Entries from September 2008
I thought of condensing this snippet, that I ripped and saved from the Sunday NY Times 2 months ago, as a part of a toast at our wedding, but I think it’d get lost in the cupcakes and champagne.
I told Hana that a new present from her grandfather would arrive in a few days, and she, being at the age where the idea of any gift or surprise is the finest thing in the world, began her anticipatory questions. “Is it here, Daddy?” she would ask me ad infinitum, until its arrival.
For me, the best part of waiting for the gift is asking Hana what she thinks it might be. “An elephant?” she guessed. “A macaroni bowl without macaroni?”
Nothing else gives me such a sense of how astonishing desire is. Desire gives equal weight to things of radically different worth. Hana cycled through the possibilities at every meal. “A piece of glass?” “Crayons?” “A cloud?”
Desire erases boundaries by easing through them. Desire is wonder in motion. Desire finds that reality’s border is loosely guarded; someone — “reason’s viceroy” — is always asleep at his post. My 3-year-old girl knows already what many poets would do well to learn: desire pushes through the limit of what is possible; it does not recognize it and retreat.
A cloud in a box would blow my mind, would knock my socks off. I hoped the gift was a cloud in a box. I had my doubts.
- Dan Beachy-Quick, from “Dissembling My Childhood“
Categories: reading
Tagged: desire anticipation imagination
September 26, 2008 · 1 Comment
Boden‘s web site has a size filter tool that lets you ask/tell the web site to only show you clothes that are available in the sizes you want. This is a step up from online clothing retail web sites that have advanced search capabilities to specify just one size. Boden lets you select several sizes for all 4 of their categories (women, men, girls, boys) and also doesn’t require you to login or have an account to use this filtering tool. There’s a small “My Sizes OFF | ON” link in the top right navigation that activates this tool:
This is a huge help for online browsing/puchasing – so many times web site users find something they want on a web site only to discover, a few clicks later, that it isn’t available in the size they want. Just don’t show them (tease!) a product if it isn’t available in their size. Of course, Zappo‘s also has the helpful option to “email me when my size is in stock,” but Zappo’s (and many other online retailers) only let you search by one size at a time.
Many people fall between sizes or sometimes buy one size up or down from their “regular” size. It’s about time an online retailer recognized this with their browse/search/filter tools.
Kudos to Boden’s web site team for a super useful search/filter option!
Categories: usability
Tagged: advanced search, boden, ecommerce, filter, helpful, online retail, size, usability
September 24, 2008 · 2 Comments
Moya and I are getting legally married soon (thanks, California!) and have spent the last few months planning — yeah, I know most people don’t decide to get married in June and then have the wedding less than 4 months later but we have an election deadline. Marriage became legal in June and there’s an election in November with this awful proposition that might send California back to the dark ages of marriage-only-for-straight-people once again.
While planning this wedding, I made a financial trade in our loose budget — a less expensive dress in exchange for spending more on tasty cake (food/drink is so much more important to me than clothes). Moya and I went to this really great tailor (Edel Claudio) and I had my “perfectly fine second choice” dress shortened.
Then I created a persistent web search to see if I could, before our wedding date, find the dress I really liked and match the price of the less expensive one, and yesterday the internet came through for me! So if my first-choice dress arrives in time, and I can get it shortened in time (I so very much do not want to wear heels), then it’ll be thanks to the world wide web community of selling and buying. I adore persistent searches – they make the web so much more usable when trying to find an elusive item at a particular price.
Here‘s what the brides & flowergirl are wearing – except now I hopefully have a different dress and can get shortened in time (if not, I’ll resort to wearing heels).
The weather might be cool/foggy or warm/sunny so we three have matching velvet jackets and I’m quite fond of the ruffly little girl jacket for our daughter.
Moya and I are both fond of classic clean lines in clothing and we got our gowns from J Crew who has quite a few wedding dresses that are clean and modern instead of princess-y or foofy.
Categories: happiness · marriage
Tagged: dress, marriage, persistent search, prop8, wedding
I read the September 8, 2008 New Yorker letters to the editor and a bit from one letter reminded me of my righteous anger. I’m angry about the way the conservative (often religious) right-wing community depicts and scapegoats the LGBT community – particularly right now with Proposition 8 on the ballot in California.
excerpt from letter to editor written by Robert Hinton:
[...] consider the possibility that our anger may be the primary barrier to our progress [...]
Which reminded me (since it mentions Martin Luther King, Jr. and Selma) of this portion of MLK, Jr’s speech in Montgomery, Alabama on March 25, 1965:
And so I plead with you this afternoon as we go ahead: remain committed to nonviolence. Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding. We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man.
Change a few words and it deftly challenges my anger towards the Proposition 8 supporters who want to take away my family’s rights — “Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the conservative religious right, but to win their friendship and understanding.”
Categories: civil rights · marriage · prop 8
Tagged: california, martin luther king jr, prop8
