is a blog by Brendan
Dear gentle reader: this blog has been operating continuously since I was a teenager. The writing below is at least a decade old. In that time every molecule of my body has been replaced, along with many foolish ideas and flighty beliefs. I want to keep some of those things public out of an honesty and humility I owe the world. I trust you to carry that context with you.
How hip are you? How hip do you want to be?
I’m comfortably hip.
Thanks for everybody who called, wrote or commented to send me birthday wishes, and to all the people who showed up at my partylike entity. You’re all great! And I am made happy by material possessions: DC gave me more of the awesome restricted-access Actors Theatre notebooks, and Maria gave me about a jillion books and DVDs and an ice cream cake and apparently something else that hasn’t arrived yet, and Lisa gave me–exclamation marks!–my first-ever illustrated story! (Of Fortado.)
Despite my inexplicable knee-jerk belief of the past several months that I’ve been 26, I’m 24. Tonight I sent off the third-to-last thing I have to do to graduate. Almost done.
It doesn’t honestly feel like I’ve lived in Louisville that long. I feel so much more competent now, in so many areas, than I did two years ago: working with humans, writing code, writing, traveling, using public transportation, applying the principles of aikido to solve nonphysical conflicts–all the things I want to spend my whole life doing.
Also, I think this is the year my brain starts dying!
Okay, double-clicking is a terrible interface, all right? It’s TERRIBLE and STUPID. It’s wildly unintuitive and it distributes a conceptually atomic operation across two distinct actions!
This is, for all of you who come over to my place and try to use Firefox and get a surprise, why my mouse’s wheel button doesn’t open a new tab. It’s set to act like a double-click, as have been all my mice since 1998. I could tell when I was seventeen that double-clicking is bad usability, and all Jakob Nielsen cares about is whether my links are blue! I HATE EVERYTHING FUN!
This has been “Brendan Pretends to be Pat from Achewood.” Except I’m serious about double-clicking, dammit.
I can’t stop listening to Jesusland. WHY CAN’T I STOP LISTENING TO JESUSLAND. Because it’s such an important song! Because, to Nathan Rabin’s disappointment, it’s not satire.
I spent most of the past week and almost all of the last 24 hours writing code for my Master’s degree project, because I’m a terrible person. And then today I came in to work on zero sleep for the first time. This should be different.
On the bus here, I had a dozing dream about falling out onto a huge slick plain of PHP and whitespace. I knew it was stuff I’d written, but I couldn’t figure out where in the whole scheme it fit. I was lost! It could be miles to the nearest comment! It was pretty scary.
I have (wisely, I think) decided not to write an anacrusis about this.
I recently discovered Scott Thigpen’s Flickr stream, thanks to Grumpy Tim Coe pointing out his “Sad People in Disney World” set. I have thought Scott Thigpen and the things he draws were awesome since about 2000, so it’s neat to see the stuff he photographs.
Anyway, I thought Jon and Amanda would want to know that he recently captured the exotic Cheshire Pug.
