I felt like it was time to do some tweaking this morning, so I changed some stuff on my blog and on Collage.
Let me say this right off the bat: Subscribe to or bookmark Collage instead of this blog. Collage reads in EVERYTHING I do – not just blog posts. You’ll get all of my pictures from Flickr, any YouTube vids I post, and a ton more. More sources will be added soon-ish. Of course, if you read my posts through Facebook or something like that, it doesn’t really apply to you. I’d love to have you read or subscribe to Collage anyway!
In fact, here are the only links you need: Read Collage | Subscribe to Collage
I wanted to make Collage even more appealing. Two Cents and a Thousand Words has kind of gone by the wayside as far as usefulness is concerned, and I’ve pretty much used it only as an outlet to inject Collage with content that won’t fit anywhere else. You won’t miss a thing if you subscribe to Collage instead of this blog; everything here ends up there. I added a list of sources to each Collage section, and I also added a little description of what each page shows. I think I finally squashed the time bug, too, that’s been showing incorrect times since I moved my site to a different server (in California) this summer. I now understand why lots of Web apps use relative time instead of absolute time.
At the same time, I didn’t want to lose all faith in the blog. If you’re coming to comment on a post or if you just find the blog in a search engine, I’ve scaled down the number of categories I use to be more content-driven than topic-driven. In other words, if you want to see my “photoblog” (stories and events that revolve around the photos I take), check out the Photography category. For project updates, check My Work. I may go back and re-associate everything, but don’t hold your breath. You’re on your own for older posts. I almost have 700 blog posts, after all.
Questions or comments? Get in touch with me. More to come soon, of course.
60 Minutes did a report on our generation. I read about it at 37signals, where Matt summed it up well: “What a crock of shit.”
This is the letter I wrote CBS after I read and watched the piece:
I’ll be bluntly honest: I was offended by your 60 Minutes “Millienials” piece. As a 24-year-old Web developer, I find it outrageous that you stereotyped a whole generation based largely on the accounts of two twenty-somethings who make a living coaching its least productive workers.
Why, in a piece covering 12- to 27-year-olds, were a large majority of the interviewees not contained within that age range? Why was all the video footage of our generation illustrating the carefree, priority-lacking members of our generation instead of showing some of us who are passionate about the work that we do or individuals who have already had great success starting their own businesses and companies?
While watching the piece, I couldn’t help but think of those old sitcoms with a grandfather whose only line in the show was “kids these days” or “get off my lawn, you scoundrels.” I can only imagine what older generations would have said as the Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers entered the workforce for the first time. I imagine they lacked the faith in you that you obviously lack in our generation.
There’s no question why the people of our generation don’t watch much television – especially shows like 60 Minutes. Your “Millenials” piece makes it tragically clear that these kinds of shows are not for us. These kinds of shows can’t stand us.
Time to go back to YouTube.
A pair of questions for everyone who has interacted with me in any way over an extended period of time:
Out of all your interactions with me, when was I the most passionate about something (and what was it)? What would you say I’m the most passionate about in general?
I’d really appreciate a response via any means (comment, e-mail, Facebook message, 206-350-HI-JR, etc. etc.).
By far my favorite photo project of 2006 was a little effort I coined 30holidays. The idea is quite simple: take one holiday or winter-related photo each day from November 26 through December 25, then upload the photos to Flickr. After the holidays passed, I had been a part of a strange coincidence, documented my holiday season, and just had a better appreciation of how we celebrate such a wonderful time of the year. I loved it.
As hard as it is to believe, November 26 is just over two weeks away. Starting that Monday, I will once again be bringing along my cameras everywhere I go to capture a single photo each day until Christmas. (This year, I hopefully won’t miss a day like I did on December 21, 2006.)
Here’s the thing: I don’t want to do this alone. If you like photography or if you just like the holiday season, please try this out, too. It’s a lot of fun. It’s as simple as registering for a free Flickr account, taking photos, and then uploading them to the site.
Get more details on the 30holidays group page. If you’d like, you can see a calendar of my collection from last year.
I really can’t wait to get started.
When you let me loose in a city like Boston, strange things will happen.
On Saturday, Kelley and Ian took me to a fantastic restaurant called FiRE + iCE. This place was about the closest thing to a new media grill as one could get; you fill a bowl full of raw meat, pasta, veggies, rice, or whatever else you’d like, fill a smaller bowl with any of about a dozen sauces, and take it to a grill at the center of the restaurant. The cooks grill the contents of the large bowl, throw on the sauce, and you have a customized meal. It’s a next-generation buffet. It never gets boring. And man, was it tasty. I’ll definitely be going back.
On Saturday night, I realized that I could spend Sunday doing more than just PodCamp in the big city. I e-mailed a few of my friends in the greater Boston area, and my good friend Laura called to invite me out to her church the next morning.
For many people, church on a Sunday morning wouldn’t be a big deal. For me, though, it was quite the change of pace; I hadn’t been to a Sunday service in about a decade. (I’m not really that much of an organized religion guy, and I religion is one of the topics I consciously don’t talk much about on this blog.)
So to the complete disbelief of anyone who knows me well, I spent Sunday morning at Vineyard in Cambridge. Like FiRE + iCE, it was a type of establishment I could never imagine taking hold in Bangor; it was the first church service I’d ever attended with plain-clothes pastors and references to YouTube and the Red Sox (it is Boston, after all). I told Laura after the service that I found it to be refreshing, and I was very glad I attended. The church did a wonderful job of delivering a message while leaving the sermon open to some interpretation; unlike some other congregations, it really seemed as though Vineyard was trying consciously to be open to a lot of people. The fact that the sermon included video clips and contemporary music definitely appealed to the new media part of me.
I’m not doing the church justice with my brief explanation, but I wanted to mention both it and the restaurant due to the differences they both showed from traditional institutions of their types. Boston definitely seems like a place that appeals to a younger, more creative population.
If you’re interested in a bit of audio to illustrate my points, Vineyard provides an MP3 of the oddly-relevant creativity-themed sermon on their site.
