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opp

08.20.2009 – 12:19 pm

One of the chief joys of the web is being able to look through the old family photos of people you don’t know.

[brought to my attention by celia]

posted in photography, san francisco | comments (0)

beyond my imagination

08.17.2009 – 7:15 pm

Gorgeous writing — the last line slays me:

“Whenever he is discouraged, I tell him that if I can survive on three continents, then there is no obstacle he cannot conquer. While astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have know, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”

–from Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

This is true of so much, every day. What magic.

[brought to my attention by ewee]

posted in inspiration, writing | comments (0)

things that go bouma

08.12.2009 – 9:00 pm

Learned a new word today, which perhaps I should’ve known, that I felt I’d been waiting all my life to come across: bouma.

A short time ago I was using this line on my business site: “People don’t read”. If she ever saw it, this surely earned the ire of my former boss, the copy director for a major U.S. retailer. What I meant by it was not so much that people are not reading the beautiful language we so painstakingly composed, so much as they are scanning shapes more than anything else — understanding bigger things to be more important than smaller things and so on. That they are, in effect, consuming boumas like Pac-Man.

Suggested reading:
– The Science of Word Recognition — or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bouma
– Bouma – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

posted in design + interactive, writing | comments (0)

I’m back

08.12.2009 – 6:05 pm

So it’s been awhile.

I’ve been blogging on and off since 1995, when the word didn’t even exist and I’d make updates to my pre-tables “Web Site” via a Unix text editor. So for a few years there were miscellaneous enthusiastic alerts about my cats and my boy and my “business”, Aries Web Designs. Around this time, also in Unix command lines, I was doing something that will haunt to the end of my days: I would whois domains — jill.com, pets.com (“There is no listing for jill.com”) — and then not buy them, because they cost about $75 and you had to send away in the mail or something. Anyway. I made some other sites, like Sutro Baths and MUNI Haiku, which I still have, and many others I don’t. Blogging the George W. Bush years was one long blasting torrent of outrage, all of which I’d rather forget happened. Gone were the genteel posts of yore. And then I kept it up awhile, and then I went away. And now I welcome you back.

I’ve imported some favorite old posts, so there may be some retro formatting and topics all up in there — including the long-running Tuesday Cocktail Break.

Thanks for your time and consideration.

posted in meta | comments (0)

cocktail break: the 7.8

04.13.2006 – 5:41 pm

So this coming Tuesday is the 100-year anniversary of The Big One, the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. This coming Tuesday is also the 34th anniversary of me, at which point I can no longer finesse being in my early 30s, and for which I will not be in SF. Which is making me very very sad. My personal theory is that I died in that quake and thus am freakishly obsessed with it. Like I decorate my home with pics of it.

So as I conceptually pull this drink out of my ass… I’m thinking disaster, crumbling things, despair. Nah? Okay then. Fire, in the Shiva way: destruction and birth and the whole Phoenix-from-the-ashes thing1. Also gold. Soot. Mint. 2 And it must be strong, very very strong.
Read More »

posted in cocktails | comments (0)

some of the best advice i’ve ever gotten

02.01.2006 – 6:58 pm

People make things much harder than they have to be. Most things are really easy.
— co-worker Victoria, wildly successful childhood immigrant from Ukraine

When things are going your way, don’t fight them.
— friend Slackerman

The decisions you make are the right ones.
— Pacat

You can make up your whole face with a tube of lipstick.
— my mom

posted in inspiration | comments (0)