1. Comments have a very low threshold for barriers to entry into discourse. This encourages thoughtless replies. I wanted thoughtful replies to what I’m doing.
2. I don’t have to handle comment spam. I mean, Akismet pretty well kills comment spam for me these days, but any time I spend fighting comment spam is time I’m not spending being creative [or, well, slacking off].
3. Relating to #1, I think comments get a lot of me-too-itis, and for the most part, that’s not worth it to me.

Let’s take a case study here on GFMorris.com: my entry about my iPhone music disappearing and showing up as other. This was a temporary problem for me, but it continues to be a problem for other users. [Whether they're lusers or people jailbreaking their phones, I don't know.] But read the comments for the entry: no one is addressing my original post at this point. Google is bringing people to my blog, which is nice and all, but the content that people care about is from other people, not me.

Is that a problem? Well, I think that it is, in a way. While I do use Alex King’s Comment License plugin to say, “Hey, I own your comments, thanks,” I have some problems with that, in a way. I use the license to say, “You’re licensing your thoughts to me,” mainly so I can say in kind, “I can police the comments if I choose, fella.” I’m not really doing it to aggregate knowledge. This place is about me spewing out ideas, not so much what you have to say about it.

I want to go back to my first point, though. It’s not so much that I don’t want to own the discourse [which, again, I don't], but I want a higher level of discourse. What comes to mind is my post about the recording rig I’m using here in early 2010. The following thoughts come to mind:

1. The initial comments I’m likely to get are “That’s cool” or “That sucks, go get better gear like X” comments. Neither of those are terribly productive.
2. Future comments are likely to be irrelevant, because my rig is continually changing. That post would’ve looked different six months ago [mainly, I was too stupid to have battery boxes in the rig, plus I didn't have all the cabling I do now for soundboard patching]. I’ve learned. I will continue to learn, and I will make followups.
3. I want to encourage discourse on what people do with their own rigs. I don’t want someone describing their budget rig in the comments on my blog—I want them writing their own posts. Is that too hard? With free blogging tools out there like WordPress.com, I don’t think that it’s too much to ask. Why do I want this? The comment box is awfully restrictive [as it has to be to avoid the comment spam problems---again, low thresholds and all that]. I want freedom of discourse.

That said, I’m going to leave the comments open on this post and see what I get. How very meta.

Well, to the two desktops, I slave hard drives. And, well, I’m a bit of a geek, so …

Discovery has:

• HAL 9000, the internal drive for the iMac.
• Discovery II, the every-night-cloned-by-SuperDuper! backup drive that ensures I’ll keep running if HAL 9000 goes, well, insane. “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true …”
• TMA-1, which used to be my Time Machine drive until it became full and unwieldy. I recommend a TM drive be 2-2.5x of the base HDD, and I had only 1.5x with TMA-1. So she became the Moon, and now I have …
• TMA-2, TMA-1’s bigger cousin, a 1.5TB miniStack v3.

I also have a Drobo, which, if you’ve followed me on Twitter lately, has been giving me all sorts of hell. Something is amiss, and I’m sure that we’ll fix it. Anyhow, the drives used to be named lame names, until I came up with the following naming system:

• Io, for audio.
• Ganymede, for storage I let anyone use. [Well, not just anyone ... just the people I give a CrashPlan backup code to.]
• Europa, which doesn’t have any cool pun to it, but is used for storing my Aperture libraries.

It would be cool, you know, if that worked right now. But I’m not bitter.

What about Atlantis, you ask?

• Atlantis’s internal HDD is Plato.
• Atlantis’s backup HDD is Cave.
• Atlantis’s Drobo, which is working just fine right now, is “Drobo”. I should rename it Timaeus.

Endeavour gets backed up to an unnamed Time Machine. Lame, I know. I’m actually preparing to sell it to fund an iPad purchase, and also to prepare for the day when I can utilize corporate’s interest-free loan plan to buy a 27″ iMac, which will get the Endeavour name. I’m trying to keep myself to three main machines, because otherwise, this house would be full of computers and all my money would go to Cupertino.

[Shut up, all of you.]

Those frustrated with Twitter are frustrated because they have a belief that a story needs a beginning, middle, and end. And that it should have all of those parts before it’s presented to them. What the hell am I supposed to learn from a tweet? The point of Twitter isn’t knowledge or understanding, it’s merely connective information tissue. It’s small bits of information carefully selected by those you’ve chosen to follow and its value isn’t in what they send, it’s how it fits into the story in your head. There are great stories to be found on Twitter, but you have to do the work.

I tell a narrative with my tweets—the narrative of my life, mainly. I announced my probable bi-polar II diagnosis on Twitter long before I posted it here. [And before I got some great feedback from friends who wanted to tell me that I'm not alone. That made it worth it.] My friends have an idea what’s going on in my life, because I share a goodly chunk of it on Twitter. Jonathan figured out that I had an obsession to eating sushi last week. My tweeps know I’m sick today. [Oddly enough, I didn't tweet where I went in to work for a couple of hours because I felt I had to do it. It was the right idea, but I'm paying for it now in feeling puny. I'll live.]

I’ve often said that I don’t know why someone who didn’t know me would read my Twitter. I’m largely the same way with Twitter—I care about the people that I follow, for the most part. I know about my friend Justin’s music school debt, how it creates angst for him and has him in a job he hates because it pays him well enough to get out of that debt. I know that some friends saw a lot of snow today, and some saw none. [And folks know that I saw very little at my house but a lot out by where Stephen and Misty live.]

Now, few of these little blips of information make a whole lot of sense if you don’t have some sense of the larger picture, which is why I write here. Why I share my life online, I’m never 100% sure, but the fact of the matter is that I do it. Part of me thinks that it’s self-expression. Part of me thinks that it’s narcissism. But I find value in it, which is why I’ve done it for almost a decade [!]. But these moments make more sense in the context of friendship, which is why I enjoy it when I go visit Rick and Jessica and don’t have to fill in gaps about what’s been going on with me since they last saw me, or how I’m excited when Mike Terry or Josh Stockment come to visit and roll on up to Nashville ['cause that's how we do], or when we meet Hubbs in Nashville.

Fundamentally, I find that Twitter is a channel of that narrative, a way of taking your friend’s temperature. What has their eye? [when it comes to links]. What has their ear? [when it comes to music.] What has their ire up? Are they at GEOFCON TWO? Are they happy about something? Have they been in a car wreck? [Happened to two different friends this week. Found out via Twitter both times.] I care about Twitter because I care about people, both those I’ve met and those I’d like to meet.

Valentines and Desserts

Friday, February 5, 7:30 PM, North Hills Church, 11319 Highway 231/431 North, Meridianville
Friday, February 12, 7:30 PM, First Presbyterian Church, 307 Gates Ave., Huntsville

Erin Colwitz, conductor
Stacy Owens, assistant conductor
Sharon Keffer, accompanist

Join the Huntsville Master Chorale and a few special soloists for an evening of unique music about the joy – and sometimes not-so-joyous – pangs of love. Enjoy the music of the Victoria and Palestrina, celebrating religious love; a choral song cycle by modern composer, Karl Korte; and old standards like Gentle Annie, Aura Lee and Paddlin’ Maddlin’ Home.

We hope you’ll join us for this varied evening of musical Valentines and Desserts.

C’mon … you get to see me in a tuxedo! Isn’t that worth coming out?

Dead Oceans 2008/2009 Sampler

Another free one.

Neumann KM140’s~>Aerco Pre~>Sony PCM-M1

**recorded FOB/DFC
**recorded by MKHstudios
**this show took place in between a ferry landing and a set of train tracks of which both were active. a few times through this recording you can hear a low ohm rumble of the ferry. we were also treated to a frieght train that passed within 40 yards of the stage during Airline to Heaven.

2006-07-12: Alderney Landing, Dartmouth, NS, Canada (disc 1) and 2006-07-12: Alderney Landing, Dartmouth, NS, Canada (disc 2).

I’m a narrowcasting person—sure, I “broadcast” information, but I usually try to keep specific folks in mind when I tweet. Most of the time, but not all, I ask, “Is this something I would phone a friend about?” The rare “broadcasting” I do is stuff like today, when I’m posting weather updates. Otherwise, my random ramblings of under 140 characters tend to be things that I’d tell my friends.

This is, of course, not the only way to use Twitter. Everyone has these conversations, at some level; but you can truly broadcast as things get aggregated. If a bunch of people tweet about an event—be it an Apple product launch, a weather/natural disaster, or the stock market—it shows up in tools that glean the chaff from Twitter.

We’re seeing the same thing that we saw with blogging—you were either doing it for personal or promotional reasons. To be honest, we’re all on some portion of that spectrum. But where I think feelings get hurt and people get riled up is when people who were sociable and narrowcast go to the broadcast end of the spectrum.

An example: my good friend Mark Traphagen. Mark’s a marketer. He went from the narrowcast model—sending things that he’d call his friends on the telephone about—to far more down the broadcast end of the spectrum. I think a lot of people are turned off by that; me, I quietly unfollowed Mark and then explained it when he emailed me about it. From reading between the tweets, I see that it’s a kerfuffle again today with a bunch of my RMFO friends, many of whom have said, of late, that Twitter has replaced the forum as their primary “hang” place.

And see, that’s the disconnect: we all tell our friends about things, like “Hey, the weather is bad in your area,” or “Yo, traffic is blocked on your drive home.” But when you’ve got this friend who’s calling you all the time to tell you about things that you’re not interested in, eventually, you stop answering the phone every time they call, right? On Twitter, you just stop following them. Sure, some people are going to take offense at that—after all, the following thing is public, and there’s tools like Twitual to show you who is and isn’t following you—and that’s understandable. There’s also different toolsets for reading Twitter, including some with grouping features that let you filter incoming stuff.

The point is this: everyone’s use case is different. I add and remove feeds all the time for my own needs, and the only difference is that I don’t make that list public, whereas Twitter does make that public. Twitter does that, I think, to push people to be more social/narrowcasted with their service. A lot of my friends—and me!—use it this way. But it’s so arrogant to tell Mark, “You’re doing it wrong!”

Again, to quote Rands, you choose who you follow. That’s it. Twitter is totally an opt-in system. If you feel spammed, stop.

[And this is where I again wonder why anyone reads what I tweet if they don't know me. Because, well, I vent and it's craaaaazy.]

Also, I would like to declare where I played in juniors or college, because I’d like to be the third Charger in the fictional NHL.

So I’m sitting here in my terribly messy house, waiting for guys to bring in my furniture. In fact, they just called—they’re 15 minutes out. Is my house a wreck? Yes, it is, but I’m working on it. My house is a metaphor for my life, I think—too much junk, too much stuff of little value being held onto, entropic, chaotic and full of music and computers. It’s just who I am, for better or for worse. There is some of that that I’d like to change—de-junk the house, learn to let things go more, etc.—and I think that I can change that if I put forth the effort. But I really don’t want to change the fact that I’m a fundamentally open person.

As such, you can read my Twitter account if you wish. Warning: it can be scary inside my head.

Now, DEFCON goes from 5 [copacetic] to 1 [thermonuclear war]. Sometime recently on Twitter, maybe the last few weeks, I jokingly started referring to the GEOFCON system to gauge my mood/relative irritation at [colleagues|subordinates|support organizations|customers|NASA]. GEOFCON 5 is a normal, happy, easy-going time. Most of you would look at GEOFCON 5 and hate it, but I like the frenetic pace of what we do, and most of the time, I handle it.

But sometimes … well, sometimes, people start fucking up, and I get mad.

I have only been to GEOFCON 1 twice. The first time was in October. The second time was today. I’m really glad that it happened at the end of the day, because I didn’t get an opportunity to find out who’d screwed up. I … didn’t need the confrontation, because I was out of control.

Right now, I’m about a GEOFCON 3. I’m agitated. I’m gonna sleep like crap tonight. But hey … we have hockey on Friday night, and this means I’ll probably have some especially fine commentary for our referees.

I. Once you have been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 16 random facts about yourself.
II. At the end of the note, tag 16 people
III. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

Ain’t taggin’ no one but Jeff, because well, Jeff Holland sucks for making me do this.

1. I shoot a Canon DSLR, but I have a Nikon Coolpix S210 for my point-and-shoot … on purpose.
2. Despite the fact that I wore a lot of flannel shirts in the 1990s, I didn’t own a Nirvana record until the current decade.
3. Contrary to how I was raised, my vote for Obama was not my first for a Democrat. That one went to Don Siegelman, and boy do I ever regret it. [Correlation != causation.]
4. I had never met anyone in Caedmon’s Call [after a show, or otherwise] before becoming a member of the [caedmonscall.net] Staff. I don’t think anyone in the band actually realizes this fact.
5. I purposefully chose not to date in my two years at MSMS because, “I’d never find my wife there. We’re gonna go to separate schools, and what’s the point in that?” Somewhere, Rick and Jessica are laughing.
6. I love that my dad’s middle name is his mother’s maiden name, and any girl I date ends up getting judged, rightly or wrongly, by what effect her last name would have on the middle name of our theoretical first-born. [This random note intended to prove to my mother that I do, in fact, want to get married and have kids, and think about it.]
7. I own a classic acoustic guitar, a 1960s Gibson Dove, but do not actually play the guitar. Andrew Osenga played it on the first of his Letters to the Editor EPs, which you can still download for free, and it resides at his house to this day.
8. I swore that I would go by my middle name, Franklin [probably shortening it to Frank], when we moved to the South. I forgot about it until Mom asked me about two weeks before we moved, and I decided I’d stick with my weird shortening of Geoffrey.
9. I had never seen a live-action hockey game until I first came to Huntsville. I have seen many, many, many since then.
10. I had a 34 on my ACT, a 1510 on my SAT, was a National Merit Finalist, and finished college with a sub-3.0 GPA, lower than my brother’s collegiate scores. I am living proof that a high IQ doesn’t mean you’re gonna kick ass in college. My GPA is decremented for a variety of reasons: MSMS burning me out on school, my untreated depression, all the time I spent screwing around with Student Government instead of school, and … well, being a lazy student.
11. My boss asked me how much money it would take to buy me out of the last year of my degree program, as he needed me full-time at the time. I considered his offer but knew it would affect our ABET accreditation.
12. I used to be afraid to fly, and am still afraid of falling from heights. I used to freak out when our family would drive over bridges, especially the Brent Spence Bridge. [What can I say? I was a weird kid.]
13. Two of my best friends pretty well thought they’d never like me after the first time they met me. That’s because our first meeting was right before the second Lord of the Rings movie came out, and my friends decided to prepare for it by watching the extended version of the first one. How would you torture me, y’all? Strap me to a chair and make me watch a three-hour movie and do nothing else. I’m such a spastic, continuous partial attention person that I just can’t do it. [The last movie I saw in the theater was The Incredibles, and only because Mark wanted to go see it.]
14. If I’d been born three hours earlier, I would’ve graduated with the aforementioned Dr. Perry. I was born at 0300 on 1 Oct 1978, and Ohio’s cutoff to start school was 30 Sep.
15. I once had a friend tell me, “If something ever happened to my husband, I would want to get remarried to you.” This revelation became even weirder when she got divorced.
16. My pinkies are crooked, which is a family trait. My left one is straighter because I’ve broken it seven times. Okay, broke it once, playing soccer, and I keep re-breaking the same spot because the break is at the end of the penultimate bone.

Any other questions?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go back to working on my Antero Nittymaki and Mathieu Biron voodoo dolls …

Again, not available on DIME, but I’ll reseed if requested.

Mic: Sony ECM MS907 (120-degree setting)
Mic config: handheld, chest level
Location: FOB DFC, 3 concrete platform levels down inside the first semicircle walkway above the pit.
Source: Sony MZ-R37 MD Recorder
Lineage: source > Total Recorder (16-bit, 44.1khz) > TLH FLAC16 (Level 6)

Edits to track 16 and fade-ins/outs done with Goldwave.

Recorded by: litmus

Transferred and mastered by litmus
www.bigmicroscope.com

A ‘From Where I Stand’ Release: FWIS-014

2007-08-24: Greek Theater, Berkeley, CA, USA

And then Owens asked about recruiting. And then … then I got to remixing.

That was a fun ninety minutes last night … and now I have to mix it down to 30 and 60-second loops before tonight’s game.

Everyone talks about the stock market, but no one talks about the credit market—at least until now. Why? The bond market is difficult to understand, because you’re lending money for a return on the investment, and sometimes you borrow money to lend it. It’s counter-intuitive in how the pricing works, etc. It’s wacky.

Anyhow, every economist worth their salt argues that what worries everyone is the credit market; the stock market just goes where it goes. [To wit: the credit market has been seizing up for weeks, while the stock market has only just now started to really, really tank.] So if fixing the stock market takes fixing the credit market, let’s really fix the credit market—not by an infusion of taxpayer cash, but true capital.

Where do we get that capital? 401ks. Everyone is aflutter over how 401ks are evaporating in value, which … well, yes, that’s what paper wealth does, people. It fluctuates until you liquidate your assets, unless you’re the cautious sort that only buys blue-chip, dividend-paying stocks. Otherwise, it is a big gambling market—that your investment allows capitalization of the company you’re buying stock in, which allows them to make more money. Until they’re paying you a dividend for the shares you own, you’re simply betting that, down the line, someone will value your investment more than you did when you bought it. This is the Greater Fool Theory, and at the end of the day, someone loses. [As long as it's not you, though, who cares?]

Anyhow, folks are worried about losing money hand over fist—again, paper wealth. So, let’s one-time, for 90 days, let everyone liquidate their assets, tax-free—ONLY if they buy certificates of deposit, T-bills, etc. You can only avoid the income/capital gains taxes if you capitalize the market or the government. Period. This floods the credit market with capital while letting the stock market tank. What happens then? The Warren Buffets of the world, the guys who buy for value and hold for a long time, they’ll go buy now-undervalued stocks. Flush with capital, banks will have money to lend companies—and with companies’ stock values in the crapper, that’s where they’ll get their capital, because selling their own shares of stock just won’t be all that appealing.

This fails all sorts of tests that I have for providing simple solutions to complex problems, and it might well be something I regret posting in the morning, but right now … seems like a half-assed good idea to me.

So, of course, we’re gonna use another rocket scientist to fix it. [No really ... Kashkari worked for NASA before going to get his MBA.]

What freaks me out is that this guy would’ve finished his engineering degree about the time I started on mine. I have a bunch of friends from my freshman year of college who are 35 this year. :boggle:

I’m thirty today. I’m excited, can’t you tell?

I’m also joining Mike and Rae in a 365-day photo pool called “Hacks and Cameras”, which I fit on both accounts. Whether be with my DSLR, my iPhone, or Photo Booth, I hope to shoot something every day of my 31st year on Earth. You can follow the pool or 30+N/365 set.

Thanks to all who have called, emailed, and the like to send their regards. It’s been a good day after a number of really bad ones in a row.

• She is the idiot that some believe that she is, and she’s parroting these talking points without really understanding them. The old joke about Rudy Giuliani’s profile of “noun, verb, 9/11″ comes to mind, although Giuliani is, from what I can tell, a reasonably intelligent man. [A reasonably intelligent man who seems to be a raging asshole with poor judgments of character, but intelligent nonetheless.]
• She is a näif thrown to the wolves, and she’s been given these talking points as a rope to pull her out of the depths of her ignorance. And not ignorance in a bad sense—a mayor and a governor has to be focused on their local issues. There was talk prior to 2006, when a Democrat won the lieutenant governorship in Alabama and made the point moot, that my governor, Bob Riley, might be a good VP runningmate this time around. Bob’s like your kindly grandpa or great uncle, or maybe that nice old man at church. He’s nice, he’s safe. But I bet that, if you pushed Bob on Israel and the Wall Street meltdown and all that, he’d be iffy, too. Same for Bobby Jindal or Tim Pawlenty. These guys know the issues in their state and region, but rarely, if ever, do they have to think beyond that. And as an Alabamian, I’m glad that Bob Riley is focused on the issues of Alabama and isn’t expounding on American foreign policy every day [although, as a former Congresscritter, he's had to think about these things in the past].

The former gives Palin little benefit of the doubt; the latter levies the greater blame at the people who picked an unready VP. For the many who want to decry Obama’s lack of experience, I respond thusly: yes, he’s inexperienced, but he’s had 19 months on the campaign trail, talking with reporters, advisors, and voters about these issues. He’s had time to think it through, internalize it, and understand the issues at some level. He’s not as experienced as McCain or Biden; few are. But Obama’s had a long, long time to think all this stuff through, and as a lawyer, he’s got the background to have critically thought through the points.

In contrast, Palin has had about five weeks to figure this out. All signs indicate that she was a late pick and had considered herself out of the running—and she was busy governing her state in the meantime. She had other things going. And now, here at the end, she’s having to play catch-up. Even if she were as sharp as Bill Clinton, that would not be much time to have internalized everything.

Palin’s candidacy feels rushed, thrown-together. I would argue that these are not times where the American people can be rushed—and with nine of the 46 VPs becoming President, and McCain set to be the oldest man elected to the office … isn’t that just a little bit scary?

[Honestly, I think the truth is somewhere between the two points I laid out up above, but I was using that for framing purposes.]

Larry Lessig lays out more reasons I wouldn’t want Palin in the VP spot … now. Maybe later, though! [Note: I am also the person who said in 2006 that Barack Obama shouldn't run this year, so ... there's that.]

[Hubbs, Lessig just outshone your work.]

I’ve lived with a lot of people not related to me in my life. To wit:

1. Drake, my first MSMS roommate, for about six weeks junior year before we realized that we were never going to study if we lived together.
2. Thomas, my roommate for the remainder of my junior year. Nice guy, turned me on to country music. [It was that or kill him. I'm not homocidal.]
3. Jason, my roommate for my senior year. Probably the roommate I’d most like to live with again, just because he was a fun guy and we meshed nearly perfectly. [This is not a slight against any of my other roommates.]
4. Justin,
5. Hurshidjon,
6. … and Satan-boy my freshman year at UAH. Seriously … can’t remember Satan-boy’s real name. That’s all any of us really called him. He was cooking up GHB—he said for gym reasons—in our room. I could never catch him, but … whatever. He lived on the other side of the suite, Justin’s side, and when Justin was booted from school early on, there was just never any conflict. I lived and let live, man.
7. Josh,
8. Brad,
9. and Chris my sophomore year at UAH. That was definitely my best roommate set of any of my on-campus roommate sets. [I know, I just said that I'd like to live with Jason again. I like multiple roommates.] Chris was a bit weird, but … he was an art major. The only awkwardness with him came to two incidents: sewing his Rocky Horror Picture Show costume in our common area, and the time I walked into our wing of the suite to see him and another guy standing next to a girl clearly fresh out of the shower. After a few seconds, I ascertained that it was an art project [she'd been a nude model for some plaster castings, I'd come to learn later], but all I could think of at the time was, “Nice towel.”
10. PJ …
11. and Kris. Suffice it to say that the former got me my current job, for which I’m eternally grateful, and the latter married a girl I’d once had a thing for. And had me in the wedding party. Good times. When PJ moved out of that apartment situation, he bought the townhouse in which I presently live.
12. Jared, after I’d lived alone for four months after moving into the first apartment with my actual lease on the name. [I rented that apartment on 31 Dec 1999, half-jokingly telling myself as I wrote the check that I might never live in it.] We lived together for 14 months. I’m surprised that they didn’t just nuke the apartment when we were done with it.
13. Todd
14. and Blake, in the second iteration of Club Todder. That was a very fun apartment situation. Of all my apartment living situations, that’s the one I liked the best. 9/11 happened during that year. Todd was just out of school, and I was all but done. We were in the prime of our lives. It was a great time.
15. Anthony …
16. … and Jackie in Club Todder: Country Edition. [Todd and Blake were also there at some period of time.] Okay, so I didn’t actually live with them, because I lived in the garage, but they were both out there at one point or another. I really shouldn’t count Jackie, because I’ve never really lived with him, but … it’s my list, and poop on your shoe if you don’t like it.
17. Leonard with Anthony after we left Club Todder. Anthony moved out …
18. … and Randy moved in. Then Leonard moved out and moved back in within about a ten-day period, and that meant …
19. … Michele moved in with us. Yeah, three guys and a girl in one apartment. After a while, Randy bailed on us, and it went back to just the three of us.
20. Ande after a few months of living here by myself after I bought the house.
21. J, starting tomorrow.

That’s a long list, longer than most folks I know that don’t live in a major city. I’ve lived outside of my parents’ home almost full-time since August 1995, at two educational institutions, in four apartments, in one rental house, and in one house I owned. I skipped only one roommate in there—I lived with my brother for two months after high school but before college. That was … not a good time for us to live together. I think now would be a lot different.

I’ve been blessed to have, on the balance, a very good set of roommates. My soon-to-be roommate is a law-school friend of a high-school friend of mine who’ll be here very short-term. I rather expect that he’ll never get another mention here. I just … want to remember.

But the concept was just mind-boggling: here is a man who has made an influence on my life–stronger than he might ever imagine, stronger than I’d probably ever realize myself–and he recognizes me. What a freakish thing.

I still can’t quite believe it.

I’ll meet Derek again. We might never be anything more than acquaintances, but for that one moment … yeah.

Well, uh, I think we’ve moved past the acquaintance stage now.

I emailed this to Bryan today for his amusement, and here’s his response:

haha. wow, funny to read that. i’m so happy i know what Fido’s is…and its funny to hear you talk about the rumor board in an unattached way…and its funny to wonder if you and derek will ever be more than acquaintances, seeing as how you are in his liner notes and slept in his house. hilarious.

Of course, Bryan knows what Fido’s is only because we hit Fido’s with Derek back in October, before going over to his house later to partake of his gracious hospitality in providing crashspace for us on the trip. [DW, you rule.] I will keep most of my fanboy moments to myself, but you can imagine the variations on the one I had as I was going to sleep: “I’m about to sleep on Derek Webb’s couch!”

I also emailed this to Andrew Osenga, in response to his story about getting a mixtape from Matthew Smith back in college when Matthew was trying to get him to give Caedmon’s Call a serious listen.

I turned it over and read down the list of songs. Waterdeep. Caedmon’s Call. Derek Webb. Vigilantes of Love. Bebo Norman. This was familiar. It was hazy, but it started coming back bit by bit. Some guy from my dorm floor made me this tape because I always ragged on the music he liked. Especially Caedmon’s. Though I’d never really heard them I had decided I didn’t like them. Probably because I had an ex-girlfriend who really did. And they played folk music and I liked atmospheric rock. So this guy made me the tape to try and convert me.

“Who would have done that?” [ ... ] Then it hit me. This tape was the handiwork of Matthew Smith. The very Matthew Smith whose house I had just come from. When he made that tape for me we were single guys living across the hall from each other in a freshman dorm. Last night our wives were holding our newborn babies. I’ve heard all those Caedmon’s songs now. Just about every night for the past four years. So crazy how things change and how unexpected and wonderful some of those changes can be.

So, when I emailed Andrew, he came back with this:

dude. do you know who opened that show in huntsville? the normals. it was the first time we ever met them, and that was the first cc show I ever saw. And Mike played an extra trash can on thankful.

Okay, this is now officially weird and hilarious. I’m laughing really hard because I remember thinking, “Who the heck are The Normals?!” It didn’t matter, though, because I made that trip with my old church kids and barely got there in time to see CC-minus-the-Youngs.

All I know is that I’m really shaking my head a lot about this shared set of experiences now. That, and I’m now pissed that I’m realizing that I could have seen The Normals. But mainly that makes me mad at Forefront. Grrrrr.

What am I doing? Well, after reading that weekday TV and video gaming seems to lower students’ educational endeavors, I got to thinking: what do I do at night when I get home from work? Well, I usually sit down, watch ABC World News Tonight, then sit down to scarf down whatever my TiVos have recorded for me. That sucking sound you hear is any chance that I will get much done going out the window.

Now, I get a fair amount done at night on the things I choose to work on, but the things that I choose to work on are not really the things that I’d value—reading more, especially my Bible in preparation for teaching Sunday school classes, maybe a little programming, Web work, etc. Instead, I half-watch TV while I piddle aimlessly on the Internet. It’s … bad.

So, I’ve decided that, for the month of October, I’ll timeshift all my non-news TV watching to the weekend, when I really don’t have much concern in the way of goofing off. That’ll add a few hours each night not spent wondering what TiVo has for me and maybe I’ll, you know, clean my office, or work on some bookcases, or any of the number of reasonable projects I could knock out…

But tonight, the Granades, Kings, and Creekmores, May anniversaries all, went out for dinner, so I was unable to crack open a beer while watching Veronica Mars. Instead, I came home, talked to the folks, puttered around a while, went and got dinner around nine, and came home to fix the foofiest thing I’ve had since I made Impeachement Punch back in college: a glass of OJ with a healthy shot of peach schnapps.

No, tonight was not a whiskey night, despite having a good bottle of Jameson in the house.

You may find yourself asking, What was in Impeachment Punch? Good question. Anthony and I devised it while sitting in the student section at a hockey game one night…

• One part amaretto
• Two parts peach schnapps
• One part peppermint schnapps
• One part sour mix
• Four parts orange juice

If feeling particularly evil, add:

• Three parts vodka
• One part triple sec

Mixed well, the first part of Impeachment Punch tastes largely like orange juice [although slightly minty and slightly cherry]; when throwing a never-to-be-forgotten party at Club Todder—ahhh, the mere mention of that phrase brings back memories—I joked about treating it like a screwdriver. Todd wordlessly handed me the vodka and waited for me to pour in a liberal amount before handing me the triple sec. We just laughed. The girls? They loved it.

[I think the funniest part of that night was the next morning, putting on my T-shirt before getting up to work on cleaning up the house. My white T-shirt reeked of beer. I was confused, because I didn't spill a drop. I then realized why: I had sweated the aromatics out.]

Right now, my parents are reading this and thinking: “Wow, we’re glad he didn’t write about this much in college. We would have been very worried.”

Right now, Todd is reading this and thinking, “That drink is pussy!”

Right now, Anthony, the One-Beer Wonderboy, is no longer reading this, having passed out at the mere mention of Impeachment Punch. Lightweight.

1. Online, I can spew content far more often. Why? I don’t have to shut up and listen and have stop-start conversations.
2. I rarely, if ever, start one-to-one conversations. I’ll talk to you all day long if you start them and keep them going, but … I just rarely start them. If I do start a conversation with you, it’s because I really enjoy your company and value you, or I want to get to know you better.

One of the symptoms of this disease is this concept in my head that I can only “know” so many people at one time, which is a bit of thought that actually has some neurological and psychological bases to it. [Most researchers of such things would argue that we really only "know" and can keep up with 150 people at a time. I have thoughts about how the connectors that Malcolm Gladwell discusses in The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference are simply people who just remember key facts about people outside that 150, but ... another day, perhaps. Probably best after I have a conversation with Dr. Granade about that.]

But anyhow … it always amuses me when someone “new” comes into my sphere, someone I strike a connection with for whatever reason. Without hard facts to back it up, I’d say that this happens more often with women than men, but usually with married women whose relationships I highly admire [take a bow, Kari], so it’s not a picking-up-women thing per se [although it has been and probably will be again, heh].

I’ve said all that to say that I’ve really enjoyed interacting with Heather Green the last few days. I enjoy her wit and wisdom, her writing is fun, and she and Jeff are just great. Plus, she’s keeping me sane in crazy times, and that … that is always a bonus.

Total Number of Books I Own: Like Spencer, I have no count on this. Once I’ve catalogued my library, I’ll know. I’m guessing on the order of … 500. I honestly have no idea.

Last Book I Bought: For me, it’s two books purchased from Amazon, one of which I mentioned as I bought it:

Books I’m Reading Now: The aforementioned two books are what’s riding around in my backpack right now. I’ve worked ~55 pp. into Flow, and I haven’t cracked Code open yet. Sometimes, I read multiple books at once. And actually, now that I think about it, I’m going through Garrison Keillor’s We Are Still Married: Stories and Letters from time to time. It’s a collection of short stories, which fits my reading habits. My reading habits very, very much skew non-fiction these days.

Books That Have Been Important To Me:

• The Bible. I’ve read and owned an NIV traslation, but lately, I’ve been loving the NRSV.
• Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. The thing I love about this book, viewed dispassionately? It has to be how Christians of most every denomination and doctrinal leaning claim it for their own.
• Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell. I just dig it—I’m an instinctual decision-maker, but I also ruminate over lots of things. It works for me, and it drives other people crazy—but Gladwell’s book made me feel not-so-crazy.

It’s kinda sad that my list of influential books is so brief. I’m sure there’s something huge that I’m missing, but honestly, I don’t have many huge “Ah-ha!” moments when reading books. Most of what I read is not in long form, for better or worse, these days, and I only gained an appreciation for literature late in my high school years.

But there is a quote from Sir Francis Bacon that I dearly love about writing; I’ve forgotten its source, but I reckon I could find it: “Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.” I wholeheartedly agree.

Five People I’ll Torture by Passing This on to Them:

• John Wilson.
• Amy.
• Kari, my favorite librarian … who will either love this or hate it. I’m hoping love, because I’m still gunning for an invite to Mike’s birthday party. [Hee.] Read Kari’s responses.
• Lara.
• Andy Osenga. [Okay, so this is a cheap excuse to get Andy to read GFMorris.com.]