michelle o

nice WSJ profile on official green lodge feminine icon Michelle O, noteworthy just for that but also for

1 - the semi-implication in the article and in the 'interview outtakes' posted online that Barack maybe still hasn't totally quit smoking (update: might be reading too much into it, but the tenses seem a little cloudy...), which is unfortunate from a health perspective but also humanizing and kind of interesting. I've been curious, both b/c I feel bad for the guy to have to try and work on ending a stress-coping addiction in the middle of the most stressful time imaginable and because the (well, almost) total non-mention of his smoking in the press is a nice and weirdly old-fashioned reminder that there are still some lines, albeit totally random lines, wrt personal privacy and respect that they generally don't cross. did you know that Laura Bush is a smoker, too? but there's some kind of deal, spoken or unspoken, where the press never takes pictures of her smoking or asks or writes about it. I'll give 2:1 odds that if dude becomes president, that'll be another barrier that gets broken

2 - the WSJ's casual and totally gratuitous use of "vibe" in a supposedly serious article - not to be too blatantly carrying the torch for the much-missed and obviously ahead of the curve Internet Vibes, but I feel like this sentence would be unthinkable for the Journal in, say, 2005 or 2006, no?

"Friends and campaign aides describe them as a high-powered team built on contrasts: She's the heart to his head, the enforcer to his lapses, regimented to his laid-back, critic to his ego, details to his broad strokes, sarcasm to his sincerity, toughness to his cool vibe."

fuck that w00t bullshit maybe I am just too like not a total fucking internet nerd but I feel like 'vibe' was obviously the true breakout word of 2007

new flows

you know, I had a birthday recently and got asked a few times the requisite 'do you feel any different/have you changed' etc type questions, and I was like, "what do you mean, like, have I changed the way I use the internet? yes! it's really exciting. but have I changed 'inside', emotionally or otherwise? not for like at least 10 years or so. obv!" kind of a flip answer but really, enhancing those internet flows is just as important, and more importantly way more achievable, than trying to deal with our obscure, hopelessly stunted inner worlds, gnah mean?

so, in the spirit of a new year and new beginnings and all that, I've recently made a couple of significant changes to my work as well as my music flows, the results of will undoubtedly be reflected in the content of this blog in more as well as less obvious ways:

1- as I mentioned recently on the old blog, I've been mainlining energy-related news for work from a carefully managed Google Reader account, and filing away anything worthwhile on my rapidly growing del.icio.us page. instead of trying to read and remember things, which is impossible already and only gets more impossible the more you read, I just skim, tag, and let the knowledge accumulate until I need it, at which point I can easily call up the crumb trail of links I've been scattering.

as you've noticed if you're reading this on the actual page and not hiding like a coward behind yr RSS reader, I've taken the opportunity presented by my blog-move to add some new 'functionality' to this page, namely a continually updated list of my latest del.icio.us links as well as a tag cloud which you can use to explore my growing information nugget from various entry points. these will undoubtedly be tweaked a bit in the days/weeks to come but I encourage you to avail yourself of these resources if you're interested - as kind of my virtual filing cabinet for work stuff, I'll be keeping it at least as up-to-date as the blog and continually working to enhance its usability etc. comments welcome.

2 - after resisting for awhile, I 'finally' got around to getting an ipod, snagging one of those little new super small clip-on 1 GB nano-shuffle-jawns. we'll see how often I actually use it considering how rarely I leave the house these days, but I'm optimistic that it could offer a kind of solution to the repetitive/obsessive/limiting listening habits I've fallen into over the past year or so of not having a car. one of the best things about driving a car is getting a nice, relatively distraction-free (well, hah etc) environment to listen to music out in the world etc. I feel like 90% of the time I spend listening to music is in front of my computer, and at least 70% or so of that time involves me being more actively focused on work or other internet stuff. definitely not good for my ears or taste in the long run

so, am now working off of a system where I've cut my 'recently played' list to cover just the past week or so and every week I shovel a random selection of these into my iPod with the handy autofill feature, and then shuffle through subway and train rides etc, walking occasz. I kind of like not having any display to tell me what I'm listening to, makes it easy to listen w/o prejudice even if I can usually kind of figure it out, definitely one of those bugs that is totally a feature. for instance, the past few days I've been traveling with a great mix of Nate's Best of 2007 (lots of dreamy, vibe-suffused global prog-folk etc), the Twin Peaks Season 2 soundtrack (yess!), the recent Beanie Siegel and Joell Ortiz albums (rappp!), Black Dice's Load Blown (maybe not as genius as I hoped?), the Durty Goodz Axiom EP, David Lynch's audiobook (creepy, more on this for sure later), and, uhh, Urge Overkill's forgotten masterpiece Exit the Dragon (definitely more on this later too).

much like when I had the car and I just had CD mixes of whatever I'd downloaded from the interweb that week, it's pleasing to see how many connections there end up being between music that doesn't have any particular relation to each other other than the fact that I sought them out and/or stumbled across them at this particular time, in this particular state of mind - connections that would probably be harder to see if I was skipping around tracks based on who they were by, what I thought I wanted to hear, my generally highly orthodox feelings about what kind of music vibes are appropriate pairings with a given environmental vibe, etc