At the end of 2011, within my first-degree family circle I’m the only one who’s in his thirties. My first cousins are all in their forties and fifties, and the next generation (the first-once-removed) ranges from zero (born today, even) to twenty-six.
I’m an island.
A few weeks (months? Months!) ago I wrote a philosophy post, over at Communikitchen, with my three tips for successful blogging. I didn’t think it was exhaustive by any means, only a good starting point.
Was it last year that Mark Zuckerberg introduced the new Facebook message system? Back then, I was so interested I barely remember it happened. What I do remember is that this new system was supposed to be the cat’s pajamas when it came to function and desirability. Quicker than e-mail (yet compatible with it), as informal as text messages (yet, supposedly, cheaper, because tied to the data plan—there would be much to discuss about this), and overall better because centralized within the Facebook experience.
A contributor that will remain anonymous sent me this brilliant piece of corporate comedy. I’m publishing it as I received it—I just changed the names to preserve the involved party’s last shred of dignity.
Enjoy.
Now it sounds like an anachronism, especially considering how digitally oriented I am, but I always liked 45s. (I won’t mention what kinds of 45s I bought when I was a kid. Let’s just say I was a kid.) Recently I became reacquainted with Queen’s A Day at the Races, after years of never listening to it for reasons unknown.
This website has always been a field of experimentation, which hasn’t always had a positive effect on the way it looked, worked, or on the freshness and interestingness of its content. In the past few months I’ve tried to come up with ideas on how to make it better, by keeping eyes and ears open to what content-conscious designers were doing. I’ve been especially inspired by Craig Mod’s journal, which is by design more a collection of essays than a blog.
Now that I’m one of the beta testers of The Soulmen’s new creation, Daedalus—the writing app for the iPad I’m using to write this post—I find myself in a bit of a pickle. The reason is that I have too many writing tools, and still get way too little writing done.1
Not entirely true: between project briefs and project notes, memos for clients, and a certain number of tweets, I really can’t say I never write. ↩
Ten years ago I graduated from the University of Bologna. As a form of celebration, today I decided to copy the original video to my computer and extract one minute and twenty-two seconds of me trying to explain what made sense of my thesis. And repeating the word “musical” a lot. And moving my hands—I claim it’s because that way I could hide how shaky they were.
After waiting something like ten hours for my turn, after everything was over my vision seemed clearer, the air warmer, Bologna cleaner. I’d forgotten.
When I re-entered Facebook at the end of 2008, my intention was to use other services (Twitter above all) to funnel information into it, in order to minimize the time I’d spend on it. I’ve mostly succeeded, but even this low-investment approach has done nothing to improve my consideration of Facebook. I still think it feels like being in middle school. I’m not saying Twitter is necessarily better in that respect, but I find it a lot less aggravating, especially because it doesn’t want to gulp down every aspect of my life—digital and organic.
I’m realizing more and more how much I miss random walks when I’m at home, as opposed to when I’m traveling. And it’s not just the possible vacation time I’m missing. Of course I miss having nothing better to do than just walking with a cup of tea in my hands, but there is more to that: the mere idea of disengaging from more regular, desk-based work seems to boost my creativity. But the secret, I think, is to exploit this boost soon—possibly as soon as I get back to my apartment.