If you could live anywhere in the world, where would you live? Why?
Submitted by abcdefg81.
It's not really my "dream address" to be honest. I wouldn't want a dream address. But if I could choose freely, I would live in New York City. Not forever, just for a while. Probably somewhere aroudn Chelsea, or NoHo or SoHo. I would also like to have a house at the coast of Southern France, somewhere around Nice.
I would also like to live in Japan for a couple of weeks or months. Probably not for my lifetime, but I wouldn't make this time exclusive. It's just clear to me that where I'm living now, is not where I want to live any longer. Why I haven't moved away from here yet? Because anywhere where I would like to live, you have to deal with visas and work permits. And you need someone hiring you to make that happen.
New York has always been the coolest city I knew. It changed a bit after 9/11, because the city became more like Disney Land. What I liked most, its roughness and unfinished surface, steady in move and ever changing, is fading away slowly.
If you have ever been on a market in Southern France, ate some of their olives, some cheese with a baguette and drank some french wine while the sun was setting down, you may have an idea of how much it can improve your life. I don't have this sort of relaxing moments here, and I sure have no ocean in front of the door, which I am missing very much.
For the past couple of months I have been working on a client project that was pretty demanding. It was drying me out in the end, almost killing me. I wouldn't have expected it to be so demanding when I started. It looked manageable, and it had been planned carefully.
Ever since I can think I had trouble with the concept of working. Don't get me wrong: I love to work. I just can't get over the fact we are still doing it the same way we did in the fifties, or before that.
Even though we see the world changing, being decentralized, being globalized, being individualized—all those "izeds" have no impact on our perception of the world.
I know that living in a western world society, I am privileged. We don't realize the luxuries we have, starting from fluent water in every house to electricity, cars, credit cards and insurances. Taking those things for granted is something that's passively taught in our schools. Even worse, when someone attacks our world, we tend to try doing the same, not even thinking about what could actually have caused this attack.
What has this to do with work? A whole lot. Our perception of how we contribute to a society needs to change. And this is not about destroying materialism, or deconstructing capitalism. It's not about finding your faith, or attending more charity events.
This is about our general direction, as a working and living society. We still have both, living to work and working to live. What we should have, would be something more like living and working in harmony. I'm not talking about utopian ideas here. What we can change is our own perception of why we work and what we do with our lives.
We can stop caring about Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, and start caring about the education system. We can stop caring about gas prices and start caring about other religions and cultures. We can stop caring about flat screen TV prices and start caring about why we must have bottled water transported across the ocean.
I'm not asking you to abandon everything and become a nun or live like a monk. I'm simply asking you to care.
What will do that to your work? It will make you sit back once in a while, look out the window and ask yourself what you're doing with your life. And maybe it will change the roots of everything one day. Culture, education, our roots. Yes, that's possible and necessary.
After playing around a little with different themes, I settled with the poppyseed theme, for now. It's got a warm and sunny mood to it, just the right thing I need now in cold, cold Zurich.
And it just doesn't. In the best cases, Web-based text editors use W3 standard technology, combined with AJAX or simple JavaScript. But in any case, what's happening in background is not simple. Editing text is one thing, but the representation you see is actually a layer that mimics the actual output. And sometimes, without wanting it, you can create havoc using this visually rich text editor.
It would be nice of VOX to provide some HTML editing function, or textile, or something at least that lets me turn off this editor. I understand they don't want people to hack their profiles too much. And I'm really, really, really glad they don't follow this "open door" kind of philosophy of Myspace, where people just put a giant div-layer over everything, to hide the ugly table-based markup of Myspace. Self designed Myspace profiles are usually based on a theme someone wrote, usually a very ugly hack in itself.
VOX is growing on me. There are a few areas of which I feel could use better search functions, but then this also relates to the people using tags. I can see tags are becoming popular and people are starting to grasp their functionality, but let's not forget that VOX is still populated by a geeky crowd.
If you had a band, what would you call yourselves?
Question submitted by Zoot.
Okay, theese have nothing to do with each other. They're just music I listen to more often, also after a year or two. "The Infadels" I just discovered recently. They're incredibly powerful... a great mixture of electronica and rock. Made me first think my music taste is changing, but it is probably just expanding...
If you never listened to Bebel Gilberto, give her a try. It's a hot summer tip from me. ;) Particularly the remixes don't grow old, but her originals are simply a class of its own. Think of sorbet icecream.
I could easily add more albums of Massive Attack, but on these you'll find music that's been inspiring for a lot of other artists. Massive Attack have always been true Avant Garde -- ahead of their time.
Recent Comments
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core said:
Forgot one thing I thought when looking at the poppyseed theme, designed by CaliforniaWomen.org. It's using the Baskerville font that... read more
on Popular Poppyseed -
core said:
You should listen to She Wants Revenge, zet. I think you'll like them too. :) read more
on Some of the music I've been listening to lately -
zet said:
First Impressions Of Earth by The Strokes = yes! I love their new tracks. Plus Julian Casablancas' voice is creepy... read more
on Some of the music I've been listening to lately -
jadelotus said:
Oh, don't get me started on names. Thinking what to call my blogs over the years has been hard enough.... read more
on QotD: Hello, Cleveland! -
core said:
If someone would ask me "with which website did you fall in love last year, first sight?", it would have... read more
on Play of Light
I do have a music project and it's called puredish. I have been thinking a lot about band names before that and a few were pretty good. It all depends on the mood or message you want to convey. Sometimes it's not a concrete message but more a type of word that transmits a certain feel.
Trent Reznor said in an interview:
"I don't know if you've ever tried to think of band names, but usually you think you have a great one and you look at it the next day and it's stupid. I had about 200 of those. Nine Inch Nails lasted the two week test, looked great in print, and could be abbreviated easily. It really doesn't have any literal meaning. It seemed kind of frightening. [In his best he-man voice] Tough and manly! It's a curse trying to come up with band names."