log (2008/04/25 to 2008/05/01)

The March of Business: Coca-Cola endorses international Communism as part of a marketing campaign.

lulz

From Steve: PETA offers huge reward for vat-grown chicken! I'm curious how they're going to determine whether the stuff "has a taste" that is "indistinguishable from real chicken flesh to non-meat-eaters."

I mean, how would they know?

And as a final lead-off link, the URL speaks for itself: Mister Picasso-head!

This weblog has been checked for sleeping children!

Okay, so. Turns out that Twitter is to weblogs as weblogs are to actual real writing: an attractive lightweight alternative that is more convenient, easier, more fun, requires less thought and skill, and produces something of (even) less long-term value. *8)

I've now written 1,164 "tweets", each one a piece of text no longer than 140 chaacters, very few of them representing any significant thought, many completely without content. I'm "following" the tweets of 169 other people, and 135 people are following mine. Twitter only shows you ten pages of recent tweets, so at the rate people produce them I'm not reading every tweet of all those 169 people, but I am looking at a good number of them. (I'm also thinking of setting up a second twitter id, to follow just the 5-10 people I'm most interested in, so I can look at just their tweets, and a good many hours of them will fit in 10 pages, so I won't lose as many.)

On the other hand I haven't posted to my weblog for nearly two weeks. And I haven't written a new long clever thing in some time.

(On the other end of the spectrum I've had some long realtime text exchanges with one or a few people on Second Life, the transcripts of some of which might be cleanable up into interesting clever things themselves. A thought that just occurred to me that doesn't really fit into the current thread but there we are.)

What else has been going on? I was sick (home from work, lying in bed, making self-pitying sounds) Monday an' Tuesday an' Wednesday an' somewhat Thursday even of last week, with a sore throat and stuffed head an' general malaise. But I got better!

Have been reorganized slightly at work, basically taken off of a project that I personally think really needs me but I'm not really all that interested in and it's politically fraught in various ways so if my boss's boss really thinks, even after my attempts to convince him to the contrary, that it's fine without me well great; I'm in some sense glad to put it behind me.

Now I'm in the both exciting and scary position of needing to pick one of the very interesting things that present themselves to me, convince management that that's what I should be working on, and then work on it with enough strength and skill that I can brag about it at the end of the year.

(I'm also still working part of my time on the strategy and technology-outlook stuff that I was previously working on part of my time, and that wasn't touched by the reorg. It's nice to have some stability at least!)

It seems to have become Spring an' all around here; nice cool air, lovely sunlight, what no doubt would be fresh and vibrant smells if I could smell them (whine, moan). I may be reacting to all the genetic information in the air with a sniffly nose; or maybe that cold from last week is still reproducing and fooling my nasal passages into producing more than usual of the stuff it hopes will carry its vast family into the outside world and the warm nourishing nasal passages of others. Hard to say!

Been a zillion years since I posted here last, and I would love to have long and profound (or even just fun, or shiny, or funny) things to say.

But for today you'll have to settle for "this weblog has been checked for sleeping children." *8)