing. If you like my writing, check it out!

An Internet Hide-out: This is my new website. Rather than try to host all my writing and art and projects on one site, I’ve decided to make my main website a portal that links to everything else. (Psst, there’s an Easter Egg on the site. See if you can figure it out.)

I think that’s about it. Yay! I’m glad to be posting again.

I’m taking a hiatus. Probably a month, maybe six weeks, no more than that. I want to announce it so that it seems premeditated (which it is) instead of making it seem like I simply got lazy.

There are several reasons for this. Feel free to skip to the bottom for the short version.

1. I really love having a venue where I regularly force myself to think deeply and put my thoughts down in a coherent manner, but that’s only one part of the allure of writing. Recently, I’ve started working on a few other writing projects of a more creative bent. One of them is a long-term project that may or may not pan out; another one is a Tumblr blog where I post daily (or more) vignettes. I want to take some time to focus on those, too, and build up steam there before I try to juggle all of my projects at once.

2. I’m getting to a point in my career where I need to get my professional online presence together, and design a full-blown portfolio site for myself that I can use to network. This blog takes an enormous amount of time to maintain and because I love it so much, it often takes precedence over my other projects, so unless I put this blog on hold, I don’t see myself pulling that portfolio together anytime soon.

3. I’m dealing with a few things within my social circle and  family that eat up a lot of emotional energy and I don’t always feel like maintaining that level of 24/7 connectivity that I need to both find things to write about, and to inform myself enough that I can formulate a semi-intelligent response to those things. I think a break would help.

TL;DR: Life’s getting in the way, I’ll be back in 4-6 weeks. If you’d like me to email you when I start posting again, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll add you to the (as-yet-non-existent) mailing list.

Cheers!

There may be a war on Christmas going on, but the holiday season remains one of my favourite times of the year. Despite the short days, and despite the exams, and despite the dip in my mood from the winter weather, I love that the holiday season gives me an excuse to be cheerful, and an excuse to be even more ostentatiously affectionate than I normally am.

I’m celebrating Christmas with my family. We don’t always get along, but they’re still my family.

I hope you’re having a good holiday, too.

Most spam is pretty easily spotted, but I’ve noticed two trends in spam comments I’ve been getting recently that I find really intriguing:

1. Instead of linking directly to the offending website, they link to a profile on a forum somewhere, and the only information on that forum is their spam website. That seems like a lot of effort to go to, especially since the click-throughs must drop precipitously due to this extra step, but… hey, I’m not the astro-turfing jerk here.

2. Most “intelligent” spam comments say something generically nice about the post. You know, “great information, thanks!” or “I found this through Google, it’s a very interesting post” or whatever. The grammar and punctuation are usually just a little bit off, and obviously the track-back information is totally sketchy. But I’ve gotten a whole bunch of comments recently that point out something wrong with the design of the site. Either my site won’t work in Internet Explorer, or there’s something wrong with my navigation menu, or whatever.

This is so clever. Most of my web projects probably would’ve taken 20% less time if I didn’t have to worry about IE integration. Probably 40% less time, if we drop IE 6 from the mix. So when I saw those comments saying something on my site was broken, I freaked out–a totally irrational response, since this site is hosted on an off-the-shelf theme. The downside is that once I realized what was going on, I deleted those comments with that much more gleefulness.

Damn spammers.

I was trying to install an instance on jPlayer on a client’s website over the weekend. Hurrah for HTML5, and all that. I’d played with jPlayer before on a few different websites and had never had issues with it.

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