[Note: I posted an excerpt of this on kottke.org, but didn't want to include the rest of it, so here's the whole thing.]
Heather Armstrong, on meeting her new neighbors and having to explain what she does for a living:
Over the last few weeks several neighbors have stopped by to introduce themselves, and invariably they are older than we are, more established, and have careers in medicine or law. And when they ask what we do, both Jon and I sort of flinch and exchange a quick look that says IT'S YOUR TURN TO LIE. We're web developers, we say, and that is never enough, they just can't leave it alone, and one of us will try to explain that I have a website. This thing. That I do. And because we're being all coy about it I just know, from the very worried expressions on their faces, that these neighbors think that we run a porn site.
This is the exact interaction I have with most people that I've met in the past couple of years, right down to the "we're web developers, we say, and that is never enough, they just can't leave it alone" part. I imagine professional mimes, phone sex operators, and people that make a living selling other people's stuff on eBay have the same sorts of awkward conversations with their new neighbors.
The expanded version of this dreaded conversation is:
Them: "So, what do you do?"
Me: "I'm, uh, a web developer. I built web sites, I guess."
Them: Some variation of "What company do you work for?" or "What project are you working on now?"
Me: "I work for myself on my own projects."
Them: [Blink, blink.]
At this point, they start using the Errol Morris technique of not saying anything so that the other person will talk to fill the lull in the conversation, which I always do because I'm already so on-edge and feeling awkward about the whole deal.
Me: "I have this web site that I do more or less full-time. It's a blog."
Thankfully, most people have heard of blogs at this point, even at family gatherings and such.
Them: "Oh, a blog. That's nice."
Them: [A long pause as they steel themselves to ask a potentially impolite question about money.]
Them: "So.....how do you make money doing that?"
Me: "Advertising. There's a small ad on every page on the site. And that's enough to pay the bills."
Them: "Oh, I see. So what is this site about?"
This is where my story and Heather's start to diverge. "I write about my experiences as a mom" is pretty straightforward, but I still don't have an elevator pitch for kottke.org. There are a set of topics that I cover regularly, but not with any sort of completeness or authority. This adds to my uncomfort.
I have only one trump card in this conversation, the thing that convinces most people that I'm not a) pulling their leg or b) wasting my life by not working a job that makes sense or requires wearing khakis, but I need to wait for the magic question before I play it: "Do you know how many people read your site?" The answer -- that hundreds of thousands of people read my site each month -- while quite low on the list of reasons why I do kottke.org, has an arresting effect on the questioner. The result is usually a respectful detente or a barrage of questions that is less awkward for me because we're suddenly on a more equal conversational footing regarding the topic...we now both believe that what I do has some merit to someone other than me.
I just saw a man walking a dog -- a terrier of some sort -- that was in turn walking two other dogs. One of the other two dogs, a beagle, would slow down periodically and the terrier, who was holding the two dogs' leashes in his mouth, would yank on the beagle's leash until he got going again. Funniest thing ever.
What's your cell phone's ringtone? What made you pick it?
The Super Mario Bros theme song. Because someday I will be sitting next to Shigeru Miyamoto on the bus, my phone will ring, and he will wink at me.
What's the oldest digital camera photo you have on your computer? When is it from? Let's see it!
Great question. Here's the one from the oldest group I can find on my hard drive:
This is a photo of Michael Sippey taken on June 27, 1998 at a bar where a bunch of us were hanging out after attending the Web98 conference in San Francisco. This Q actually dovetails nicely into the previous QotD because this was the first time I met a bunch of people I knew online for the first time and, wow, was that ever an overwhelming and pleasant experience.
But back to the photo. I'm not usually a gadget early adopter type of person, but I was the first person I knew with a digital camera. I have photos on a hard drive or Jaz disk somewhere from even earlier than the above photo (I think I bought the camera in 3/98). The camera was a Nikon CoolPix 300 which cost $650, had 4Mb of internal memory, could record sound, had a stylus for taking notes (no grafitti or anything like that, just straight up scribbling), used a touch screen for menu navigation, took the world's crappiest 640x480 photos, and was generally a big pain in the ass to use. My current telephone takes better photos than that thing did. The whole ordeal put me off both early adoption and hybrid devices for quite a long time.
On the way back from lunch, David and I witnessed a car accident. We were crossing 23rd Street when we saw a taxi creep around the traffic stopped at the light and into the lane going the opposite way. As I was commenting to David, "huh, what's this idiot doing?" a police car pulled up behind the stopped traffic, noticed where the taxi was, and flipped on her lights.
As soon as the pedestrians cleared the crosswalk, the taxi ran the red into the intersection and attempted to do a U-turn back around onto 23rd Street to head back the way he came. Halfway through the U-turn, he noticed the cop pulling out into the oncoming traffic lane, basically right where the taxi driver wanted to go.
Panicking because of the cop, the cabbie aborts the U-turn and instead turns left down Broadway. The cop put on her siren and pulled into the intersection to follow the taxi. The taxi driver knows he's screwed at this point and crosses all the way across Broadway (3-4 lanes of traffic) to try and make a hasty right turn down 22nd Street to lose the cop. But he doesn't see the delivery truck speeding to make the light at 23rd and the truck slams into the side of the cab about halfway down the block.
Everyone seemed to be more or less ok, but as David said shortly after the crash, "that guy just lost his job."
myheritage.com tells me I look most like Geena Davis. And after that, Pete Sampras and Ernest Hemingway. I think that fecking thing is busted.
I dare you to watch this video all the way through.
Either 50,000 fried pork dumplings from Dumpling House in Chinatown or this 61" Plasma HDTV and 2500 fried pork dumplings from Dumpling House.
The books icon looks like a hamburger. A White Castle hamburger to be precise.
"you know that dude Ben Schott, who writes that book that people in your family give you for Christmas when... read more
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