Minutiæ: April 2008

Notice: I have neither posted nor updated any content on this blog since the mid 2010's. (😱) Please check out the homepage and my bio, for more recent information.

Wired's aggregated coverage of the San Francisco Olympic torch relay is awesome. I'm enthralled by the event simply because of the up-to-the-minute, user-submitted material which includes a live video feed from a user's phone, a Flickr link for recent "olympic" tagged photos, and CNN's iReports. The everyman has turned into the most up-to-date and most comprehensive event journalist. This stuff is awesome.

I'm reading into Qik right now, which is what the phone-based video feed is using. This looks like an excellent idea; I'm probably getting a new phone in the next couple months and might have to plan around using this.

I love thunderstorms, probably to levels that shouldn't be considered safe by normal standards. When I lived in the dorms a couple years ago and they forced us to the basement during a tornado warning? I was the guy that snuck out the back and stood on top of the parking garage to take photos like this one:

I drove through today's storm, accidentally, because I didn't have the time to check my usual radar page. Oops. If I'd checked it, I would've seen something like this:

So, there I was, on Stadium Boulevard, driving to work through a stretch where the sky got dark -- and I really mean late-evening twilight dark. By the time I got to Forum (like a mile or two from campus) the sky started lightening up. As if the system had come and gone without doing anything. Oh, if only we were so lucky.

I waited maybe a minute for the stoplight to turn green. It started to rain right as the light turned green. By the time I passed where the old T.K. Brothers grill/pub stands (quarter mile, if even), the rain got really hard. Then I started noticing little ice pellets.

And then everything turned to white. Like a blizzard. A blizzard of sleet. And by blizzard, I do want to convey that I couldn't see anything past a couple feet.

I made it to work just fine; I ran through the parking lot, under the Yankees umbrella I got from one of the games I went to last year, as the rain and hail continued to flood everything around me. The sleety hail didn't do anything to my car; the pellets were just too small to do any damage to anything.

That got my heart going better than anything I've done recently. I can't wait for more.

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Also, an update on photos from my vacation: I can't seem to find the negatives I developed in St. Louis and I think they're somewhere lost somewhere between here, St. Louis, or New Jersey. I'll keep you posted.

Update: Site's back to the "normal" theme.

It's no joke, I have an obsession with nostalgia. Most notoriously, there's my love of baseball and the rich history of the game and it's traditions. But there are plenty of other examples of nostalgic indulgences, like typewriters, black and white film photography, and (most recently) fountain pens.

But I'm also prone to actual nostalgia -- not just the faux nostalgia of surrounding myself with the old school.

Every time I revise my résumé and realize I've been on the Web for a decade and realize I've been messing around with HTML and Web design/development for almost as long... Well, I can't help but feel a little nostalgic about those humble roots. And with good reason -- while most of the things I've worked on since 1998 have disappeared (account inactivity, group disbanding, hosting change, site redevelopment...), my first site, somehow is still live (albeit in a limited capability).

Today, I've invoked that feeling from that first website of mine and recreated that very plain, styleless HTML into a Wordpress template. In a sick and twisted way, I actually enjoyed writing the tag soup of <font> tags and pointless <hr> and <br> tags... You know, the same way you'd enjoy hearing an old Backstreet Boys song you haven't heard in years -- that is, before you realize what it is you're actually listening to.

(I also get the strangest feeling I'm going to regret linking to that ol' site...)

I recently read an article (I can't seem to remember where) about the increase in faux-90's retro Web design, like the one used on Radiohead's site. I smiled to myself because I remember making plenty of pages and sites that looked like that in my day. When I was like, 15. Retro-trendiness is a sad, sad thing.

So cheers to April Fool's Day and cheers to good ol' nineties Web nostalgia.