Dancing with Matt August 22, 2008
Posted by Wade Rockett in Intarweb, Life.Tags: gnomedex
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I’m in the back, on the left. You really can’t make me out at all, but I’m there.
New Writing For Pay - Christa Terry, author and pro blogger June 14, 2008
Posted by Wade Rockett in Life.Tags: writingforpay
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I’ve posted my interviews with Christa Terry, aka “Never Teh Bride” at the blog Manolo For The Brides at Writing For Pay. Check it out!
The shows track the arc of her writing career to date thusly:
Part Two: Professional blogger
Your strengths and weaknesses, as voted by your friends April 18, 2008
Posted by Wade Rockett in Intarweb, Life, Miscellany.Tags: Facebook, black eyes, feathers in my cap
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I’ve received an e-mail from from Facebook’s “Compare People” app, containing the critical data I need to optimize my interpersonal relationships.
Your friends have voted on your strengths and weaknesses:
STRENGTHS:
happiest
best father (potential)
nicest
WEAKNESSES:
best listener
most talkative
So apparently I do not listen as well as others, nor do I talk enough.
Meet me at SXSWi 2008 March 6, 2008
Posted by Wade Rockett in Geek, Life, Work.Tags: SXSWi
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I’m in Austin, Texas right this very second for the South by Southwest Interactive festival. If you’re coming too, keep an eye out for this clown:
Here’s a photo I took in downtown Austin with my new BlackJack mobile phone:
I believe this is where the Ghostbusters will have their final showdown with Zuul.
Meme it like it’s hott: My week in media January 31, 2008
Posted by Wade Rockett in Life.Tags: media, meme
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PR Geek tagged me with the My Week In Media meme. Let’s see what I’ve been consuming!
What I’ve read
I started reading The Hard Way by Lee Child, and a short story by my friend Philip. My co-workers and I normally meet during lunch to read newspaper advice columns to each other and make fun of them, but our workload is so heavy that we only got to do that once. My friend Gregory mailed me an article he clipped out about Peter Gomes.
What I’ve watched
We started Season 3 of The Wire, and a British sitcom called Black Books. Over the weekend we watched Paprika, a feature-length anime. We caught occasional episodes of The Daily Show (renamed “A Daily Show” since the writers’ strike began), bits of The Colbert Report, and reruns of Scrubs.
What I’ve listened to
Lots and lots of podcasts: MacBreak Weekly, Never Not Funny (a new one to me), The Sound of Young America, The Writer’s Almanac, Pray As You Go, Buzz Out Loud, and The Weekly Geek. I’ve also continued to indulge an inexplicable craving for 70s and early 80s heavy metal of the leather/spikes/ridiculous Satanic imagery subgenre. The jewel in the crown here is a mashup of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath I discovered called “Whole Lotta Sabbath”.
What I’ve surfed
A couple of the podcasts prompted me to look for comedy video clips on Funny or Die, YouTube, and Super Deluxe. I watch Twitter obsessively and have been adding people like Mike Monteiro and Scott Simpson to my Follow list. (Whenever Merlin Mann praises someone, I check them out immediately.) I am playing six games of Scrabulous on Facebook. A few people I know joined Pownce and Plaxo so I’ve been poking around those services. I’ve been hitting a lot of blogs by people in PR and marketing with a focus on copywriting and/or social media.
SoCal wildfires - Safe and Well List lets loved ones know you’re okay October 23, 2007
Posted by Wade Rockett in Life.add a comment
Folks who’ve been affected by the Southern California wildfires but are safe can post their status at the Red Cross’s Safe and Well site.
From Ike Pigott’s blog:
Safe and Well is made up of two parts: a place for evacuees to register themselves, and a search enabled side for loved ones seeking information. There were a lot of internal conversations about privacy. For instance, what if Constance Frey wants her parents to know she’s okay, but doesn’t want her abusive estranged boyfriend to find her? Essentially, those searching will find nothing more than a simple note:
- I am safe and well.
- Family and I are safe and well.
- Currently at shelter.
- Currently at home.
- Currently at friend/family member/neighbor’s house.
- Currently at a hotel.
- Will make phone calls when able.
- Will email when able.
- Will mail letter/postcard when able.
To get even that much, they’ll need to know one of her pre-disaster contact numbers or her address.
“…that idea of art as redemption” October 5, 2007
Posted by Wade Rockett in Art, Friends and Fellow Travelers, Life, Photography, Writing.add a comment
It was hard for me to let go of that idea of art as redemption; of the creative act as a sort validation for suffering and disillusionment. Poetry seemed to me much more than mere consolation. But this feeling, I’m chagrined to say as I stare down the age of forty, was inextricably bound up for me in personal ambition (or, at least, a sense of personal worth). Everyone wants to be useful, but I long wanted to be praised, admired and recognized for my usefulness. It seems to me now, however, that poetry is indeed a “normative instrument” only when your ambition burns brighter for the work than for yourself.
– Gregory Crosby
Random ideas for managing e-mail better September 6, 2007
Posted by Wade Rockett in Life.add a comment
Delete more messages, more often. There’s a lot of stuff that I don’t really need to know, and absolutely don’t need to act on.
I only need to archive the final message in a thread.
As Brian Oberkirch suggests, make “no” the default answer to requests.
At work, create a “WFH” subject line filter in Outlook that drops those messages into a separate folder. I almost never need to know that one of my colleagues is working from home.
Philosopher: 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation August 16, 2007
Posted by Wade Rockett in Games, Geek, Life, Technology, What.add a comment
From the New York Times:
Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.
…There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.
…“My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that,” he says, “is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation.”
Via Buzz Out Loud
Growl. August 9, 2007
Posted by Wade Rockett in Life.5 comments
They’re few and far between, but I have these days where I come in to work in the mornings ravenously hungry.
It’s not even 9 AM and I just ate two slices of pepperoni pizza that I brought for lunch.
