{"id":1211,"date":"2006-06-24T21:56:29","date_gmt":"2006-06-24T21:56:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/?p=1211"},"modified":"2006-06-24T21:56:29","modified_gmt":"2006-06-24T21:56:29","slug":"where-do-i-stop-where-do-i-begin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/archives\/1211","title":{"rendered":"Where do I stop, where do I begin."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This morning I woke up in a <i>fantastic<\/i> mood, wrapped in a warm sense that all was right with the world and that today would be a great day.  If I could wake up that way every day, I think life would be a sweet and magical thing &#150; however, I can&#8217;t afford to sleep for 10 hours every night.  Ah, well.  <i>C&#8217;est la vie.<\/i>  Maybe if I got that much sleep on a regular basis I could make up for lost time in productivity.<br \/>\nRegardless, my day really was fantastic.  There&#8217;s been some kind of weird snafu with our Internet at home, which I suspect is directly connected to our AirPort network being held together with spit and baling wire, so I haven&#8217;t been able to check my email or surf the web &#150; which I&#8217;m sure contributed greatly to my peace of mind.  After getting cleaned up I packed my laptop and some books into my leather laptop bag and headed into town.<br \/>\nThe weather was warm but overcast with a cool breeze and clouds so low that they concealed the tops of the skyscrapers downtown, which was really quite amazing.  I made my way to the Prudential Center to pick up a copy of the new live <a href=\"http:\/\/www.countingcrows.com\">Counting Crows<\/a> album at Barnes and Noble.  The band is taking an interesting stab at getting people to continue buying physical CDs &#150; there are actually <i>four different versions<\/i> of the new disc, three of which offer a different exclusive track based on where you buy it, and the one from Barnes and Noble includes a copy of &#8220;Blues Run the Game,&#8221; which isn&#8217;t on any of their albums.  Therefore, off to B&#038;N I went.  After that, I poked around downtown for a little bit, hiding from the occasional rain burst in Trader Joe&#8217;s and Best Cellars, where <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chocolate.com\">chocolate.com<\/a> was sponsoring a chocolate-and-wine tasting.  Their little ruse worked &#150; I left with a bottle of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.corkd.com\/wine\/view\/6837\">Gilberts Tawny Porto<\/a>, which is a delicious port with &#8220;an orange colour and a ripe fruit flavor, all wrapped up in an elegant vanilla touch and chocolate hints, giving this wine a perfect finish.&#8221;  Whatever.  I&#8217;m still getting started with this whole wine thing, so all I know is <i>it tasted great.<\/i>  Good enough for me.  (I&#8217;m a little more verbose in my corkd review, but that&#8217;s pretty much the long and the short of it.  <i>The wine done tasted good.<\/i>)<br \/>\nOh, but I forgot the best part.  After I left the house, I took the back way to the T stop and saw that the new lofts out back of our place were having an open house, and oh, mama.  Swing by <a title=\"Cambridge Somerville Davis Square Lofts\" href=\"http:\/\/www.davissquarelofts.com\/\">davissquarelofts.com<\/a> and let the SlideShowPro module load &#150; I suppose it&#8217;s a sign that the developer chose one of my favorite singers, Beth Orton, for the soundtrack to the show (and inspiring the title of this post), but the apartments I saw were <i>amazing.<\/i>  One of them had both exposed beams and exposed brick inside, with window treatments and trim that made me downright homesick.  I&#8217;d never put two and two together before, but this drove the point home &#150; a big chunk of why I love the industrial loft look stems from the style of the living room in my parents&#8217; house.  Mom and Dad have a big brick wall wrapping the fireplace and exposed beams everywhere you look in our living room, and stepping into this apartment was like coming home.  My heart sank when I heard the asking price, but <i>wow.<\/i>  It gives me hope that there&#8217;s places like this out there.  Further, the guy showing the place (who also works there as an architect\/designer) was a Denison grad whose father grew up in Cleveland, so we had a bit of a natter about Ohio and small liberal arts colleges and Boston and MIT and so on and so on.  Yes, I am definitely my parents&#8217; son, striking up conversations with interesting strangers wherever I go.  Call it the Long-winded curse.<br \/>\nLet&#8217;s see, other news.  One, my department head <a href=\"http:\/\/www.henryjenkins.org\">Henry Jenkins<\/a> now has a blog, which I&#8217;m doing some design work for, and within three days he made <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boingboing.net\/2006\/06\/23\/media_scholar_henry_.html\">Boing Boing<\/a>.  No surprise there, Cory Doctorow is a friend of the department, but I wish we&#8217;d made the link list <i>after<\/i> I&#8217;d gotten the new design in place.  \ud83d\ude42<br \/>\nTwo, my old friend <a href=\"http:\/\/gold-flamingo.livejournal.com\/\">Aurelia Flaming<\/a> has joined the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/60092255@N00\/\">Flickring masses<\/a>, posting a <i>great whopping mass<\/i> of photos from her recent safari trip to Africa.  Very cool stuff there, including, um, a dik dik.  (I can feel the comment spammers clustering around this post already.)<br \/>\nOh, and to complete this little trifecta of news, the biggest piece of news I&#8217;ve currently got to share.  Last week I received confirmation that a proposal some associates of mine had fielded a while back was accepted, and so next month I&#8217;m going to be speaking on a panel at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sandboxsymposium.com\/\">Sandbox Symposium<\/a> at SIGGRAPH 2006 here in Boston.  I am, of course, totally jazzed about this.  I&#8217;m also somewhat nervous.  This will be my first time trotting my thoughts on transmedia storytelling out in public (well, up on a stage anyway) and so I need to start whipping this stuff into something resembling coherence.  Wow.  I was stoked enough about <i>going<\/i> to SIGGRAPH without actually <i>speaking<\/i> there.  Here&#8217;s hoping I don&#8217;t get any Statlers and Waldorfs in the audience.<br \/>\nI have officially joined the lecture circuit.  Pass the wine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This morning I woke up in a fantastic mood, wrapped in a warm sense that all was right with the world and that today would be a great day. If I could wake up that way every day, I think life would be a sweet and magical thing &#150; however, I can&#8217;t afford to sleep [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4e5QR-jx","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1211\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}