Late-ish adapter

You know, if I had much more time and money, I would be an eager early adapter; I get excited by many new gadgets and technology. But time and money constrictions do indeed make me conservative. I wait and see after others have used and abused the item in question and the company has issued an upgrade to fix all known bugs.

This holds true with web apps and communities as well. It takes awhile for me to decide the usefulness of joining and using, this was true for LiveJournal, Flickr… and now Twitter.* (Interesting examples as I consider all three journaling sites: traditional, pictorial and expositional.)

When I redesigned my website and set up my new Wordpress blog, I realized I missed traditional journaling; documenting an event or thoroughly exploring an idea. Besides the discipline and mind stretching, I enjoy and find it useful to go back and see where I was at at a certain point in time. The only reason I didn’t start there and then is this was about the time I discovered I was pregnant. Naturally this would’ve been the topic most on my mind and I was far from ready to reveal or discuss anything about that.

But that (and this) type of journaling can consume more time than I have to spare. This is partly why Flickr became my default journal of sorts a couple years back. It’s an excellent way for me to document things I’d done and when. But, naturally, it doesn’t capture thoughts.

In walks Twitter. Actually, I was first introduced to Twitter about two years ago and was unimpressed and bewildered by the application. But then, the examples I saw all followed this model:

“What a nice day!”

“I had breakfast.”

“My neighbor mowed the lawn.”

And so on. It just took enough people I knew to join in and the standard use to tweak slightly before I became intrigued. Brenna’s regular Twitter collections helped soften me quite a bit, actually. It’s nice to have a place to share a thought or simple happening without feeling obliged to build a post around it nor look for commentary.** (People can comment on a particular entry, but it feels more conversational than an acknowledgment.) Or create an email and figure out who all to send it to. This way it’s out there free to amuse or annoy as folks may choose.

Also, as I do these things for my own benefit as well to share, I’m pleased to have a place to jot things down, have time stamped and then collect every week as an ersatz diary. And, yes, a lot of the thoughts and events are about my pregnancy—it is changing and ruling my life after all. It’s for that reason that I wish I had started Twittering before, then I would know exactly when Kip first felt Taran kick, laughing and crying as he did so. (Thankfully I happen to know when I first felt her as I was dashing off an email to Dylan at the time and chose to mention it to her.)

And, really, the biggest reason I decided I must start Twittering is that I can think of no better way to document my labor and delivery while sharing with those who can’t or choose not to be there first hand.***

* Yes, somewhere after Kris and before Dylan, I joined Twitter. And by god, I enjoy it.

***I imagine there will be a point in the process I’ll be handing it over to Dylan.

Oh, Alan Garner…

“She wants to be flowers, but you make her owls. You must not complain, then, if she goes hunting.”

Stupid text tricks

Actually some sophisticated java applications that allow you to interact with text in interesting ways: chronotext.org. I’m particularly entranced with Sketchbook on the Book and The Book of Sand. (found via BibliOdyssey)

Information wants to be aesthetically pleasing

I’m drawn maps, charts of activity and ideograms and find them beautiful even when they are documenting one man’s conspiracy mania.

Which brings me to information aesthetics, a “weblog is based on the assertion that information visualization can be enriched with the principles of creative design and art, to develop valuable data representations that address the emotional experience of users, instead of solely focusing on typical task effectiveness metrics” and stuff like that there.

And Andrew Vande Moere does a good job at finding some nice looking ones: example 1, example 2 and example 3. And then there’s the Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River by Harold N. Fisk, 1944, which maps the ancient courses of the Mississippi River:

This is plate five of a fifteen plate set, all of which have been assembled into the stretch of the river(s) for your convenience right here.

What I really need…

… is a week off from everything—the day job, Dicebox, everything—to just sleep and read.

Then a week to draw, experiment with drawing and just darn play.

Then a week to just write.

Another week to design. Then maybe another to write and draw.

Ah, well. At least I have coffee to console me.

In the meantime, you have probably noticed I’ve slipped in to a more erratic schedule here and it will continue as such until the end of February, by which time I will have a new web space, design and have begun posting Wode.

So this might be a good time for me to mention Bloglines, your friends list away from LiveJournal. It will track all your favorite blogs with RSS feed, like Jennworks, blargblog, Making Light, Alas a Blog and most Movable Type journals. It will also display the most recent entries of all of them in one window, the length of the displayed entry—from just a title to the first couple of lines to the whole darn thing—is dependent of the RSS feed of the blog in question.

In these busy days, I’ve been finding it extremely helpful. Even if I don’t have the time to read everything, at least I know what I’m missing.