Circadian Shift

I have a 30 minute subway commute to the office in the mornings, and it's pretty much "dead" time. I get woozy if I try to read for more than a couple stops, and I dislike listening to music because I have to crank up the volume so high just to hear it properly.

However, I'm tempted to give some of these literary and sound art MP3s a whirl during that long dead stretch. There's a bunch of stuff from Canadian poet Christian Bök, some Dada works, a poetry series that includes readings by Patti Smith, Philip Glass, and Laurie Anderson (among others) -- just too many to list them all. (Props to Cup of Chicha for the link.)

And, just because, here's some related linkage that I'd thrown up on del.icio.us a while back:

• Bring Da Noise: A Brief Survey of Sound Art
• A Working Terminology for Minimal Music
• symphony for dot matrix printers

Addendum: Almost immediately after I posted this, I checked del.icio.us again to see what's new, and found pointers to two Philip Glass MP3s that are available for free download (registration required) on Amazon.com: 100,000 People and The Fog of War, both from the soundtrack to the movie The Fog of War.

Addendum 2: One more Philip Glass download: Music Box, from The Music of Candyman.

Addendum 3: (Last one, I promise.) Here's complete list of MP3 downloads from Philip Glass available at Amazon.com. And -- another find from del.icio.us -- The Sound of Mathematics features "MIDI files of algorithmic music determined by mathematics and the musical preferences of a human".

I am sitting in my cube giggling like an idiot (as opposed to whining like an idiot, like I seem to have been doing much of lately) because of this.

Thank you, Raging Kraut, for brightening my day a bit.

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.
Helen Keller

And I just walked into the fucking doorframe and got a bloody nose.

(Thanks, once again, to Gaping Void for the pithy visual summary.)

I got off to a good start yesterday, but then things fizzled out by lunch.

(Pic courtesy of GapingVoid.)

Anyway, here's some linkage.

• Gorilla study gives social clues -- "The western gorilla lives peacefully in human-like social groups, a study shows." (via Anthropology in the News)
• Badbossology.com -- "Protecting People & Companies from Bad Bosses" (via the nub(?))
• A Writer’s Toolkit (via del.icio.us)
• Informing Ourselves To Death -- by Neil Postman (ibid.)
• They seemed normal but plotted to kill thousands -- right-wing cyanide bombers in Texas (via Manifesto Multilinko)

BTW, there was a monster-spike in traffic here, earlier in the week, thanks to this site pointing to my post about BamBam the cat and his accidental haircut. That easily has to be the most popular page on this site.

Coincidentally, I happened to stumble across another blog post featuring an annoyed cat with a bad haircut. Feel free to go there and gawk.

• Graig ponders what's in a past when it comes to having indie cred
• Stylus lists their Top Ten Songs I Loved To Dance To At The School Disco (Aged 12) -- "Voodoo Ray", "Dub Be Good to Me", "Groove is in the Heart".... sigh (via Sleeve Notes)
• Demented Toon Tunes -- got a hankering to hear Elmer Fudd singing a Bruce Springsteen song? (via del.icio.us)

Making presentations:

• Presenting pet peeves
• Technical presentation advice
• More on presentations...

Language slaughter:

• 100 Most Often Mispronounced Words and Phrases in English
• the most irritating words and phrases in the English language
• Beyond the Five-Paragraph Essay

Let there be light:

• Light transmitting concrete
• Light-up bedsheets
• White LED Light Bulb

It's the World Wide Wombat Web.

(via Give, Get, Take, and Have)

Found this one in the archives:

Chicken Soup for Bloggers:

"I think one of the hardest things to do in the blogosphere is to learn the equivalent of hitting singles day after day, especially when it seems like everyone else in the blogosphere is knocking them over the fence. Face it, no one hits a home run day after day, not even Lileks or Den Beste. The best you can do is make contact, keep the ball in play, advance the runner, keep on keeping on. Yes, a home run drives in a lot of traffic, but since home runs are few and far between for most of us, it's the singles that keep us in the game."

Having wondered aloud if something has infected the blogosphere lately, I discover that the affliction has a name:

"Beal," for those who may not be aware, is an illness characterized by having it. It's named after the character Howard Beal in Network, and was discovered by one of my college English Lit professors.

Thus:

Susie: "I can't go to class, I have beal."

Helpful questioner: "What's beal?"

Susie: "It's the reason I can't go to class."

In this case, though, I think beal has struck the blogosphere with a vengeance. I know I have been unable to comment on others' blogs because of it, and I suspect that there was a particularly bad outbreak this past weekend--only a few hardy souls were able to post at all. Unfortunately, there is no known cure for beal. It strikes without warning, usually in winter time, and has no set duration. Research into its cause and treatment are sadly underfunded. In fact, very few people are even aware it exists!

Over on Ripples, David St. Lawrence posts some thoughts on combating beal.

I'm suffering not so much from a lack of inspiration as I am from an excess of information; there's just so damn much of it out there, and I've got too few fingers for too many pies.

(Not coincidentally, I seem to have hit a fork in the road known as my so-called "career". I need to decide what I'm going to focus on.)

Anyway, enough whingeing. Thanks to those of you who've bothered to stick around.

(BTW, a long time ago, Richard coined a term of his own -- "blangst" -- which strikes me as being more readily compreshensible than "beal". But maybe that's just me.)

[Addendum: 'Twould appear that extrasonic and lactose incompetent are both taking tentative steps back into the world of living blogs. Let's hope recovery is also contagious.]

Ugh. I'm awake.

As it happens, The Times is running a series of articles on sleep this weekend:

• Good sleep guide: Eyes wide open
• Sleepless: The diary of an insomniac
• Sleep tiredness: Facing life in the fast lane
• Sleep special: Waking nightmare
• Sleep dreaming: Dream doctors
• Sleep nutrition: Let’s get energised
• Sleep napping: No snooze is bad news
• Sleep shopping: Wake up feeling fine

It also turns that yesterday was the vernal equinox, which means more daylight. This is a good thing.

Lastly, here's a bit of writing called "The Simple Poetry of Sleep" (via wood s lot).

Just as bob reports that he's feeling better, and has started blogging again, Chris decides to put his blog on extended hiatus.

Could there be a malaise spreading in blogland?

Here are some quotes on why people give up their weblogs.

I'm not ready to throw in the towel, yet. No, not yet.

Mind you, I'm now up to 633 unread items in the aggregator. At some point, I'm just going to have to let the bits go.

But, right now, I think I need some sleep.

Note to self for future TODO list: give these a spin.

• Citrus Alarm Clock -- multiple alarm support; fade-in audio alarm; support for MP3s, playlists, other media (Windows)
• Softdiv Alarm Clocks -- does alarms and reminders; program launcher; supports MP3, WAV, MIDI (Windows)
• BlueFive Software Alarm -- supports MP3, MIDI, WAV (Windows)
• AtomTimer MP3 Alarm Clock -- does auto-synchonization with NIST atomic time servers (Windows)
• XMMS-Alarm -- plug-in for X Multimedia System to turn it into an alarm clock; supports playlists; gradual audio fade-in (Linux)
• Cloxten -- supports MP3, OGG, WAV; currently pre-alpha (Linux)

All of above is freeware.

Additional linkage:

• Tucows: Windows > System and Utilities > Clock and Timers
• NONAGS Time Tools (freeware for Windows)
• DailyMP3.com: Alarm/Waker Utilities

As of right now, I have 474 unread items in my aggregator. And I'm guessing there another 600 or so that I've looked at and saved but not done anything with.

Still throwing up the occasional snippet of linkage elsewhere.

sigh

Anyway, this has already been linked to by a lot of people, but I might as well follow the herd:

Swiss Army Knife connects with the future

One of the knife’s two makers has released a version with a memory key that plugs into computers.

• Wikipedia has an entry on the March 11, 2004 Madrid attacks (via Hotlinks)
• Crucial Conversations is the companion website to a book of the same name; they have a number of free downloads providing advice on how to handle those really big "talks" (via I think not, baby puppy)
• Brain Connection is a site about the brain and learning; as it happens, this coming week (March 15-21) is Brain Awareness Week (via del.icio.us)
• The Recycling Reference offers "Ten ways to recycle, reuse and properly dispose of waste that you never thought about before."; it's on a Canadian site, so some of the resources mentioned will be Canuck-specific (via Manifesto Multilinko)
• lastly, here's a writeup of How News Travels on the Internet (via Neat New Stuff on the Net)

In absence of more meaningful content, I will share with you a shot from the keychain-cam that I took last Sunday:

Although the photo would suggest that I was actually getting some writing done, I can't say it was very productive. Or coherent.

Oh well...

Refuted seed as if someone was watching over it
Before it was as if response was based on fact
Providing, deciding it wasn’t there
Swept to it, based to it, it was not there

Regular blogging is still MIA. However, I'm still tossing up links over at del.icio.us.

Doing a glance glance 'round my blogging neighbourhood, I discover that bob is also having a crise de blog, while Eva has been spending too much time in the lab, and churning out even more graphs in Excel than I have been.

But anyway...

I'm presently listening to a recording of Fischerspooner performing live, courtesy of CBC Radio 3. A quick Google yielded a treasure trove of Fischerspooner MP3s, including more mixes of "Emerge" than you can shake a stick at.

Have fun.

Yes, I live.

Today is feeling an awful lot like an exercise in cognitive dissonance.

Here are some images, just because.

Coffee is 'health drink' says Italian

Thanks to "N" for the link

I am afraid to look at the stuff that's accumulated in my aggregator.

OK, that's perhaps overstating things, but the prospecting of sorting through it all and picking out stuff to link to is still too overwhelming. I got me a bad case of blogging anxiety.

Meanwhile, here's some stuff cribbed from Scientific American -- they've got a "Link to this article" widget that took care of the HTML gruntwork for me.

• Scientists See How Placebo Effect Eases Pain
• Sex Differences in the Brain -- Men and women display patterns of behavioral and cognitive differences that reflect varying hormonal influences on brain development
• Sleep Lets Brain File Memories
• Tetris Dreams -- How and when people see pieces from the computer game in their sleep tells of the role dreaming plays in learning
• How long can humans stay awake?

I will get my shit together, eventually.