I hate it when people say “I hate that word” just after having used a word. If you hate it, don’t use it. If you just used it then accept the fact that it has some utility. It seems like such a cop-out.
I think I’ve seen the expression most often after the word blogosphere, but I just came across it for folksonomy as well.
I know, I know, now we can watch to see when I use this expression. I have no such plans though. If I hate it, I do my best to avoid it. Also, I may just have a different threshold regarding hateful sentiments toward words.
I’ve been thinking about starting a new type of post on this blog: shorts posts with fairly random thoughts. For the most part, I don’t have time for long elaborate posts, but on occasion I do have random thoughts that would be fun to write down and perhaps of interest to the E-Blog fans who keep coming back despite the infrequently updated content around here. So if you see a “Random thought” headline, you’ve been warned.
Those of you who read my blog, but do not visit my Flickr account may be thinking that I abandoned Project 365 weeks ago. Not so! I have been very diligent about taking at least one photo (if not dozens) every day and designating one for the Project 365 set each day. Before the year is over, I hope to catch up with posting these to the blog.
Taken: December 1, 2006
#38: At the last social hour at the Center, we decided to expand the Wine Committee into the Decadence Committee, because, well, some of us don’t like wine, but more importantly: there are more ways than one to be decadent. So we created a Cheese Committee and a Chocolate Committee. Which one do you think I’m in? These were the fruits of our labor. More coming next time.
Taken: December 2, 2006
#39: In honor of the big Stanford-Cal football game the next day, the fountain water was turned red (bright pink is a more like what it was, but I am assuming the goal was red).
Taken: December 3, 2006
#40: I got a great deal on Cranium Pop 5 (<$11 including shipping!) and as soon as it arrived, I had some friends over for a game. This is my teammate’s rendition of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which needless to say, I guessed.:)
Taken: December 4, 2006
#41: Screenshot of an email singing the praises of Project 365 and why more who like photography should join! (hint)
Taken: December 5, 2006
#42: Sex and the City Kiss and Tell book, a must for any SATC fan.
Taken: December 6, 2006
#43: Leaves in the Center parking lot.
Taken: December 7, 2006
#44: Spotted on East Campus Drive at Stanford, reminded me of all the work my project group and I are doing.. although likely not quite the same type of surveying.
I just put in an order for the Gorillapod that has come recommended to me by a couple of fellow Flickrites. You can get free ground shipping and a 15% discount if you buy it on Joby and put in the code gorillapodlove, which is something they’ve made available until the end of this year. (That Flickr group page says 10%, but it was 15% off.) Enjoy!
UPDATE (12/26/06): I had a bad experience trying to use Paypal for payment and in the end it didn’t work. Joby seems to care about customer experiences so I emailed them about this, but the response I received was very generic. So take note that 1. you may not be able to use Paypal for a purchase on joby.com; and 2. don’t bother sending an email to 100percent@joby.com.
Yaniv over at Hello World tagged me days ago regarding the “five things you don’t know about me” meme. I’ve been too overwhelmed to respond, but it’s time I got around to it. It reminds me, by the way, of the four things meme, which I suspect also revealed a bunch of things people don’t know about bloggers they read.
1. I grew up in Budapest with occasional short-term stays (lasting 4-21 months) in the U.S. specifically in Connecticut (twice), Texas and Hawaii by the time I was 16. Since then, I’ve lived in five additional states: Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California, in that order.
2. When I was 13, I wrote a fan letter to Dan Rather from Budapest. How much fan mail was he getting from teenagers in Hungary in the 1980s? Not much, I suspect. He kindly responded with an autographed photo (not that I had asked), which I found thrilling.
3. I was at the R.E.M. concert in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1995 when the band’s drummer collapsed due to a hemorrhage on the surface of his brain. A bunch of us from the Smith College Junior Year Abroad program went to this concert thanks to money we saved from our daily food allocation from the college.
4. When I was in middle school, I was interested in business (with aspirations of working on Wall Street one day) and so decided to study Japanese (this was the 80s after all). There was only one place you could study Japanese in Budapest at the time. It was fun, but due to subsequent US stays I had to abandon this particular interest.
5. My first choice for college was Cornell’s Communication Department thanks to the wonderful time I had attending the Cornell Summer College Program the summer before senior year of high school. I got in, but since Comm at Cornell is in one of their state schools and I was an international student, I did not qualify for financial aid. It was out of the question for me to attend a school in the US without financial aid. I was crushed. I was devastated. I ended up attending Smith College and absolutely loved it. In fact, I am convinced that it was a much better match than Cornell had been during its regular sessions so in the end all worked out well. Interestingly, years later, I did make my way to a communication department since that is where I am now based at Northwestern.
Finally, I’m supposed to tap five other people: Noor Ali-Hasan, Basket Case, Dan Drezner, Jeremy Freese and Seth Finkelstein – tell us a few things we don’t know about you.
Last in this season’s gift guide series are some ideas for charitable giving. If you celebrate any of the season’s gift-giving holidays, it’s getting to that point where it is too late to order anything for delivery and soon you won’t have time to run out and buy something either. What’s left? You could make a charitable donation on behalf of the people on your list.
I am sure there are the usual suspects on everyone’s list, either charities that are the first to gain mention during any crisis, ones automatically associated with the holidays, or ones you donate to every year and so it is likely that you reach for your checkbook this time of year with specific organizations in mind. For example, some bloggers – like yours truly – have a history of supporting causes such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation since their mission is so closely aligned with what we do.
But in addition to the usual suspects, how about considering some lesser known charities? Is bigger always better in this realm?
Recently, I stumbled upon an interesting site called the Darfur Wall.
They have put up 400,000 dark numbers in honor of the 400,000 people who have been killed in the Darfur genocide. For each dollar you donate, a number is lit up to honor a lost life. The founders of the organization are picking up all administrative costs of the site so there is very little overhead. Other than Paypal fees (it would be nice if Paypal had a different fee structure for charitable giving), all of your donation goes to the four organizations supported by this foundation, allocated specifically to Darfur relief efforts.
You can choose the number you want to light. Instead of an extra stocking stuffer or an additional cookie platter, how about lighting up some of those numbers in honor of the people on your gift list?
Whatever your choice for giving, the Charity Navigator is a helpful resource in seeing how an organization spends its money. (I suspect because the Darfur Foundation is so new, they are not yet listed.)
In related news, the New York Times had an interesting article about charitable giving by Peter Singer the other day.
Wow. These images are amazing. Viewing these may benefit considerably from a high-speed connection and definitely from a large screen.
In case you can’t get to it, it may be that the site is being blocked by your school/workplace, because years ago it was an “adult site” and it got banned by a bunch of filters. That raises an interesting point about buying domain names. It’s worth looking into their past. In this case, a quick check on the Wayback Machine would’ve helped.
In any case, the images are amazing, enjoy if you can get to them.