Category: Uncategorized

I truly have become addicted to Dwell, reading issues over and over again, trying to extract something new from them.

Yesterday, after a seemingly endless wait, March 2007 arrived.

Ahhhhhhhhh….mmmmmm….

Call me in a month.

I try and avoid the “me-too” factor that has dominated the land of blogs for most of the time I have been involved in it. Simply aping one persons comments with a slight variation, or personal interpretation doesn’t add much to the initial thrill of finding the original germ of an idea.

Kathy Sierra, someone who has been quoted and analyzed multiple times in this blog, has hit another double to the wall. She talks about the value of serendipity, randomness, in exposing us to new ideas and concepts, ones that we would not have run across in our siloed, standardized lives.

Yesterday was a great example of this for me. Something I read a post on Notebookism that spoke of outsider art or Art Brut. I looked it up on Wikipedia, and spiralled into a 90-minute voyage of discovery into this genre of expression, fueled not by training and ideology, but by a raw, unchecked need to express the world in an artistic way.

I would have never gone down this path unless I had read the Notebookism post, and would have been hard-pressed to find structured explanations (whatever you may think of them) of the topics without Wikipedia.

As I explore myself, and examine the foundations that support my cracked mental structure, I find that I appreciate the random explorations far more than a formal education process. I don’t learn the way that we have been taught.

I prefer to discover.

And when you get right down to the basics of Kathy’s post, that’s what she is saying. People are far more enthusiastic, receptive, and amazed when they discover something for themselves.

It may be an old idea to you. I may not interest you. But when a person gets that gleam in their eye, that rush in their mind, when they get the “WOW!“, then they are committed.

Personally, I am finding that I am having a lot more WOW! moments lately. The combination of therapy, and my medications, has forced me to look at the world that I live in, and the world that I have created, substantially different than I have for the last 15 years.

I am re-discovering the joy and awe of discovery. There is so much out there that gets left behind when your mind is absorbed, consumed, by a single devouring purpose. I am awakening from that period, and finding that my mental indigestion requires the soothing relief of the new and unexpected.

Samantha says this one is the best one so far.

What do you think?

Some mornings, the world looks like this.

I love my medications.

Our colocation facility will be undergoing a power outage tonight/tomorrow morning. I apologize for this, but I’m not the only one it’s affecting, and no one is happy about it.

UPDATE: Power Outage has been re-scheduled. I will post another notice/banner when this date has been passed on to me.

A picture I took last night…

I am starting to play with a variety of effects to manipulate some of the photographs I am taking with my new camera. I have created four modified versions of the original below. The modified pictures can be found here.

I would love to get comments from folks, either here, or on flickr, telling me which one they like best.

For those of you who are addicted to the mayhem and destruction of Mythbusters, Buster is a beloved, if unfortunate, member of the cast.

Well, Buster may be out of a job.

Apparently, a guy in Minneapolis managed to prove not one, but two myths in a single 10-12 second period [here]. Namely:

1. A person can break through a piece of tempered plate glass with a single impact, thereby exiting the building above ground-level
2. An awning can slow a person’s a 17-storey fall enough to prevent said individual from being killed after exiting the building through a broken window (See #1 above).

Mr. Savage and Mr. Hyneman, give this damn lucky person an award!

I am starting to play with Gimp and some of the photos I have been taking with the new camera.

This is my favourite mod so far. I call it Altar of the Everyday.

Dave Sifry and his team have been very good to me. You know, bite the hand, etc.

But I got up from my afternoon siesta, and found this,

And when I finally did get a copy of the page…

Ouch.

Wonder what a Technorati Monster looks like….

UPDATE, 17:19 Jan 19 2007: Technorati sites are back up. Good to see it.