12.21.2004

Good god, it's been ages!

Sorry 'bout that. I have no good explanations for my lack of participation and I'm not particularly interested in sharing the bad ones. Please forgive me if these seem a little on the brief side, but there's only one way to get back into the swing of things, so here goes...

Mark (one of my house/blog-mates) has been reading loads of stuff from Peter Suber's site. Peter was one of our Philosophy Prof's at Earlham College, and a particularly amazing one at that. He has an essay entitled "When we leave our desks" and it was originally a baccalaureate address given at Earlham in 1992. It generally works as a primer on Philosophy and specifically, for me anyway, as a kick in the pants.

My interest in politics has waned a little since about a month before the American election, but real life is always interesting. Since I constantly hear terrible things about what's going on in Iraq, I usually look forward to balancing it out with some optimistic news, Arthur Chrenkoff from the Wall Street Journal abides. This stuff from Spirit of America is pretty neat too.

Karla got me an IPod (20-gig style) for Christmas (we exchanged some gifts early), and I love it. I don't often listen to music through headphones and now hear what I've been missing. This morning I partook of some Magnetic Fields (69 Love Songs), Sufjan Stevens (Greetings from Michigan), and Neutral Milk Hotel (In the Aeroplane over the Sea). And it all has me thinking of splurging on one of these systems (or a variation thereof) from Apple. I have something like this at work, only a couple years old, and the things you can do from creating music, video, and doing photo editing is pretty amazing. Not that you can't do them on a PC, I've simply had much better luck with Mac's in this regard. Robert Rodriguez (another inspiring fella) is up to no good these days filming Sin City, using an HD camera and heavy post-production, but the main reason a filmmaker (especially one as notoriously penny-pinching and efficient as Rodriguez) can do this kind of thing is because of the crazy advances in technology from the past couple years. So it feels like time to either shit or get off the pot.

Oh and Joe, I found this one from Oxblog for you regarding the utility of school.

Ahhh... that's better.

UPDATE: Here's another link, with folks talking about making college mandatory?

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