I was waiting for it to happen. I was hoping it wouldn't, but all this news about him was bound to make it happen. Today I called someone on the phone for the first time and she wasn't home. Her housemate picked up the phone and asked to take a message. I said, "Tell her Elan called and that she should call me back as soon as possible." The housemate asked me for my phone number and then asked me if I my name is spelled
I've been called many things in my life: Ellen, Eli, Alan, Eelin, and other conceivable variations of my name, but today was the first time my name was Elian. I'm sure it won't be the last. I couldn't care less about Elian. The only thing that ever bothered me about him is his name. Yeah, how selfish. I know.
8:24 PMI received answer from an anonymous visitor to the bird question:
The bird probably sees its own reflection in the window and is trying to chase off what it thinks is a rival since it's mating season. This can be bad because birds sometimes smash into the window doing this and kill themselves. Your bird sounds pretty smart though.I'm glad my bird is pretty smart. I think she's very smart.
5:15 PMFriday, April 28, 2000
We didn't go to the restaurant. I didn't feel like it last minute (well, I didn't feel like it earlier). We were going, not to celebrate anything, but because I won a $80 gift certificate to the restaurant last year in a UJA event ticket raffle. The certificate expires tomorrow night. If anybody wants to go use it tomorrow night, let me know. I can't go because I'm visiting Dave. Today is Dave's birthday, so tomorrow we're going out.
11:32 PMI realized today that for the last few weeks I’ve been learning to consciously do something I’ve always had trouble with. I’m learning to live a balanced life. I remember in high school, depending on the time of year, I’d fill my days and weeks with thinking about and doing one major thing at a time. In the winter every year, it would be fencing. During junior year, while it was going on, it would be NEDC. Spring senior year was all about volleyball. Otherwise, it was computer league or math league. In college, it was all about the computer club, or the Jewish Student Center, or OS/2 or fencing. During college summers, I wasn’t giving much time to anything besides internships.
I don’t regret it, really. That’s who I was or maybe still am. I was always frustrated with my inability to excel at more than one thing at a time. I was good at what I did, but I couldn’t seem to be good at more than one thing at a time. Oh, and let’s not forget about the girls. I was great at infatuating over one for an extended period. Everything revolved around her, whichever one it was at the time. These activities, people or goals would bring themselves to the center of my life and everything I looked at, everyone else who came through my life, was viewed as either in support of or against my life’s center at the moment.
That made me fickle. I was undependable. If I made a commitment to you because it supported my life’s center at that moment, then you were lucky. You were lucky if when I needed to deliver on that commitment my life’s center was the same as when I made the commitment. It’s hard to be good to yourself, to others around you and in all your roles and responsibilities when your core, your internal security system keeps changing. So, you find something that doesn’t change. You find something you’re about that’s always the same. You find things to believe in that integrate all your roles and responsibilities.
You make that your core. You try to look at your life with perspective. Not just perspective of the week, or year, or decade, but of your whole life, of your life in the context of your entire family history and even in the context of humanity and you could take it even further. You look at it, find the view that inspires you and reflect on your beliefs and actions in the context of it all. Then you do something. What that is, I have no idea.
I’m done writing for the moment. I thought I knew where I was going when I started, but now I have no clue and now Amy’s here. I gotta go, maybe we’ll see you tonight at Lido, the Russian restaurant in Brooklyn.
8:40 PMI called Bell Atlantic. I need to wait until midnight for my minutes to reset. I’ll go back to anticipating.
7:59 PMI've been anticipating today for over a week. My cell phone billing cycle starts over and my minutes used fall to zero.
6:06 PMThursday, April 27, 2000
I'm getting tired of the monotony of life and I can't get that damn Britney Spears song out of my head. Somebody shoot me. And the bunny, too.
9:58 PM |
I didn't make the bunny's butt, I stole it.
5:27 PMI just found the web site for the dance studio Amy and I are taking lessons at.
1:53 PMWhen one can't write, one redesigns.
11:48 AMI've observed interesting bird behavior. A little bird, with a brown-orange colored breast, sits a few feet from my neighbor's window on a telephone wire hanging between the street post and the house. About every 15 seconds, the bird flies slowly from the wire, lightly hits its feet or yellow beak against the top edge of my neighbor's window. The bird has been doing this for three days from the same spot on the wire to the same spot on the window.
8:52 AMWednesday, April 26, 2000
Web design wit: I think designers are influencing Jakob Nielsen or perhaps he's joining the cause or both. In the past, he played close attention to usability, but now he is slipping. On April 14, 2000, he titled a link to his book as the "blue/green book." He was providing a humorous reference to Being Jakob Nielsen: The Story of the Blue and the Green. I caught the humor, but that wasn't very usable. If he is going to link to a web page about a book, he should title the link with the books name, so users know what to expect. Instead, he tricked me and disappointed me. He wasn't being very Jakob Nielsen.
To top that, now he thinks "interaction design" is a synonym for "usability." In his latest Alertbox, he links to a page containing "ten usability heuristics" but titles the link "basic heuristics for interaction design." Now all we need are usability experts calling themselves interaction designers and interaction designers calling themselves usability experts.
9:54 PMEventually some had to do this: an Elian version of the Wassup! commercial (Macromedia Flash and sound support is necessary for the full experience).
7:16 PMAmy and I signed up for dance lessons last night at the Rogers DanceSport Center in Fairfield, NJ. Every Monday night for the next eight weeks we're taking Mambo lessons. I can't wait until I can show Amir a move or two at the Copacabana.
5:37 PMSome of us work very hard at hiding our feelings. We could get very good at providing a blank stare while inwardly wanting to kill the person we are talking to. Yesterday, I ran into an old Fair Lawn High School classmate, literally. He saw me running, followed me home in his new 2-door Honda Accord and stopped to chat. I haven't spoken to him since high school.
We did the standard exchange of what we are doing with our lives. We tried to remember all the classmates we hang out with and what they're doing. What entertained me the most, during the whole discussion were his facial expressions. At every other word, his face would change to communicate approval, disapproval, wonder, happiness, disagreement or disgust. All I was talking about was where I work, who I saw, what I read; you know, the standard stuff.
People complain that everybody has layers and layers built up to prevent others from seeing their internal state. Most people think this is a bad thing. After talking to him, I really wonder. I felt like I was playing a video game, taking random shots in some dark jungle hoping to hit something. Then I realized what I was doing. I realized I was just talking to try to get a relaxed smile on his face. As soon as I realized that, I stopped trying. Then I continued talking as a secure human being simply amused at how my words triggered all sorts of responses. How would you feel if every time you spoke a word to someone, you could see his or her judgment, approval or disapproval? You had better be quite secure with yourself in such a world. Of course, if we were all secure, there wouldn't be so many layers.
4:41 PMTuesday, April 25, 2000
What I wrote earlier about
wasn't clear. Let me try again. You may like or dislike something I write. You may want to write about it or show it to someone else. The only way to get them directly to what I wrote is by getting the URL that points to. You may want to send that URL through email or put it on your own web site. If you copy, paste and send that URL, then whomever you send it to will reach directly what I wrote when they click on it. Every underneath each entry points to a different URL. If you click on it, it will take you to the top of that entry. There, that was my quick attempt at being a technical writer, although I assumed you know what an URL is. 10:54 PMI added
to the end of every entry for the time when I write something of consequence (once every two years or so) leading you to want to link to it on a web site or in an e-mail. I like the way it works. If the entry you link to is still on the front page of this site, then it will bring you to the front page. When the entry moves to my archives, the link will bring you there. 3:34 PMI saw Sixth Sense this weekend for the first time. When you watch movies more than once you experience them differently each time. This happens because you know how things will end up, the jokes aren't funny the second time around, you notice more details, or you're in a different mood. Well, when I watch Sixth Sense for the second time, I am certain that I will experience it completely differently, more so than any other movie I have ever seen as far as I can remember. If you've seen it, you know what I'm talking about. If you haven't, you will when you see it.
3:27 PMMonday, April 24, 2000
On Saturday, we took a trolley bus tour of Boston and Cambridge. The tour guide reminded me of the great Boston Molassacre. I found some unclear pictures here (choose "Disaster Strikes").
3:06 PMAmy and I had fun in Boston this weekend. I'm proud of us for driving through the heavy rain to get there and having fun throughout the weekend, despite the rain. I don't like letting weather interfere with having fun. There were some pleasant surprises in Massachusetts. The T was free on part of Saturday because of Earth Day, and a tollbooth attendant on Route 90 let us through for free.
Max was kind enough to host us. We met up with Dan Reed and Chris Stengel, friends from Lehigh. This past week had a very Ivy League theme. In addition to me working two blocks from Princeton University and last week's visit with friends from Columbia, yesterday we met up with a friend of Amy's at Harvard and stopped at Yale on the way home to have dinner with Dave G.
2:51 PMI guess on April 23 Cam was inspired by my play-writing style on April 20. :) Of course, I was inspired by someone else's writing from way back.
2:44 PMSaturday, April 22, 2000
Despite all the tadpoles falling from the sky last night, Amy and I decided to make our way to Boston. It took us four hours to get here, then we spent one hour finding Max's place. We're hoping to see friends and have Max take us to his favorite karaoke bar tonight. His favorite Dunkin' Donuts, Wendys and bagel place are out because of the holidays.
11:34 AMFriday, April 21, 2000
Matt thinks I have a thing for funny hats. He also caught my dad looking "horrified."
I should share that when my dad has a face like that at the computer, his stocks aren't doing well.
6:11 PMI love how people perceive alphaWorks as a whole division of IBM. In "Web UI On The Cusp Of Change" (via Camworld) the author writes "One option I discovered is Sash, from the infinitely inventive folks at IBM's AlphaWorks division." First of all, alphaWorks is with a lower-case "a." Not that I care anymore, I just want to be annoying. I stopped fighting the lower-case "a" battle years ago, about six months after I stopped working at IBM.
It was fun to watch the popularity of alphaWorks increase over the years. Two other Lehigh students, some contractors and I launched it in 1996. It started with six technologies and no one on the Internet had a clue we existed. The mission was to create mind share for IBM in the Internet space by taking technologies under development in IBM Research and sharing them with the world.
Well, years later, it has dozens of technologies and people think its a massive division in IBM that whips out very cool technologies. alphaWorks is actually a web site front-end to technologies originating all over IBM. John Patrick's initial vision was that alphaWorks be a first step in the process of technology maturing into a IBM product. How wonderful it is to see his vision come true and be part of it from the beginning! And that feeling is what I'm hoping to have in the future from Onclave, too.
3:47 PMVenom is a club I visited in Singapore, although it was too packed to go in. They're streaming live video from the inside of the club right now. They do this every night between 10pm and 3am. At this time of year, they are exactly 12 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time, so we can watch other people party while we're working.
1:58 PMThursday, April 20, 2000
Setting: Amy's house for the second Passover seder
Characters: Andrew, Amy's 4 year old cousin and Elan, 23 year old me
Andrew: Are you a grownup or a kid?
Elan: I'm a kid.
Andrew: So, do you have parents?
Elan: Yes, a mother and a father.
Andrew: Where are they? How did you get here?
Elan: [lying] They dropped me off.
Andrew: How are you getting home?
Elan: [still lying] They're picking me up.
Andrew: [running to his older brother] Come meet a big kid!
9:57 PMTo make it through the week I've been saying "I love gefilte fish" over and over to myself. Speaking of gefilte fish, I found jewish embryo humor and religious humor
3:53 PMTuesday was Orit Furman's birthday. With the help of some friends, Max created a web site for her. She's a creative person and needs an outlet, so now she can manage her own site on the Internet to help others feel good.
3:44 PMWednesday, April 19, 2000
Ugh, I stayed in the hotel this happened in only three weeks ago.
4:11 PMCam shared some positive words about the Onclave Weblog today. Thanks for the kind words Cam; I like our weblog, too.
1:50 PMLast night I added a list of web sites I visit and the sites of close friends to the right column of the front page of elan.org.
1:49 PMAs an experiment, I joined two webrings last night. My neighbors in the webloggers ring are Fear and Loathing and Michael Webb. My neighbors in the linksluts ring are Neale and Aviva (warning: site does not work in Netscape). Aviva's site reminds me of my childhood. I think I was the only boy in the neighborhood with a Rainbow Brite comforter and window curtains. Unfortunately, Neale will only be my neighbor until someone else joins the linksluts ring.
Speaking of Neale, a few weeks ago he created "Watching the Watchers," a small browser window that shows a different webcam image every 30 seconds from different webloggers (including me). Click on the picture of eyes on the left-hand column on his web site to see it in action.
1:44 PMI had bagels for lunch today because I knew I wouldn't be having any for eight days.
12:57 PM
