Reading for 2008-12-29

Roberto Bolaño's "Beach" - the essay in which, if you view the story as biographical, gives the idea that Bolaño was a heroin addict. The whole heroin addict thing has been debunked (mostly), but the story is good nevertheless.
- via the Millions

T.C. Boyle's "Top of the Food Chain" - this came up on the Wallace-l .  I haven't read it yet, but it sounded interesting.

Finally, the ground read of Bolaño's 2666 is about to begin over at bolano-l .  Come on over and join the discussion (begins January 12th)!

Post 3

Every morning on the way to work I tell myself that today will be the day that I'm very productive and that I will get lots of works done and be the king of everything. I tell myself that I will keep my web browser closed until after noon (at least) and I'll focus on knocking out at least one big hard issue.

Yeah, and so it never really works out that way.

I'm actually pretty organized. I know what I've got to do and when it needs to be done and I usually hit all of my goals - but I know I could be much, much better. If I could manage to focus all day then I'd probably get twice the amount of work done that I'm doing now.

Instead, I'm searching around for podcasts that could explain this Microsoft Expression stuff to me since I've somehow never heard of it. And now I'm checking my RSS reader for the hundredth time this afternoon.

So here we go - one more promise to myself that I'm going to start kicking ass. Seriously now. And maybe I can track that kind of thing on this here blog. Or maybe not. Because I'm all about starting things that I can't (or won't) finish.

Post 2

Sometime last week Pitchfork changed the RSS feed in two significant ways. The biggest thing being that you can read the full text of all of the items in their news feed. They used to only show the news headline, but the link to the article was misformed and clicking didn't do you much good. So the second thing is that the links in the feed work now. This is all pretty good news since I was about to drop the Pitchfork feed from my Google Reader.

Today I created a playlist in iTunes called "Unloved" which contains all of the songs that I've never listened to (where playcount = 0). So that gave me a playlist of 938 songs. I sorted them by their playtime - so that the shortest ones come first and then I hit play. The good news is that I've knocked out a bunch of them already - mostly skits, intros, transition songs, etc. I'm into the "just under two minute songs" section of this new playlist - listening to some Pavement right now. Sorting a playlist by the length of the songs creates a pretty disjointed flow - so I don't recommend doing this when DJing a party or anything!

Finally, I'm supposed to be a speaker at this conference in about three weeks and the presentation is due today and I'm only about a third of the way through it. And I gotta tell you, I'm totally not motivated to finish it - hence the blogging.

Post 1

I read a really fantastic article by Jason Scott today regarding the Creative Commons license.

Jason's main point is that people attach these licenses to their work without really knowing what they've signed up for and then *poof* their work is out there for everybody to use and distribute for F-R-Double-E.