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A few days ago I...
A few days ago I had a discussion about this topic with a friend of a friend. She lives in neighborhood I don't know very well, and we were in the bar she considers her local watering hole. She agreed that in the city, it's rare to meet and become friends with total strangers, but nevertheless she had several friends of that type. We discussed what effect the neighborhood might have had, and she said that it's small enough but also self-contained enough that some weekends she never leaves the neighborhood, and as a result has a lot of opportunities to run into the same people over and over again. So people she had met in line at the coffee shop, or doing laundry, or hanging out at the bar, she'd strike up a conversation with once or twice and eventually become friends with.
-- (January 19, 2010) on wednesday 2009-12-16 1721
I agree: I do th...
I agree: I do think the public square is important for creating community, and I think you're probably right that it's at least partly about communication in some subtle way, even if there isn't much verbal communication between strangers.
Strangely, or maybe predictably, I have had a disproportionate number of verbal interactions with strangers in public places in the last few weeks. Whether that's due to chance or some subconscious change connected to thinking about community, I'm not sure...
-- (January 14, 2010) on wednesday 2009-12-16 1721
What is it about...
What is it about cities that makes them more alive and more soulful than suburbs? If it's 'community', what exactly *is* 'community'? I'm not sure it's strangers meeting in public squares. My experience with Boston and San Francisco doesn't include much meeting of strangers. I think city-dwellers quickly learn how to exist in close proximity with each other without interacting. Walking down the street, people avoid eye contact. Standing in elevators, busses, or trains, people mind their own business and ignore the strangers around them. I can think of two common exceptions to this: sports events, both at the event itself and on public transit going to and from the event, and drunk people. I had a strange experience this Christmas Eve on my way to the airport, when some tipsy partiers boarded the BART car I was riding and smiling and laughing, wished everyone Merry Christmas. They made eye contact and expected responses, but it still took me a minute to decide if they were actually talking to me or not. I wanted to enjoy the cheerful interaction with strangers, but it was very hard to break through the strong social more of keeping to yourself on the train.
Actually, my strongest experiences of meeting strangers in public places have occurred in a small town bar in blue-collar Clinton, MA. I'm not sure what about the bar makes it so friendly. Perhaps it's just my own expectations, or perhaps the small-town mores are different from a big city's. But bartenders and patrons alike are more friendly and talkative and open with strangers there than in any city bar I know.
I don't think it's meeting and interacting with strangers in public spaces that makes a city feel alive. But the feeling of a city as a living organism, of people as the life-blood flowing through the veins of the city streets, is a big part of why I love the city. Somehow, walking through the streets, I feel connected to the people around me, even though I almost never interact with them. I do think public squares are important to that community feeling, too, even though I doubt I'll ever make a friend by striking up a conversation in one.
I would love to hear theories on what makes a city feel alive.
-- (January 7, 2010) on wednesday 2009-12-16 1721
My email provi...
My email provider (FastMail.fm) allows you to turn your email address into a domain name and then use any user name you want as the local part of the email address. e.g. joeuser@example.com can receive email sent to any *@joeuser.example.com. So when I have to enter an email address on a site I don't trust, I just use the site's domain name as the local part of the email address: 1800flowers.com@joesuer.example.com . No setup required, unless I have to send mail *from* that address, which is sometimes necessary later to unsubscribe from their list. In that case I use the trick from this hint.
I too had become lax about using this policy; after doing it for several years I found very few instances of someone selling my address to a spammer. In plenty of cases I got on a 'legitimate' mailing list I hadn't intended to sign up for, but these lists always respected unsubscribe requests.
But recently I placed an order with 1800flowers.com and started getting mail from their affiliates. Fortunately I had used a custom address so I was able to track down the source of the new mailing list subscriptions. Unfortunately they have lots of affiliates, and the unsubscribe database is not shared. So far I've unsubscribed from mailing lists of four different affiliates; we'll see how many more are yet to come.
-- (June 16, 2009) on monday 2009-06-08 1537
Hmm, I think I'm in the habit of firing up emacs if I want to do complex replacements or use macros. I usally get by with this type of thing in vi: '/foo<RET>' to hilight all instances of 'foo' (if you have 'set hlsearch' on in ~/.vimrc). Then I do a first replace with 'cwbar<ESC>' (change word to 'bar') or '3sbar<ESC>' (replace 3 characters with 'bar'). From there you can navigate among the search results with 'n' and 'N' and use '.' to repeat the replacement command. This can actually cover a lot of cases though since the search string is a regexp and the change command can be anything.
Just for curiosity's sake though, I looked up how to do an emacs-style search and replace with back-references and prompting, and here it is: ':%s/foo/bar/gc' The core is 's/foo/bar/g', like the sed command. '%' means apply to all lines in the file, and 'c' means to prompt interactively for each match. The whole thing is introduced by ':' which is how you get the M-x prompt. And it turns out there's a lot of crazy stuff supported for searches, like search-and-move, search-and-second-search, etc. Try ':help pattern.txt' if you're curious.
And you probably want 'set incsearch' and 'set smartcase' in your ~/.vimrc.
Attachment: dot.vimrc
-- (April 10, 2009) on sunday, 2009-03-29 0437
Ive become ambie...
I've become ambieditorous to the point of using VIPER mode in emacs. I love the way vi shortcuts don't cause me to contort my hands and type several keys at once; it's probably better for avoiding RSI.
Copy and cut commands in vi start with either d for cut or y for copy, followed by any movement command. So 'de' is cut to end of word, 'y$' is copy to end of line. 'dt(' is cut up to the next '(' char found. You can also store these snippets in cut buffers using the double quote char and a letter (the name of the buffer) as a prefix, like so: '"aye' puts the current word in cut buffer 'a', from which you can later paste it with '"ap'.
There's also visual mode, which is great for more complex copying where you don't know ahead of time how to specify the end of the copy region. Go to the place you want to be like emacs' mark, and hit 'v'. Now move around with any movement keys (e.g. '/' to search or 'f(' to find '(' chars, followed by '.' to repeat the find). When the selection is correct, hit 'y' or 'd' to copy or cut and exit visual mode.
-- (April 3, 2009) on sunday 2009-03-29 0437