Where I’m @

20011221

The best thing I’ve heard today: Listening to CHMR, 93.5 FM, out of St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, I heard possibly a better rap Christmas tune than RUN-DMC’s “Christmas in Hollis”. The chorus goes something (I have a memory like a sieve) like “Share the dough on Christmas, Yo!” Great beats, great new-school flow, and a socially conscious message. Sounds a little like LONS, but if you know better, do tell.

posted by Tk at 16:49 • • sealed in amber

20011220

Coolest thing today: I confirmed that the new show Enterprise has a character named Trip on it, which may or may not make sense of the television section’s blurb for the other night’s episode, “Pregnant Trip”, which had me worried.

Worst thing today: IMDB seems to have started pop-unders, some of them very large and sometimes more than one at once. Last day I visit that site with anything other than Mozilla, and I recommend the same for you.

posted by Tk at 15:09 • • sealed in amber

20011214

This week’s independent site: Exploding Dog!
You mean you haven't heard of ED yet? ED exemplifies what is great about the Web. One guy, drawing pictures based on phrases emailed to him. Some of the drawings are very funny, some are very sad, and many many are just a little bit eerie. You can look at it every day, you can get desktop backgrounds, you can use the site as a good instance of focus and the foregrounding of content and community in a website if you like. Highly recommended.

Independent site review concept by Aortal

posted by Tk at 11:49 • • sealed in amber

At least we know what Rudy Giuliani’s going to be doing after he leaves office in just over two-Thank-God-weeks: Head of the Office for Promoting New York Internationally.

posted by Tk at 11:36 • • sealed in amber

20011212

Whoops. How’d that happen?
There I was, all geared up to talk up an indie site, and kablooey, nothing.
So here ’tis.

OK, the truth is I haven’t had much time to think about this so I’m going to pull it off the top of my head. Oh, right, there’s Linkdup. I’ve finally come around to thinking that it is pronounced like “linked-up” slurred together, rather than “link dupe” (which would be another sort of site entirely). Linkdup is an editorialized clearinghouse for design links, much like the hibernating K10K, but without quite the attitude and high turnover of content. Which makes Linkdup quite manageable and not as likely to cause your cerebellum to blow a gasket. There’s also a membership option (of which I have not partaken) that enables you to mark particular links as your faves and come back to them, or something like that. (I did say that I did’nt do the membership thing yet.) This one would get filed under the old Café Los Negroes category of Butta.

posted by Tk at 15:45 • • sealed in amber

20011206

Sometimes I wonder if I’m to be permanently behind the curve. Or maybe it’s that I’m too busy looking at other people’s curves to notice mine. Wait. That’s not right at all.

Anyway, I’ve been turned on (via PiratedSites) to Aortal, and tomorrow I’m going to review my first indie site for your viewing pleasure. Why tomorrow? Because today I’m up to my elbows in debugging a web application and because I hope that will make me blog tomorrow.

posted by Tk at 12:07 • • sealed in amber

20011205

Arguable benefit to having WKTU, a radio station with possibly the shortest playlist in the Western Hemisphere, on the radio in the cubicle behind you all day: Hearing new Christmas songs. Not that they’re particularly good (though some have good hooks), but I feel like I’ve heard them all and ’KTU is showing me some I haven’t. Cases in point: “Disco Santa” by Holiday Express (MP3/RealAudio) and “Dominic the Donkey” by The Royaltones (MP3)

posted by Tk at 11:17 • • sealed in amber

20011203

Seems that some people never learn. And after Sept. 11th we were being told that we needed security advice from Israel?

posted by Tk at 14:27 • • sealed in amber

20011201

Cruel, Ain’t It?

While I’d love to rhapsodize about the gorgeous weather we’re having and the particular pleasure I took in going to the Borough Hall Greenmarket this morning, I find it more important not to, since today is December first, World AIDS Day. As suggested by Link and Think, I have a personal account of AIDS to relate.

My first year at Yale was an eye-opener in many ways, not least in the academic sense. To give myself an edge in applying, I had declared that I intended to major in History of Art, though I had next to no idea what that even meant. So I really had to figure it out, and essentially was taking my parents’ advice to just pay attention to what was exciting and interesting and follow up on that. The class that interested me the most, of the many fascinating ones, was a lecture on the High Middle Ages given by one John Boswell. I had no idea who he was beyond that he was a superb lecturer with a great sense of humor about but a great respect for his subject, as well as an evident interest in communicating this to students. One of my roommates and I even had lunch with him once — that’s the kind of professor he was, to make two fairly unsophisticated freshpeople feel it was OK to have lunch with him. (Only later did I find out he was very much one of the rising stars of the history department.) The two of us also went to a small talk/discussion that featured him and his most recent book, The Kindness of Strangers, which was certainly as wonderful as the lunch, if not as personal.
Two years later, he had a bad bout of what I was told was Lyme Disease. Eighteen months after that he was dead. “From complications of AIDS” goes the line, and I use that when I'm talking to people who I’m not sure understand the reality of AIDS, that it in itself doesn’t kill anyone. But it feels better to just say that he died of AIDS.
For me, Professor Boswell is an exemplar of AIDS because my loss is less private and emotional than it is shared and cultural. I've read two of his books, and they're fantastic.^* How many other great books would he have written? How much more could he have contributed to Yale, to New Haven, to the country? There's a void left when anyone dies, and it gets closed up for some people. I’ve not really accepted Professor Boswell's loss completely. I kinda am waiting for the next book, but it won't be coming.

Here are some other places for you to read up (again?) on AIDS/HIV and what we've lost because of it.

• Google search for John Boswell
• The creators of A Day With(out) Art, Visual AIDS
• TheBody, an AIDS education site
• TheWorld Health Organization’s page on HIV/AIDS
• Yahoo search for AIDS
• Google search for AIDS
• amfAR
• MetaFilter today

^*Absolutely wonderful research on tolerance, and I extrapolate them to be excellent reinforcement for the fact that Christianity is about love and freedom (but with accompanying responsibilities for both) rather than repression and self-righteousness.

posted by Tk at 11:05 • • sealed in amber