Life of Riley
I’ve been surprisingly touched by the death of “the world’s oldest blogger,” Olive Riley, over the weekend at the age of 108. I mean, look at that face.
As her friend, who did the typing for her and videotaped her for YouTube, put it:
Archived entries for Web stuff
God, they’re dumb
On the internet, it’s easy to tell that you’re an anti-gay crapweasel.
Word clouds
I’ve been trying out lots of fun interesting internet stuff this weekend. There’s Zoomii, where you can browse Amazon visually, like you would bookstore shelves. And then there’s Wordle, which makes beautiful “word clouds” from any block of text. I tried making one based on my post “Things Falls Apart.” I think it’s gorgeous. Try it out for yourself.
Adventures in near-anonymous web fame
So I e-mailed the staff of Lifehacker after finding an interview in the July issue of Geek magazine (cool, BTW) with Rob Corddry, late of The Daily Show, where he said Lifehacker was da bomb (is that what the kids are saying these days?). They wrote a post on the site about Corddry’s praise, and even were nice enough to end the post with “Thanks, Adam.”
Of course, “Adam” could be Adam West, Adam Carolla, Adam Snavely, Adam Ant, Adam Cartwright, Adam Arkin, or Adam Sandler, among others. And in my haste I didn’t even mention my site or any other way they could credit me – but I wasn’t thinking of that when I sent the e-mail, either. So I don’t expect to be getting any Lifehacker readers coming by here. Still, it’s nice to be mentioned.
In other online fame news, the current top hit when you Google “Adam Blust” is La Shawn Barber’s site. Ack. Although I do feel I did pretty well there, considering the circumstances.
Comments
I’ve come to realize something I don’t like about my new PressBox theme – in order to leave a comment, you have to click on the title to go to the specific screen for the post, and then comment. You also can’t see on the main page if anyone else has already commented, which is likely to keep people from commenting in general.
I hope anyone reading will still comment when the mood strikes, until I can get this worked out.
What’s the point of Twitter?
I’ve noticed more and more people using Twitter. Can anyone tell me why they use it? Seems kind of like calling up your friend and saying, “I’m eating a sandwich. Look at it! LOOK AT IT!” But then again, maybe I’m just an old codger who came of age with the TRS-80 and doesn’t understand all this new high-falutin’ technology.
To me, though, it seems like one of those classic solutions in search of a problem, like anti-static spray.
Let me know where I’m going wrong here.
New design for lucky8ball
After many months of procrastination, I finally put up a new design for my business site, lucky8ball. Let me know what you think.
Tumblr
Lately I’ve become enamored of a mini-blog service called Tumblr. While Movable Type’s interface has “evolved” to become prettier but almost impenetrable, Tumblr makes things simple – so simple that it makes you smile. You can easily post a quote, image, video, link, or whatever. It’s really more of an online scrapbook than a blog, but for our short-attention-span times, it’s great.
I’m trying it out, and I love the simplicity and the cleanliness of the template designs. Plus, it’s dead simple to use. Try it out and let me know what you think.
Fun with hate
Last night Bill O’Reilly called DailyKos.com a “hate site,” run by “far left hatemongers.” He rattled off some random comments from the site, like how someone said “Better luck next time” when Dick Cheney was almost blown up in Iraq. And then O’Reilly said this about the site:
“It’s like the Ku Klux Klan. It’s like the Nazi party. There’s no difference.”
I swear, irony is lost on these people.
It reminds me of this story from the late Molly Ivins:
I have a correspondent named Irwin Wingo in Weatherford, Texas. Irwin and some of the leading men of the town are in the habit of meeting about 10 every morning at the Chat’n'Chew Cafe to drink coffee and discuss the state of the world. One of their members is a dittohead, a Limbaugh listener. He came in one day, plopped himself down, and said, “I think Rush is right. Racism in this country is dead. I don’t know what the niggers will find to gripe about now.”