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2003 Journal December 27, 2003: I'm out of here. See you all in three weeks, with a lot of photos. Hopefully my camera batteries will hold out! December 21, 2003 Been to a lot of parties lately, and have been spreding the gospel, so to speak, about my vow three years ago to stop giving Christmas gifts. It's working out really well, after several years of working out the kinks with relatives and friends. What I do is donate all the money I would have given in gifts to charities. I then bake and make simple things for people, and present people with these gifts and an explanation of where their gift money went. I tell people up front what I am doing, so if they insist on getting me a gift, I don't need to feel guilty (this took several years, and is probably the hardest part of the whole deal - feeling guilty when others buy you things). Anyway, most everyone has responded to this plan really well. I have to say, I came up with this after several very very depressing holiday shopping seasons. I hated feeling like I was buying stuff just for the sake of buying it. Most everyone I know doesn't need more stuff anyway. The gifts seemed hollow. It was all too depressing. I enjoy the holidays much more now. Over my lifetime, tens of thousands more dollars will go to charities (for example - you can build a Cambodian school). I actually make stuff, and talk to people about what is important to me. December 6, 2003 I'm really going to Chile. I have the tickets and everything. I have a new boss at work who I haven't met yet. And every night this month seems to be booked solid with events. Ah, December. Over Thanksgiving, I finished Richard Florida's Rise of the Creative Class. I'd heard him talk about it, so the book was a little anti-climactic, but still, a highly recommended read. At least for anyone who feels compelled to think about a) how we should be educating children, b) what will happen to rural communities, c) why America is so split down the middle, d) why good jobs follow homosexuals, e) why if you are stressed out now about your [creative] job, don't look for things to get better. In fact, it seems more and more pointless to try and intentionally craft any sort of professional career these days. And it really made me think about the arc of my own career, which has been so far about Art and Technology -- the two main 'Creative Class' professions. More on that later. November 20, 2003
If you were wondering where the bunny photos were coming from last week, you can see more of the event here. And I have finally addedd the tiniest bit of information about my professional life. November 11, 2003 Do you ever feel like you are a part of too many groups that aren't really accomplishing everything you wish they would? But you keep wanting to start new groups? It's a kind of masochism, I think. Surely one of them will work out. The latest idea: start a community technology advocacy group in Washington State. And then there are those two portals I keep meaning to start. Anyone handy with PHP and MySQL? I have a database of 2000 performance art articles and a domain. Why? It's a long story... November 6, 2003 Ok, I really hope that this site does not turn into the record of my midlife crisis, but I'm seriously considering another overseas trip (a la 2002). Where do you think I should go? The short list so far contains: Patagonia, Bali/Java, or Turkey. November 3, 2003 After years of lying fallow, my site has gotten a slight redesign, and a new purpose for existence. Mainly, I've decided to create a photo journal of every day between my 39th and 40th birthdays. Why? Well, it's a hell of a lot easier to take a picutre every day than it is to write something, and it got a hell of a lot easier to take a picture every day now that I have a digital camera (Cannon G3) and a new(ish) iBook, which sports the efficient iPhoto application which automatically generates all the photo 'blog' pages for me. Basically, I'm a lazy opportunist with some egocentricities.
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OK!