Cleanup Sunday

I saw Eyedea & Abilities with Dan Schned and Jitla last night. That was an excellent show, and it let out just as the T-Wolves beat the Lakers. We went storming around the packed downtown bars, and it was really one hell of a time.

Today, inside during this endless rain, I am bringing together the elements of the new server "tarfin", poking around, adding mod_perl to Apache2 (a slightly tricky proposition) and helping move some furniture around for people, and cleaning the room a little bit.

Oddly enough in the last 3 days two people have each given me CRT monitors—three, if you include the one that Eric let me use with the Compaq—and now I am in a world of Cathode Ray riches.

Then again, we should take a reality check here and look at a recent piece in the Times:

Studies show that gregarious, well-connected people actually lost friends, and experienced symptoms of loneliness and depression, after joining discussion groups and other activities. People who communicated with disembodied strangers online found the experience empty and emotionally frustrating but were nonetheless seduced by the novelty of the new medium. As Prof. Robert Kraut, a Carnegie Mellon researcher, told me recently, such people allowed low-quality relationships developed in virtual reality to replace higher-quality relationships in the real world.
........
Marcus is a child of the Net, where everyone has a pseudonym, telling a story makes it true, and adolescents create older, cooler, more socially powerful selves any time they wish. The ability to slip easily into a new, false self is tailor-made for emotionally fragile adolescents, who can consider a bout of acne or a few excess pounds an unbearable tragedy.

But teenagers who spend much of their lives hunched over computer screens miss the socializing, the real-world experience that would allow them to leave adolescence behind and grow into adulthood. These vital experiences, like much else, are simply not available in a virtual form.

Wisconsin's senator Russ Feingold has put together an advertising campaign on the blogs. My dad recently sent me a Feingold 2004 bumper sticker, which has a certain geographic symmetry across the car bumper from my Wellstone! sticker.

For those of you deeply saddened by the lack of news tidbits, well, I have been keeping looser tabs on the news than usual, but I have been saving a lot of news bookmarks, and you can expect that things will be parsed again more closely this coming week.

Posted by HongPong at May 30, 2004 11:34 PM
Listed under Campaign 2004 , HongPong-site , Music , News , Open Source .