Let It Snow (to stop traffic)

I had my doubts about commuting to work this morning. I thought twice about the endeavor when I looked out the window as I made my daily lunch. An odd silence echoed the sight - a parking lot on the highway. To say that Washington DC traffic is horrible is an understatement - every year it climbs the tables to now reside at #2 worst in the US behind NYC - but today's sight on I-270 that runs from Frederick to the Beltway was unusual. Car-to-car parking lot, literally stopped on a five-lane highway.

Out at the car, I made an easy decision - I would take the backroads to the office. My decision was confirmed when the daily traffic report made my mobile phone vibrate incessantly (every morning, 8am, the traffic report!). I turned on the radio, and the news became worse than the text messages - back-ups on 495 outer loop, inner loop, 395, 95 north and south, Baltimore-Washington Parkway, George Washington Parkway, 50, 66, Ohio Avenue, New York, nearly every major route in and around DC with at least one accident.

It took awhile to get going as I waited for lines of cars trying the same trick as me. Then, I was held up by one, two, three, four, five accidents on the back roads - which were mere stop-offs on a slow caravan out to Laurel. 90 minutes later, and I phoned home to Wendy to let her know that it was a long ride.

No bother, though - I switched the radio on to local 97.1, the "official radio station for the holidays" that has been playing around-the-clock holiday music since before Thanksgiving. I was dialed in and smiling as "Let It Snow" warmed up the car. Absolutely right...

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A Little Bit of Proust

Somehow I started to read Proust. The blame goes to Alain de Botton , a writer whose witticisms deconstruct modern thinking and make intellectualism seem but a trifle and a whim. He wrote a book in 1997 called "How Proust Can Change Your Life" which distills the enigmatic French novelist into a self-help dispenser of pithy ideas. How clever I found Mr. de Botton to be when I dipped my toe into the vagaries of Proust; I picked up volume one of "In Search of Lost Time" and instantly fell into the deep end. What author dares to run sentences onward into the stratosphere that sometimes seemingly mellows behind the stars of a bright night, but never so much as an introspective person that wretches for the meaning of a simple thought, sometimes stumbling, but always emerging strongly as that same night in starry sky, almost an homage back to Van Gogh, whose rich paintings greatly represented the mood of a generation - and generations often afford a few mis-steps in l...

Try Something New: 750 Words

If there is anything universally redeeming about writing, it is the ability to delve into the inner thoughts of one's own psyche and come back with perspective on feelings, motivations, and desires. In this way, journaling as the specific form of writing that provides this redemption can be a worthwhile pursuit. One might suppose that the internet world would offer various tools to make journaling simple, easy, and relatively painless, but that has not always been the case - until now. I came across this from Lifehacker, who was promoting the site back in March: 750words. The site is run by a former Amazon product manager who has an interest in journaling for the creative process and data visualization. Mash those things together, and you have an interesting site that is built around the premise that creative juices get flowing by consistently writing 3 pages worth of stuff on a daily basis, which translates to roughly 750 words. Logging in by using your Google or Facebook use...

Netscape, We Hardly Knew Ye...

In 1995, I started using email. In my first college days, my friend Virge anointed me with a playful email handle - toddity. She never told me that your email address was somewhat permanent, and I spent the rest of my university days with an username that amused most who got a message from good, old Eudora. At that time, I used Netscape as my web browser. Fast forward almost 15 years. I moved on first to Internet Explorer (Microsoft had a monopolistic hand in it), and then to Firefox from which I am penning this blog entry. Somewhere along the way, Netscape was acquired by AOL and sent down the river on a slow obsolescence. Until next week, when Netscape will end up on the scrap heap with Prodigy, Compuserve, and Excite@Home. How much the internet has changed. I can wax poetically on blogs and social networks, but I can also remember messageboards, usenets, IM, forums, web 1.0, HTML, and the world wide web when www. was a foreign concept. The concept is still the same - connec...

Journal : OpenRoadWorks

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