Maszman Speaks!

Recently, Steven Berlin John­son gave a talk at his alma mater Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity on the future of text called The Glass Box And The Com­mon­place Book. It’s a bit dis­jointed, but def­i­nitely worth reading.

In case you’re won­der­ing, keep­ing a com­mon­place book involved tran­scrib­ing into it inter­est­ing or inspi­ra­tional pas­sages from one’s read­ing, assem­bling a per­son­al­ized ency­clo­pe­dia of quotations.

As you can see, I did man­age to update the theme to some­thing that works for me. It’s Ele­gant Grunge by Michael Tyson. I’ll prob­a­bly move some of the things around and I know I want a header graphic, but for now things are good enough.

Let me know what you think.

I had planned a major site over­haul, new theme, updated wid­gets, vis­i­ble tags in posts, etc. Unfor­tu­nately, it didn’t quite work out. I had to revert back to the old setup, but with a cou­ple of minor changes. The old “Asides” block is now called “Miniblog” and no longer has its own RSS feed. If you’re a reg­u­lar RSS reader and have a sep­a­rate feed for the Asides, I apol­o­gize for the change. The theme I am using is old and hasn’t been updated so it doesn’t han­dle the asides cat­e­gory in the data­base. There’s a new header image too. If you’re won­der­ing, it’s my Her­itage H-575 archtop.

Brad Gra­ham, who was one of the peo­ple who orig­i­nally inspired me to start my own weblog, has passed away sud­denly at age 41. You would be hard-pressed to find a more influ­en­tial or bet­ter regarded per­son on the web. A lot of peo­ple are going to miss him.