New articles released on the Yankee Magazine website now automatically trigger an update to the Yankee Magazine Twitter stream. So now you can follow Yankee through Twitter, and get an SMS or instant message every time there’s new content. Ah the joys of having content in a CMS and having access to an easy-to-implement API.
Every morning at 8:10 a.m. we leave our house at 100 Prince Street in Charlottetown and head north to Prince Street School. And every morning at about 8:12 a.m. we see the same bird perched on the same place on the same traffic light at the corner of Prince and Kent. It’s magic.
If you’ve bumped up against my digital identity in any of its multi-hued forms, you’ve no doubt come across my ubiquitous avatar:
From time to time I get flack from people thinking I need a better photo for this. “It’s really, really red, you know?” they write.
Yes, it’s really, really red. I know. It doesn’t bother me. Indeed it stands out, which is not bad for an avatar to do.
Until yesterday I thought that the original photos from the session that gave rise to the avatar were lost, but a consolidation of iPhoto libraries from four Macs produced the set:
This was a self-inflicted random act of photography conducted with our yellow living room wall as a backdrop on July 24, 2003. I shot the photos with my Canon S100; the top set with a flash, and the bottom set without.
The top set look like mug shots, and the lighting is far too harsh. Although the bottom set is very saturated with red, and not at all what I “really looked like,” the effect caught my eye. And the combination of whimsy, curiosity and suspicion in the last photo, in the bottom-right, is about as good a photographic representation of the inside of my head as you’ll find. So that became the avatar (I’ll use the bottom-left photo as the avatar when I release my first solo-acoustic album).
The funny thing about that photo is that when you look at it full-size, it’s actually quite out of focus; indeed it hurts my eyes to look at:
Somehow when it gets resized and cropped, it looks, well, okay. Of course it still is really, really red. I know.
What’s the story of your avatar?
There’s an excellent article in The Atlantic this month by Henry Blodget on the ins and outs of “socially responsible investing.” Blodget manages to put into words something I’ve long felt but have never been able to adequately express:
At some level, after all, our very economic system is socially problematic. The benefits accrue disproportionately to owners (investors, this means you), who make fortunes off the labor of rank-and-file employees. Luck plays a role, as does timing. Education, connections, and money give some people an edge, and hard work doesn’t always carry the day. The key to increasing profit and wealth is improving productivity, and an owner’s glee at producing the same amount with 50 workers as with 100 is not often shared by those who got canned. If you’re going to invest in any free-market enterprise, you’re going to have to accept that no matter how enlightened you choices, your money will be supporting wealth disparity, inequality, and other arguably unfair conditions that go hand in hand with a successful free-market economy.
What’s in that paragraph that’s missing from almost anything else that considers the subject is simply the admission that owning a piece of the market economy is, simply by definition, unfair. For me, that’s the key, and it makes considering the issue so much easier because deciding whether to become an investor or not is thus a simple matter of deciding whether I can live with that essential quality of the enterprise.
If I can, then all bets, so to speak, are off: I could easily become an aggressive and completely socially irresponsible investor (tobacco, whale killing, nuclear plants: bring it on!).
When I came home on Sunday afternoon [[Catherine]] asked me to find out from [[Oliver]] what he meant by “water cake.” Earlier in the day she had asked him what kind of cake he wanted for his birthday, and that was his response. But she couldn’t get out of him what he actually meant.
Once I started talking to Oliver about Water Cakes it became clear that he knew exactly what he wanted — I could tell he was channelling a great vision in his head. It was also clear that the laws of physics and chemistry would prevent successful completion of a cake that involved tremendous amount of boiling water. Or, at the very least, our guests would be scalded.
So, using the kind of verbal judo that all parents in the readership will know well, I managed to convince Oliver that, although his cake vision was entirely valid, actual execution would demand some design modifications. By the end of our talk I had him around to a position wherein a normally baked cake would suffice, albeit one with interpretations of the graphical user interface of the Water Cake applied with icing.
Fortunately Catherine is brilliant, so at this point my work was done and I handed things over to her. Here’s the result:
Today [[Oliver]] turns 7. By coincidence I’ve been working to merge our various collections of digital photos from various Macs into one uber-collection. Which, given that we bought our first digital camera the month before Oliver was born, has been a good review of his life so far.
The most amazing photo of Oliver, for me, is this one:
It’s amazing because it was taken when he was three days old. After two days of lying motionless under a ventilated hood with tubes and wires strapped all over him, on the third day Oliver decided he was going to be okay; and so he was. This wasn’t a gradual phase into health, but rather a quantum leap into full-on babyhood. Indeed, as the expression you see there on his face suggests, he was a little taken aback by it all. As were we.
Happy Birthday Oliver!
[[Oliver]] and I had the pleasure of a repeat trip to the annual Open House at the Atlantic Veterinary College this afternoon. They know how to open house up there, and it’s always well organized, educational and entertaining.
The most intriguing discovery of our visit was a heretofore secret research lab where they are breeding freaky PigSheepCow combo-animals:
About This Blog
I am Peter Rukavina and this is my blog. I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.
To learn more about me, read my /now, look at my bio, read presentations and speeches I’ve written, or get in touch (peter@rukavina.net is the quickest way). You can subscribe to an RSS feed of posts, an RSS feed of comments, or receive a daily digests of posts by email.