I was struck while reading Travels in Hyperreality a few months ago by the realization that the conservatives had appropriated the techniques of the Academic Left such as postmodernism and deconstructionism, and put them into the service of the conservative movement. I find this supremely ironic, given the utter disdain with which conservatives view postmodernism, […]
The Dark Tower series, by Stephen King
A few weeks ago, when I was in the library, I saw books 5, 6 and 7 of the Dark Tower series by Stephen King (that’d be Wolves of the Calla, Song of Susannah, and The Dark Tower). Since I’d liked the first few books in the series, but had dropped it when it wasn’t […]
Interesting discussion
Dave Policar has been having some interesting discussions over on his journal about religion and politics, thinking about some of the same issues I’ve been struggling with. The comments and discussion on yesterday’s post were particularly interesting. Several people including myself got involved with a variety of viewpoints. There are some really tangled issues here […]
New laptop
So my laptop finally came yesterday. I had to make one more phone call this morning, because they only refunded the bogus shipping charges when it shipped, and forgot to refund me the $25 for the coupon that they first accepted, and then denied. But they agreed to do that after leaving me on hold […]
I’m not dead!
Yes, even though I haven’t updated in two weeks, I am not dead. Really. I’ve just been pretty busy. And distracted. What have I been doing? I bought a dining room table off of craigslist over Thanksgiving weekend, which I was able to move with Christy’s help. I had a games day, where we played […]
New directions
This post is to give people a heads up on the sorts of things I’m planning to write about here for the next little bit. And to give people the opportunity to provide feedback, if they so desire. This is pretty much the result of a long conversation I had with Brad and Jill before […]
Links of the last two weeks
Since it’s been a while since I’ve written, I have a lot of links to put up and comment on. So here we go. danah boyd has made some really great posts to OMST recently. This one asks the interesting question: why are people interested in publicly articulating their social relationships? And this one examines […]
HP sucks
After poking around for a while, I finally settled on the HP DV1000 laptop. It was cheaper, but still had all the functionality I was looking for. And although the Powerbooks are lustworthy, given that all of my current jobs involve Windows programming, I couldn’t do it. So I put in the order at hp.com […]
The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad, by Minister Faust
Amazon link I saw this in the library. The title was just too good to pass up, especially since I’m always fascinated by tales of the trickster, of which the coyote is one of the main avatars. I flipped through the first few pages, liked the tone, and checked it out. I mean, each character […]
CEO Barbie
I was talking to my co-worker yesterday, and we picked up on the thread of that conversation we had about management by conversation. In fact, the same thing happened as what I described in that post, except that he was the one doing the asking; he walked over to my cube, and asked me a […]
