Red Cedar

gee, thanks

Posted on November 10, 2005 by Megan

hey-o

over the past couple of weeks, i have received several emails from people complimenting this blog in some fashion or other – many from friends, and a few from people i have never met in real time. i just wanted to say (cause i’ve been bad about responding to email lately) – that it really means a lot to me that people read and enjoy my writing and photos here – and thanks for saying such lovely things about my blog-writing. i really really do appreciate it greatly when people respond to my writing either via email or blog-comments.

so thanks – tons – i mean it 🙂

data fetish

Posted on November 9, 2005 by Megan

1 Comment

you know, i often try to pass myself off as “not a geek” or “not a computer-person” which everyone knows is just ridiculous given that i work with computers, helped found a radical tech collective, and used to give workshops that entailed taking apart computers and putting them back together so everyone could look at (and touch) the insides. it’s particularly ridiculous in light of my raging fetish for information organizing tools.

that’s right – tools and strategies to organize information get me hot: sensible taxonomies, data-management tools, information architecture diagrams – nothing excites me more in the cerebral sense. if that’s not a sad and geeky admission, i don’t know what is.

in any case, kellan over at laughing meme posted a couple of days ago about a new online book-listing tool called library thing. it allows you to catalog your book collection with comments, ratings, reviews, and tags and then cross-reference that to the collections and reviews of the 10,000+ other users on the site. inputting books is simple with a search-engine that uses the collections of amazon and 30 libraries to feed responses to queries and allow you to select the right book to add to your online collection. best of all is you can export the whole thing to an excel spreadsheet in case you want to keep your catalog in a localized database or export it to another book-logging service.

woah nelly – i’m in love. all of a sudden, thoughts of a separate blog for book-reviewing have gone out the window, and last night i heedlessly spent $25 for a lifetime membership to the site, as i rushed to start my own online catalog of book holdings. in my excited state, i managed to catalog about half the books on my shelves, and i plan to finish the rest this weekend.

now this service is not without flaws. i think it needs an integrated forum and blog-ability, and the interface is a bit on the ugly side (but i’m not a superficial lover, and looks aren’t everything). kellan makes a bunch of points in his review about rss feeds and lack thereof. rss feeds really aren’t my thing, so i don’t feel the lack of them in the way he seems to.

it may be quick and flirty, but i’ve commited. i personally think with the right care and massaging, library thing could turn out to be my kind of tool – a willing partner in my desire for an organized internet.

a whirlwind romance? oh yes, but at least i don’t have anyone to cook breakfast for in the morning.

a death, a sadness

Posted on November 8, 2005 by Megan

2 Comments

i was going to write a witty message about my car-mechanic experiences of the past few days, but i just received an email from my mother informing me that my cousin sarah hung herself last night. everything just seems very small and narrow at the moment, as though a film has come down over the morning: like someone walking on my own grave to have a cousin the same age take her life – it feels too close.

i have not seen sarah in years, her living in oregon and not having a close relationship to the canadian side of the family. when we were children we played together in the summers – and though i suspect we were very similar as rebellious adolescents, we did not live close enough to commiserate with one another. mostly what i know of her is through my aunt josephine, her grandmother – who has now lost both her oldest child and oldest grandchild to suicide.

i wonder if she was programmed somehow to self-destruct, her psychology grown up in the shadow of her father’s suicide by hanging in his early thirties.

i wish i could say i do not understand why a woman my age would take her life, but depressive episodes in the past two years have allowed me a glimpse into that mindset of hopelessness. i am thankful i am no longer in that place, and i wish i had been close enough to her to tell Sarah that those feelings really do pass if given enough time and nurturing by others.

sadness.