August 9, 1998
|
Slowly the house is getting painted. The painters are serious alcoholics. We dole out their pay like methadone, being careful not to pay them on a day when we want them to show up the next day. Here's a swatch that gets the yellow, green, and cream trim together. We'll change the directions to: "look for the large glowing thing in the middle of town." This is no namby-pamby corn silk yellow; no this is lemon ice box pie salted butter no nonsense yellow. |
| My niece Melanie and her pal Katie are our B&B interns. We were riding bikes around the lake when this kitten walked out of the bushes and demanded to be rescued. A woman with 3 kids came along in a truck. Not someone I knew. This is so Unity. We gave her directions to our house and she put the kitty in the basement for us. Later that day we gave it to someone who had just moved and needed a cat. A new record time for a complete rescue-and-hand-off.
The kids did the "certification bike ride" today: many of you know the drill. In Acadia, ride 10 miles from the visitor center to Jordan Pond, have tea & popovers, ride 10 miles back. It was a clear sunny hot day; we could see forever from the top of Cadillac. |
| I spent some time this afternoon in my best reading spot. Dappled shade and a breeze off the lake. I finished Close to the Machine by Ellen Ullmann. So many familiar experiences: the constant push to learn the next new language, to grasp emerging concepts; the job of making a human friendly tool with linear, binary logic. I am trying to find some reasons to disagree with her take on the Web:
The spreadsheet is the program that all but created the personal computer. The spreadsheet and the word processor--two tools empty of information, two little programs sitting patiently and passively for their human owners to put something interesting into them. Now, fifteen years later, the Internet browser is the program creating the the second generation of the personal computer. The browser--a click-click baby tool for searching the Web, where everything of interest already resides. It is a journey through the looking glass in the age of information: one pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small.Maybe I have such a good time creating content for the web, I don't realize how passive it is for users. |
And finally, from an evening canoe ride, just an average sunset. | |
| |