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must blog before head explodes

Listening to:	Supernova 2005, Attention Panel
Reading:	Louis Armstrong, An Extravagant Life
Weather:	55, clear and sunny

Happy October! This has been an incredible stretch of weather for the past 6 weeks or more for us in the foothills of the Alleghenies, one of the 11 mountain ranges of Appalachia. Clear sunny days and comfortable cool nights after an unusually hot and humid summer. Autumn totally rules here, especially when it's not too wet, so I'm a happy little camper. I should say, though, the night temps have taken a wicked dip, it was 35 on my porch at 7:15am yesterday. I'm holding out, not firing up the furnace just yet, hoping it was an early anomaly.

I've neglected blogging for a while, so I have a fat brain dump imminent. In trying to manage the flow, I'm wondering, should I zag instead of the usual zig? I mean, should I start with the now (uh, looks like I already have), and head backward in time, open to the possibility that some of the past never makes it to the page, but now I can feel current enough to move forward? [interruption: my typos are sometimes privately entertaining, as Freud promised, and sometimes they're just the crystal ball the doctor ordered. I just typed "backword" before correcting. But backword makes perfect sense to me now, so tally ho, on with the show. . .]

Continuous partial attention. This is the topic of Linda Stone's intro to the panel discussion to which I've been listening this morning while doing my (also recently neglected) dishes. Some synthesizes how we are currently coping with information overload. Specifically how are we utilizing technology to suit our need to filter the overwhelming quantities of stuff we encounter, and the levels of attention we pay to different things. She also makes delivers some great insights about how we evolved from trusting insitutions to filter our info (marriage, our company employer, Walter Cronkite), to unbridled personal freedom and trusting nothing, to now where we trust our networks to do our filtering for us (the blogosphere, technorati, listservs). The iPod is recreating a little personal non-communication zone that we desperately need away from the cell phone and blackberry. Check her out: "With continuous partial attention we keep the top-level item in focus while we scan the periphery in case something more important emerges."

This is exactly what pisses me off about y'all and your call waiting. I always feel like when I'm on the phone with someone who makes copious use of call waiting, he's just talking to me until somebody better rings in. Very obnoxious, yo? I do not have call waiting for that very reason: when I'm listening to you, I'm listening to you. Not just settling for your noise till something better comes along. No cell phone for me, either, so I don't need the little white earbuds of iPod to create some me time. When I'm in my car, which is many hours per week, I'm happily incommunicado.

The sunset project. I know so little beyond point and shoot on my little Canon Elph SD400, I decided to try a bunch of settings on this sunset. On my way home I took the high road, of course :), and was lucky enough to catch an amazing vista. I stopped, backed up, hopped out, and sat the camera atop my car as I snapped away in manual mode changing various settings with each shot. Took about a minute, probably. I was not careful to keep the same composition each time, didn't think of it till after I got home and downloaded the pix. I'm interested in the idea of series art, and have a timelines project in mind (non-photographic), which I've been working on in my head on a back burner for a few weeks. More on this later.

Well, off to the mall. Again. That's the thing about a teenager who lives in the country, her social mecca is the freakin mall, and I'm the taxi driver.

More backwords later.

permalink posted by cat 11:00 AM

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