Author Archives: Kyle Kimberlin

slow motion dogs

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This is a really beautiful Pedigree commercial. Beautiful in the sense that the dogs in it are.

Somebody sent it to me a couple of days ago, and now I can't remember who, or who I shared it with in turn. But it doesn't seem to be here on the blog, so now you have it too.

Enjoy … One thing, though. Don't just click the play button. That plays a wimpy little version.

Click the little button in the lower right corner of the video that looks like this.

This will open the video in full screen. When it's over, press the Esc button on your keyboard.

everybody

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A guy is trying to draw every person in New York, which I think is a pretty interesting idea. Futility can be inspiring, no?

Here's a newspaper article about him. And here's his blog, with drawings. I imagine the latter took quite a bump up in traffic from the former today.

Hey, if more people were hanging out in Taco Bell drawing pictures of each other, the world couldn't be any worse off for it.

Posted in art

fair warning

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I’ve been known, though not widely, to say I like all vegetables. “I never met a vegetable I didn’t like,” or something, say I.

I’m generalizing. There are a few veggies I cannot abide. For example, I like corn. I like it just about any way you want to cook it. But I absolutely do not like those little baby corn cobs I all too often encounter in Asian dishes.

Disgusting. I don’t know why.

So, just don’t say you didn’t know, in advance. Nobody puts baby corn in my food, nobody gets hurt.
Capiche?

Posted in fun

good deeds

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My thought for the day was:

If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.
– Albert Einstein

I don't think that's why people are good. Well, first of all I think people are inherently good. Have you ever met a baby who wasn't? So let's boil about half of all philosophy down into a nutshell and say that we're born good, and as we grow up we learn we ought to try to stay good. And by the time we're young adults, we know that good is as good does. Just like mean is as mean does, stupid is as stupid does, etc.

Where do you suppose we are most likely to see examples of lives lived in the path of goodness vs. evil in modern times? YouTube, of course, or TV. Like this cool commercial from Liberty Mutual.

If only we could go through our days so keenly aware of the needs of those around us, and so ready to support and empower them. They made another one, just as good.

Makes you want to get out and walk around downtown, doesn't it?

I know, I'm getting chances just as good, though maybe no so worthy of a soundtrack, and I'm blowing most of them off. Was I as kind today as I could have been? No. But somebody did pause and let me merge into traffic, so maybe tomorrow it will be my turn.

I wonder how Liberty Mutual's day went. Let's hope they didn't deny any claims for no good reason. Because the Bible teaches us that the Lord is not big on such irony.

zen and the art of

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Here's something that's been bugging the stuffing out of me for a while. People need to stop using Zen And The Art Of … in the title of every misbegotten how to spew that their half-baked muse strikes them to hack up.

Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values was a great book by Robert M. Pirsig. It was published in 1974, 36 years ago this spring. I read it in about 1981, and could not put it down. That was back when I had an attention span.

Since then, countless people have ripped off that title. Zen And The Art Of Poker, Zen And The Art Of Rhubarb Furniture, Zen And The Art Of Vampires, Zen And The Art Of Chicken n Dumplins, Zen And The Art Of Zen, Zen And The Art Of Leather Pants, Zen And The Art Of Getting Rich, Zen And The Art Of The Banana Sandwich. Then there's the one that set me off, Zen and the art of serial-drama maintenance.

Huh? Knock it off! It was fresh once, over a third of a century ago, when Pirsig did it, and that was that. He got there first, nailed it down, done. Get over it. Shoot for a original thought, for cryin' out loud. 

You can't just come along and write For Whom The Bell Rings, A Clean Well-Lighted House, or The Sound and the Funny, and expect to get away with it. What If I spewed up a poem about walking a dog at night, hearing her rabies tags jingling, and called it Stopping By Woods On A Chilly Evening? I'd be dragged to the withered bracken!

Am I serious? No, not really. I made up half those titles in the third paragraph. Can you guess which? But it does seem like a pretty easy way to scratch the itch to find a title, and nobody respects taking the easy way out. I can stop ranting now, and we can just feel sorry for those so lacking in imagination. They wouldn't know Zen if it ran up and bit them, and they don't understand that repetition is the death of something, as somebody already said.  

first thoughts on posterous

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I started using Posterous yesterday to post stuff. It’s a blogging site. I like it.

Wikipedia explains: Posterous is a simple blogging platform  started in May, 2009 funded by Y Combinator. It boasts integrated and automatic posting to other social media tools such as Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook, a built-in Google Analytics package, and custom themes.

Right. So I can post stuff to Metaphor, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, etc. all by e-mail. I can post to one or some or all with one e-mail.

This is useful because I don’t have to hobble all over the place, launching text editors, tweaking fonts and paragraph breaks, etc. It’s really easy, and it works great. Plus it creates an additional blog called Kimberlin’s Posterous, which combines all those things I’ve shared.

I have hit a few snags. First, when I post to Facebook, it creates a simple post and puts it right where it should be. But if I have included a link, such as http://kimberlin.posterous.com, that link is not an active hyperlink. You cant click it and go. I guess you’d have to type or paste it into your browser. I sent an e-mail to their Help desk about this, so we’ll see.

I thought I would have a problem with the tags I use on Metaphor to create groups of posts with the same general topic, such as poems. There’s no way to specify a tag in the e-mail I use to post. And if I open the post on Blogger to add tags, it would create a lot of formatting work. But I learned that when I go to the list of posts on Blogger to edit, I can add tags any time, without opening the posts. Cool.

Lastly, there’s no way to add the “read more” break I like to put in long posts. That was something I really wanted, and Blogger finally added it. So that will get some thought.

So far, so good. 

Buzz Kill

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I just killed Buzz and I'm feeling a little guilty.

I don't mean this guy, who is a blogger. I mean Google Buzz, the new social networking feature built in to my Gmail. I turned it off. I thought it might be worth a few words of explanation, since this blog does occasionally venture into the Murky Realms of Geek.

Buzz works fine, technically. It looks nice, and the people are as good as me, as bad as I am.

The problem with Google Buzz is simply that it doesn't solve anything. It does not meet an existing need. It gives me something else to do, another toy to play with, without replacing any of the toys I'm playing with already. And to that extent, it's not very useful. Indeed, Buzz is a lot like a commercial for Viagra; if it solves anything, it's a problem that nobody seems to actually have. The similarities abound: As far as I knew, I didn't need the application. And what I got was actually a lingering distraction.

I believe that what we who use computers to be productive and to participate in society need are a few good tools. (Quod erat demonstrandum. Bad ones aren't as good.) Not a plethora of toys to satiate our constantly fluttering attention, but good tools. Let's go with that. Tools.

The problem with two many tools, sometimes, is information overload. Too much info coming from too many directions, and our online world starts to look a lot like this.

Does that mean we shouldn't try new things like Google Buzz? No. It's good to try stuff. It's fun to learn, and it's good for our brains, up to a point. I hoped that there would be a way to aggregate Facebook into Buzz, and have just one such thing, but that doesn't work. And right now, I'm typing this post in Gmail and hoping to publish it through Posterous, which is something I just tried for the first time today. If it works out, it will replace a feature of my blog writing process, and help me be more efficient.

Want to see something slick? Check out http://kimberlin.posterous.com/

So how many social networking apps do I need? None! No, One! No, Two!  Yes, two. One for friends, one for professional contacts. Don't mix them together, faithful reader. Any expert will tell you that. Don't mix business with pleasure. Don't dip your pen in the company … no, that's the wrong analogy.

For personal networking, Facebook is the show that's playing in the big room now. So if you invite me to join Planky or Bink or Splooge, or whatever you're playing with this week, sorry, pass. Yeah, I made those up. But it you know some of the sharing sites, they look real.

Linkedin is the site of preference for professionals networking for business. That's pretty settled too.

More About Tools, Generally 

If you read this blog regularly, you know I've been frustrated about tools more than a little lately. I was thinking about getting a new Office productivity suite, party to keep up with the times and the fun, and partly to keep up my skill set. I tried out Office 2010 and it's pretty cool, but I'm not going that way because it's going to be expensive as hell on hot toast. I tried out OpenOffice, but it doesn't have a replacement for Publisher. But it's free. But I have Word 2003, but I'm bored with it, but it does what I need. Aaargh!

If you're a person who is handy around the house, you might have a set of tools, many of which are similar and might serve the same purpose. Two hammers. A set of wrenches, etc. They do not conflict or cause problems for each other. If you tighten a screw with your 4 inch screwdriver, it's doesn't cause a problem that you also own a six inch screwdriver.

With computers, it's different sometimes. Software can cause conflicts, discontent. Let's say I have a photo that you really want and need tonight. You ask me to fix it up and send it to you. If I open it with Photoshop, polish it, and send it to you in Photoshop's psd format, then go to bed, let us hope you also have Photoshop. A nice jpeg might have been better.

I have OpenOffice and Microsoft Office on my computer, and there are ways I could make real trouble for myself by saving documents in two different word processing formats.

Try installing 2 different antivirus programs and see what happens. Don't try it. I'm being facetious.

It's not always like Dad's tool shed, where he has hundreds of tools in the drawers and hanging on the walls. For every job there is a best tool. Sometimes you have to choose.

Choose wisely.

 

no waves please

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The earthquake in Chile today is awful. I feel sorry for the people down there. And these terrible earthquakes lately have me thinking that we could be next, here in southern California. Heaven forefend. So no thanks anyway on the tsunami.

I realize we aren't in serious jeopardy here, but there's nothing but a pitiful sand berm protecting the homes on Sandyland Road. And not much is left of that, with these storms we've been having.

It's kind of amazing, how tenuous life is on the coast, considering that people have been living here for several hundred years.