danbruno.net/blog

This is what happens when you take a poem and replace every instance of “love” with “Boston Red Sox Hall of Fame Catcher Carlton Fisk.” (via)

From the official Dave Matthews Band website:

We are deeply saddened that LeRoi Moore, saxophonist and founding member of Dave Matthews Band, died unexpectedly Tuesday afternoon, August 19, 2008, at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles from sudden complications stemming from his June ATV accident on his farm near Charlottesville, Virginia. LeRoi had recently returned to his Los Angeles home to begin an intensive physical rehabilitation program.

What a terrible loss. Though I don’t listen much anymore, I was a huge DMB fan for the first half of my musical life. I can’t imagine the band will ever be the same, if they continue at all. Very sad news.

On a tangentially related note, I see that DMB fansite nancies.org has shut down. Nancies was my first online community, and even though I haven’t visited in years it feels strange to know that it’s not there anymore.

I may be gone, but the Tufts embezzlement saga continues apace. For now I’m standing by my original assessment.

The Big Picture, hands down the best photoblog on the internet, has posted pictures from the Olympics opening ceremony.

Stop the presses: I have made money on the internet.

My Project Wonderful ads over on the sidebar have earned me $10.02 over the course of nineteen months. That’s enough for me to withdraw the credits from my account and convert ‘em into cold, hard cash. Cash with which I can go across the street and buy a delicious cheeseburger.

For the sake of comparison, I earned $10.30 in my two years with Google AdSense. Google won’t pay out until you’ve made $100, though, so that’s not much help to me. Nothing like a steady paycheck that comes every twenty years.

So: thanks to everyone who, for some reason, still visits this site. I dedicate the cheeseburger I plan to buy with my winnings to you.

This is a story about how the internet works. I haven’t tried to extract any meaning from it, and I’m not sure there’s any to find, but I find something charming in its serendipity.

I no longer remember how I first discovered Daring Fireball. It’s been in my bookmarks since before I had a Mac, in my newsreader for as long as I’ve known was a newsreader was. Although I’m not as interested in the minutiae of Apple as I once was, it’s still one of my favorite websites.

Last month DF’s John Gruber linked to a blog called Big Contrarian, promising “Good writing, interesting links, and an original, thoughtful design.” I added it to the newsreader and promptly buried it at the bottom of the list. Occasionally I invoked the “Mark All in Feed as Read” command to soothe the uneasiness caused by unread items.

A week or two ago I added 43 Folders to my newsreader. I’ve been aware of the site (and its proprietor Merlin Mann) for a long time, and have even been an occasional visitor, but I never thought I was the intended audience — I seem to get by just fine without any “lifehacks.” More recently, though, I’ve become a Merlin fan from his hilarious Twitter and, through that his You Look Nice Today podcast, so I thought I’d give his website a chance. It grabbed my attention, and I began paging back through the most recent posts.

In one of Merlin’s posts I saw a familiar-sounding link — Jack Shedd’s Big Contrarian, the same blog Gruber had recommended. I dug it out from the bottom of my RSS feeds and began paging back through his most recent posts.

Jack’s blog soon revealed another familiar-sounding link — the personal blog of Diana Kimball, one of the people behind the fantastic ROFLCon. I read the essay Shedd had linked to — which I highly recommend, incidentally — and then (naturally) I began paging back through her most recent posts.

It only got worse. From Diana’s blog I found one of her other projects, a neat video series called The Tim and Diana Show; from there I found her co-collaborator Tim Hwang’s site, The U.S. Bureau of Fabulous Bitches (which is excellent, and much more cerebral than its title lets on). From there, I decided I had better quit my newsreader and look out the window for a few minutes.

After spending the whole morning skipping from blog to blog and slurping up content as I went, I looked up and followed Tim and Diana’s Twitter streams — fully aware that I risked starting the cycle over again. Who knows how many blogs I’ll end up subscribing to when I’m through with those?

But then I noticed something odd: Tim has been following my Twitter stream for two months now. I imagine he ran a search on ROFLCon and pulled up my mindless tweets from back in April. Maybe I’m leaving another trail of links leading in the opposite direction.