sjh - mountain biking running linux vegan geek spice - mtb / vegan / running / linux / canberra / cycling / etc

Steven Hanley hackergotchi picture Steven
Hanley
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email: sjh@svana.org

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Tue, 21 Dec 2004

Poetic Ani Sigs - 14:51
To further my point about Ani lyrics being an eminently readable form of poetry or similar, I should talk about my email signature.

From around 1996 until April 2002 my email signature was the same few lines of text 

Look Up In The Sky
    Is it a bird?   No
        Is it a plane    No
            Is it a small blue banana?
Yes
Which was deliberately obscure and strange, anyway I finally got around to changing my signature in April 2002 to the following Ani Difranco quote. 
You are subtle as a window pane standing in my view
but I will wait for it to rain so that I can see you
   Anticipate - Ani
Which is as you can see the opening of the song Anticipate, I love the quote, and I like the double meaning of the song title by saying "Anticipate Ani".

Not long after Sam (Reinhardt) returned to work in January 2003 after time off following the birth of Maxine (notice the Righteous Baby t-shirt <g>), Sam suggested she was bored with my signature and that I should change it. Obviously not realising my previous tendency to keep an email signature for many years. Anyway I gave it some thought at the time and decided one thing I could do is go through all of Ani's lyrics from all her albums and select at least one quote from each song or poem. Using this I could have random signatures generated from the selection of quotes.

The idea behind this was to show how good Ani's lyrics are due to the fact there is some good quotable snippet from every one of her numerous songs. Anyway I extracted the quotes (in a format that is pretty trivial to parse) and since then have not used them in my signature. I guess for now Sam will just have to put up with the fact my signature doesn't change much.

I did however I think prove the point of the exercise. Though there are a few songs I did not collect quotes from, generally due to them being too short, I did collect quotes from almost all of the approximately 180 songs released by Ani since 1990.

[/leisure/music] link

Gladwell impact, though I still wonder about marketing. - 12:32
Kottke linked to an article about Malcolm Gladwell today, discussing his impact on companies and marketing and various other areas. I have said in the past how much I enjoy Gladwell articles. The article about him today is interesting to see from the perspective of how business have been utilising his ideas. A good read, though as Hugh Macleod often points out, Branding/Marketing/Advertising etc in the forms most recognised today really are, or should be, dying out. In the fast company article there is a quote from Garry Warech of Simmons on his views of Gladwell ideas "This is great. We can operationalize this and help our clients.". Anyone who uses "operationalize" in a sentence should probably have been shot at birth...

[/various] link

Cool/Intelligent people attract Cool/Intelligent people - 11:27
This train of thought came from a post made by Robert Scoble on the subject of ipods and marketing. Scoble said "Let's take a lesson from the geek dinners. I learned that if you get three people who a lot of people want to have dinner with that you'll have a large interesting group.".

He is quite correct, this is one of the things that makes linux.conf.au such a fun and interesting conference to attend. A whole bunch of cool intelligent people rock up to speak at the conference and delegates attend because they can sit around and chat with these people (and hear them speak too, but to some extent that is secondary).

[/lca] link

Mikal is not over analysing. - 10:52
Yesterday I commented on the Ben Folds Five song Brick after seeing Mikal ask a question about how other people perceive the song. Mikal thought I may have been criticising him for over analysing the lyrics, I really wasn't. I mentioned I had not listened to the lyrics of Brick properly until after I heard Ben Folds talking about the song in interviews. I did also say some fans seem to over analyse songs, I don't think Mikal has, listening to lyrics and noticing what they are about is not the freaky analysis I was thinking of. I was thinking more of this sort of thing.

I agree with Mikal that the lyrics in songs are important and can be a form of poetry, heck this is something I constantly point out with Ani Difranco lyrics, they are a form of poetry and worth reading in their own right. I guess I was not so much commenting on Brick, or Mikal's interpretation so much on how some fans may take analysis well beyond what artists ever saw in their own music.

[/leisure/music] link

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