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Diskage:
Books Lying
Open Soul-Devouring
Worry When I Grow Up:
Curse of the Day: |
Wednesday January 8, 2003 | |||
| Quote
of the Day
In the late 1970s, the Census Bureau discovered that the aggregated data from the 1960s Census could be read only using an UNIVAC Type II-A tape drive. At the time, there were only two of those in existence: one in Japan, and one in the Smithsonian Museum! -- Emma |
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Daily
Update Late getting to this today, largely due to a certain person who can't seem to stick to a preset bedtime filling up much of my early morning with online chat. You know who you are. And don't think that just because it was the highlight of my year makes it okay. But I've got a bunch to say today, so I'll just have to take the time to say it. And then dash over (metaphorically speaking) to the D2 site to bang out my weekly column. Fortunately I did the last column feedback yesterday, which is beginning to take longer than the actual columns, with the amount of replies I'm getting. Some random stuff before the news.
Seldom do any referrals pop up from anything but search engines or the D2 site, but there's one today. 26 incoming from the Atlanta Falcons football discussion forum. http://boards.atlantafalcons.com Obviously someone saw my comments about football and Vick a few days ago, and quoted or posted or something them there. I have no emails as a result of this, and I haven't looked around the board there to try and find the message pointing to here, so I have no idea what context it was presented in. As with all referrals from forums, there is no way to tell which message it came from, since you just get a default /message.cfm or something like that, due to how the script works. Glad I didn't say anything too nasty, or I'd be drowning in, "Vick is the greatest and you are a spank monkey!" emails. Actually, since I sort of enjoy those type, perhaps it's a bad thing. I don't write about sports that often, I suppose since there is a lot of international traffic here, and people in Oz or the UK or wherever aren't going to give a damn about US sports results. Plus this isn't a real sporting type site, I mean it's not a common topic, so I figure the average reader here isn't real interested in that sort of thing. I think there is a market for it though. There a ton of major sports sites, of which epsn.com is clearly the best. All of them have columnists, and one nice thing about sports coverage is that opinion is allowed, and encouraged. News sites like CNN cover the news, but don't include intelligent editorial and analysis much. Which is what blogs do, and why there are so many popular ones. People like to read the news, and immediately see opinion and analysis of it. Sports sites integrate that pretty well, and there are technical analysis type sites, but I don't know of many sports blogs, where you can hear a real person talking about their team and their passion for it, and kicking around the details. Sports talk shows on the radio are huge, and there are 24 hours sports stations in every city, so it's odd there isn't more of an Internet presence for that sort of thing. I'm not the one to do it though. I do enjoy some sports, but not enough to pay attention to the whole league, keep up on player movement, and hop on the latest news. And I wouldn't want to do that sort of site unless I had more than a vague opinion on things. Rob and Rany on the Royals, Alleyoop, and Baseball Prospectus, all do something like that. None are blogs, but they are all intelligent and knowledgeable, and all offer something you don't get in the more "professional" sports pieces on big websites, though Rob Neyer (of Rob and Rany) writes a really good column on EPSN.com. It's sort of a negative to be a newspaper columnist on sports, local or national, since then you are almost forced to censor yourself all the time. After all, it's hard to write about how someone's OPS is .650 and they should be riding the pine when you have to go talk to them after the game each day, and you see their wife and friends in the stands and on road trips. But if you're just some asshole with a blog, you can shoot your mouth (fingers) off all you like, and get a lot closer to the truth of things. Or at least try to be objective. If someone had a blog that offered commentary and analysis of a near quality to the better non-blog sports sites, I think it would be a tremendous success. More people are interested in sports than politics, after all. Compare TV ratings for a debate vs. a playoff game. There probably are some good sports blogs already, but I've not seen them. Fire me an email if you know of any.
And there are 14 of them a week younger, and another 11 four days younger than that. I'll be gushing over the cuties for about the next week, by which time I'll begin to have Tribbles thoughts. Some news. • The annual Mr. Blackwell's worst dressed list has been released, and it's full of snippy comments and painful outfits. Unlike a lot of top 10 lists, his are generally pretty accurate. Anna Nicole Smith comes in first, by both ugly clothes and gross vehicular weight. The only surprise is that Christina Aguilera is only #9. I'm sure she'll be furious about not breaking the top 5. I'd throw in the link to Mr. Blackwell's site, but it doesn't appear to have been updated since 1998. Tacky.
• Cool new concept motorcycle thing, from Chrysler. I predict they'll get so much interest from this debut that they'll decide to make some. People will want it for the status symbol, regardless of the price. Or perhaps because of the price. I grabbed some pics of it and put them here.
• If you're bored, you could check out this weblog of the year awards page. There are categories for almost every country on earth (seemingly) as well as most humorous, best over all weblog, best weblog about HTML, and lots of other stuff. I only felt qualified to vote in 4 or 5 categories, and 2 of them were for this site, because I'm a dirty whore. Feel free to vote for me as well, not that I have any chance of winning, but why not. |
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 s
I teased yesterday, here's a bit more about my new non-secret
semi-admirer.
So Sunday an email comes in. No text, just a subject, which reads:
I didn't give it much thought, but since I get emails semi-regularly at the D2 site asking what I and the rest of the admins look like, usually from bored 14 y/o's who are none-too polite in their asking, I didn't take this email too dearly to my heart. I gave him a quick reply to the tune of, "I don't have an organized page with images of me, but I've posted some pics every now and then, and there are some from the E3 articles on the D2 site as well. Or you could just click back a few weeks in the daily archives, I posted some not too long ago." Not a rude reply, but I was doing other things, and wasn't really in the mood to dig up photos of my stupid ass for every idiot who might email about it. Plus I'm sort of annoyed at myself for not having decent photo navigation set up by now, (see my New Year's Resolutions) and my self-loathing tainted my email reply. I didn't expect to hear back. Yet I did. The next day he replied saying he looked but couldn't find any, and suddenly during the course of the email, the assumed he became a she, in my reading mind. More over, she was a self-proclaimed she, which doesn't mean a lot on the internet, but it's better than nothing. I'm not using her name, so we'll just call her Kay, which matches the first initial of her name, and looks more like a name than just the single letter "K".
Just so no one mails about this asking where the hell the pics are, here's a couple new ones, taken New Year's Day, with my new jacket on. They are in the bathroom mirror, at night, no flash, so are sort grainy. But not too bad. I usually hate how I look in photos, and I merely dislike these, so I guess that's an improvement. I like to tell myself that I'm not ugly. I don't harbor illusions of being good looking, but when I also don't harbor illusions of having any idea what women see as attractive or not in men, so I'm far from an expert. However I know I'm not exactly missing out on a career as a fashion mode. Anyway, I sent her links to this and this and these, and didn't think I'd hear from him/maybe-her again. Yet I did.
Here's a crop of the other shot, where I think she looks very cute. Nice hair too. Not that she isn't cute in the other stage dancing shot (he said hurriedly) but the face only is even cuter.
Why would anyone do that? Why not, it's the Internet. There are freaks galore. *cough* Anyway, we've traded a few more pics, which is nice of Kay being as there are lots of photos of me around here, and they are all of this dopey looking guy. While there aren't any pics of her I can see otherwise, and the ones of her feature a pretty woman. So we've chatted a few times, including some ICQathons, and it's fun to have someone new to talk to who doesn't hate me. Yet. And no, no cyber yet. Also, in answer to my rhetorical question from yesterday:
I can report that the answer is 4, assuming at least two of them are pretty long, and you don't mind being teased and taunted like the horny pig you are. More to come, perhaps. |
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