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Got the giggles I was rudely interrupted while recording my lit game podcast late Friday night. It was my younger son emitting a loud slurping sound. One or the other of my kids often is around at a close-by computer when I'm sitting here at mine. We have desks set up in an L shape so we can make eye contact and talk. I like that.
"Fault of your home receiver" is a phrase burned into my memory, almost like "The number you have dialed is not in service." As soon as I said it I thought, Aaron is 35 years younger than me. He wouldn't have any experience with TV not working as it should. He's never heard a voice of authority reassuring the masses that they don't need to jump up (because what's a remote) and twiddle with the vertical hold or finesse the rabbit ears. The internet can have glitches. That's expected. You don't count on it being as available as a TV network. You don't count on the production being as polished either. It will be kind of sad if (when?) this stage of pagemaking and A/V making phases out, but then maybe a new mode of expression will emerge where homespun stuff is OK for a while. Now my headline doesn't fit anymore. The giggles wore off and I have made myself all wistful. Saturday Night Live Wondered if somebody might be live-blogging Dave's Friendly Medicine Show. Tim and David are. LOL! This is crazy, almost IMing. David W saw me following along and gave me a shout out. Hey, David. You got a hoist? Hold it right there, buddy. Just don't reach for that headline, and nobody'll get hurt. I just went to edit a headline. Something suddenly clicked with me. If you write entries with headlines, the text of the head is the item's permalink, right? But if you change the headline copy, your permalink changes. I'll have to be careful about that, because I'm a wicked reviser anyway. Then, this tool makes you into a worse reviser than you already are, I think. Plus, I'll wander off during a post, and often by the time I get to the end of it, the headline I wrote doesn't describe the post anymore. So I'll change it, but if anyone has linked to me in the meantime, the link goes dead. I'll try to wait until the post is finished before I write the headline. I can try anyway, but see, I'm never finished. Quick note to follow up on later You know, I think there is something about this tool that makes you enjoy writing more. I'll have more time later to think more about why this might be. Maybe I'll run the idea by my sis-in-law who teaches freshman comp. Maybe she'd even test it in a class if she doesn't have the next term too planned already. Soothsayer It's definitely only 1:29 p.m. Central time on Saturday for me, but Hil's today's outline is already on Sunday. That's because she is in Australia, where it's tomorrow, so if you want to know about the future, she might tell you about it, if you ask nice. I hope she won't mind if I tell about a time zone oddity during her journey to the U.S. seven or eight years ago for a gathering of Jane Austen fans at Craigsville on the Cape. Somewhere along the way on her return trip, crossing the International Dateline headed west, she lost her birthday! Never happened. It got skipped right over. It always cracks me up to think about that. Hil made it over here! I would like you to meet my friend Hil. I conned her into becoming my instant outliner buddy, and it looks like she is taking the blogging tool for a spin, too. It's fun to see the brand new OPML blogs in their first minutes of life. You can sense an interaction between the blogger and the software. They're having a conversation with each other, getting to know each other, tentatively. There's something sweet about it. Textbook-free environment Wired story about an Arizona high school designed to operate without paper books. Every student has an iBook. |
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I left the slurp in there, and that put me in a silly mood. Listen to the Max Headroom-style repeating effect at the end of the 2.5-minute podcast. Aaron said people would think their media players were choking, so I tacked this on, in hopes of resembling an old time TV announcer: "This is not the fault of your home receiver." 
