Archive for blog
July 25, 2008 at 7:40 am · tag/s : blog, death, melbourne, money, people
we live here - the tree on the left is gone now. so is the old weird guy in the flat underneath us. i saw what must have been his body lying on the couch through his window as i walked past one day.
he had just built an elaborate construction for growing tomatoes in the tiny square of green outside his window with much banging and smoking. he smoked like a trooper. you never saw him without a cigarette in his mouth. the smell that came from the flat was incredible. we called him mr.stinky.
one day they came along and delivered two large skips and started throwing all his stuff into them. now the place has been renovated and they want $320 a week for it. this is the real estate agent’s photograph which shows the front of the building. mr.stinky’s flat is at the back. some good looking tomatoes gradually ripened, but no one was game to pick them.
July 16, 2008 at 8:20 pm · tag/s : blog, mp3
wordpress 2.6 is out and features a tumblr-like bookmarklet and youngmosstongue has the first album by legendary new zealand band the verlaines Hallelujah All The Way Home as well as bucketloads of other good stuff
July 7, 2008 at 8:09 pm · tag/s : blog, doubt, life, melbourne, money, people
it is exactly the sort of day when you have every right to be miserable and/or worried. what with the petrol prices and the drought and the interest rates and the cost of housing and drug queen roberta williams turns cover girl.
my appointment with the dental hygienist in outer western mongolia is actually with the aptly named dr.goldberg who’s talent is not cleaning teeth but wearing a worried expression after he has looked in your mouth and poked around a bit. he tries to sell me thirty thousand dollars worth of dental work.
all of a sudden it is a bad day. not that i wasn’t expecting it, nor was i fooled by its auspicious beginning.
it starts raining. i have a bad coffee in a cafe. for no apparent reason they prop the door open with a brick and the cold air streams in. an old, old lady is munching on a sandwich. she looks worried too. she hides the uneaten half of her sandwich in a serviette.
but it is the meaninglessness of my activities and their inconsequential nature which is the cause of my misery today.
July 2, 2008 at 10:10 am · tag/s : blog, software
although i never really abandoned it, i have recently moved back to macjournal after working with devonthink for half a year. the new version macjournal 5 has some of the same features as devonthink, and is much cheaper and leaner. this is useful for me since i work exclusively on pre-intel macs with tiger and i have only 1gb of ram in my ibook. devonthink demands oodles of ram. hopefully macjournal 5 won’t prove equally demanding!
when the fabled devonthink 2 is released, if ever, i might have another go with it, but i think it is a little too ambitious for its own good, at least in the pro version which you have to use if you want to have more than one database. macjournal now also allows multiple database, (which it calls ‘documents’). this is great if you don’t need to access all of your data all of the time. mj5 also introduces smart folders (or journals) and status, flagging, tagging, priority and rating options for each entry. most importantly it allows you to import any sort of file and view or launch it from within mj. you can also open and edit a file or entry in a separate window and have different windows open at any one time. there is also a liveword count.
under the hood things are also much improved : you can just double click on one of your macjournal data files to open it, and the single huge unwieldy database is a thing of the past. unless they are encoded, files are just saved as rtf or rtfd and can be accessed externally from the macjournal application. without a doubt this would also improve .mac synching which was so horrible in macjournal 4. as i finally gave up on my .mac account at the beginning of the year i have no way of testing this but i will report on my tests using a webdav server and ben rister’s synk in an update to this post later, if anyone is interested.
of course being able to post directly to your blog as i am doing with this post, and downloading and editing all your existing posts from within mj is one of the crucial features which makes this software so useful. last but not least, the personalized support provided by the developer dan schimpf is also brilliant.
wishlist : although i haven’t got one (yet!) obviously iphone syncing is a must. also it would be nice to be able to link to journals and entries in different documents and have mj open them if necessary and to be able to change the status labels. smarter smart journals? a ‘today’ smart journal? tumblr support? (is coming dan says)
but it’s good to be back!
May 23, 2008 at 2:14 pm · tag/s : blog
so yeah. well see tumblr is this other blogging thing that occupies a space somewhere between your twitter and delicious and flickr and google reader shared items page and your own perfectly good blog but although you are always posting things up here and there, good serious blogging is hard and you are busy and then you discover tumblr. everything you post anywhere in one flat file, and the ability to make smallish but bigger than twitter posts. and so one morning you wake up and you think about just replacing all your websites with this one. for a while anyway. and : all your other blogs and link sites and other blah are still online if people really want to find them. but you don’t actually do it. do you? not yet anyway …
April 19, 2008 at 12:46 pm · tag/s : art, blog, death, doubt, loss, people, reading, writing
a much more engaging and humble piece by alex james in the independent about the suicide of his friend angus fairhurst (4.10.1966 - 29.3.2008) than the annoying self-serving piece by tracy emin which i linked some time ago to in ephemeral.
unlike his close friends damien hirst and sarah lucas, fairhurst was full of doubt. a few weeks ago he went alone to scotland and “with a ladder and a rope that he’d handwoven in silk, climbed the ladder and hanged himself in a meticulously planned grisly piece of theatre.”
April 9, 2008 at 8:21 am · tag/s : australia, blog, blogs, melbourne, reading
letter to the editor
I love clocks, in fact I have 17 of them. But what a bore, having to get up at 2am to put them all back an hour. I mean, couldn’t they let us put them back at 10pm as we go to bed.
- Doug Jacques,
Nambucca Heads.
ha ha ha … doug : you are a genius. marieke hardy thought you were serious.
but then she is not very smart.
and she is annoying.
and she has a stupid haircut.
and her blog sucks.
March 27, 2008 at 8:08 pm · tag/s : blog, holocaust, reading, text, writing
Published in 1975, Charles Reznikoff’s book-length poem Holocaust is a collage of witness testimonies from the Nuremberg Military Tribunal and the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.
“By using the language of others he attends to the “object” of genocide without imaginative or philosophical flourish, and by reciting it again in his own rhythm he becomes a second witness to its truth. Ultimately, the reader responds not to the poet but to the testimony itself.” writes Kathryn Crim in the Boston Review.
read more »
October 26, 2007 at 11:51 am · tag/s : blog, people, web, writing
Here is an interview with web guru Mark Frauenfelder, blogger, Wired editor, writer and publisher of bOiNG bOiNG, from Michael Bank’s forthcoming book, Blogging Heroes (Wiley 2007). He is also the author of one of the fullest, most unreserved and unconditional public apologies it is possible to imagine : An apology to Ursula K Le Guin … Last I heard it hadn’t worked : Ursula is still cranky. Jeez. What does a bloke have to do?
October 3, 2007 at 4:48 pm · tag/s : blog, loss, mp3, music
elsewhere i am writing on loss and i have started a list there of all the things i’ve lost - at three thirty this morning i woke up remembering another item to add to the list : the patti smith piss factory single on the original mer label (and the stanley single by snatch!) were in that box of singles i sold for $100 at newtown markets when i was a desperate student in the late eighties … damn! i wonder how much that would be worth now … and also : i love that song … i lie there for about half an hour thinking about it in the dark night … the original piss factory single on the mer label … bought by me in 1976 … in the rough trade shop in london …
:( …
i no longer have it … damn damn damn!!
ah well … but i was there … priceless … as the credit card ads say
and i can listen to the song anytime i want
and there are the lyrics
(elsewhere i have written - as have others - about why patti smith mattered)
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