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Istanbul was Constantinople

This is potentially interesting. I've just been asked to go to Istanbul in January and speak at a big public event on behalf of my company. Should be more than a thousand people there.

Istanbul. Will try to stay the weekend, take a look around.

Passive Aggressive

I can tell I've been working in communications too long. I was listening to Boards of Canada while putting laundry away today. That track "Dandelion" came on, which features a Leslie Nielsen voiceover from a 1960s documentary on underwater geology.

So I was trying to match up socks from the basket and Leslie said: "A new contraption to capture a dandelion in one piece has been put together by the crew."

I actually felt an autonomic physical disgust response, and before I could stop myself I was thinking "Who writes this stuff! It's all in passive voice, and the grammar is too complex, and what's with 'put together by the crew' - couldn't they find a more forceful verb than 'put together'!!"

Jesus, guess I've been working too much lately. Or maybe it's all the coffee. I gotta relax.

First Second Life

Went on Second Life for the first time today. There's been too much news about it lately, and the idea is just too obviously perfect for me to have held off any longer. Second Life is Gibson's matrix, Stephenson's Metaverse, and Burroughs's Interzone. So yeah, we're here now. We've made it this far. It's happening.

What did I learn today? So far, only that a circa 2003 iMac with a gig of RAM just can't seem to handle the graphics. But the concept is there. I hope the place doesn't burn down before I get the chance try this for real.

Fuck knows where I'm going to find the time for this... I really enjoyed Tribenet and met some cool people (hi Deborah!), but I just couldn't trade sleep for online time any more and just had to drop off. Likewise, I've got a MySpace account but have never logged in since creating it. There's too much going on to keep track of.

Second Life? I still can barely handle the first!

Back for just a moment

Crazy at work again and I've been buried under the flood. So much to talk about but never enough time.

I didn't get any photos from Munich, but I finally got a breather today, and so I put up a few shots from my trip to Seattle last month. As I wrote earlier, we got a visual treat as our A340 chased the sun across the top of Greenland. At that latitude and speed, the plane was flying west at exactly the rate of the rotation of the Earth, so we got this amazing pink Arctic sunset for hours. So here are a few shots of that, and a few from the week in Seattle.

More to come. I'll catch up on the site (and on sleep) one of these days. Must dive back in now...

Election Day

Election day in the US and I'm boxed up in this conference in Munich. Have been too busy to keep track of the races, but when I woke up this morning I saw the Democrats had taken the House and the Senate is going down to the wire.

I think it's important that the voter turnout has been higher than ever- into the 50s and 60s for some of the states that are reporting. It would be great if this isn't just a temporary spasm of voter interest brought on by a bad war and a miserable congress, but is instead the beginning of a new trend of people holding politicians accountable for the things they've said and done. But we'll have to see about that. I'm also glad that there don't seem to have been any major problems with the new voting machines. At least none we know of yet.

Back to work. Hoping the Senate gets wrapped up by the time I fly out tonight.

I have a crippling, hammer-of-God hangover. Not sure why I needed to say that.

Muscle & Hate

There have been some good shows in town this past week, which is another reason I'm so tired lately. Saw Nitzer Ebb two days ago and danced my ass off. I really miss that aggressive old school industrial style.

I've really been digging industrial music lately, I don't know where this impulse is coming from but it almost feels like it's 1988 again. Probably stress related. But it's good to have some nice pounding aggressive music on the iPod when it's two in the morning and I'm still online, IM'ing with co-workers who are on Pacific Standard Time.

They recorded the Nitzer Ebb show and put it on YouTube here. It's funny, you can see me dancing, (well, just the side of my head) near the camera at around 45 seconds in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSgAI7poW9g

Munich

Flying to Munich tomorrow for a conference, no rest for the wicked. I'm so short on sleep I can hardly see straight. This time will be a little different though because Cecilie is coming with for the weekend. So while I'm trapped in nightmare conference-land she can go out museum-hopping.

We haven't done a biz trip together since Moscow three years ago. This should be fun. I just need to catch up on sleep so I can function.

This Corrosion

Have been more buried than usual with day-job work. I'm optimistic things are going to get better around January (when I get to stop working two jobs and hand off half the stuff I've been doing to a new hire), but lately it's been really hard. Not much sleep. Feeling kinda hazy.

So I'm sitting here listening to industrial on the iPod so I can stay awake and keep working, and Sisters of Mercy "This Corrosion" just came on. It was Loraine's favorite song, and of course I always think about her when it comes on. I don't think I ever saw her dancing to it back in the old club scene, but I can imagine how she would have looked.

Last time I saw Hannah was in Chicago in July, and it occurred to me at the time that it had been three years since Lo passed away. I had wanted to talk about what that felt like, but I decided not to risk being a downer because it had been such a great night, airport to club to early morning diner. But now I kind of wish I had.

Hey now, hey now now, sing this corrosion to me...