In my last post, I wrote about the passing of someone I would consider a friend. As an update, I would like to tell you others have also been crushed by it and have set up Remembering Cory.
Also check out this special episode of The Half-Eaten Hat Show in which his friend plays music that Gimpi liked.
Oct 2
I awoke this morning and happened to notice some text in an IRC Channel I idle in often. I have known most of the people in that channel for years. Although we don’t chat as much as we used to "back in the day", it is still nice to hear how they are doing and good news does brighten my day.
Today was not one of those days. The black screen with white text could not have looked any gimmer. The chat was about the passing of a very unique and exeptional person.
With the passing of Cory "Gimpi" Carrier, our world has just become a darker place and heaven just gained an angel with a great sense of humor and outlook on life.
With his passing, even my normal wordy nature, fails. I am in a state of wishing I could have known him even better. He certainly was high on my wish list of IRC friends to meet, regretting not making that list a higher priority. I am not Alice Cooper. I DO cry. I have been doing so off and on all day.
Today, as I am sure many other long time IRC friends have. spent most of my day fighting tears. No, I did not know him as well as others. Most of us, like here and here are not saying much. I suspect, like myself, we just don’t know what to say.
This is something I never would have expected. Apparently, the Internet is have in negative effects on inhabitants of our mostly frozen southern continent.
I suppose if one gave the idea more thought we should expect it. The Internet seems to be a reminder of all they are isolated from.
Here are a few article on and blogs from the cold place:
Oct 18
Kudos to Beth for fnding this neat news site.
For thos of you needing news on why I have been rather inactive, it is due to a number of reasons:
Fear not though, or maybe best said fear more, I hope to be back in full swing no later than January. I will actually have a fat DSL connection with a room dedicated to my internet passion. Till then, thanks for bearing with me.
Oct 2
It has been too long since I have grabbed my cyber quill and scribed my opinions into the digital matter of cyberspace. It feels like an eternity since I grasped the hard plastic of my favorite mouse and rolled it about its pad as I surfed the tubes of fiber optic cable and wires. Enough already!!! I must surf!!!
The reason I have been off the net of late is that I have been busy traveling the country. This has led to the re-ignition of two old habits; photography and reading. Keep checking Lumpy’s Corner and my Flickr Site for the photos. Today I thought I might talk about e-books, more specifically, e-books for a PDA.
The bad news is that the new job is not going to work out. The good news is that I already accepted another offer that is even more so a step in a desired direction. The great news is that it will be a regular job with regular hours and I will be back blogging again… Now back to the subject.
There has been much discussion about tagging and using it for other purposes. I am still sifting through a barrage of links on the many aspects of this subject. I thought putting up a few links here might generate some discussion and brain food.
Can tags be use to auto discover hierarchies? That is a very good question. The issue is that there is a difference between tagA –> tagB and tagB–>tagA. Nonetheless, associations are clearly there and can be made. The issue seems more of how well they can be made and used.
As I said though, I still am digging through this. Here are some more links and, hopefully, I can get some input as I dig further and think on it more. One thing for sure though, I have become a tagaholic… I am becoming even more convinced that my bold bullets in this past post are very, very true. I have also become a rather addicted "delicious stalker", which is a person who follows and learns from the tagging of others by adding them to their network.
(I added Mr. Kasley to my network taking the total up to 16.) But it is going to get worse… I have discovered tagyu!!! I don’t know how I ever missed it.
Here are some links, some for brain food and others to hook you on tagyu.
"Now you can look at a book and see both the user-created tags as well as the librarian-assigned subject headings. This puts us in the middle of the age old debate: tags or subject headings? Folksonomies or taxonomies? Ok, maybe the question isn’t quite that old, but it’s certainly debated. Subject analysis is a fuzzy discipline – decisions on "aboutness" are hard. But is it necessarily a question of one over the other? Can they work together at all? "
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Thanks to Robert Kirckpatrick for this story via his blog (a daily read for Lumpy). I quote:
The RSS feed publishing service Feedburner has just announced a partnership with Newsweek to provide a wide variety of services supporting Newsweek RSS feeds. The magazine’s online component offers nearly 40 feeds on numerous topics. Beyond feed delivery and analytics, the partnership will also utilize Feedburner’s API enabled FeedFlare service – whereby feed items can be followed with buttons for functions like tagging the item into Del.icio.us or emailing it.
I think this great news even though I am not a big fan of Newsweek. I am just happy to see that some of the established media is getting with the techno-trend and not combating them.
You can read the full article here
Mar 7
I mentioned that I intended to change my focus with this little endeavor I call Tid Bits. My formal education being in the field of psychology, I have always been fascinated by human interaction. I was also the kid with the home electronics kits that built little gadgets of all kinds. During the Commodore 64 days, I even dabbled with robots. There is certainly no doubt that the Internet has changed our world. Being redundant, say the same for the PC and acknowledge both have changed how we process Information.
Recently, there has been much concern about information overload. Now psychologically speaking, such issues are caused by an individuals inability to adapt to their environment and/or modify their environment. There is no doubt that modernization has changed our environment. The Internet and the PC are part of it. It seems obvious that the rate of change is increasing as well. There is much more to it than what has become known as information overload. We are rapidly heading to an era of new enlightenment or an age where we suffocate and choke on a ceaseless stream of information, which shall prevail?
Over my next few posting here, that is what I shall ramble about. Some points shall seem obvious, others, so accepted that they may be taken for granted and scarcely noticed. I should also make it clear that these observations are largely aimed at what most would term western society. If you are some remote desert isle where survival is your only focus, it likely will not apply. Then again, if that is your situation, you’re not reading this. Not yet anyhow… Soon enough, even the desert isles shall have connectivity.
Consider the following points: