Personal — Page 22

Astute readers of the present

March 25, 2001 by Michael Boyle

website (that would be you) will notice a relative lack of updates, entries, and fabulous commentary. This of course is due to my new status as employed person, and the position looks like it will involve a great deal of work and effort, so this is likely to continue. As well, I hope and intend to set up an internal weblog at my new office to use as an instructional and communicative tool for the various interested parties, which will take some time and effort away from this one. But not too much, never fear.

Interspersed with this shift from un- to employment has been some lovely time spent with two Excellent Visitors. Of course, it being a tiny world, although we had never met, we have common acquaintances, and perhaps friends if you can count someone you have met once and read ever since a Friend (I think you can, but wouldn’t want to presume). The three of us enjoyed a lovely coffee and sandwich at a local cafe on Thursday, and then tonight we three added a fourth companion and went to Nantha’s, where we got the full treatment.

Sometimes one comes across

March 17, 2001 by Michael Boyle

the most interesting things late at night when one has no business doing so. So here I am, sitting at my computer post-bar, pre-bedtime, reading some nice personal websites. And I follow the link that Jason Kottke has put up to his earliest “daily website” or weblog entry from three years ago. And I find that but days after he started, he made a very pithy comment about the state of the web at that time – and if anything it’s even worse now (if hypertext = better and pseudo-hypertext = worse). I among hundreds of others have made the same comment, both before and after he did. But one of the nice things about the weblog format is that you can date a comment and fix it in time – something that’s hard to do in with quite the same certainty as in a weblog.

It’s pretty boring of me

March 13, 2001 by Michael Boyle

to link to a Feed article – I do it all the time – but that’s only because, to me, it is the most interesting magazine going, in any medium. Anyhow, tonight’s object of my attention is the excellent, refreshing article, This Is Planet Earth. Mitchell Stephens has begun a long journey to report on the state of globalization around the world.

His first stop was to meet with the inestimable Clifford Geertz and his second, Wichita KS, where he found Laotion food among other things.

It’s personally interesting to me to read that because it mirrors my own experience in a way. In the early 90s I had this insane job in which I travelled to every city in Canada (pretty much). In my travels I was shocked, quite literally, to find a completely legitimate Thai restaurant in Prince Albert SK, to meet Indian (i.e., from India) businessmen (they were invariably men) in all sorts of cities, no matter how small and remote, and generally put the lie to the standard Canadian dogma: immigrants live in the big cities (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, etc.) and the rest is still very white and protestant. In my experience 10 years ago, that is simply not true.

I grew up at University in an environment in which very different issues were at the front of everyone’s mind – a very similar world as was described by Naomi Klein in No Logo (in fact if I’m not mistaken we overlapped at McGill). But I studied political theory, so even then the idea of globalization was kicking around – but at that time the whole edifice relied (at least casually) on the bedrock principle that cities=diversity, towns=whitebread. In Canada that’s an even deeper idea that permeates our entire canon of literature until 1990 or so. And it was, and is, wrong.

All this by way of saying that this sort of fresh, novel approach to the question of globalization is long overdue.

I’m in deep juggler mode

March 13, 2001 by Michael Boyle

at the moment, which is a really fun spot to be in. In theory I’m looking for work as a product/project manager for a web concern or something like that. In fact, I haven’t been looking much – I’ve been waiting by the phone for an offer that I will take. And in the interim – I’m learning, playing, and developing projects at a fever pitch.

I’m doing a lot of playing around with CSS box-properties layouts, which has been good, if a little frustrating. As well, Aaron and Luke pretty much convinced me to roll my own tools to manage content for montrealstories.org (although an interim solution will be deployed sooner) – so I’m playing with XML, PHP and some other stuff to get that going. I have a bit of a background in scripting, though with a different kind of tool, so I’m feeling pretty confident.

As well, though, I’ve just now figured out the next project, which could be pretty neat. I’m not going to say more so I don’t jinx it, but it would be a different sort of thing, and terribly interesting to develop.

Bottom line: what I really need isn’t a job but a patron, sort of like a renaissance-era painter, or maybe a poet in Paris in the 20s. All that said, I am still excited about the job on the horizon too. It’ll just cut into my personal research time

I just sent this email

March 9, 2001 by Michael Boyle

Hola,

A (late) “official” announcement about the next Montreal Weblog keepers get together! This is more or less the first anniversary of the night that Ed Bilodeau, David Petite, Aaron Cope, Heather Champ and myself got together, so it’s worthy of recognition.

And we do that with beer.

So the plan is this: meet on Sunday at 2pm at News Cafe, which is on St-Laurent at (I think it’s) Guilbault – at the corner of the tiny sidestreet between Bifteck and des Pins. It’s on the West side of the street and there’s food and coffee and stuff there. At a later time it is rather likely that we’ll move elsewhere for a quiet (or not so quiet) Sunday afternoon beer.

Please pass this along to anyone else (she or he should keep a weblog or other personal website) you feel should have been included in this email. And, on the day, if you have to get in touch with me, you can sms my phone through mikel.org and I’ll call you back.