love

Over years of texting and communicating through IM, you develop linguistic conventions that communicate emotion even through the impersonal medium of text. For me, an ever-present one has been the ellipsis; it denotes a moment without words. Often it's slackjawed astonishment. Sometimes it's laughter.

Yesterday it was tears.

I missed Drupalcon Chicago because of Jeff's accident. I'd been looking forward to it for months; I'd saved up vacation days, planned to crash at Byron's apartment, and to take extra time before and after the conference so I could go back to the museums and get to know the city better.

The best-laid plans…

A quick entry of two notable photos.

After a not-so-good day, Jeff hands me a little package and tells me to open it. Inside I find Moleskine’s Paris city notebook. [what is it?] I see the ‘CDG,’ for Charles de Gaulle, and I burst into tears, for his spouse is a fountain pen lover who adores little perfect notebooks like these and who is very very nervous about going to Paris alone.

"Make your notes here," he says. "It won’t be the last time you go to the city."

I may not have him with me on his trip, but suddenly I have city maps and addresses, and I have a spousal good luck charm.

My smile blossomed at ten after four, when he walked in the door, unexpected, early.  I had commented to Adam online a bit earlier that there was something calm and perfect about the afternoon: the raging storm; the slanted lamplight across my laptop; the soft sound of snoring, geriatric cats.  Suddenly, it was better.

Jeff smiled as he put his bag down and said, "Stacy sent us all home."  He put down his string bag of water bottle, lunch remnants, and snacks; he took his place on the other couch and I paused from debugging.

"I don’t know what it is I want tonight," I said, "but I want to do something a little different.  I just don’t know what."

"Why don’t we go out to dinner?"

In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, and by that I mean “this doesn’t have anything to do with Valentine’s Day,” I present something I love:

Open data formats.

Most of you know I’ve been logging my listening habits over at last.fm for several years now. Some time ago, a nifty gentleman wrote a set of scripts (available at lastgraph.aeracode.org) to generate a visual representation of a single user’s listening habits over time.

2005

2006

2007

I think I have earlier data saved on files at home, but I’ll have to check. Clicking on the files will take you to the larger versions archived on flickr.

A little voice inside my head said,

In lieu of the entry I’m actually taking time to write and edit and revise and actually think about, I present linkfood.

‘In Teh Beginning’ (lolcats meets inexplicable meets … uh, you’ll see)

From Colter: ‘How To Get Your Love On’ on relationships: