I’ve cared about typographically correct punctuation (as well and as distinct from grammatically correct punctuation) for as longer than I’ve had a computer. The difference between typical home computer output (and display) and typography as seen in books was always glaringly evident, and I wanted to narrow that gap as much as possible. This post is a discussion of some of the issues, how I’ve handled them in the past, and my current approaches.
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Novak Djokovic won the 2011 Australian Open men’s final last night in straights, 6–4, 6–2, 6–3. That’s his second Australian Open title, coming three years after his last victory (against Tsonga, and also after defeating Federer in straights in the semis). I watched the final on replay this morning, and frankly am quite glad I didn’t stay up for it, as it fairly poor.
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Perhaps the ironic loop would have been complete if I had have been paid by filmdrunk.com to write this post… but no such exchange took place.
Rafael Nadal lost to David Ferrer, playing injured against possibly the worst opponent to face when injured—Ferrer is a fantastic retriever and is in ridiculously good shape, and if possible will wear opponents down by stretching points out. That straight-sets loss meant a sad end to Nadal’s attempt to make history by becoming the first man since 1969 to hold all four titles at once. He was clearly injured but refused to quit, and his post-match interview shows that he was very respectful of Ferrer and trying not to take anything away from Ferrer’s achievement.
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Unfortunately I haven’t been able to watch as much of this as I’d like. The women’s tournament was considered to be “wide open”, while the main story on the men’s side was whether Federer could stop the “Rafa Slam”.
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I can check off my first completed goal for 2011, to celebrate my birthday. I did that last night, and it was great, although I could have done with less alcohol… Thanks to everyone who came out! For all who couldn’t make it, I missed you, and I hope I see you soon!
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I’ve mentioned pandoc once before, and it’s again proved rather useful. I’ve been looking for more ways to use it, as I love its core principle (although I naturally wish that it focused on reStructuredText rather than Markdown) of being a comprehensive text format converter. It might at one point be the answer for getting from reST to PDF—something that the current reST tools don’t help me with because I insist on using Unicode, and XeTeX isn’t yet supported. But today pandoc helped with a different task: going from reST to plain text.
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I don’t mean our personal narratives, the “stories of our lives”, but rather the stories we know, whether our own or others’. We all know many—probably more than we can recall at any given moment.
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I’ve recently been doing some online banking reorganization, and have realized just how inconvenient a lot of the services are. The main issue is that they’re all different services, where I want centralization.
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Martin Luther King, Jr., 4 April 1967: “I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.”
What does it mean to truly express yourself? At first glance, it may seem that this is a pointless question, since the truth value of self-expression can only really be measured by the subject. But that’s not how it really works, and generally we’re well able to spot falsity, artificiality, and posturing. I don’t mean that we’re able to detect lies, as I’m not really talking about objective truth here, but more about what we believe about ourselves and the use of our genuine voice, where “genuine” is something that can’t necessarily be pinned down by a solid definition.
This lack of a solid definition, and of empirical testability, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It’s probably easiest to observe “non-genuine self-expression” when children do it, or when we ourselves remember doing it as children. Children will generally do this imitatively, trying to act in some way that they’ve seen others act, most likely in an attempt to be treated similarly to how those others are treated. It’s clear to an observer that it’s an act, and the child knows it’s an act but is committed to denying that knowledge. That is an example of the inverse of self-expression, but probably only one of the easiest forms to spot—after all, which is more likely to occur as we grow older, that we give up posturing and posing to attract the kinds of attention we desire, or that we become far more adept at so doing?
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First up, Marshawn Lynch’s ridiculous run that sealed the crazy Seahawks upset of the Saints last weekend—with sound effects that, frankly, make the run more realistic to me than the version without them.
Last night I and my players finished the first story arc in my first roleplaying campaign in 15 years. I’m very happy to have done it, and will run the second arc later this year. I want to review what worked and what didn’t in the first arc.
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I bought a Kindle back in November, and have now had time to evaluate it. I’m happy with it and so far have seen few downsides.
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I think it’s it’s pointless to speculate about Loughner’s motivations at this point, especially since analyzing his online imprint seems like an exercise in reading tea leaves—is he a right-winger because he likes Ayn Rand, or a leftist because he likes The Communist Manifesto?
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I’m not referring to a physical zone here, of course, but mental states can often feel like places. Especially when confusion is one of their hallmarks.
Right now this is a mixture of jet lag, sleep deprivation, and tiredness.
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The most common tag I applied to blog posts in 2010 was: personal, 63 times. (Unfortunately it isn’t clear how to link to WordPress posts with a combined tag and year constraints, so the links go to all the posts with the tag, not just 2010’s). I’m a little surprised that was the most common tag.
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Some statistics on my posts from 2010.
2010 is the first year in which I consistently kept metadata such as tags, writing time, and wordcount for my morning pages, which means it’s the first year in which I can do certain kinds of data analysis on them; this post covers what I think is interesting data about the 392,582 words that I wrote in my morning pages in over 240 hours in 2010.
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I could have titled this “Tron: Legacy Review”, but decided on the more honest naming.
I should note that I don’t remember the original Tron very well, and wasn’t coming to this film hoping that it would be “true” to the original. I didn’t really have expectations; I dread to think what my reaction would have been if I had had any.
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My goals for 2011.
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