Play with the Machine » selfreflection http://www.machinelake.com Sat, 03 Sep 2011 16:08:33 +0000 en hourly 1 More reminiscing http://www.machinelake.com/2008/01/12/more-reminiscing/ http://www.machinelake.com/2008/01/12/more-reminiscing/#comments Sun, 13 Jan 2008 05:00:03 +0000 gavin http://www.machinelake.com/2008/01/12/more-reminiscing/ In lieu of anything actually new, how about a walk down memory lane Play with the Machine style?

January 2005

Tara Mcpherson: “Fantastic poster maker & illustrator. Letterpress-esque, check out the Stereolab one. She sells them, Stereolab is on $35.” Timely even! Her stuff is featured prominently in Juno’s (from the movie Juno) bedroom.

January 2004

FSDB: “FSDB is a file system data base. FSDB provides a thread-safe, process-safe Database class which uses the native file system as its back end and allows multiple file formats and serialization methods. Users access objects in terms of their paths relative to the base directory of the database […]” This was (is?) and all Ruby thing. Still kicking it seems—last updated October 2006. I never did anything with it, my Ruby love already fading in 2004. So many alternatives nowadays. What to choose? Amazon S3 and SimpleDB and Thrudb all look interesting.

January 2003

Foreign Groceries Museum: “Nice. Lingua de Gato isn’t what you think.” This one is bittersweet. Steve recently lost the 5000+ photos he had on Flickr to a phishing scam. The above link clicks thru to a Flickr Not Found error page. I don’t like to throw the word tragic around but I think this qualifies. Such a loss.

January 2002

I had a thing for photologs in 2002 it seems:

PixelPile now defunct.

lightningfield still around sorta, last updated March 2007.

Noah Grey still very much alive & kicking.

April 2001 (earliest I have with easy archive access)

Turning Point For BeOS, Users?: “It’s funny, I reformatted my BeOS partition this weekend. Needed more room for linux. Hadn’t booted into Be for over a year. Sad.” Everything in that sentence & title is long gone. No Byte, no Be. A lot can happen in 7 years.

Guess what still works? Amazon urls from 2001! For example, L’aventure Fantastique! Back in the day I used the weblog as my del.icio.us.

Thanks for your indulgence. One last one:

“Experience merely forgotten is seldom beyond recall, if we try hard and patiently to bring it back. It is only when we forget having forgotten that a door closes between us and the past.” Robert Grudin “Time and the Art of Living”

New stuff coming up! Really.

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So that was a fun year! http://www.machinelake.com/2008/01/01/so-that-was-a-fun-year/ http://www.machinelake.com/2008/01/01/so-that-was-a-fun-year/#comments Wed, 02 Jan 2008 03:17:39 +0000 gavin http://www.machinelake.com/2008/01/01/so-that-was-a-fun-year/ Not without the usual sadness…. So long Oscar Peterson, Ettore Sottsass, Don Herbert and so many more….

And hello 2008! Glad to meet you.

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Once again with energy http://www.machinelake.com/2007/05/29/once-again-with-energy/ http://www.machinelake.com/2007/05/29/once-again-with-energy/#comments Tue, 29 May 2007 16:51:47 +0000 gavin http://www.machinelake.com/2007/05/29/once-again-with-energy/ The old machinelake.com was near death. So to reinvigorate it I decided to tear it all down and start from scratch! Nothing like the smell of fresh paint to get the creativity going….

It is pretty bare-bones. Nothing fancy for me. No “next page” “previous page” crutches for you. At least not yet. The TODO list is kinda long.

Not sure if this rebuild qualifies as “fetishizing the interesting” or not. But really the old Ruby/Typo system was junk; it needed replacing. Handcrafted artisanal innovation.

The graphic on the left there is from Nodebox. I was having some fun with tags and some Nodebox extras.

There could be problems…. If you run into something particularly annoying or broken and you feel inclined, drop me a message. Email is on the About page. Thanks.

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Onwards http://www.machinelake.com/2005/08/08/onwards/ http://www.machinelake.com/2005/08/08/onwards/#comments Mon, 08 Aug 2005 21:13:00 +0000 gavin http://www.machinelake.com/2005/08/08/onwards/ Machinelake.com ran into some problems a few weeks back. Long story short, it’s all brand new. All the archives, categories, etc. will come back as soon as possible. Generally, I try looking at these interludes of failure as useful ways of breaking bad habits and getting out of ruts. So great! New ways of doing stuff! Until something breaks again…

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Thanks for your patience http://www.machinelake.com/2005/08/08/thanks-for-your-patience/ http://www.machinelake.com/2005/08/08/thanks-for-your-patience/#comments Mon, 08 Aug 2005 18:11:08 +0000 gavin http://www.machinelake.com/2005/08/08/thanks-for-your-patience/ Slowly. Back in action.

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