Many kudos to the Mozilla people for making FF 3 exponentially better on the mac than FF 2. Snappy, pretty, nifty new features, and an app that looks like it belongs on the mac, rejoice. There’s a small bit of bug fixing and cleanup left to be done, but it’s already outshining my other browsers. And since I regularly have 2-4 browsers open at once - Camino, Safari, Firefox, IE 7 & IE 6Â in Parallels - it’s great fun to find I’m spending most of my time in the new Firefox.
Heidi Anderson was my best friend in college for a year or two. We met in the year-long Foundations of Natural Science class at The Evergreen State College and were lab partners in the chemistry component. Her father, it turns out, was a nobel nominated geneticist, so I think you can guess who carried the weight in the lab. She was one of the best-read people I have ever met, was an extremely competent backpacker, had a great sense of humor and will be missed.
After we graduated from college we drifted apart. When I heard that she was missing (link), I couldn’t stop thinking about her and briefly posted here about the situation and was on the verge of doing a mass emailing when, alas, the worst fears came to pass (link).
I have been struck by the tone of the news articles on her - perhaps it’s just that I’ve never had something like this happen so close to my own life, but I feel like posting a defense of her person here. It’s amazing how a general line like ’she has a medical condition and needs medication’ can transform in the mind of the reader to something unstable or worse - Heidi had a chronic stomach ailment, no more.
Whatever the cause - accident or suicide, this is a sad end to a lovely person.
Via my friend Mel Favara. I’ll be reading in this series. The one I attended was super fun.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE THIRD INSTALLMENT OF THE 1,000 WORDS READING SERIES: THE FUTURE MAIDEN IN THE MIST, 7PM MONDAY, MARCH 3, 2008. FREE CONTACT: MEL FAVARA 971-506-3340, mel.Favara@gmail.com More info at 1000wordspdx.blogspot.com
In this innovative reading series, five participants each present 1,000 words of prose written for the occasion. Writers agree to produce 250 words per week for four weeks leading up to the reading; they are given a theme at the beginning (THE FUTURE, this time), and must include certain phrases and words in each weekly effort as capriciously assigned by the host. A stunning variety of fresh works result from the writers’ wildly divergent interpretations of the prompts, and the rapid-fire presentation of short pieces make for an entertaining reading. Reading:
Benjamin Parzybok: Ben founded Gumball Poetry, a literary journal published into gumball machines, co-founded Project Hamad which helped free Adel Hamad, a Guantanamo inmate, runs the treasure hunt/caper into the underbelly of the city known as Peachblow (via the Black Magic Insurance Agency), and runs a startup around walking(walkertracker.com). He has a novel, Couch, forthcoming from Small Beer Press in the fall of 2008. He lives with his wife, the writer Laura Moulton, and their two kids in Portland, OR.
Daniel Thomas: Now in the full bloom of manhood, Daniel embodies the wisdom and perspective of the formally trained philosopher, the earthy humility of the former junky, the vulnerability of the natural born aesthete, the taste and style of a foppish dandy and the inexplicable ownership of very strange purebred dog. For bread and wine, he builds houses with Hammer and Hand.
Jill Stukenberg: Fiction and nonfiction star Jill Stukenberg recently relocated to Portland from New Mexico, where she earned an MFA from New Mexico State University. She writes and teaches at Clark College and Clackamas Community College.
Series curator Mel Favara will also read. She teaches English and hosts other literary hybrid events in Portland. Her work has appeared in the Willamette Week, No Slander, Columbia Poetry Review, and in her zine, teen sleuth.
Special guest Matthew Hattie Hein, formerly of the band New Bad Things and currently performing all by his lonesome and teaching English all over town, will play the guitar and sing.
I’ve just had the third person tell me about a dream, unbeknownst to the others.
I wish people told me their dreams every day - sort of like that old hippy book, The Kin of Ata are Waiting for You. It didn’t hurt that in my friend David’s dream, I’d just inherited 400 million dollars. Apparently he was a bit confused why I refused to change my life very much. Phh. In your dreams, man!
I definitely need an official category for 400 million dollars.
I’m very happy to present to you my movie, Levin’s Bicycle.
Levin’s Bicycle originally was shown at the Filmed by Bike film festival in Portland, OR and Celluloid Cycles in Adelaide, Australia.
I’m writing four installments of 250 words each for Mel Favara’s 1000 Word Reading Series, along with 3 other writers.
The setup is this:
The theme is ‘The Future’
Each week we get our assignment, which includes four words we must use - this week they are: granular, montage, tablecloth, and spurn and one phrase: “And the thing I most fear may come to pass, that”
Assignments are due on Sunday night (or punishable by…?). It’s awesome fun writing under these kinds of bonds. Your story is half yours, yet at the same time you look for ways to wickedly foil the assigner - can I use all 4 words and the phrase in a single sentence? What if a dog bargs and the main character thinks it’s saying “Spurn! Spurn!” etc
If you are unfamiliar with the art of word counting, it’s a sort of addiction - however in writing novels I always count in the opposite direction. A 5,000 word day is a total blow-out that needs later the tender care of black licorice and bourbon to bring the brain back from the brink. For me, 1,000 - 1,500 words is a solid day’s work. If I hit 300-400 words only, they better be well done.
Trying to write 250 words is a tremendous challenge. I’m a long distance runner, not a sprinter, I guess. And so each week after we get our assignments I easily bang out 600 or 900 or 1200 words, and then I spend the rest of the week fretting and deleting and fretting and removing ideas and removing characters and jettisoning the garbage and so on.
Secondly, it’s my first all-out 100% science fiction attempt, and it’s a blast.
The reading will be at Maiden in the Mist, 639 SE Morrison St., Portland, OR in the first week or so of March. I’ll post date, etc. when it gets closer.
Unthinkingly is looking to start work on building a free, open web app to help CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture - organic farms that sell a share to a family, in essence) facilitate ordering, billing and member management.
“The basic use case comes from my mom : she doesn’t like very much lettuce in her box. Last year she got six heads of lettuce at a time. So ideally mom could just login and set her preference, pay her bill, update her address, give notice that she’s out of town for a month, etc. The farmer then knows exactly how many heads of lettuce to harvest, and can keep the rest in the ground until going to the market on Saturday.”
Most of the CSAs I’ve belonged to have a share box. When you pick up your share if there’s anything you don’t want you put it in the share box, then anyone else can browse that box for things they do want. It’s hard to beat the efficiency of this. However, there could be a lot of benefits to an app like this if you have a CSA where you pick up your share. A few things I think would be very interesting are:
seasonal recipe sharing - in my experience, you need a recipe to go through 40 tomatoes RIGHT NOW. Next week it might be something different. I love this kind of crash or adapt cooking. It reminds me a little of cooking via The Five Obstructions
A social community for the shares to help the farmers plan their crops well ahead of time
tools to help organize pickups/deliveries/work parties
robust calendaring for the growing season
What I like about this idea most of all is there should be a robust social community around your farm. I can’t think of a better natural community - you’re local, you likely have similar goals via food, and by extension lifestyle, and that community could easily expand beyond the farm. Since we don’t live in tiny communities any more and with the advent of social software this seems like a perfect fit to build a social web community around a farm.
As a sort of disclaimer, I run the Portland Area CSA Coalition’s website here: http://pacsac.org
I have this sort of problem too. Just the other day I lost my glasses for probably the fourth time in a matter of 45 minutes. It was unexpected, of course.
One: I’ve started a blog. That much should be obvious at this point. Actually, Levin and I have started a blog together. We’ve decided to call it ‘Secret’ - in part because we both love secrets, and also because we’re both secretive. It’s an admission that running a blog, an inherently open medium, is going to take a little learning.
Three:Small Beer Press has purchased my novel, Couch - a book about three guys who carry a somewhat opinionated couch to South America.
Hooray! What a fantastic way to start 2008. I wrote Couch while Laura and I were living in South America in 2002. It was a magical time, and I am very excited to be working with the fantastic people at Small Beer Press.
<br /><a href="http://walkertracker.com/walker.php?ben&i=ec5d8624d66" title="A walking community for pedometer geeks">View ben's Step Blog at Walker Tracker</a>
