weblog.masukomi.org

The Hi-Per Hanger from Black And Grey

\

Let’s get this out of the way right off-the-bat. This, is a seventy dollar hanger. Technically it’s $30.95-$72.95 + shipping, and that is a pretty hard price-tag to swallow for a hanger. But, the real question is “is it worth it?” I’m asking from a purely practical perspective. The answer, as far as I’m concerned, is a whole hearted YES! If mine were stolen today I would go to the web site tomorrow and buy another one without hesitation.

A variation on my Simple Checklist Sheet.

The Macro Micro Checklist allows you to maintain a list of key deliverables, fine grained tasks, and a quick calendar of highlights for the upcoming month.

In the top left you’ve got a list of Key Deliverables. These are the high-level tasks / projects you’ve got on your plate. They may be personal things like “File Taxes” or work based things like “Deliver Example.com’s new logo”. There’s a faint dashed box you can either ignore or make a checkbox out of, and then check off the deliverable when you’ve completed it. If one of them needs to be brought to someone’s attention, needs followup, or whatever, you can just fill in the exclamation point at the end of the line.

Almost five years ago I wrote a self organizing todo-list application. It was ugly, but worked really well. Unfortunately for me, I really prefer writing my todo lists out on paper. I like the simplicity of it, ideas just flow out through my pen. I can make notes and draw little arrows connecting things. And, I can make really satisfying check-marks in boxes when I’ve finished something.

Paper’s just the right medium for me, and I know I’m not the only one. So, I created a paper version of that self organizing todo list, and every few months I find some little thing I can do to improve it. Now I’ve got three different forms which I’ll cover below:

Some of you may remember that I was working on creating my own language. I wrote a creation myth in it a little over a year ago, and with the exception of a few months, I’ve been trying to make daily diary entries in it as a way of not only recording my life but practicing my language.

I didn’t create this for any grandiose reason. I simply wanted a language that would express the way I think. I wanted to play with language itself and learn more about it. And, I wanted to learn a new language. But I’m fairly honest with myself about what I can, and will, realistically accomplish. I could learn a natural language no problem, except for the lack of anyone to speak it with. More importantly, natural languages are external things. Someone else created them. The rules are someone else’s, and to speak it correctly you have to learn, and abide by those rules. But, they’re all just abstract foreign things. They’re not anything you’ve grown up with (at least not the languages I’m interested in), or anything that conforms to your brain’s view of the world. And without someone else to speak it with, it’s a lot like rote memorization. You memorize their words, their rules, and just accept them. And free writing in a natural language before you really understand the rules can lead to some very bad habits based on misunderstandings, and the words you have to look up seem fairly random. It doesn’t make a lot of sense why a word sounds the way it does, or why it means such different things¹. Reading from books isn’t very doable either until you’ve built up a fairly decent vocabulary.

In WebBikeWorld’s review of the HJC IS-16 helmet they pondered why there was Velcro on the inside of the chin-bar. A commenter suggested that maybe it was for a Respro Foggy. Curious as to what one was I Googled their site and was amazed at the simple brilliance of it. There is nothing fancy here. It’s just one of those head-slappingly obvious ideas that makes you wonder why no-one else has been making these.

There are a number of people out there who have expressed an interest in learning Na’vi (the language spoken by the Omatikaya in Avatar ) and are getting verbally shat upon by the communities they dare to mention this in. And, I can understand the knee-jerk reaction that it’s silly to learn a language from a semi-random piece of popular fiction. But, I can also think beyond that.

Learning a language, any language, is a remarkable thing, especially in American society, and if you think about it, there is nothing more or less valid about a language that was created for a movie. Does it really matter how a language came to be? The fact is that it is a legitimate and speakable language. Koreans write in Hangul, a writing system that Sejong the Great made up from scratch less than 600 years ago. They didn’t need a writing system, they were getting by with Chinese characters. It just so happens that the Korean people seemed to agree they deserved their own writing system, so they switched, but it was no more a “real” writing system than any of the ones Tolkien created for his languages. There are two million Esperanto speakers, and maybe ten million who have studied it. It’s a conlang (constructed language) just like Elvish and Na’vi, the only difference being that it was created to bring world peace through improved communication instead of just being created for the sheer love of language.

Over on Sociological Images Lisa evaluates Avatar(spoiler alert) Unfortunately, she’s got an agenda, and is seeing what she wants to see instead of what’s actually there.

First off, she says that the Na’vi “… are, in short, the stereotypical “noble savage.” Which as I stated in my review of Avatar, is simply false.

The Na’vi are never portrayed in the classic sense of “noble savage”. They are noble yes, but your classic “noble savage” (at least as I’ve seen it) is also, “savage”, “primitive”, and simply “doesn’t know better.” You will find none of that in this film. The Na’vi are simply an indigenous people with simpler technology than ours…

Every web page on the internet has an URL that is a unique address (that’s why it goes in the “address” bar), and in the beginning everyone used that. But early e-mail clients kinda sucked, and some of the current ones still do, and those addresses were so long they’d wrap, or had some funky characters in them that the e-mail client wasn’t expecting, and so it’d break the URL in such a way that you’d have to copy and paste both parts of it into the address bar instead of just clicking on it.

I didn’t plan to write this.

I just can’t get it out of my head.

Despite the hype, despite my fear of having expectations set too high, Avatar has blown me away.

You’ve probably heard people talking about how incredible the CGI is, and it is. But that’s not important. What’s important, is that James Cameron has created a lush and beautiful world that is utterly believable. You will hear that the plot is fairly simple, even predictable. But, that’s not important either. What’s important is that you enjoy every moment of it. What’s important, is that you care about characters, and when over one hundred and fifty minutes have gone by, you just want to see it all over again. It simply does not matter that the core story arc has been used time and again. Storytellers keep using it because it’s a works, and works well.

There was a young girl, at that age when puberty hasn’t quite reached her, and everything hasn’t changed. I watched her through the window of the subway train as she buried her face into her fathers chest and hid from the cold. He was talking with another man his age and gesturing with his arms. After a moment she turned around, reached up, and put her hands around his forearms. Not to interfere. Just, to be let them hang, to touch him as he continued talking and gesturing.