Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/10/25/yelp-2/
My take on Yelp:
When it comes to social networking, I prefer to interact with articulate people. Grammar is one benchmark. Style and panache go a long way too. Passion is another element of good writing. So, yeah, Yelpers will tend to embody some combination of erudition, style, panache, and passion, and that stuff makes me hot!
I like that Yelp is not MySpace. There’s a “cover charge” here and that is comfort with written self-expression.
-danny
Of course, this is my personal view. I am not speaking for my employer.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/10/12/apple-shipping/
So, I’m in San Francisco, and Apple HQ is just a ways down the peninsula. So, what happens when you order a laptop through their store? It ships from the factory in China to the Philipines, and then to Alaska. Well, Philipines seems a bit of a detour, and Alaska seems a bit more indirect, but then it is flown to Indiana where it is inspected by customs. From Indianapolis it is a straight shot to San Francisco.
On the one hand I am enchanted by the globe-trotting nature of the Macintosh computer. On the other hand, I wonder how much jet fuel is being wasted by flying products from hub to hub to hub to hub in this manner. Maybe fossil fuel is still too cheap.
3 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/10/11/marriage-i-we/
There’s a talk thread on Yelp about Cohabitation. Marla S made a good point, which I think is good to bear in mind if one aspires to cohabitate and marry.
The gist of it is: when you are living together, you’re thinking about I: “Can I live with this person?” But for a healthy marriage, you need to be intent on adapting your life to your relationship with your partner: you need to be thinking about we: “Can we realize our common dreams?” There’s a difference that should be considered when moving from cohabitation to marriage.
It is the difference in mind-set, I think, moving from being a self-centered adult to a founding member of a new family, that gets you in practice for being a parent.
I think a lot of people must get tripped up, since becoming an adult is about moving from dependency to being independent, and being married and starting a family is about moving from independence to interdependence. (And then having kids adds never getting enough sleep, changing diapers and the occasional trip to the emergency room.)Â It takes a lot of character building and revision, just when you thought you had it all figured out . . . a lot of folks I know seem content to stay at “adult” and are reluctant to venture much further.
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/10/10/mac-a-la-mode/
I drove down to Mountain View yesterday and met Brian and Jessica for dinner. I also picked up the remote control for the TV Brian gifted us last year. He gave me another remote for the DVD player he also gave me last year, and then there was another TV remote that was nearly identical.
We puzzled a bit, and then I realized that this other TV remote was for a TV I bought years earlier, and had traded to Joe for the TiVo he had won. Joe had lived with Brian prior to my living with Brian, and when he moved he must have forgotten his remote.
Later that night, I was talking to Mike, who has the TiVo that I traded to Joe, which I gave to Mike when I went to travel, since Brian didn’t want it. Mike upgraded the TiVo, and has another connected to the satellite, would I like my old TiVo back, in all its upgraded glory? Not really, though I asked if he might want my car, since I never drive it any more, and could perhaps do without, but due to sentimentality, I would rather “keep it in the family.” (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/09/22/makeout-tips-eyeglasses/
So, I been distracted this morning by a talk thread on Yelp. It turns out that guys make passes at girls who wear glasses after all, and at least among the Yelpers, a nice pair of eyeglasses is a total turn-on. But what happens when you have successfully flirted and are ready for some lip action? How do you negotiate interfering eyewear without making a spectacle of your affection? Well, as a long-time wearer, here’s my tips for making out with eyeglasses:
TIP: If you wanna make out, TAKE YOUR GLASSES OFF!
TIP: If you’re having a nice evening with a date who wears glasses, and then you notice they’ve taken their glasses off, it is maybe time to gracefully excuse yourself, or get ready for some HOT.
TIP: If your date is going well and you want to get them “in the mood” you could try sliding their eyeglasses off, and setting them somewhere safe, and then bringing your face close to theirs to stare into their eyes, your mouth slightly agape as your eyes wonder intently at this newfound intimacy . . .
TIP: DO NOT LAY THEM ON THE BED. I testify from personal experience that they can get squished and then your eyeglasses are a tragic victim of your own romantic success.
5 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/09/11/wired-911-begat-the-blog/
Curse your RSS Feeds, Gmail, for linking me to this spastic hyperbole:
When the world changed on Sept. 11, 2001, the web changed with it.
While phone networks and big news sites struggled to cope with heavy traffic, many survivors and spectators turned to online journals to share feelings, get information or detail their whereabouts. It was raw, emotional and new — and many commentators now remember it as a key moment in the birth of the blog.
“If Americans learned anything from the surprise mass-murder perpetrated on 9/11, it was that they could express their feelings honestly on the Internet.”
I try not to be a cynical, jaded, old man, but please . . . its schlocky writing like that that makes me want to invade foreign countries, just so we can bring back the draft so that instead of talking about the contribution that Muhamed Atta made to the blogosphere, a few talentless hacks might be torn from their comfort zone and have some life to share with us.
Don’t mind me, I’m just venting my spleen. After all, blogging about September 11 is “raw, emotional and new.” You’re witnessing a re-enactment of Internet History!
2 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/09/10/romancing-myself/
At Church, this morning, was read the following poem, which resonated with current life activity:
Love After Love
Derek Walcott
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
On Labor Day I took myself out on a date: we went to Peet’s, then had some pizza, and then popcorn and soda while watching the new Woody Allen movie at the local theater. “I was born in the Hebrew faith, but when I got older I converted to Narcissism,” said Woody. (more…)
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/09/09/divorce-and-taxes/
One interesting thing about getting divorced in California is that you have to wait six months after filing for a Joint Petition for Summary Dissolution of Marriage, before you can petition for final judgement. Yup, it takes six months to get a divorce. “You’d think they’d make you wait six months before getting married,” was Grandma’s response.
This leaves open questions as to what constitutes Community Property, and filing taxes. Answers I have not easily found online. A bit of “friendly advice” I got from someone is that Community Property ends at separation. As far as filing taxes, I found another bit of advice:
You are considered unmarried if you were legally separated on December 31 or if your spouse did not live in your home for the last six months of the year.
So, let us say your spouse seperates from you in April, files in July, and you are still legally married until January. As best I can tell, you file separately, and the assets your acquire later in the year are yours.
Of course, I am neither a lawyer nor an accountant.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/09/06/serial-console-woes/
So, I’m setting up a box. I need to test different filesystem configurations, which will involve a lot of boot-configure-install-post-install-benchmark cycles. We have a nice network boot infrastructure, but getting serial booting to work is always fun. Today I found that the vendor has set up BIOS “remote access” to COM2. Funny thing, the box only has one serial port! So, I set that to COM1, and configure console redirection only up to the boot loader, tell the bootloader that I want text console=ttyS0 and we’re in business!
But man, if SuSE’s YaST aint a bloody mess when it downgrades to text on a serial port:
What you don’t see here is the constant slow screen-redraw, constant pressing control-L. This is what it looks like at a good moment!
I think I understand why. I mean, I would think that Linux developers would take serial consoles and text mode to heart. After all, that’s the whole point, right? But that’s how I think, because I manage dozens of servers at a time, remote, and all my boxes are rack-mount jobbies with lots o’ fans and nobody wants to be in the same room.
But the developers who hack on Linux probably aren’t hard-core SysAdmins. Their dev system is some beat-up old hardware sitting near their desk, wired up to a spare VGA monitor, so yeah, text mode is kind of an afterthought. Especially given the pain in the butt that setting up serial consoles can be!
2 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/09/05/popularity-pays/
Says Paul Graham:
Of course you have to have a business model eventually. But experience so far suggests that figuring out how to make money from something popular is a lot easier than making something popular.
I get a lot of criticism for telling founders to focus first on making something great, instead of worrying about how to make money. And yet that is exactly what Google did. And Apple, for that matter. You’d think examples like that would be enough to convince people.
Is this another Bubble? I don’t think so, not so far. There may be a lot of lame startups being started, but that’s not the definition of a bubble. A bubble is when a lot of money is being invested in lame startups, and that’s not happening yet. The reason so many new startups are getting started is that the cost has gone down, not that funding has gone up.
This is one reason I’m optimistic about my present employer: we’ve got something that is proving to be very popular. We’ve got a good thing going such that we can become hugely popular, and if we can capitalize on that even a little bit, we should be doing alright.
As to whether this is the mentality that brought us the Bubble, I think the thing to watch out for is Irrational Exuberence, and over-reaching. Popular or not, VC-backed or not, I haven’t heard any of that since the bust. I’d like to think that we of the Silicon Valley have Gotten Over Ourselves a bit–our experiments, called “startups”–have some sense of scope, and few companies outside of Microsoft or Google have barrels of F-U money to throw around. We’re no longer surrounded by IPO-funded Mercedeses and BMWs, and nobody I know is paying $2,000/mo rent. I hope we retain this sense of sensibility.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/09/01/quotidian/
A few cool quotes Grandma forwarded to me. This I’d say “lost . . . and found:”
It’s true that we don’t know what we’ve got until we lose it,
But it’s also true that we don’t know
What we’ve been missing until it arrives.
I have felt both ways about my wife, and now I’m looking forward to discovering what else I have been missing.
I recall the scene from “Dances With Wolves” where the one guy tells Dunbar that he was good friends with Stands With a Fist’s deceased husband, and he at first resented Dunbar, but now he thinks that maybe his friend “left” because he knew Dunbar would come along.
Then, “If you want to be happy for the rest of your life . . .”
Don’t go for looks; they can deceive.
Don’t go for wealth; even that fades away.
Go for someone who makes you smile
Because it takes only a smile to make a dark day seem bright.
Find the one that makes your heart smile.
And then, ask a optimist:
The happiest of people
Don’t necessarily have the best of everything;
They just make the most of everything that comes along their way.
There have been times when I was maybe more bi-polar, and people would ask, “why are you so happy all the time?” And I would answer “Because it beats being sad!”
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/08/27/sharing-paradox/
When you are just trying to enjoy the moment, and not start a relationship, you are much freer in sharing yourself. This tends to be when you fall in love despite yourself.
When you are trying to pull off a relationship, you are more inhibited. You take some care in how and what you reveal so as not to scare off the other person. Then you do an impaired job of being present in the relationship.
You do best, in my opinion, when you shrug off that inhibition, and share yourself freely, but considerately. The best medium, I think, is when you are broaching some potentially sensitive topic and ask your partner if they are comfortable about it and they can find it in themselves to be comfortable, because they dig you, they are coming to accept you for who you are, and not for who you present yourself to be.
And of course, in order to best be accepting of another person’s sharing, you’ll have to be accepting of what you know about yourself. Love starts in your own heart.
“Be a brilliant soul
Sparkling in the galaxy
While walking on Earth.”
And also, be polite. If you are an interesting cat, there can be a lot to take in. Don’t hold back on the sharing, but leave enough time for listening to appreciate how much sharing your partner can digest in a sitting. That is a good opportunity to shift gears, shut up, and listen. Especially for us guys, listening is a skill that takes a bit of cultivation.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/08/25/recycling-baggage/
Just after we moved to the new place in Walnut Creek, the marriage started falling apart. Throughout the crisis my attention was focused on that, and a lot of daily life stuff just stopped completely. Here’s the pile of unopened bills, some with yellow forwarding stickers from March. The pile in the foreground is in the recycling, the background pile are keepers.
Since I started the new job, all bills are caught up, and the credit cards are all paid off for the first time in a couple of years. I don’t want to go back and keep my records straight for the last half year, as it would be too painful. I’m giving my financial records a “fresh ‘start over'” in Quicken.
This picture doesn’t make me sad or anything, but kind of glad to be paring things down and moving along. The pile just struck me as symbolic, so I self-indulgently snapped a picture to share.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/08/21/nice-girls/
Anna, thanks for the link.
This ode rocks:
I’ve read the tribute to the nice guys; this is my response.
This is my tribute to the nice girls. To the nice girls who are overlooked, who become friends and nothing more, who spend hours fixating upon their looks and their personalities and their actions because it must be they that are doing something wrong. This is for the girls who don’t give it up on the first date, who don’t want to play mind games, who provide a comforting hug and a supportive audience for a story they’ve heard a thousand times. This is for the girls who understand that they aren’t perfect and that the guys they’re interested in aren’t either, for the girls who flirt and laugh and worry and obsess over the slightest glance, whisper, touch, because somehow they are able to keep alive that hope that maybe… maybe this time he’ll have understood. This is an homage to the girls who laugh loud and often, who are comfortable in skirts and sweats and combat boots, who care more than they should for guys who don’t deserve their attention. This is for those girls who have been in the trenches, who have watched other girls time and time again fake up and make up and fuck up the guys in their lives without saying a word. This is for the girls who have been there from the beginning and have heard the trite words of advice, from “there are plenty of fish in the sea,” to “time heals all wounds.” This is to honor those girls who know that guys are just as scared as they are, who know that they deserve better, who are seeking to find it.
(Read the whole dang thing.)
Reads a bit like “Howl . . .”
I think that one thing that gets a lot of us derailed is the whole consumerism aspect of modern life. It is suspiciously weird when you’re “shopping around” for someone to walk up to you with their heart on their sleeve and be real. At best, its too-good-to-be-true. “What’s the catch?” And, often enough, you’re not that interested, because you’ve gotten used to being attracted to people who are more screwy than this.
And I think that’s how we end up with “nice guys” and “nice girls” having such a hard time getting anywhere. Everyone’s after the bling . . .
I, on the other hand, for the time being, get to let go of my love and my anger, such that I can kind of observe from the sidelines and try not to get overly-fixated on this game. Ahhh, delicious abstraction! Hopefully I can keep my consciousness with me as I move along with life. Of course, life itself never gives you a “break” . . . we keep it interesting over here.
2 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/08/14/quotes-quotes-quotes/
While waiting on a file transfer, perhaps I can share a variety of quotes that have caught my mind lately.
I attended San Francisco’s Unitarian Universalist church for the first time this Sunday. One of the hymns has some lyrics which I dug:
We’ll be a land building up ancient cities,
Raising up devastations from old;
Restoring ruins of generations.
Oh, we’ll build a land of people so bold.
Barabara Zanotti
“We’ll Build a Land”
Then, several quotes from the August, 2006 issue of The Sun, dealing mostly with romantic relationships. (A subject especially near and dear to my heart this year.)
It remains inexplicable to me that we can finally become happy again after someone we love has died. Yet there I stood at the end of my bed, a scant four years out, feeling happy. Was this not betrayal? It does not help to say that the dead are gone and do not care. The problem of grief is never with them; it is with us, with those who remain. Like the bed we lie in, it is ours.
Susan Carol Hauser
“The Marriage Bed”
And a bunch of “Sunbeams” starting with something light-yet-presidential: (more…)
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