On this blog

1. This blog started on February 8, 2006 with this post.
2. There is no official subject to the blog, no niche it attempts to fill, no target audience it aims for. It’s just about my loves, my thoughts, my writings, my life. I do write to be read but I write about what I would like to read.
3. The above said, I’m very into the web, languages, the future, design (particularly interface and information design), philosophy, computers, and economics. If that’s your fix, you should like it here.
4. English is of course preferred but you may comment back in either Spanish, Esperanto, French, German, Japanese, or Toki Pona, and have some fairly good chance of being understood. By at least me that is.
5. Comments that are either spam or pointless insults will be summarily deleted. Anything else goes.
6. Ocasionalmente escribo en español bajo la etiqueta de Spanish.
7. If you YubNub (and you should!), you can google within the blog through the “elzr” command.
8. This blog began running on Typo, but it is now so heavily modded to be almost it’s own engine. On the balance I think it was a mistake using a 3rd-party engine, I should have started from scratch. Yes, it would have been extremely lousy at the beginning but by now I would own this blog in a way that I don’t right now—there are still too many dark, hidden patches I barely understand. The law of leaky abstractions is a bitch.
9. The “{time units} delta” title on the homepage refers to the time that has passed since the last post. The title is a homage to Charles Stross’s fantastic Accelerando, where the word is used as a noun to mean divergence between “copies” (as when characters in a light-speed vessel refer to the cultural delta of the faster world outside) and as a verb to create a divergent “copy” (as when one character commits suicide and asks not to be delta-ed). Since I see this blog as my digital self (I’m in fact planning for it to outlive me), the word seemed fitting.
10. “In my opinion it is much more true that the thoughts of a living writer are in any printed copy of his book than that they are in his brain.” (Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 7.364)
11. Somehow I managed to write 75 posts on August 2006. I’m still baffled.
12. Infodesign Challenge has been in several ways one of the most popular posts so far, getting mentioned in BoingBoing, Kottke, and Information Aesthetics.
13. Hyperscript was also popular, being mentioned in Joe’s Blog, making the Reddit homepage, and being bookmarked by more than a hundred in del.icio.us
14. Imagery, which isn’t a blog post, but which is hosted under the blog’s domain has been mentioned on a shitload of places.
15. I often talk about ideas because that’s what I define my life by. Let others define their lives by people, drama, objects, or accomplishments. Does it follow that ideas are the most important thing in the whole word? Asking me is like asking a chef which is the greatest of the senses or a libertine what’s the greatest thing two people can do together.. There, the idea that ideas aren’t necessarily all-important is an idea I much appreciate. The idea of self-reference, like here, is also an old chum. The idea of personifying ideas is turning out surprisingly fertile. The idea of the hyper-self-aware writer gets old.
16. Often I tweak, fix or even completely rewrite whole posts. I tend to use this blog as a way to force me to congeal ideas out of whim air. I throw them out and start polishing spurred by public scrutiny. Plus, I don’t write for you, I write for the future.