A long time ago, I wrote:

I just look forward to the album from United Nations, the collaboration project between Geoff Rickly (lead singer of Thursday) and Daryl Palumbo (lead singer of Glassjaw, among other bands). Then my life will be complete.

Apparently, my life will be complete on September 9th.

I’ve been thinking about this since it happened.

Geoff Rickly, by bill shouldis. Licensed by the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

I was introduced to TED several months ago. For me, it’s an ingenious collection of original content, comprised of talks from some of today’s foremost thinkers. And, the vast majority of the speeches are under 20 minutes long, letting one learn about the world while brushing one’s teeth even.

Were I to post all of the clips I think are interesting, I’d end up duplicating TED.com’s index. I can’t help but share this one below: Sir Martin Rees discussing the future of Earth. Starting off by stating that he speaks “first as an astronomer and then as a worried member of the human race,” he asks the questions that I, hopefully along many others who are much smarter than me, have been thinking about for quite some time. In 17 minutes.

Emphasis mine.

From an interview with Marc Ecko:

Whatever you do in life, be passionate about it. At least once a month, if not every day, reassess what you’re doing and make sure you still love it. If you’re passionate about something others around you may see as a dead end, pave your own way. Be a trailblazer.

From “Why Old Technologies Are Still Kicking,” a discussion on mainframe technology:

“Technologies want to survive, and they reinvent themselves to go on,” he said.

From the opinion piece “The Republican Resurrection” by Frank Rich:

Mrs. Clinton is fond of mocking her adversary for offering “just words.” But words can matter, and Mrs. Clinton’s tragedy is that she never realized they could have mattered for her, too. You have to wonder if her Iraq speech would have been greeted with the same shrug if she had tossed away her usual talking points and seized the opportunity to address the war in the same adult way that Mr. Obama addressed race.

When work is a big playground (albeit with real consequences of failure), it’s hard to get out of the mind set of the enterprise infrastructuralist.

Today I was walking back home and thinking, “My apartment is a single point of failure for some of my critically important data. Hmm. Okay, well, I should replicate it remotely somewhere. But if I were to do that, I might as well have remotely replicated storage as well. So I need some SAN space mirrored at the hardware level between two disparate geographic sites. But then, I need two dedicated servers co-located with that storage to actually serve me the files. Or maybe I should just use snap-mirrored NFS toasters.”

Then I came to my senses.

I’m still sad I don’t have my own datacenter(s).

…but the bartender had no idea what i was talking about.

(This, a thank you post, to whomever anonymously sent me a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. While I kind of enjoyed being made fun of for not having read it, it was really good to finally do it.)

Jon, Chris, and I saw the Foo Fighters and Serj Tankian (singer from System of a Down) at MSG tonight. Amazing show. The crowd was not really what I had expected. The three of us *started* the mosh pit. Me. Starting a mosh pit. Ridiculous. But it happened tonight. Many times.

By the end, we [met | had physical contact with] a nice group of guys, and one crazy girl, who felt the same we did.

Sadly, no good concert injuries to speak of. I banged up my knee and elbow a bit, and Chris drew a little blood, but nothing like the guy who broke his leg. By standing there. We had nothing to do with it. Honest.

Sleep.

Photo credit: Dave - Foo Fighters by gajbireland. Licensed under CC Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic.

From this week’s “The Look Book” in New York Magazine (yes, again):

What do you do?
I knew you were going to ask that, but I’m weird about being associated with what I do. We all label people based on that, so what I do is, I’m a human living life, just like you are.

But how do you pay rent?
Vocationally, I’m a fashion stylist and an artist and I’m multifaceted. And then I also work at Jeffrey in their women’s designer section. I’m in a space with four walls and other people, and it’s been very challenging to wrap my brain around that.

(Emphasis mine).

I’ve been thinking along similar lines. Pretty sweet.

From this week’s “The Look Book” in New York Magazine:

Tell me about your look.
A lot of it is influenced by Japanese street fashion, but mostly I wear band gear. My favorite band is Glassjaw.

What are they like?
It’s hard to explain them, but it’s music that you want to hear when you break up with the love of your life. Very emotional. Very angry. Honestly, I’ve never had a love of my life, but if I did, that’s what I would listen to when we broke up.

I just look forward to the album from United Nations, the collaboration project between Geoff Rickly (lead singer of Thursday) and Daryl Palumbo (lead singer of Glassjaw, among other bands). Then my life will be complete.