apple juice

I’ve been reflecting on the past year’s experiences, and I have a favorites list of sorts to share with you:

• Favorite Book: Audacity of Hope – Barack Obama
• Favorite Album: Veneer – Jose Gonzalez
• Favorite Movie: Little Miss Sunshine
• Favorite Video Game: Guitar Hero
• Favorite Restaurant: Birchwood Cafe
• Favorite Coffee Shop: Soverign Grounds
• Favorite Whoops Moment: Crashing into a railing on the stone arch bridge, flipping over and breaking my collarbone. Whoops!
• Most awkward realization of growing older: Our 10 year high school reunion

My long-time readers of this site will have noticed a decrease in the amount of activity on this site in the past 6 months. I started a new job this summer, and for a variety of reasons, posting to my site has been pushed lower and lower on the priority scale.

Time, obviously, has been a factor. Whereas I used to have a more regular flow in terms of productivity and I could tune into a website or read about the latest political or science news for a few minutes, my new environment is such that instead of 1 or two projects… now there are 25 different things on my whiteboard. Instead of answering to just a few people, there are hundreds of people that may be knocking on my door at any time. It is very exciting, it fits my personality, and it doesn’t leave too much time for browse and comment activities.

The main reason, though, is more difficult. Sub-conciously, I’ve been stuck the past few months trying to figure out how this site plays into my life. What outlet does this serve? If it’s to tell funny stories, scream frustrations about Bush, and relate the weird things that I see in the world (like the lady I saw yesterday with a leaf blower, trying to clean off her sidewalk, but really just blowing snow all over the freaking place)… Well, a lot of those stories now need to pass through a filter, and I’m very conscious of that.

Luckily, I had a minor revelation yesterday. The tagline of this site is “A blinding flash of the obvious”, and this would fit right in. Yesterday, I was at a workshop with Tim Wilson, who is the technology integration specialist at the Hopkins schools. The topic of the workshop was the “read/write web”– blogs, wikis, etc, and how these technologies fit into education.

It was a great workshop. I didn’t learn any new technologies exactly, but I went in with the hope that I would learn a bit about how to talk about these exciting things, get pumped up a bit and forget about all the little things that you can get bogged down in. Kind of a recharge outside of the daily bubble… and I got that. I think instead of seeing a slow decline in the amount of things I talk about, you’ll begin to see a couple of new categories show up… things that I work with on a daily basis now. There will still be geeky little posts about my car or politics or some new CD I got, but there will be some new things as well.

Anyways, why am I writing all this? Like I said way back at the beginning, this site is really just for me. The fact that other people read it is an added bonus.

Painting, originally uploaded by ajc3.

I’ve been painting the living room tonight, what do you think?

Did you know I had a nascent career in photography? Neither did I! I give thanks to Flickr, and the creative commons license, because I am enjoying 2 seconds of internet fame.

American Public Media’s Marketplace show did a story about green energy, and they used a picture of mine on the web page about the story!

A couple months ago, I took a picture of the BioDiesel tank at the Apple Valley Marathon, posted it to flickr, and tagged it with ‘biodiesel’.

Fast forward to this afternoon, and I received an email from the New Media Director at APR. It said: Thanks for using creative commons, we used a picture of yours, here’s the link back to the story we used it in– which is exactly what is supposed to happen.

One other funny thing about this photo. I took it with my cameraphone! Yep, all 352×288 pixels are living it up! (My digital camera on the other hand, takes something on the order of 2500×1800 pixels, quite a difference in quality)

Anyways, I think it’s pretty cool, check it out, and listen to the story!

I’m upset that I’m just hearing this now, and unable to go check out the store one last time, but it appears that Let It Be Records has closed its doors.

I used make trips down Nicollet mall weekly when I was working downtown. I’d spend my lunch hour browsing the stacks of CDs and vinyl. Nowadays, I’m not in that area as much and have been visiting the Electric Fetus, or my local shop, Roadrunner Records.

But it’s a sad loss, they were a fixture downtown. Here’s hoping something cool will occupy that space in the future.

Update: 6/24/2005 Looks like it’s true, and the former Let It Be property will be turn into some condos. Story here.

Hollywood Sign, originally uploaded by ajc3.

The hollywood sign is behind me, if you can see it through the ‘june gloom’.

Absolutely, Power Corrupts

No, not an article about Tom Delay. (I’m soooo funnny)

Mark Teahen is no exception. This odd swing of his — the reason he’s a good hitter but not a power hitter — has a rich provenance. There was nothing to do in Yucaipa except play baseball — or, at any rate, nothing else he wanted to do. Every afternoon he and his two brothers would go out into the backyard for a game of Wiffle ball. Right field — the natural power zone for a left hander like Teahen — ended at the back of the house. If you hit the ball on the roof, it got stuck in the gutter, so the boys declared what would have normally been a home run an out. It was left field, a low brick wall, that tempted the hitter. Reach out over the plate and serve the ball into left field, and you had yourself a home run. Mark and his older brother Matt, both lefties, developed an extreme tendency to go the other way, to try to hit the ball over the left-field wall. Only his younger brother, Mick, the lone righty, learned to pull the ball and hit with power.

A great article about two baseball players with different swings and skills in the midst of steriods and the rise of the power hitter in Major League Baseball.

It’s the paragraph I quoted that I like the most, though. It reminds me of playing baseball with my brother and our friends in the various front and backyards of our hometown. You could never pull it because that meant you would lose the ball in the woods, and whatever you do, don’t miss! A miss meant a mark on the garage door and an angry parent!

So, (cue music) although I wasn’t ever a great baseball player, it’s funny how those things shape you, your swing, your skills. I didn’t strike out too much, and I liked slapping line drives where people weren’t standing. I never hit a homerun at any level of baseball. But the one time I really crushed it, I just stood there like and idiot and watched it… “where the heck did that come from?” It bounced off the wall in left center and I only got a single because I only took 2 steps out of the batters box before I stopped to watch. Oh well!