Tag Archive for 'categories'

Baker’s Dozen of Unfortunate Categories (well… currently an actual dozen…): #3 Beer

Published on October 2, 2007 in reviews. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Beer is the one category that I had no questions about retaining…

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A good beer is better than any other fluid with which your thirst may be quenched. Done right, it is more complex than a fine glass of wine and less highfalutin. I originally bought this URL and some cheap-ass Go-Daddy Hosting to make a personal beer review site, but that just seems silly with the proliferation of other fine choices and my propensity to diverge from the intended subject matter…

As I am a damned boring person, I love to search for brewpubs I have not yet visited and make a trip of it. Usually incorporating a hike or such along the way. As I like to take a few pictures as well (and have difficulty remembering where I have gone), this hobby serves many purposes:

  • Exercise
  • Drinking
  • Photography
  • Exploration
  • Getting outside

I usually use the one-two punch of Beermapping maps to discover what is located in a particular direction/region and then look at Beerfly Reviews at the Beer Advocate website to see if they are any good.

I see that the Beermapping website has a new feature to make a beer itinerary, but I usually use Google Maps to create a multi-pint (this was a typo… but I had to leave it… Pint not point, classic) itinerary with other places to “check-out.” It is always a good idea to put phone numbers and location names on your map as well…

By the way, if you are going to go on a beer tour, know your limits. I think a shared sampler between yourself and your esteemed colleague of beer sampledom and a pint of the establishment’s finest brew along with a snack is about anyone’s legal limit. Don’t push yourself. A safe, lackadaisical tour where you miss a few places on your itinerary just leaves you the future opportunity to check-out somewhere else. Plus, you can always get a couple of bombers (a 22oz beer in a bottle) or a growler (a 64oz – pitcher-sized – beer carrier with a cap) to-go (as shown by this random CC-licensed picture of a person with that very idea):

Support your local brewery, originally uploaded by michael and anna.

 

If you are going to stop somewhere (like a park, beach, etc.) and intend to sample a fine brew… remember to pack a bottle-opener (I have a waiter’s corkscrew/bottle-opener in my glovebox just in case). Again, don’t drink-and-drive or leave a partially enjoyed (a.k.a open container) in your vehicle; it is not worth it.

I like the idea of adding a embedded, geotagged map to the sidebar with mini-reviews and pics to this site, but have not ever gotten around to it, nor do I know if the effort would bear fruit worth picking. It would be nice to see where I have gone though…

Beer is good, and I will undoubtedly be using this category in the future (unless I am 100% “on-the-wagon,” then I will delete this category and the posts in it and cry…).

13 Categories of Doom… #2: Art

Published on September 30, 2007 in uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Since I have decided to constrain my categories to the unlucky thirteen that survive… I am going through them one-by-one to give an idea of why this one may have made the cut… It is probably that I am trying to spur some ideas through this exercise, but I realize that I can still refine them somewhat by the one-by-one social review… Case in point, “boredom” is going to be eliminated with the post in the category (yes… one lonely post) subsumed by the aforementioned category of apathy).

Actually, with the death of “boredom” as a category, I am down to an even dozen, but that doesn’t sound as ominous as “thirteen” or even “baker’s dozen.” I thought of another category that with which I was going to replace “boredom,” but I can no longer remember it. I will now bide my time, waiting until a proper topic that will capture my thoughts presents itself anew.

Blank Canvas, originally uploaded by ginsnob (All Rights Reserved, but it still has the option to blog a picture…)

Category #2: Art:

  • (n.) Human effort to imitate, supplement, alter or counteract the work of nature
  • (n.) The conscious production or arrangement of sounds, colors, forms, movements, or other elements in a manner that affects the sense of beauty, specifically the production of the beautiful in a graphic or plastic medium.

I enjoy the idea of crafting a web query to “define art.” It seems like a paradox to try to define the undefinable.

No one agrees on what art is, in fact, I almost thought of making this category more vague by dubbing it “beauty;” thus, I would be making more of a catch-all. Beauty is rather limiting as a concept, and has a far fewer and less interesting connotations for individuals than “art.”

Most people generally concur on what is or is not beautiful, but art isn’t always beautiful; Art challenges you and your cherished beliefs in a multi-directional manner. I love to think that the question, “is this art?” will cause one to eventually question their existence and the arbitrary, self-referential meaning that they place on the world that surrounds them.

By the way, this category would not be used to define a post as art… that is just conceited and leading. It is more to say that it is somewhat art-related… who knows how? To define a category on art in greater detail than a “feeling” or “gist” would be far too limiting.

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13 Damned Categories… #1: Apathy

Published on September 26, 2007 in apathy. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

I parsed my tag-like categories into into 13 broad topics that I can capture and steer the vast majority of my writings… and I see can see from a high-level that the topics upon which I have chosen to focus have grave implications for the redemption of my soul… (or may just say that I am a little “half glass empty”).

I could add some more, but I like the symbolic nature of constraining myself to thirteen… These thirteen are the unlucky few topics chosen to represent my thoughts, dreams and greatest fears (or perhaps just the semi-coherent postings I can motivate myself to create).

I may as well focus on why I have chosen these topics for a few posts. It may spur some great ideas, or at least give me some direction… I will begin alphabetically (and even hotlink the best picture I can find to depict the category–an aside, it is nigh impossible to find a picture of a person in a bed, with their covers over their head, in the fetal position [surprisingly]):

  1. Apathy: Defined as “an absence of emotion or enthusiasm.

Alphabetically, apathy is the first of the Thirteen Damned Categories; yes, this is the name of their grouping in unison in this ‘blog. I think I may license the name of this groupingunder a Creative Commons License, as I have recently learned nobody will really respect that license anyways…

I find that often, my writings are tainted with the flavor of defeat. Apathy is an apt description for a posting that I care about far too much, but it is outside of my control. Perhaps apathy is actually used as a defensive mechanism for myself; allowing me the merest shred of psychological armor for my thoughts lain bare…

Then again, it may just be about things that I care little or am fantastically unenthused, but that is far less exciting or existentially meaningful. I find that I oft drift to holding a philosophical view of the world somewhat nihilistic in taste that is grey and suffocating; where the world is lifeless and devoid of meaning. If I were to post something that feels this way, I think that it would be a shoe-in for a categorization of “Apathy…”

Categories (not equal to) Tags…

Published on September 25, 2007 in new media. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket

I, like many other technophiles, am an upgrade whore. I love to upgrade the second that a new update is available, even if it has the potential to FUBAR everything that works just fine.

Quite often, I know in advance that an update will cause me to spend multiple hours to tweak and ensure that it works properly, when it was excellent before upgrading. Case in point, WordPress 2.3.

This update adds quite a few snazzy features to the backend of WordPress, and is, all-in-all, an excellent update. That being said, it adds Tags and folksonomies, which most people were hacking categories to resemble. This means, to make my blog work properly and “feel” right, I need to:

  • Add code to my theme to make it tag aware. I have done this using a WordPress-cited reference that goes into the basics. With a highly modified theme, making a theme tag aware is far more complicated than the author of the webpage suggests (honestly, the methodology described on the page is a bit vague until you read the second page that the author created in response to people asking, “WTF!?!”
  • Go back through my page and add tags to old posts and reduce the number of categories employed.
  • Remember to add tags to the bottom of a post and not add a shitload of categories.
  • Hell… if I am going to streamline categories, I should look at the categories I have and focus them into the central themes of the page, then get rid of the category cloud widget, because that is a hack to use categories like tags…
  • Add a tag cloud widget or write some code to display the new tags, and make it work as I would like…
  • Perhaps I should make about 10 categories and not allow a post to utilize more than two at a time. Now I have to make new category rules Goddamit!

In addition to changing the manner in which my WordPress install works, I will have to tweak tagging on things linked to the page and see how changing all of my categories breaks everything.

By the time that I have all of the issues fixed that this upgrade has caused, it will be time for me to upgrade again and hose everything that I have worked for… And I will love it.

P.S. You would think that uploading a simple fucking picture to Photobucket would be easy, but the website sucks ass… slow and user-inaccessible.

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Category: “Uncategorized?”

Published on June 13, 2007 in uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

I find it intriguing that the default categorization for WordPress posts is “uncategorized.” It seems as if they should be just not categorized, so that they would not even be seen if you searched by category. “Uncategorized” is a categorization in and of itself; it seems like the ultimate paradox. That is, if it was not just a decision made by a coder without regards to semantics.

picture of an empty box - not a category

Another thing. If you search for images on Google using the keyword “uncategorized” you get many results, that seem to defy categorization. For example (all of these will be hotlinked from the sources – they can be damned – hopefully someone will exchange the picture with something cool like “don’t hotlink pictures” or a picture of genitalia, but I will not be so lucky):

This picture certainly fits into no category, except for perhaps “sucky murals.” I could go to the blog site and find out that it is some famous piece of art, but I do not care (perhaps if it were categorized I would…).

Here is an uncategorized picture of a person in from of an elephant mural… it seems not to fit into a category, but is it uncategorized? I would say it is actually in the category of “random bad murals with people walking in front of them.” You may not think this a good category or tag, but I bet the blogger would use it more than once.

This uncategorized picture is “closer than we think,” but I do not know what we are thinking about, nor do I care. I still think that whatever “it” is in the sentence should probably be the category.

Here is an other image that came-up as uncategorized. At first I thought it was a middle-aged man staring at a half-naked woman, but, upon my hotlinking it, I realize it is the dreadfully unfunny Amy Sedaris.

Middle-aged man staring at an ass = funny and sad, Amy Sedaris doing the same thing = uncategorized (obviously).

I will go with this one as being uncategorized; when is a picture like this ever appropriate?


These pictures clearly show that being uncategorized is an apt fate for elephant-related pictures…

and whatever godforsaken animal this creature may be.

I could scour the web for posts and pages categorized as uncategorized, but, obviously, there are likely millions of unconnected, lazy posts that are growing exponentially as spam bloggers and the disenfranchised start blogs that go nowhere faster than towards coherent or relevant tags.

Obviously there is only one category for this posting, and it may be the first time that it is, in fact, relevant.