Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Perspective

Trying to see the big picture.


Is this a photo of a guy playing hacky sack?


Or is it a photo of my daughter Lyndsey taking a picture of some guys playing hacky sack?

The above can pretty much be carried on indefinitely. Zoom out a bit more and you have a photo of an Arts Festival with people shooting pictures and browsing artwork and entertaining themselves playing hackysack. Zoom out yet again and there's a photo of downtown Oklahoma City with its annual Arts Festival in progress...

We all think we know things. We "know" 9/11 was an inside job by the U.S. government. Or we "know" if we don't take the fight to the terrorists, they will bring the fight to us. Or we "know" Jesus Christ is the Son of God. Or we "know" drugs are bad and drug dealers are the lowest kind of life form. Or we "know" that Republicans hate poor people.

When you think you know something, try to keep perspective in mind.

Inspiration and Inertia

I've been terribly uninspired lately when it comes to writing anything. I've not written much either here on my Blogger account or on my GNN blog. And, in my view even worse, I've not been able to make myself do any work on my personal website, Rocketjam.com for the past three or four months (at least).

Sure I can come up with some excuses why this has been the case. I've been doing some layout work for Altec-Lansing. I spent a fair amount of time developing a new version of my Macintosh scaling program Scaletron! along with creating a new icon, updating the documentation, etc, etc. I've been working on updating my employer's website, transitioning its HTML code from a table based layout to a CSS layout. And I did the design, layout and most of the editing for the latest issue of Frequency 23's zine, the Pirate Pages. And I'm even doing some drawing again.

But really, those are just excuses. They haven't taken so much of my time that I couldn't be blogging and doing some web site updates. And I've got more than one post in some draft state both here and at my GNN account, so it's not even really like I need to come up with an idea to write about. I could just finish some of the posts I've started.

Without examining all the reasons for neglecting these things, I'm going to make a real effort this year to keeping these sites of mine a bit fresher. Finish some of the blog posts I've started, and write some new stuff. And get back to keeping the Rocketjam.com site updated and adding some of the content that I'm eternally planning to add.