Most blogs I read lightly. The list of blogs I find interesting is so long that I skim them, looking for nuggets of information and entertainment. Blogs tend to lend themselves to that sort of light reading—skipping from post to post (images of video games come to mind, complete with picking up useful items and “content points” along the way).
But every now and then, I stop short on a blog post, forced into a deeper level of reading and consideration than I expect. I tend to go back to the posts to read them again, trying to understand why they interrupted my breezy progress through the ‘roll.
Timothy Burke’s post “Living in a Historical Time” was one of those. Here’s a bit from the end:
Some things cannot be cured, and must be endured. Or if not just endured, instead changed for the better and faced with responsibility and a principled understanding of what the limits and possibilities of action are. We can know, learn and grow in wisdom, and even fight back against the burdens of our time, looking for and making the miracle of progress in a world that has ceased to believe in it. But grief is grief. It is right and just that we feel loss from which there is no restoration. I can raise my daughter, and try to move back from grief. I can try to find again my sense of joy in the world and reconnect to friends and life. My father is dead and will always be, and everything that depended on the changing possibilities of his life in the world is gone. A ruin is broken stone and scattered metal forever, no matter what gets built on it later.
That’s why I don’t take Burke off my blogroll, despite the fact that he doesn’t ping when he updates, doesn’t update often enough, and doesn’t allow comments. :)
And as my husband points out, the only thing better than seeing your name in an official NSF award notice is seeing it while you listen to Allison Krauss singing on Austin City Limits. Damn, that woman can sing. (Oh, man. That’s going to trigger the filtering software again, isn’t it?)
You know you’re really a geek when this Clay Shirky line makes you laugh:
If you thought that all that was wrong with RSS 1.0 is that RDF didn’t make it confusing enough, attach the twin boat-anchors of OWL and the Semantic Web to Echo and see what happens.
From Sam Ruby’s wiki on the emerging Echo RSS replacement project. (And yes, I know that just reading that wiki is enough to push me way too high on the geek-o-meter.)
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