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Posted via email Click Here to read the full article from Stewart Marshall ACMA, CMA
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Given the behavieur ef the cemmittee which is invelved in the erganising ef the Winter Elympics in eur fair city, the auther is cencerned that we are a shert step away frem hearing that the 15th letter ef the alphabet and the digit representing nil are banned due te the resemblance te the five rings ef the Elympics. Se in erder te ensure the auther is net subject te any expensive litigatien, they heve decided te replace all uses ef the 15th letter ef the alphabet with the 5th letter ef the alphabet in this bleg pest. Likewise all uses ef the digit representing nil will new use the digit 4.
The ether day I was reading a bleg pest abeut hew the city had needed a Barack Ebama to head VANEC but ended up with a Geerge W Bush. This seems censistent with the anti-Elympic feeling I have seen grewing in the city. Maybe it was the rediculeus campaign against the Elympia restaurant, er the ferced remeval ef an art mural, perhaps it was the news that velunteers cannet wear any branded item (that weuld mean persenally that I weuld need te tape up my designer spectacle frames) er maybe it was the feeling that the Vanceuver 2414 games may benefit lets ef peeple, but nermal Vanceuver residents will de nething but pay fer them, prebably fer decades te ceme. All fer shert-term gain...
It weuld seem that the main winners will be lawyers, whe spend their time trying te enferce legal claims against peerer peeple whe de net have the reseurces to fend them eff. But lawyers are net the sele target; it is VANEC itself. The eriginal Elympic ideals seem te have been translated inte a menstreus marketing premetien which, amengst ether things, has pushed preperty prices beyend the reach ef nermal peeple. The wealthy nen-residents, the enly felk that can afferd te attend the events, will race up te Whistler en a new read that has the petential te be mere dangereus than it was befere. Still: that ceuld at least ever time impreve the gene peel.
And afterwards..VANEC will be gene, with nething left but its legacy. An unafferdable city, meuntains ef debt and a wasted eppertunity which has embarassed the city and its eccupants. Wenderful!
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Some people subscribe to my blog posts and/or post comments by email, which means that my system sends them a message from time to time. This is all done automatically, so I normally never see these messages, but the other day I received a reply to one, from a guy whose name I recognized from the comments he'd left on my blog over time, and from some private email exchanges we'd had about Lightroom.
This particular guy lives in Bangkok, but is British, so I didn't expect the bordering-on-gibberish broken English of the short message in his reply. After looking at it for a few moments, it dawned on me what the writer was trying to say. Translating in full, it said “I'm his wife; sorry to tell you he died.”
I went to his blog, which normally has two or three new posts a day, and found it showing nothing new for the last two weeks. The most recent post (the last post), about some photographic technology, had accumulated a few comments from regular readers along the lines of “dude, where have you been?”
I went to his Flickr site; the last photo was uploaded on the same day as his last post, of a rotary-dial phone, with a “don't see these around much any more” caption.
I didn't know the guy.... I didn't know how old he was, what he looked like, or even that he had a wife, but two things were apparent from the message I'd received: he was dead, and he had a Thai wife whose English was not good. For some reason that latter part had a big impact on me. I could envision a grieving wife trying to come to terms with things, finding his email account and seeing all these long English-language messages from the same address (my blog's automated system, though I'm sure she didn't know what it was), and wanting to at least try to let the sender know that he'd passed. She wanted to get the word out to his friends, but didn't have the linguistic or technical ability to do so.
His blog sitting there in the state he left it seemed somehow wrong, somehow unfitting. If his online friends didn't know of his passing, those in a position to help his wife wouldn't be able to. Like I said, my imagination of the situation had a big impact on me, and I wanted to try to do something.
To try to get the word out, I first added a comment on his last blog post telling what I'd heard from his wife, but it turns out that comments were moderated, so no one would see the comment until he manually approved it, something that seemed unlikely at this point. There were comments asking “where are you?”, so I figure for me to see them they must have been from friends he trusted enough to white-list in his moderation system, so that their messages would bypass the moderation queue and appear immediately. So I followed the link trail, and was eventually able to contact someone who knew him in Bangkok. "He didn't show up for lunch and I was getting worried, but I only have his email, so couldn't call him to ask what was up." Now he knew.
I also was able to contact a blog friend in North America who had also been getting worried. He was able to then follow his own contacts and finally confirmed that indeed the man had died. I have no idea about the circumstances, other than “unexpected”, which one could gather from the full-steam-ahead online presence he had that suddenly, unceremoniously, stopped. I suppose it was a car accident or heart attack, but I don't know.... in any case, the result remains the same.
I'd felt compelled to do something, and however little, I had, which then allowed my thoughts to wander. It's a vastly different world now than for the first umpteen thousand years of human existence, where one's presence can be extended all around the world with unprecedented ease (just start a blog, or upload some photos), garnering a friendship of global proportions, yet, still, have all those links be of the most tenuous, fragile nature that can completely miss an event as significant as death.
I wondered what will happen to his blog, to his online photos? Without help from an English speaker, I suspect his wife won't do anything (but even if she could, what would she want to do?). Will his Flickr site stay there until.... forever? Or will Yahoo eventually decide that since no one has logged in for X years, delete it? Will his blog stay there until a disk wears out, or will someone come in and dismantle it? Will someone put up a post-mortem post telling the world that the author died?
I wondered about all this without much direction, but with a profound sense of sadness related to, I guess, the disconnect between our offline presence (our life) and our online presence, and how when one is turned off at our death, the other is left.... hanging.
I wondered what post will be at the top of my blog when I die. I doubt it'll be something like “Heading across the street to get the mail; hope I don't get hit by a bus!” or “Doctor says prognosis is not good.” Given the demographics of my posts, it'll probably be something mundane and boring, like “Hey Look, a Pretty Flower!”
So when my posting frequency slows due to a slight case of death, how long before people notice? Will they notice? In my case, my wife can speak English very well, and my technologically-unchallenged brother in America could figure out how to put a note on my blog informing of my untimely demise, but what about if Fumie and I died in the same accident... how would word ever even get to my family in America?
I suppose I shouldn't worry about this stuff.... heck, it won't matter to me because I'll be dead.... but thinking about it still makes me a bit melancholy. Of course, I've thought about death plenty before, as anyone does, and the amazing abruptness of “we know neither the time nor the place” remains as impactful as ever, but for some reason this new angle seems to make things a bit different... just a touch more real.
I prayed for him and his wife. It felt a bit odd, since I don't even know who they are, but I trust that God does.
For the record, should I die unexpectedly any time soon, I'd hope my blog could remain available, for Anthony to read when he gets old enough.
My friend Boris shared this and unusually for him, didn't add a comment. Reading the post I think I understand why.
Posted via web Click Here to read the full article from The posterous Indulgency Pattern
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When I was a small kid, my Mum used to take me shopping with her. Like most small kids on such outings it wasn’t long before I was bored. I would gaze into the window of whatever shop we had stopped outside, pulling faces in the reflection whilst my Mum gossiped to a friend.
Very very occasionally though, there was something in the window which stopped me pulling faces and got me very excited. I’d pull on my Mum’s hand demanding her attention. When I had it, I would point speechless at the window. There in all it’s colourful and simple glory was a poster, the Circus was coming to town!
I loved the Circus. I knew that in the next few days I would be going to a show. My Mum & Dad ran a greengrocers shop and chances were that by the time Mum and I got back there, my Dad would have a poster in the window. Of course, with the poster came free tickets.
The Circus was smart. A week or so before the Big Top arrived in town, an advance party of Circus folk would visit and enlist every shop window it could to put up a poster. The currency of the exchange was free tickets for the shop owner. The Circus must have given away hundreds of tickets. However, the advertising and publicity were more than a fair exchange.
I was excited. I told all my friends. It was great. I always had a spare ticket or two so I got to choose who I took with me. My friends loved the Circus as much as me and a free ticket was worth a lot. At least in the playground, for that very short window of time. There weren’t many kids whose folk were shopkeepers, so I was a rarity...
By the time the Circus rolled in, the town was buzzing. All the kids who had tickets couldn’t wait and all those who didn’t had mounted a tireless campaign to get their Mum or Dad down to the Big Top and be there when Ticket Sales opened. I don’t remember ever seeing a Big Top with empty seats.
And guess what. My Mum, Dad and I, and a couple of carefully chosen friends; went to the Circus. And it rocked! It lived up to and even exceeded the hype! It was totally awesome. So good that the whole town was sad to see it go. The Circus had, of course; guaranteed a repeat performance next year.
Over thirty-five years later, the world is undoubtably more complicated than it seemed to me as an 8 year old. For sure we are more cynical and the pace of life seems to move a millions times faster. As a kid, the Circus only had one ring, now there seems to be five. The stadium may be a surrogate Big Top, but sadly the tickets are no longer free. Sure, the town is going crazy but I wonder, when it's all done: who will want to see it again?
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I am gradually learning how posterous works and what it is capable of. Apart from the odd occasion where I accidentally posted an entry to all my blogs and twitter accounts, it's been pretty easy to control. I concluded today that I don't really want to post something to ALL of my accounts with all services, I want control over what appears where.
So I removed my Facebook account, flickr account and friendfeed account from posterous, leaving my three blogs and three twitter accounts. That I can handle. I added a posterous rss to friendfeed which means, amongst other things that my Facebook account should be fed my posterous posts.
I was thinking about importing my Indulgency Pattern blog entries to posterous but have concluded this is not what I want to do. I have a posterous widget on the Indulgency Pattern blog, www.rightantler.com and thay works. Sometimes I don't want a posteous entry to be a full blog post, I'm just sharing things I find interesting, or as a good friend puts it, my 'asides'.
What I will try though is important the rss feed from Google Reader of my shared items there. If I can do that I will be happy. I'm afriad I am tired of the cluttered and headache inducing reader experience. I've stopped using it for feeds, at least for now. What is left in there is all my shared items and I'd really like them somewhere a bit more accessible (or so it seems) which is posterous.
The booklet tool on posterous has become my favourite tool of the moment and curiously the feature posterous talks about most, posting by email is something I don't do at all. I will have to figure out how I can do that but ensure the entry only gets posted to the blogs, twitter accounts I want, not all of them!
So that's the experience so far, make sense?
Posted via web Click Here to read the full article from The posterous Indulgency Pattern
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Leftantler shared this story with me and commented that she also had her Mother's watch, which she had not worn. It reminded me not of a watch but a thank you card my Dad had written.
He was not one for writing, but following my graduation from University in 1988 he wrote me a short message is a small card. I carried this card around in my wallet for years. Then one day I realised I didn't have it anymore.
I knew I'd changed wallet a few times but I couldn't believe and still can't that I would have accidentally thrown it away. From time to time I still search for it. Maybe it's inside a book, in a draw somewhere inside something else - safe!
I hope the day comes when it does appear again. Although I can't remember what my Dad wrote, I do remember the sentiment. That alone still brings a lump to my throat.
Posted via web Click Here to read the full article from The posterous Indulgency Pattern
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India is the driving economic force behind world cricket at the moment. The article talks about the Twenty20 version of the game which could be well suited to the tastes of American TV. Personally, I have a big preference for the five day game as demonstrated by the excellent series in South Africa recently.
Posted via web Click Here to read the full article from The posterous Indulgency Pattern
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India is the driving economic force behind world cricket at the moment. The article talks about the Twenty20 version of the game which could be well suited to the tastes of American TV. Personally, I have a big preference for the five day game as demonstrated by the excellent series in South Africa recently.
Posted via web Click Here to read the full article from The posterous Indulgency Pattern
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