Who ordered the scrambled brains?

There was a great turnout at The Space (2020 Wilshire) on Sunday. The event was called DTOX and it was a fundraiser for a non-profit started by UC students (LA and other) who visited the Philippines last year. The booze flowed as their fund grew. They intend to use this money to help the victims of toxic waste dumps in the Philippines. Filipinos, in particular, that knew of this event and had no reason not be there should re-evaluate the continuation of their existence on this planet. =/ I’ll be posting more info about them as I get it.

I’ve been meaning to respond to a pressing and urgent question posed to me by my brother Shaun in a recent instant message. I originally intended merely to respond to the question via IM after due thought. But while pondering the question, I realized that this issue was deserving of far more attention, and I’m sure you’ll agree.

what’s better: a chocolate eclair or a baked apple?

A “baked apple”? At first I wasn’t sure what that was. But later, the symbolism became clear. A baked apple is an apple that has been cooked in an oven. I then concluded that a chocolate eclair was better than a baked apple. I might be wrong, so I encourage feedback from my philosopher-readers/eaters.

Ramenya. This is a great little Japanese noodle restaurant on Olympic Blvd off Sawtelle. And just as I preferred the originality, adventure and genuineness of off-Broadway theater (or theatre) when I lived in New York, so do I appreciate these attributes in off-Sawtelle Japanese restaurants. (Interestingly, the post-DTOX newly rediscovered Westside chili-cheese fries haven Tomy’s [nsic] is on-Sawtelle, but that is hardly Japanese food.) Nat and I have been trying to get a bowl of their delicious ramen for nearly a week before success. First there was the 9:31 Incident. The 9:31 Incident took place last Tuesday, when we got there one-minute after their absurd and non-standard 9:30pm closing time. If only the finale of America’s Next Top Model started at the absurd and non-standard time of 7:30pm. Holy crap did I just admit to watching that? But seriously, Naima was a lock from the start. Then there was the self-explanatory Closed on Wednesday Incident. How absurd and non-standard is that? I guess it follows the absurd and non-standard deliciousness of their ramen. We finally got our ramen fix last night. And boy was it good. Mike’s Morsel: Get their before 9:30pm, and don’t bother on Wednesdays. I recommend the Chashu Ramen (a McGranahan family favorite; pictured). Nat recommends the Tofu Ramen (a Natalie personal favorite, especially when feeling under the weather; also pictured).

Speaking of recommendations, I recommend you all go out and buy the new Gorillaz album, if for nothing other than the song Feel Good Inc.

I’ve also been reading this fellow university programmer’s blog furiously, who’s been doing this blogging thing for at least 5 months longer than I have. He’s culled some very interesting links about the direction of blogging, and has been discussing some interesting ideas of his own, including the idea of tagging blog posts for use in his university’s system-wide category filterer (a la del.icio.us for posts within a blog hosting environment). In his example, he tagged some of his posts as “programming” related, which enables users to go to http://blog.case.edu/topics/programming. Ideally, posts tagged as “programming” by other bloggers on their blog system will show up there as well. (Right about here, I start to digress.) Makes me wonder if there is any way to implement this across blog systems? Still wondering, maybe if all blogs provided feeds for their categories at /categories/*/feed or something, like as a REST service, an aggregator can easily pick it up. Again, I need to look into blog web service API’s. Which would be useful in implementing my blog discussion thread idea (where trackback threaded discussions are automatically aggregated). Lengthy cross-blog discussion is not big now, but, give it two years, after the impending blog-supernova. Explication later. (OK, done digressing.) Update: Yeah, regarding the tagging of posts and searching by these tags across blogs, technorati already got to it. Pretty neat. They use category RSS feeds as I had mused. Now, for example, you can use their tag search to find all blog posts tagged as “Mike’s Morsels.” Haha!

Some site updates: I mucked around with the “Meta” links on the right. I figure that section should provide information about the site itself. I restored the XFN link that I originally removed. It’s a dumb idea, but hey millions of people seem to like what it provides (proprietary alternatives include Xanga, Friendster, the FaceBook, LiveJournal, and of course, My Space, et al.). XFN is the closest thing we DIY Free-software fans have. I also moved the RSS feeds from the bottom of the page to the Meta section. Lastly I removed the CreativeCommons graphic and just left the text “Some rights reserved”. I mean, otherwise I could see my blog quickly sliding into the support-banner mess where many others are. Next, I gotta get on this FOAF bandwagon.

Well, that’s all for now. Look forward to my next entry about the stigmatization of “being sensitive” in America today (with a barely related digression into the stigma of “illegal” immigrants).

I also need to figure out what I’m doing with my gratuitous category usage. This post is part of four categories. Should I instead have broken up the post into more coherent entries? Or does that go against some undiscovered tenant of the temporal nature of blogging? What’s more important? Blogging’s temporal nature (and the need to keep a bunch of otherwise unrelated ideas together in a single post) or the categorization of the content for perhaps increased future utility. (The reason I’m blabbering about the “why’s” and “how’s” of blogging so much is because I’m planning on writing a paper on it for my Social Knowledge and Social Power class, and it’s also part of that fascinating field known as information science.) Update: Just talked about this with Nat, and concluded that perhaps it would be best to be able to label certain paragraphs by category, rather than the entire post. Perhaps it’s related to how often you post. Perhaps it’s related to the importance of the element of stream-of-consciousness vs. the cataloging of thoughts vs. other contexts that bear on what makes a piece of information interesting. Food for blog.

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