Ways to do and not to do Blogger

I've been rather impressed with blogger's help directions and the ease of things. For example, do you know that if you want to move a blog from one google account from another, all you need to do is follow "How do I move a blog between accounts?" I'm just surprised that their knowledge base contain a question like this, and their application makes it easily doable as opposed to some hacks by users.

That said, I still wish that Blogger has static page built in so I don't have to go through hack like this one. But I guess that's against the nature of a blog (as a stream of consciousness kind of thing). But really, people don't just need to record events in their every day life. They need to be moored down by certain events in life... a good movie, a happy day, a memorable book. Static pages anchor things down. Every time I find a more or less interesting post in a blog, and want to know more about its author (to see whether it's worth the time reading the other posts), I wish there were static pages that the author chooses (or not) to present him/herself. And no, a simple "about me" page doesn't do a person's life justice!

Hugo results and Anathem

This year's Hugo result is in. There was a race for best novel between Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard book and Neal Stephenson's Anathem and The Graveyard book won.
I'm a fan of both authors and I've read both books recently so I really hoped Anathem would win. The Graveyard book to me was just a cute little book, intended for children while Anathem was wider in scope and ideas, and taught me so much more.

I guess another reason that I love Anathem is that I'm partial to the cloister theme, it reminds me of Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose. As I finished Anathem, I have a strange longing to be in a community like that, with people that are not dedicated to self-promotions. It seems like such a simple life, with seniors that you can look up to and trust, and a sense of camaraderie... things that modern days easily lack. After reading the book, for a while, I wanted to wear an avout garment all day long so as not to have to worry about what clothes to put on (and have an excuse not to).

The idea of the The 10,000 Year Clock by the Long Now Foundation that inspired Anathem also appeals to me with it anachronism. Here are people who are not rushing, people who realize that long after we are gone, life goes on. I can just imagine thousands of years from now, our descendants stumble upon the clock possibly broken and in ruins in a remote corner of the world. What an adventure that must be!

And then there's the chant of the Centenarians. In my imagination, their chant is a bit different from the music provided with the book. A few months after I read the book, NPR's music has a piece about throat singing by Tibetian Gyuto monks, and I was elated. This is the sound that my imagination was hinting at. This is how the centenarians sound.

An interesting point about Anathem is Stephenson's made up words. I know a lot of people couldn't get through the book because of the vocabulary. Even xkcd has a comics about how difficult it is, which totally surprise me because it gave me no problem at all. Before each chapter of the book where the word will be used, there's even a definition of it. It wasn't a hard read by any means, in fact, I remember sitting down with the book one night and couldn't stop reading until morning. But the coined words are fun. I wrote up the definition of Anathem on my Starbuck cup and was carrying it around for a while, having fun looking at the expression on people's face when they tried to read it.