Back to Kinja

My Kinja Digest, and HNBP’s Kinja Card.

The new Kinja went completely under my radar when it relaunched, partly because I was in the Philippines at the time, but mostly because all my feedreading had been on Bloglines.

My problem with Bloglines, however, (and this is a problem with me, not with Bloglines) was that I had 252 feeds, (it was over 300 at one point before I did some pruning) and the inbox-like “unread messages” interface became intimidating if I left anything unread for more than a few hours. Treating each new weblog entry from each feed as an individual item to be read became an overwhelming exercise in trying to keep up with a never-ending flow of content, and clicking “Mark All As Read” always left me with a gnawing feeling of having missed something.

I couldn’t keep going like that, waking up with hundreds of unread feeds waiting for me every morning, and then again every evening after work. (Not that and have a life too, anyway.) If feeds are a river, I was drowning in a flood. I had to stop being anxious about missing dozens of unread posts per hour. To badly mangle the river metaphor, you can’t drink a river with a cup; you’re supposed to sit on the riverbank and peacefully watch the current flow — and not try to catch sight of every single boat, beaver, or twig that floats by.

So I’ve switched back to Kinja for feed reading. Tagging has been added, and my old concerns with post-strafing and long pauses between updates seem to have been addressed. (On the down side, batch-editing of subscriptions seems to have been removed as a feature, which makes tagging, deleting, and editing multiple digest links rather tedious, and the AJAX interface is something I could do without.) I can go to my digest and not be pressured by an insanely high “unread posts” count, and now I regard my links as a view that I can occasionally admire, rather than a list of tasks that need to be done.

Kitsch ‘n Ditz Indulgences

I’m about to tell you something shocking and awful which might cause you to lose a lot of respect for me. If you don’t think you can stand to be terribly disillusioned with the Paulo you’ve come to know and love, stop reading right now.

I have a Livejournal. I use it to paste funny chat transcripts and random stupid images I make or find on the web.

Wait, wait; it gets worse.

I’m also on MySpace. And I revived my Friendster profile, too.

Links to all have been added to Brownpau’s Home on the Online Internet Web. It’s my hope that despite my petty and shallow indulgence in these aspects of internet kitsch ‘n ditz, you may retain at least some of the former esteem with which I was once held before I admitted these horrible secrets.

(The MySpace profile is especially fun to work with, since the customization uses a freeform <textarea> which takes just about any snippet of code, even <style> tags which can override the default profile CSS. Is it any wonder people go so wild with it?)

Strawberries, Grapes, Crackers

I helped Amy set up a scene for a painting yesterday, and the same light she found perfect for the painting was also perfect for a few photographic still lifes of the food on the table:

Still Life: Strawberry Still Life: Strawberries Still Life: Crackers, Grapes, Strawberries Still Life: Crackers

Still Life: Grapes and Strawberries

The Trip to New Jersey

Five hour bus ride to New York last night. Driver was a funny Hispanic guy with large quantites of gold bling hanging from his neck, equipped with a delightful array of loud and colorful Spanish curses for late passengers, weaving trucks, and heavy traffic. Sitting beside me was a journalism student from Rockville. She was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and was visiting New York with friends for spring break. She liked Marie Claire Magazine.

Somewhere in Delaware, the bus abruptly stopped alongside another bus which appeared to have broken down, and we picked up an extra load of stranded passengers. The bus was fairly full, so we could not take them all, and many of them were forced to stand. (Others who had been unable to get on were forced to wait longer for the next bus yet to come.) The driver turned off all indoor lights so that we could speed through the night without law enforcement noticing the standees. I stood up to share my seat with others.

In New York, Madison Square Garden was fenced off for some kind of basketball game. Searching for the entrance to Penn Station, I passed behind a CBS news anchor on camera.

At the rail station in Elizabeth, an old man in a wheelchair alternated between calling for help and yelling curses at a man passed out in the elevator, sprawled across the floor so that it was impossible for the wheelchair to get in. I offered to help. Passed-Out Guy had a pulse — and pants damp with urine — but was a dead weight, impossible for me to lift. I settled for rolling him into one corner of the elevator so Old Wheelchair Guy could roll in.

“Oh God,” said Old Wheelchair Guy, “is he okay?” He leaned over to poke Passed-Out Guy in the shoulder. “Hey Poppy, you okay?”

I shook him. “¿Despierte, amigo. Esta bien?” — is what I would have said if I remembered any of my Spanish. Passed-Out Guy blinked. There was no smell of alcohol on him, so I wondered if he had OD’d, though there was no sign of a nosebleed or vomit.

Old Wheelchair Guy — who seemed to suffer from mental as well as physical disabilities — thanked me, and we left Passed-Out Guy in the elevator. I washed my hands thoroughly on getting home.

Pandora Doing What She Does Best

IMG_5534.JPG IMG_5545.JPG

More black and white photos of the cat. (Click them for larger sizes.) She’s had a touch of feline conjunctivitis lately, squinting a bit, with a crusty bloodlike discharge gathering in the corner of one eye — easily cleaned with a damp tissue.

Many EDSAs

“I had always hoped and dreamed that we Filipinos could be more intensely nationalistic, and EDSA was it. Finally, Filipino people were identifying with all that’s good about the Filipino – the sharing of the food, the praying together, the kindness and support shown for everybody, the total giving of oneself.­ I don’t want that changed. In fact I want many EDSAs to happen — although I don’t think that’s possible, it was one of a kind — or at least for us to learn the lessons of EDSA.

President Cory Aquino

Mr & Ms Magazine, 7 March 1986

(emphasis added)

Dear Tita Cory: I have good news and bad news on your dalawang hiling for many EDSAs and lessons learned. Hulaan niyo na lang po kung alin ang alin.

Kottke No Longer “Pro”

Oh, What a Year, says Jason Kottke, ending his “micropatronage experiment” a year after he got $39,900 from his enthusiastic audience. Here’s what I thought of it at the time, and I’m pretty glad now I didn’t contribute. I’d been hoping for two things out of the Pro Plan, which would have had me dropping a significant donation in the pot post facto: a revival of 0sil8, and a general spam cleanup. Neither thing happened.

Feedback on Metafilter is largely cynical about the whole affair. Felix Salmon talks about promises. And Bitter Pill looks at what might have been.

I think I can sympathize a bit with JKottke, though: as someone in the process of launching a semi-independent venture myself, I know what it’s like to watch the days slide idly away while plans stay unchecked on the to-do list, till, before you know it, a year has passed. A clear separation between “work” and “play” actually helps me maintain productivity in both fields, which is why I don’t think I’ll ever make brownpau.com a “Pro” source of income — never mind the unfeasability of this weblog actually being considered a genuinely marketable web publishing venture.

Hmmm. On the other hand, there is lots of room for a nice big red Chitika leaderboard at the top of the front page…