I was digging through some music I hadn’t listened to in a while, and I stumbled across Ashley MacIsaac’s HiTM How Are You Today? album. He’s a Canadian fiddler who often mixes traditional Celtic folk with rock. He seems like a bit of a tool as a person, but he makes some great music.
This album’s from the mid-nineties, and it’s his most famous. “Sleepy Maggie” and “The Devil in the Kitchen” were the two popular songs from the album, but the song I’ve chosen, “Wing-Stock”, was a favourite of mine. It’s more traditional than the popular songs, but I love the way it builds up for the first two minutes.
This is the age where all of my objectives came to a point. I’m a very goal-oriented person, but I seem to have reached the point in my life where I’ve basically accomplished the major goals I had set for myself. Three of the big milestones to hit before reaching twenty-five were:
Start traveling, and have lived somewhere abroad for even a short time.
Finish my degree and find an enjoyable job that allows me to continue learning .
Move into a single apartment, buy furniture, and settle down somewhere for longer than six months.
These are the same, unchanged, three goals I’ve had since elementary school. It’s great to have accomplished them, but I feel like I’ve just been drifting through life this last year. I don’t have any real goals left. I still want to learn as much as I can, advance in my career, travel the world as much as possible, take writing more seriously, meet that special someone, and become healthier, but none of these are really tangible.
I’m very happy with where I am right now, but I think I should sit down and think about where I’m heading and how to get there, set some new goals to work towards. As much as I enjoy flying through the air, it’s nice to have a target to aim at.
But don’t get me wrong, this birthday wasn’t all about contemplating goals and reevaluation life. I doubled my cash at the blackjack table too!
I know a few people who are considering dropping their smoking habit soon. I smoked for about seven years through my high school and undergraduate university years and then quit cold turkey. While lately I can still be seen stealing a drag after partaking in a night of intoxicated leisure, I did manage to go over three years without taking a single puff. I was thinking of advice I could give these would-be free breathers and came up with a few categorized points. Now you probably wouldn’t hear Dr. Phil give these tips out, but I think they’re solid nonetheless.
Quit Smoking: The Seven Deadly Sins Method
Lust
While quite possibly the most enjoyable of the group, this sin unfortunately doesn’t have much to do with our quitting smoking guide, but I can offer one tip: only have sex with those whose personality you strongly dislike or whose appearance you find mildly disgusting. This will keep you from staying around afterwards for that glorious post-romp cigarette.
Gluttony
Stuff that pretty little face of yours. Eat until you couldn’t possibly take another bite, and then force yourself to take that bite. Smother the clawing and taunting of your previous addiction with jelly-filled doughnuts. Do not, however, get drunk if you usually smoke while drinking. Always move to a new poison to keep things interesting. If you normally drink, have yourself a joint. Normally eat mushrooms? Try a hit of acid instead. Smoking crack more your thing? Move on to crystal meth! This will not only keep you distracted, but since it’s a new sensation, you won’t immediate reach for your cigarette pack. If you’re already a crystal meth addict, now is probably not the best time to stop smoking.
Greed
You don’t have to share nothin’ with no one. End of tip.
Sloth
Quitting smoking is a full time job. You cannot be expected to function as a regular human being during this time, so don’t even try. Spend entire weekends playing video games and watching M.A.S.H. reruns. Show up to work late and do as little as possible while there. Make sure you burden those around you as much as you can. Pain is meant to be shared.
Wrath
This is your time to rage, so let it all out. Don’t like how that McDonald’s employee made your burger? Let them have it! Did someone cut you off with their gigantic SUV? Get out of your car at the next red light and don’t get back in until you hurt them. When you’re at your absolute breaking point, curl up in the fetal position and have a good cry. When you can cry no more, slowly being rebuilding that rage. I like to refer to this as the cycle of hatred.
Envy
Spend every moment of every day imagining you’re someone else. Stare dreamily at every person you see with bright white teeth. Linger around those whose smell is that of sweet perfume or spicy cologne. Openly drool over anyone you see dining or drinking. Vicariously taste the strong, full flavours they’re experiencing. Don’t hold back the tears when watching someone spend the money they didn’t give to cigarette companies. Want everything. Envy everyone.
Pride
Look down on those foolish suckers who are still smoking. You managed to drop a habit. Your superior intelligence and grasp of future consequences together have made your will power so mighty that you can accomplish any task and withstand any force. Look at all of these pathetic, weak smokers around you, chained to their cigarette packs like dogs to their owners. They make you sick - not because of their smell, as ghastly as it is, but because they’re a blemish on humanity, a pock on an otherwise perfect face of society. It is up to you and your comrades to lead these misguided souls down the path of health. Begin preaching immediately.
I hope this advice works for you. Bask in the healing power of the seven glorious sins, and nothing will stand in your way.
I hadn’t heard of Schmap before, but they decided to use one of my Munich photos from Flickr in their guide. The photo they chose isn’t an especially good shot, but they only display it at a maximum width of 150 pixels, so most photos will look decent at that size.
It seems to be a great guide for tourists. It will display a map of a city, using Yahoo! Maps, with marked points of interest. You can select a destination, read a description of the area, and view a photo chosen from Flickr. Points of interest include everything from neighborhoods and parks to museums and pubs. It also has information on walking paths, cultural events, and dining recommendations. It seems like a really good resource, and I’ll try to make use of it on my next trip. It has fairly wide coverage in Europe, North America, and Oceania, but only in major cities right now.
Choosing photos from Flickr, with permission from the photographers, is a terrific idea. Not only do they have access to photos from all over the world, but they receive an enormous amount of word of mouth publicity from it. Most people are more than happy to let them use their photos, and most people, like I am today, will link to their contribution. Free photos and free marketing. Pure genuis.
A Gentlemen’s Duel Whoops, it appears this video was a copyright violation and was taking down. If you stumble across it in the future, have a look. It really is fantastic.
[via]
Kiwi!
[via my still weblog-less friend, Chris]
As a side note, what’s with Wordpress’ awful post formatting? I moved to Wordpress from Movable Type, and I’m incredibly happy with everything except its post writing forms, which is unfortunately a large part of a content management system. If you’re trying to embed an object or do anything with DIVs, it will just auto-format your post into an unintelligible mess. Here’s a tip for future CMS coders: if you’re going to offer a straight HTML entry form, do not auto-format the HTML I enter. It’s like giving someone the choice of what movie they’d like to watch, only to switch it to Glitter five minutes in. Just let me do what I want, you damn system!
I had no idea the contest would grow to be so large. Over eighty people submitted entries, and I was really surprised by the quality of their work. Everyone was commenting on each other’s pieces, and it turned into a cool little writer’s community.
My entry didn’t place, but it did receive an honourable mention, which I suppose means I just missed out. I’m quite happy with that, after reading the rest of the entries. Overall, it was a positive experience. There were a lot of inspiring pieces, and people left quite a few encouraging comments on mine.
I’m going to keep my eye out for other contests. It’s a nice way to experiment with some shorter fiction.
I know a few of my friends aren’t yet making use of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, so I thought I’d write a little post to help drag them into the 21st century. Even a programmer friend of mine, a technically-savvy individual, is still using bookmarks for his news sites and comics. Bookmarks! How embarrassing!
If you frequent more than three websites, you should really be using RSS feeds. For those who haven’t heard of it, RSS allows websites to publish content to feeds that can be monitored for updates by feed readers (aggregators). If this seems confusing, don’t worry - you don’t really need to know how it works, just how to use it.
As an example, if you add looselogic.com to your feed reader, every time I write a weblog post it will automatically display in your reader as an unread entry. Once you’ve finished reading it, you can mark it as being read, much like you would within an e-mail client.
The first decision you need to make when choosing a feed reader is whether to use a web application or a local application. I prefer to use a web application for this, since you can access it from any computer and keep your settings. With a web application, if you mark everything in your feed reader as read at home, when you check it at work those entries will still be read. If you use a local application, you’ll have to install it on each computer you want to use, and they won’t be synchronized with each other.
The two web applications I’ve used are Bloglines and Google Reader. I started with Bloglines and recently moved over to Google to give it a try. Both applications are great, but I like how Google only marks the posts you’ve scrolled over as read, where as Bloglines will mark the entire feed as read as soon as you click on it. Luckily, you can export your feeds, with any directories you’ve created, into an OPML file that can be imported into other readers, so trying a few different applications is fairly painless.
Below I’ve listed how I’ve set up my RSS feeds, to give a better idea of their utility.
Announcements
Feeds of news releases from various companies.
Comics
The web comics I read. Most websites these days have both their comics and their news postings on the same feed.
Cooking
Cooking-related feeds. Mainly food weblogs that post recipes every now and then.
News feeds from gaming sites. Gaming news, reviews, announcements, trailers, demos, etc.
Literature
News feeds from, you guessed it, literature-themed sites. Random literature articles, book reviews, writing tips, that sort of thing.
Loose Logic
The feeds from this very site. One for the posts, just to monitor them, and one for the site’s comments.
Music
Music news and weblogs.
News
World and local news. Still trying to find the right sites to use for this, to get the most news with the least amount of spam. BBC News and CBC are two good starting points. Both sites offer a full list of feeds, from headlines and world news to local and special-topic news.
Personal
All of the non-commercial, variety weblogs I frequent and Twitter.
Personal Development
Do It Yourself, personal finance, and life hack sites. Any of that Getting Things Done, personal development hogwash.
I wouldn’t typically have the time to read everything listed here. I’ve often, in the past, set up a similar schema using bookmarks, but it was just too cumbersome to browse through all of these websites once a day. Since setting them up using RSS feeds, it’s a breeze. I check it a few times a day, read everything that’s been updated, and I’m all caught up.
RSS feeds save me a lot of time, and I’m constantly finding more uses for them. If you subscribe to a useful feed that I haven’t mentioned, let me know!
Ashley MacIsaac - Wing-Stock
I know a few of my friends aren’t yet making use of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, so I thought I’d write a little post to help drag them into the 21st century. Even a programmer friend of mine, a technically-savvy individual, is still using bookmarks for his news sites and comics. Bookmarks! How embarrassing!
