I looked into the rather popular del.icio.us, but found the site’s design a bit chaotic for my taste and the features weren’t all that appealing. Social bookmarking, the broader category of service provided by del.icio.us, sounds like it may have some benefits. These include browsing what others are frequently bookmarking and the computer recommending bookmarks of interest based on keywords used to describe your bookmarks. Still, I don’t see myself as prioritizing these features or having much time to sort through other people’s bookmarks. And the fact is - some people just bookmark a lot of junk.

Alternatively, I ended up at a bit more of a startup website (but less of a grassroots one, as it is run by LookSmart) called Furl.net. In having to compete with del.icio.us and others, it has some differentiating features that really caught my eye (and I think will impress you too if you like keeping track of things on the Internet). Most impressively, when you bookmark a page of interest through Furl, it saves a copy of the webpage to their server. This webpage is then searchable in your account. Instead of trying to search the whole web for a specific page you found five pages into a google search to reference it, or trying to remember what name the bookmark has in your browser, you can just search your archive for a few keywords that are easily recalled about the webpage. For me this is huge, because I end up on a lot of obscure websites and culling them into my archive really helps differentiate them from all of the bogus hits I get on Google. Another bonus of this feature, especially for those obscure websites, is that if the webpage is taken down or moves, the archive and the information it contains will still be viewable in the Furl archive.

Additionally, like del.icio.us, it is possible to associate many topics with one bookmark. Instead of your browser, in which it is necessary to force a bookmark into one folder, the same bookmark will show up when you look at any one of the topics affiliated with it. For me, this means that to relocate it, at any given time I only have to remember one of the topics I thought the bookmark fit into. Much better odds this way of relocating that old website by the guy that built a monorail in his backyard than if I had one folder name to guess off of.

If, for some odd reason some of you are interested, my Furl archive is viewable online. Since my bookmark series of posts is the easiest, I certainly have some outlandish hopes it will also be the most popular. If so and random web snippets of my interests aren’t droll, take a peek at the Furl archive for an extra helping!

I think that the idea of having a roof top garden is a fantastic one. Living in Honolulu, where space is so precious, I am surprised not to see more of these. Browsing through some of the projects that have used this system, it strikes me that so many of the installations are ONLY for energy savings or storm water management. Quite a few are ONLY for aesthetics from office windows. It is great that having plants on a building infer such great economic benefits that it is done only for these reasons.

Yet, as much as this seems all good and well, the roof should be a place for people too! Perhaps my experiences here (and an utter lack of open space) lead me to over-anticipate the importance of open space for people’s use for the country as a whole. Still, to me the roof of a building should be the top floor and it should be the best floor - where one can escape the climate controlled can they are working in and stand up, walk, run for a while. Especially here where the weather is so consistent, I can image a whole series of parks and cafes on the roofs of major retail centers. I would much rather sit at a cafe on the roof of a building where the view is potentially 360 degrees than to sit at a cafe crammed on a sidewalk next to a road choked with mopeds and cars sporting obnoxious and noxious exhaust systems.

The GreenGrid system seems to focus a lot on saving weight, which is a major technical challenge needed for rooftop gardens to not collapse the building, and thus become more widespread. Not surprisingly, but not unconvincingly, they compare their product quite favorably with a custom designed system in almost every respect, including weight. Looking at how many of the examples are laid out though shows that the systems doesn’t really hide the fact it is modular. I think the appeal for people space is greatly diminished because of this “cheap” feel. It seems to me that it would be an effective synthesis to combine one or two custom defining elements, then accomplish the rest with a GreenGrid. In a sense this could be an environmentally minded and everyday installation analogous to some of the rather fancy gardens created from modular media (often just pots) indoors for home and garden shows.

And a small annoyance, but why in the world does the marketers of GreenGrid and, it seems, the majority of websites devoted to rooftop gardens have such tiny, narrow field of view photos? The photos above aren’t even resized. Even Wikipedia has poor selection - best being an image of a hotel roof top garden, the worst even smaller than the GreenGrid photos. Not much of a sales pitch.

This book has just enough information to really whet the appetite on all kinds of subjects. It has just enough good pictures to keep a visually addicted person like me engaged and it is brief enough to actually finish a topic. It makes me want to study all kinds of other disciplines. Then the sour sting of bile reminds me how I feel about school. I have this problem where I conflate the knowledge school promises with reality. Never quite kicked that habit from elementary school of tearing up my homework before I even start it, which might not help either.

This book ought to be great light geek reading. Then maybe I’ll pull a Good Will Hunting and go to my library for the free details.

Listening to NPR last week I heard the author of this book speak about the Middle East. He struck me as quite intelligent and made several good points, though the details of the entire thing have slipped my mind. All I had was the author’s name that I managed to speak into my cellphone’s voice recorder as I drove to work. Luckily, that was enough to track the book down during a trip to Barnes and Noble.

The book is an account of the Islamist movement that lead up to groups like al-Qaeda and the response of U.S. and international intelligence to the growing movement.

I have made it a goal of mine to try and read more books about history, politics and current events. Of late, the little reading I do is usually non-fiction anyway, and up until relatively recently was largely of news (the rest being for one hobby or another). Well, slowly but surely I am getting fed up with news sources for being too repetative, too brief and only making the most glaring connections between world events - in effect rendering the news as a source of despair not of understanding. So, my hope is that something more substantial, namely books, will shed a little light on world events and what they might mean comprehensively and long term - not things any politician or the media ever wastes much breath to touch on.

When I get this read, I’ll at least post some thoughts on it and decide whether I think it clues us common folk into what is going on in the world, as I hope it will.

Since I have a Robert A. Heinlen quote on the main page of oddbug.net, I figured I should read a book by him. This is his most famous and supposedly one of the most famous science fiction novels of all time. I’ve heard it is strange and a bit edgy. It is also not so new, published in 1961. I’ll be interested to see how ideas of sci-fi have held up for that long.

I am looking forward to reading it. I have been taking ever so slightly longer lunches at work to read and give my brain a rest from routine during the day — so there is some chance I’ll get to this book sometime soon.

The other group of book post will be a bit harder to follow through with on my end. I will, generally, attempt to put forth thoughts on books I have finished. Occasionally I write down notes for myself anyway, I may as well publish them here since they don’t regularly come up in phone conversations. I don’t know if I’ll eventually get in trouble with this idea, either on the amount of commitment, the choice of book or content of the post. Nevertheless it should let a little of my mind leak out here where it can be lapped up (then I’ll be judged by content, not cover which may not leave me better off…).

I’ll be indicating the first group by prefixing the title as “New Book.” The later will be prefixed by “Book Reviewed.” I’d love to get some feedback on both, so please feel free to comment. After all, a book is kind of lonely entertainment if other people don’t share some thoughts on it. You’ll be able to find both types of entries under the category “books.”

Realistically, this book category will probably be rather dissapointing to you book lovers out there. Why? Well, eighty-percent of the time nowadays my eyes go crossed and my nose bleeds when I try to read. Surprised? Well, that wasn’t the case before college, or maybe my senior year of high school. I really plowed through books before then, before they were required reading so much of the time.

Last Christmas my family and I were playing a board game with long time family friends, the Mitchells. It has been a while since then, and I haven’t played the game since, so I haven’t a clue what the game was called. It was a measure of how well you knew the other contestants by guessing their answers to certain questions: favorites, what would you do in this situation, etc. Well, ill-fated family friends hadn’t seen much of me since I came to Hawai’i, so they guessed correctly to their experience that I was more “Head in a book” than “Song in my head.” Oops. I’ve gone loopy since then.

These series of posts will probably verify that my head is worth it’s weight in sandy loam. I’ll be lucky to make many entires. Still, the fact that the desire to read forever when I am standing in the bookstore says that old bookworm is probably around somewhere! Stay tuned!

I ran across a very amusing website quite long ago. It is the webpage for an
actual museum, The Museum of Bad Art (MOBA), based in Boston. By now I haven’t the slightest idea how I managed to stumble upon this, but I sure am glad I did! I just rediscovered it looking through bookmarks for things worth sharing. There are some real classics, and the art curator descriptions generally send me into a second, heartier round of laughter.

Check out The Museum of Bad Art and and look around. A few of my favorites are: Pauline Resting — read the excerpt from MOBA news towards the bottom of the page; Dog — unexplicable and great description; and Mama and Babe — very freaky, great commentary. Don’t miss Inspiration, More, Think Again and Suicide either.

This museum literally got its start by pulling paintings from the trash. They regularly do strange things like have galleries of bad artwork out in the middle of a forest, shrink wrap the artwork and hang it outside as a drive-thru galley and other great nonsensish-ness.

My only regret with this webpage is that the resolution of the images is a little low and there aren’t new ones added all that often. It looks like they have a coffee table book for sale though — if only I had I a coffee table and horizontal surfaces weren’t such valuable commodities in the apartment…

I really get a kick out of MOBA every time I visit though, and it is nice to forget about it altogether and rediscover it now and again. If I had some space around here I would be a fun and pointless endeavor to start something similar in Honolulu. I have a feeling that there is a lot of sleeping talent here — I’d bet I have it in me to create some monsters like those on MOBA.

Since these posts are meant to give a sampling of my interests on the Internet, the subject range will be broad. At first, these may be fairly random. Well, eternally these may be fairly random. But some topics that first debut here may eventually start a whole new line of posts or discussion — and I’ll do my best to let it evolve that way when it is fit to do so.

My first post in the Bookmarks Series follows this post directly and suitably satisfies the criteria for randomness. Enjoy!

I have a whole host of ideas for what I want to accomplish here. I won’t get into them as it is too ambitious and far, far too boring. Besides, I’ll be to achieve half of them, so I won’t set hopes to high yet. At mininimum, though, I intend this site to accomplish three basics. First, I hope to be able to share at least a little bit of my life a little easier to a few more friends and family — you. If I can manage to update when I travel it will be a nice travel log, of sorts. Second, it will be a repository for my ideas — organized and updatable from anywhere. Third, through posting my ideas I hope to give some insight into how my gears turn and make some turn elsewhere. I have benefited from others who have posted their ideas and projects online, so I figure I’d do well to pay it forward.

Of course, the first challenge for me is going to be getting some content on here. I decided the easiest and cheapest trick available would be to just move some old stuff here. Inconveniently, little of that stuff isn’t dated or interesting. Nevertheless, I found at least one thing that I figure is most appropriate. In honor of beginning this new website I have enshrined my very first webpages — made my freshman year of college — in this, the first post of a brave new website. You can brave those dusy old pages by clicking on the link at the end of this post. Admittedly, it is not much to look at, but it is amusing to at least look at what my head and feet looked like five years ago. So here’s to the intention to create a webpage, and here’s to giving it a go!

To go back in time and see the last time I started a webpage and didn’t do much with it go to The Life of Matt in College.