Where were you 20 years ago? [wikipedia.org]? We watched all the news reports in school as it unfolded in the days leading up to the final events… not that we really understood the significance of the events (the same can be said for the the other big international development that year [wikipedia.org]).
Category: ranting
Random thoughts, frustrations, ideas and opinions. Quality not guaranteed, consume only under adult supervision
Taking a cab home from work late tonight I had a second to reflect on an interesting coincidence: my office is now located (we’ve moved recently which brings up a different but equally funny note; I’ve changed office 5 times since coming to Singapore, but I’ve only changed jobs twice… I guess since I’ve managed to put a stop to my habit of moving house once a year that was going on for 12 years now that I own a house, somehow that curse has been transferred to moving office way to often… And now that this parenthetical reference has dragged on so long that, like a freshman reading Kant, you can’t remember what the main sentence was talking about we return you to your normally scheduled programming…) in the building next door to the building that housed my office when I first moved to Singapore in 2004.
Categories
Steal these photos! Again!
All my public photos on my Flickr account [flickr.com] are released under the Creative Commons, Attribution License [creativecommons.org]. This means that no one has to seek my permission to use the photos for any work, be it commercial or non-commercial. A lot of people do send me email via Flickr to tell me they have used a photo or to ask if I would be OK with them using one in a certain context.
It’s always fun to google myself or use Flickr’s click-through records to see new places that an image has been used. In addition to a number of blogs, my photos can be found on a few travel related sites (here [sacred-destinations.com] and here [travelmuse.com]), and there are currently 76 of my photos on Wikimedia Commons [commons.wikimedia.org] a few of which are actually used on Wikipedia pages. I even had one photo published [confusion.cc] as the cover of a text book. But today I came across, for the first time, one of my photos on a site I actually use (albeit a page I would not have come to without the Flickr click-through reports). I signed up to Dopplr [dopplr.org] last year, long after I visited Moscow, but one of my Moscow photos is now the backdrop for the Moscow Page [dopplr.com]:
NB: you can see the original photo on Flickr [flickr.com].
NB2: the original “Steal these photos” [confusion.cc] post was way back in 2005!
I wanted to talk like a Kevin Smith [wikipedia.org] character when I was in high school…
Jesus, nobody twisted your arm to be here. You’re here of your own volition. You like to think the weight of the world rests on your shoulder. Like this place would fall apart if Dante wasn’t here. Jesus, you overcompensate for having what’s basically a monkey’s job. You push fucking buttons. Anybody can waltz in here and do our jobs. You-You’re so obsessed with making it seem so much more epic, so much more important than it really is. Christ, you work in a convenience store, Dante! And badly, I might add! I work in a shitty video store, badly as well. You know, that guy Jay’s got it right, man. He has no delusions about what he does. Us, we like to make ourselves seem so much more important than the people that come in here to buy a paper, or, god forbid, cigarettes. We look down on them as if we’re so advanced. Well, if we’re so fucking advanced, what are we doing working here?
Randal Graves, in “Clerks” [imdb.com]
Now, I think I might prefer Anthony Bourdain [wikipedia.org]…
“Alice Waters annoys the living shit out of me. We’re all in the middle of a recession, like we’re all going to start buying expensive organic food and running to the green market. There’s something very Khmer Rouge about Alice Waters that has become unrealistic. I mean I’m not crazy about our obsession with corn or ethanol and all that, but I’m a little uncomfortable with legislating good eating habits. I’m suspicious of orthodoxy, the kind of orthodoxy when it comes to what you put in your mouth. I’m a little reluctant to admit that maybe Americans are too stupid to figure out that the food we’re eating is killing us. But I don’t know if it’s time to send out special squads to close all the McDonald’s. My libertarian side is at odds with my revulsion at what we as a country have done to ourselves physically with what we’ve chosen to eat and our fast food culture. I’m really divided on that issue.”
Anthony Bourdain
If I prefer Anthony Bourdain, it’s only because you can’t talk like Kevin Smith characters in the real world… unless you live in a frat house or work in porn…
Last night I received a package from France; from L’Asiathèque – Maison des langues du monde [asiatheque.com]. Inside was a copy of their new book Vocabulaire du chinois contemporain 1; Exercices pour la préparation au HSK. On the cover is a photo I took! [flickr.com]
Very cool. I sold a photo [confusion.cc] once… but now I’m published!