Objective - Chris Hollander's Blog: pensive

what a dork.

Wed, 07 Jun 2006 18:48:46 GMT

no, but seriously... what a dork. I haven't posted here in over two months, and the last post i leave up is a dork'ed up rant on my awesome geek toys... pretty sad, really.

So, in the past two months, i've been insanely busy at work, busy going insane during the last episode of lost, and lost important episodes of my favorite shows because my time warner DVR sucks. :(

We've also thrown a few parties at the house; most notably, Jill and Dave's going away party, and Dave's 30th birthday after party.

I have a trip to ireland scheduled this July. :) does anyone want me to bring them back anything?

Expect pictures from the parties soon, and pictures from Ireland later.

P.S. Did i tell you about the time our house was invaded by the irish for 5 weeks? if not, expect to read about it soon...

ok, so its officially a problem...

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 19:42:15 GMT

Apparently, I'm not the only person who is finding it incredibly difficult to not tag emoticons to the end of all of my text based communications.

Over at the fishbowl, Charles Miller shares, and I feel his pain:

but it has now reached a point where I can’t say anything over chat or instant-messaging that’s even remotely meant in the slightest hint of jest without appending a fucking ‘:)’ to it.

seriously... whats the deal here? who knew that the english language was so lacking in terms of punctuation? There's no relief in sight, either. Even with talk of additional punction marks, I don't see emoticons going away any time soon; half-duplex, text based communication just falls short when it comes to conveying subtlety, and tone. the larger problem, at least from my perspective, is that i've come to rely on a small, finite set of discrete icons to represent my entire spectrum of emotion:

very happy
politely tolerating
truly amused
impressed (potentially with myself)
wondering why you just wrote whatever you wrote
wondering why I just wrote whatever I wrote
annoyed by the inadequecies of emoticons to convey anything important.

remember/forget...

Wed, 18 Jan 2006 20:44:41 GMT

If you could have someone who had once forgotten you suddenly remember, or have someone who remembers you suddenly forget who you are, which would you choose?

I can ask MSN messenger to either remember who I am, or forget, just as easily. When will this feature be released for real life?

I blame geeks. If you've grown up with computers, you've learned that things are disposable. delete a file. format a disk. Erase a paragraph; remove a stranger from the background of a picture. remove loss from your life. its so easy, isn't it? I constantly ask my co-workers if they mind me "Deleting" the whiteboard; they only correct me half the time. I constantly find myself trying to hit CTRL+Z to undo mistakes I make... at my computer or away from it. I constantly try to Tivo-Instant replay things that I missed... songs on the radio, sights that whizz by, conversations that I should have payed more attention to.

When I watch 50 first dates, or Memento, or Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, its obvious that I'm not the only person who thinks about things like this. In all of these movies, people stuggle to remember, or struggle to forget. Which is harder?