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Random bits

~LS~ — Sat, 12 May 2012 17:08:31 +0000

I am trying to hack my related post plugin to work only on my blog and not all the other pages. It requires learning about WordPress hooks and conditional tags. This means learning about the is_home tag. The idea of is_home as conditional is quite worrisome in our current political and economic landscape and in the context of my new mortgage, my intended renovations, my newly adopted rescue cats. I provide their “Forever Home” in animal rescue lingo. That’s a weighty responsibility.

I consider it positive that I still have toothpaste in the tube I hacked open.

Make it do

~LS~ — Tue, 08 May 2012 13:36:25 +0000

The Baton Rouge Recycling Office has an excellent link the Center for a New American Dream. The Center has an an anti-consumption agenda, with loads of resources about cutting down on trash. The link that directed me was titled “reducing junk mail,” but the actual way to reduce junk mail is buried on the site. Someone at the Recycling Office is very clever, but perhaps not so clever after all. Depending on your politics – and this is true for most citizens in Baton Rouge – the Center’s clear anti-capitalism message will turn folks away and their junk mail will continue to clog Baton Rouge’s trash bins. For me, however, the website was a gold mine I’ve bookmarked to explore. From there, I hopped onto an interesting project the Center promotes called “Make [...]

Self-storage

~LS~ — Wed, 02 May 2012 14:34:23 +0000

Usually when I pass the self-storage places in the strip malls as I drive to work, I ignore them. They are part of the mundane aspects of my daily life that blend in with the roadside trivia like payday loan shops, Payless shoes, the Mall, and Office Depot, McDonalds, the homeless panhandler, the gas station, and people waiting for the bus. None of these things stand out until I need them or they disrupt me. Selective perception, and all.

Lately I’ve observed the large amount of self-storage places all around me. I started tracking them during my trip to New York City, where they seemed out of place because the city has no strip malls. Given that space is a premium in the city, they make more sense there than in suburbia.

With occupy Wall Street dominating the discursive and political field, the need for somewhere to store our [...]

A bare etching and the intimacy of touch

~LS~ — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 01:58:02 +0000

I bought several Jack Bilander etchings lately. Bilander was an artist in Chelsea, my neighborhood growing up in New York City. Lately I’ve had this urge to go there. I’ve built up an obsession, really, to return to my Grandmother’s apartment, to be in her space, to see the cheap 1960s parquet floors of Penn South, smell the esoteric scent of Jewish working class intelligentsia, and view a wall full of images still strikingly memorable forty years later. I don’t know why I became obsessed with Jack Bilander, but when I found his suite of pictures on Picasa, I sighed audibly, repeatedly, at how many of them I remembered vividly. So indelible and powerful. Clearly it’s a need formed because of where I am in my life at this precise moment. But precise moments are the entire point.

[...]

D&D Fortune Cookies

~LS~ — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 01:01:20 +0000

At the beginning of the semester I had to give a speech at convocation to the entire faculty, staff, and administration. I chose to speak about why the start of a new semester is like a fortune cookie. Throughout the speech I periodically opened up a fortune cookie, read the fortune, and made a comment. It was a fun speech and people liked it. They are still giving me fortune cookies and making jokes about it. I keep trying to explain to them that I don’t necessarily like to eat fortune cookies, I use them during Dungeons and Dragons. I just like to take the fortunes out and put them on the D&D battle mat. They give me a blank look, shake their head, and shove a stale fortune cookie my way. (Note: All fortune cookies are stale, right?)

So, it’s easier just to show you a picture than to [...]

Alien Monkey Cat and Broom

~LS~ — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 05:50:34 +0000

Let me introduce you to this cat. Her name is Monkey, which is short for Alien Monkey Cat. Some people call her AMC for short, but only on Facebook. She is visiting from another planet and she is residing with me for a while while she spies on us. I have shared her mission notes on Facebook, but now that I’m blogging again, I can use this as an opportunity to spread the word widely and perhaps save the planet from takeover by her species. Be forewarned. They have dripping, venomous spikes in their tails.

Now, just to be clear, the purpose of today’s post is to discuss the equinox broom phenomenon. A meme has been going around on Facebook in which people take pictures of balancing their brooms. Supposedly this feat can be accomplished during the Spring equinox. So, I thought I might try it. My broom [...]

Outside the interface

~LS~ — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 02:10:23 +0000

Today I opened something somewhere and got another nag message from Google about its new privacy policy. The nag message invited me to “dismiss” it, a language choice that reflects a mildly amusing and disturbing political and interpersonal frame that we’ve developed with internet computing. Perhaps my amusement about being nagged over privacy derives from my almost-divorced status, but that is neither here nor there.

I’m not going to waste time knifing through the current policy change. The short version: it will consolidate the privacy options for multiple Google services into one statement to accept or reject with one click of a button, all for the sake of clarity and simplicity. Bundled privacy, in other words. I’ll get back to Google first, but I want to talk about the issue of interface. This will be a branching, circuitous route, so bear with me.

Sherry Turkle’s [...]

I’m back

~LS~ — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 10:28:49 +0000

I’m waiting for Typekit to populate/propagate my font. I’m using Cooper. It’s been some time since I’ve blogged. There’s so much to say I don’t know where to begin. I’ll just chalk it up to a lost and found year. The font makes the webdesign. I have to finish rebooting things here.

As always, the design reflects things about my life too numerous to go into. For instance, I tried to de-clutter and get things squared away into a single-file simple column. I failed. However, things did get shoved to the bottom, all linky and soldier-like, messy in an orderly fashion, but overwhelming from a big-picture perspective.

The Sells-Jaros household is now just the Sells household. The Jaros household will be a household with someone else. Quite surreal. The Sells household is also without the beloved Pach Du. That was a devastation too great to be accounted for – [...]

I’m really alive

~LS~ — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 13:27:30 +0000

I promise. Just insanely busy. I’ll be back, I promise.

Too busy!

~LS~ — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 12:58:17 +0000

Damn! I’m so busy I missed all of February and most of March for blogging. Something’s gotta give!