Monthly Archives: November 2009

The year winding down is always a good time for reflection. And on this Thanksgiving, I have to say that I cannot remember a year like this one. A year that has made me so depressed and dispirited. A year … Continue reading →

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Posted on November 25, 2009

Music for the post-apocalypse…

Posted on November 24, 2009 | 3 Comments

The music blog LA Weekly has put together a playlist for the post-apocalypse, so make sure your iPod stays charged. Here are my favorites (or click over for the full list and videos ):

  • The Sisters of Mercy, “Black Planet”
  • The Rolling Stones, “Gimme Shelter”
  • David Bowie, “Five Years”
  • Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “The Weeping Song”

I would add:

  • Barry McGuire, “Eve of Destruction”
  • Blue Oyster Cult, “Don’t Fear the Reaper”
  • Bob Dylan, “All Along the Watchtower”
  • Coldplay, “A Rush of Blood to the Head”
  • Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Bad Moon Rising”
  • Crosby, Stills and Nash, “Wooden Ships”
  • Crowded House, “Don’t Dream It’s Over” (because of that scene in The Stand miniseries)
  • Morrissey, “Everyday Is Like Sunday”
  • Neil Young, “Don’t Let It Bring You Down”
  • Nick Drake, “Pink Moon”
  • Peter Gabriel, “Here Comes the Flood”
  • Pink Floyd, “Two Suns in the Sunset”
  • Ryan Adams, “Afraid Not Scared”
  • Steeley Dan, “King of the World”
  • Talking Heads, “Swamp”
  • TV on the Radio, “Staring at the Sun”
  • The White Stripes, “Seven Nation Army”

Here is a more complete list of apocalyptic songs at Wikipedia.

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Predicting the future: A futile exercise

Posted on November 20, 2009 | Leave a comment

Buddhists advise us to live in the moment. It seems simple, but it is probably one of the hardest things we can do as human beings. Being aware of time gives us consciousness, and is our curse. As Jonathan Franzen says in The Corrections:

The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid the price for the privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself.

We obsessively live in the past, wishing we could get a “do-over” or just trying to figure out why things happened the way they did, usually an exercise in futility. But we are even more obsessed with the future. Turn on the TV or NPR, surf the blogs, open the newspaper. You will find story after story, one “expert” after another, trying to tell us what will happen. How will the Senate vote on healthcare; what will the 2010 election results be; what will happen to the economy?

Stand back from all this noise and view it as a whole, and it quickly becomes meaningless. What makes these pundits’ predictions any more accurate or trustworthy than the predictions of the ancients reading the future in the entrails of their animal sacrifices, or the old lady trying to find a pattern in her tea leaves?

We look into the future and what we see is the darkness of the abyss. Hardly comforting. So we try to do the impossible: We try to act like we know what is going to happen.

That’s why “live in the moment” is such great advice, even if it is so difficult to achieve. Think of the concept of flow, of being so focused and in tune with what you are doing that time effectively ceases to exist. It may occur when you’re fixing a car or shaping a vase from clay or taking a run or talking with friends. For me, it usually happens when I’m writing, cooking, gardening, organizing or am caught up in a project that has me fully engaged. Regardless, at that time of flow, you are truly in the moment. The past and the future have lost their significance. For many people, including me, it is these times of “flow” when they are happiest.

If we all spent more time in flow (or pursuing those activities that bring about that state) and less time worrying about the future, I think we’d actually achieve that other elusive element of human existence: peace.

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How to give Google Wave invitations

Posted on November 11, 2009 | 10 Comments

Notice: Please do not ask me for a Google Wave invitation. I am not giving away any more.

I see a lot of people have been visiting my blog because of my recent offer of Google Wave invitations, and judging by the search terms, some are confused as to how to give out invitations. I always try to be helpful, so here’s a quick tutorial.

To give out invitations, you must have gotten some from Google. I don’t think everybody got them. If you were invited by Google to be a beta tester, you did. If you were invited by someone else, you probably didn’t. Google will be sending out more invitations as soon as their servers can handle the additional capacity, by the way, so keep checking.

Open up Google Wave. In your Inbox you should see a Wave sent just to you with the subject “Invite others to Google Wave.” Click on it to open it. At the bottom of the Wave, you’ll see the number of invitations you have and a box to enter the email addresses of folks you’d like to invite. Once you enter an email address, scroll down in the Wave a bit (use that teeny scroll bar on the right side of the Wave), and click the “Add to invite list” button to nominate them.

This is important — I don’t think the nominations are automatic. Google wants to control the flow of people coming onto the service, which may explain the delay in someone receiving your invitation. Have patience. I’m fairly positive everyone I nominated eventually got their invitation.

And that’s it. I haven’t actually been using Google Wave, sad to say. Anybody else doing something cool with it?

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Posted in Geeking Out

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Stop saying Twitter is useless! Because now there are Twitter lists

Posted on November 10, 2009 | 3 Comments

Have you played around with Twitter‘s new lists feature yet? Well, you should, because lists take Twitter from “pretty cool” to “OMG I can’t live without Twitter!”

The idea behind lists is actually super simple (and staying super simple is part of what makes Twitter so great). Basically, you can group some of your Tweeple (i.e., people you follow on Twitter) into a list.

But here’s why this is so awesome:

  • You can group people by any criteria you choose and then go to the list to see a timeline of only their tweets. For example, you may want to check in on just the people you work with or the celebrities you’re stalking.
  • If you put someone on a list, you don’t have to follow them. You can still see their tweets by accessing the list. So you can limit your main Twitter timeline to only the people you truly care about. I am now actively following only about 50 people, which is a lot easier to keep up with. Since I keep Twitter open on my iGoogle page, it is extra-nice to get rid of the excess noise.
  • You can follow other people’s lists. So you don’t even have to go to all the trouble of making your own. People have made lists for every possible category. Here’s the place to find the best of them.
  • If you’re following someone on a Twitter list, why do you have to bother reading their blog anymore? (No, wait, you should still read my blog.)

So I have made a few lists that you may or may not want to follow. They are:

And a few others. Visit my Twitter page to see them all.

Now that Twitter is finally integrating retweets into its web interface, there will be no end to its usefulness. We can just pretty much ignore Facebook and StumbleUpon as no longer relevant.

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