Every page now has Seesmic/Disqus video commenting. Scroll to the bottom to see or post video comments. To read a text-only version of Jonathan's Coffeeblog on your iPhone or other mobile phone, click here. Or to see the graphics with less text, click here.
Nuts about Notes
- 8:58 PM Monday, June 1, 2009
[Notes marked in mud, sand, skin, or trees?]
That's me. Since my first computer with floppy drives (a Kaypro II) I've been fascinated with creating, organizing, transmitting, and re-using small scraps of text and perhaps photos or sketches. Back in the Kaypro days there was a fascinating bit of software called KAMAS, which could make text outlines, and later with my first Mac, there was a great program called MindWrite. Now there are many programs for handling notes on computers and smartphones. As time went on I became interested in the existing variety of non-electronic note-making tools (notebooks, scrapbooks, and sketchbooks). At this point I realize that notes, and all of the things one can do with them, are a special interest of mine.
Footsteps on the Moon
- 5:19 PM Sunday, February 22, 2009
[Old ideas never die, unless they're blown away.]
Back in 1969, when Neil Armstrong became the first human being to set foot on earth's moon, I remember something that was reported on television. The bootprints of the heavy space suit footwear made impressions in the loose topsoil of the moon's surface, and because the moon has no wind to blow the bootprints away, it was predicted that they would be there for millions of years. Millions. Literally. That, to me, was "mindblowing," in the jargon of the era. Years later, when I became interested in the origins of ideas, and the course of history of these ideas, I began to realize that ideas, too, have the potential to last forever in the minds of humans unless there is some "wind" that eradicates them. Moreover, it takes a lot of such "wind" over a long period of time, to extinguish an old idea from human memory.
The laptop freed the writer from his office, and the iPhone freed him from his laptop. An iPhone is compact and light enough to be carried almost everywhere, and the writer can now choose the setting in which to write his article: a park or a beach, for example. I began this blogpost on my iPhone while lying in bed, on my back. The choice of setting can enhance the writer's creativity, diminish his anxiety, and help him find more time during the day....
I've tried it before. I changed the background color of the page templates for Jonathan's Coffeeblog, and found a color I didn't totally hate. And now, finally, I've taken the bull by the horms and, hopefully, made the ol' C'blog more useful and readable. In large measure I was able to do this due to the tactful guidance of a friend who is an interface designer for the Web and mobile devices. The Coffeeblog has grown organically and incrementally, like a huge fungus, although I prefer the metaphor of Rome and Paris which also grew organically from small beginnings. It has always been, and still is, my toy to play with powerful and interesting software for integrating text and images.
Crisis Averted
- 3:22 PM Tuesday, June 3, 2008
[Software hassles can happen to anyone.]
Over the last five days my Coffeeblog reader stats plummeted. When I tried to look at the blog itself it kept hanging up and wouldn't load completely. I finally tracked the problem to a button which I had installed in the sidebar years ago: the Blogflux mapstats button.
Captain Video and the Video Rangers. Remember them? If you do, you were a kid when I was, back in the 1950's. In those days there was an American company called Dumont, who manufactured a television set of the same name, and started a TV network. One of their shows, broadcast live in what would become the early prime-time slot, was a science fiction/adventure serial named after the good captain and his sidekick. A full hour of the program has been salvaged, and can be seen here on YouTube. But cowboys? Yes, there were cowboys in the show, because reruns of Westerns could be used for filler. Advertisements were frequent, long, venal, and aimed at children. The captain and his Ranger dressed in military-style uniforms and flew a spaceship resembling a propeller-driven World War Two aircraft. But that was not important; what was, besides the ads, was the video. The captain, most recordings of the show, Dumont televisions, and the Dumont network are long gone (they passed into oblivion in 1955), but their legacy is more prevalent than ever on today's Internet: the advertisements, of course, and the video....
Bacn
- 6:08 PM Friday, May 9, 2008
[One man's noise is another man's signal.]
Poor Hormel. That's the meat-packing company that invented the canned luncheon meat in the late 1930's whose brand name has become iconic: Spam. I googled Spam and found out all kinds of cool stuff. For example, there is a kind of spam sushi, called spam musubi, popular in Hawaii. Then there is Spam Spread, which is reportedlyhalal, which means kosher for Muslims. Who knew? Spam, of course, is the internet nickname for unsolicited, unwanted, and deservedly deprecated email concerning strategies for enlarging the membrum virilis, keeping said membra viriles in a state of precoital readiness, and, for those who are unconcerned about the state of their membrum virilis, or have no such membrum, mortgages. Oh, yes, and get-rich-quick schemes out of Nigeria. But I digress. Why? Because I am not intending to write about Spam here. I am writing about bacn.
Lately the course of events I have been following on the Internet has demonstrated that the technological tail has been wagging the dog, the dog being content. In other words, what is written and shown is becoming increasingly influenced by the high-tech ways of showing it. One of the best illustrations of this increasing influence is this cartoon by blogger Hugh MacLeod, who announced that he was leaving the social networking site Twitter because it was "too easy," and because it was distracting him from the content ("art! ideas! poetry!…") that he sought back in 2005. Twitter, about which I wrote previously, is a child of the mashup phenomenon. What's that? Keep reading.
It's Tuesday, April 8, 2008 5:17:01 PM US/Pacific. I just looked at the Coffeeblog and learned that my last post was March 20: Purim. It's over. It's been over for 17 days. And yet, until this item, I haven't posted anything to the Coffeeblog. Seventeen days. Two weeks and three days. And that troubles me. I experience it as stressful. The stress of not blogging. And that brings me to a recent meme purveyed in the dead tree medium known as the New York Times. As their recent headline (April 6) trumpeted (in part) "Writers Blog Till They Drop."
Universonal
- 7:38 PM Tuesday, March 18, 2008
[When the personal is universal and vice versa.]
I've been more and more satisfied with what I've posted to the Coffeeblog over the past few months, and I'm getting more page views from visitors. How much these visitors read of what I've written, I don't know. But they're visiting, and some of them, according to my statistical software, stick around and read other things I've written after they read the stuff they were searching for. There is another trend, however, over the past few months: I've been posting to the Coffeeblog less often. What does that mean? Am I getting bored with blogging? (No.) Are my standards getting higher (Yes.), and therefore am I intimidating myself about writing more and posting new images? (Maybe.) I think I know what is happening. The Coffeeblog has transcended mere ego-tripping, hobbyism, and showing off, though it is all of the above. It has become nothing less than a repository for my sense of personal identity. In decades past, that role was filled by college, job, ideological identification, and to a lesser extent, lifestyle. Now, as a certified old geezer (I collect Social Security!) I have needed to rewrite the whole saga before my demise, which even if it should happen fifty years from today, will be untimely. (I guess my health is good enough for me to still think that way.) What all of this lengthy paragraph implies is that the Coffeeblog is very, very personal. But there's much more to it than that.
Since 2004, Apple has had a nifty product called Airport Express, a $100 wireless router with an audio jack that works with iTunes. Run an audio cable from the gadget to your stereo system or TV sound system, and you can play back iTunes from any computer in the house that has wireless access. It's a great way to listen to your MP3's and purchased iTunes over your best speakers. For years I've coveted Airport Express, but held off buying one, making do with a wired connection from an old iPod....
Jes' me an' my iPhone.
- 2:17 PM Monday, January 28, 2008
[There's blogging, and there's blogging blogging.]
This morning I left my fat laptop at home. (I call it my fat laptop because next month there will be thin laptops, even though I don't really need one.) I'm enjoying a brief sunny respite from the Northern California winter rain, seated out on the terrace of Espresso Roma. Heck, I was even able to take a self-portrait with the iPhone for the image which you now see above if you are not using the text-only version of Jonathan's Coffeeblog....
Yesterday was the last day of this year's (2008) MacWorld Expo, the huge Apple event in San Francisco, and as usual Apple CEO Steve Jobs was going to knock our socks off with his presentation of astounding, revolutionary new products. This year, his main offering was an ultra-thin, ultra-light laptop computer which Apple calls the MacBook Air. As I left MacWorld Expo, I was humming that great Peggy Lee standard, "Is That All There Is?" I was kinda disappointed....
I am Curiousyellow
- 12:07 PM Thursday, November 15, 2007
[Long? Boring? Banned in Massachusetts?]
The month after I started Jonathan's Coffeeblog, I was curious about the process of starting a blog using the Blogger website. I gave my exploratory blog the title "Curious" with the username (changed later) of "curiousyellow," which I made up on the moment, suddenly recalling the 1967 Swedish film I am Curious (Yellow). Since then, curiousyellow has been my username on many social websites, including Flickr, del.icio.us, Twitter, and Seesmic. Recently I decided to see the movie again to see if my opinion of it had changed. It has changed....
The Counterculture of the 1960's is dead. Kaput. History. A little over forty years ago the Summer of Love, one of the iconic events of the Counterculture, took place here in San Francisco. The following year there occurred the world-wide cataclysm of 1968, the emergence of the New Left, which challenged everything across the political spectrum, including the Old Left. However, 1968 in its turn was an echo of 1848, the year that the Communist Manifesto was published, and the suffering urban workers rose up against their nouveau-riche middle-class overlords and the still-powerful aristocracy....
Where angels fear to tread
- 2:17 PM Monday, November 5, 2007
[Write, photograph, draw, paint, film, record, and publish.]
I'm not a journalist, editor, publisher, food writer, art director, art historian, graphic designer, cartoonist, movie critic, historian, television personality, videographer, video editor, software engineer, philosopher, sage, or pundit. I've never been, and I never will be, at least by professional and academic standards. And that's exactly the point. Thanks to the recent explosion of technological innovation, however, I and anyone with a computer or even a high-end cell phone can be any of the above. Sort of. Or pretend to be. Is that a good thing? Yes, according to me. (I am writing that being sort of a pundit, or pretending to be.)...
Osanpo Video
- 8:20 PM Tuesday, October 23, 2007
[I had an epiphany.]
There is a very popular group on the photography-oriented social networking website Flickr: Osanpo Camera. It is so popular that they have a daily limit on the number of photos that can be posted. Now, osanpo is a Japanese word that means, essentially, "free walking," If the o at the beginning of the word means "honorable," as it does in many other Japanese words, than osanpo means "honorable free walking." In my opinion osanpo deserves to be honored; it is a fascinating yet very democratic art form. I wanted to read more about it, but I can't read Japanese and most Internet references to osanpo are in that language. However. I would like to believe that a new project of mine, a video project, is in the best osanpo tradition....
In 1999, Virginia Postrel, then editor of Reason magazine, produced her bookThe Future and its Enemies, which introduced the idea (a radical, world-changing idea, I think) that humanity can be divided, not into liberal vs. conservative, or rightist vs. leftist, or god-fearing vs. atheist, or bourgeois vs proletarian, but into stasist vs. dynamist. In brief, stasists are opposed to change and innovation, dynamists welcome both. Since The Future and Its Enemies, Mrs. Postrel has elaborated on the status of the stasist-dynamist dynamic in her excellent blog, The Dynamist, and written another radically innovative book, The Substance of Style. The Internet, where Jonathan's Coffeeblog lives, is a product of the dynamist world view. It seems to me that that some of the world most extreme stasists are utilizing the Internet to spread their ideas in order to fulfill their goal of controlling the future by stifling innovation and change. By using the Internet that way, what stasists are doing is paradoxical if not hypocritical. However, before going into detail, I want to clarify, in Virginia Postrel's own words, just what is meant by a stasist and a dynamist:...
It's taken me years to come up with this format for Jonathan's Coffeeblog, and meanwhile things keep changing on the Internet. Now they've got Jottit, created by Simon Carstensen and Aaron Swartz. It's basically a website for making websites. Instant websites. I mean, really instant. Go to the URL (http://jottit.com) and you're immediately asked to create a "page," meaning a web page. Type something. BAM! You've got a web page. Just email the URL to others and they can read what you've got there. If you name the pages for the date and time you wrote them, you've got a blog. You can't put images on it (yet) except for ASCII images (remember them?) But you can put links and even format the text a little bit.
It's not even a month since I shelled out 600 smackers and an obscene amount of tax for my iPhone, and it's already changed my life. Could it change yours? If you avoid computers, email, and mobile phones, probably not. But then, you wouldn't be reading this. For me, however, things have already changed. I'm no longer tethered to Wi-Fi. I can access websites, send and receive email, check in with my Twitter buddies, and do text messages anywhere where my old cellphone worked. Since the iPhone has a speaker, I can play podcasts in the car while driving, then walk off at my destination without interrupting the program. (Audio podcasts, dammit! Watching videos while driving could change your life by ending it. It's more tempting than you think.) The iPhone camera is easier to use and captures better images that my old cameraphone, so I'm taking more photos than ever (here are some)....
Easier on the Eyes?
- 9:39 PM Friday, July 20, 2007
[Suddenly it began to look very PC.]
I suppose that it had something to do with my new iPhone. That Apple minimalism got to me. Actually it may have begun earlier this year when I spent more than 200 bucks on a pair of Prada glasses. On a cost-per-wear basis, that's not too bad, but that was the first time I spent a lot of extra money just because something looked stylish. My old Japanese glasses cracked right across the bridge of my nose, and I couldn't fix them with duct tape. Are you beginning to see a trend here? A life-long nerd suddenly craves high style. Not that I can or will change my whole life. The Prada glasses and the iPhone are merely tokenistic. I still love my rust-colored fleece jacket which I bought on sale at REI when the color became very unfashionable. My girlfriend hates it but it's an old friend....
I Caved
- 12:15 PM Thursday, July 19, 2007
[Obscene indeed.]
Yep. I bought one. An iPhone. Although I said I wouldn't. Am I sorry now? Quoting Frank Sinatra, "Regrets? I've had a few, But then again, too few to mention. I did what I had to do And saw it through without exemption." How, you might ask, did this sudden major reversal of declared intent come to pass?...
…this weekend, that is. It's going on sale tomorrow at six PM. Steve Jobs is one of my top hi-tech heroes, so I hope he doesn't take it personally. That doesn't mean that I won't ever buy one. In fact, I'm fairly certain that I will buy an iPhone within the next few years, barring some unexpected disaster, Hey, I wrote about it when it was first announced. But right now, I'm telling Apple, "Thanks, but no thanks."...
Theodor Holm Nelson, generally credited with inventing hypertext, calls himself a nexialist. Although the word does not appear in the Wiktionary or have a Google definition, I find it to be a very appealing and useful world, meaning, presumably, someone who studies the connections between things which are ordinarily studied in isolation by various scientific specialties. The word comes from a science fiction novel by A. E. Van Vogt....
Lolcats
- 1:17 PM Thursday, May 3, 2007
[Cuteness is essential.]
I'll get right to the point: The lolcat is a species of cartoon. As I did, you may have seen one or more without knowing what they were called, because lolcats are a big Internet fad, or in Internet jargon, a viral meme. A basic lolcat consists of a cute cat photo overprinted with a humorous caption. Cuteness is essential, and is usually intensified by the use of odd spelling and bizarre grammar. The lol, of course refers to the abbreviation for "laughing out loud," found throughout the anglophone Internet. (Hmmm… I wonder: what is the expression in, say, the Hungarian Internet?)...
I suppose it started with Aunt Clara, my mother's aunt. She was a very interesting lady in her own way, and if she were still alive and had email, I would probably now be asking her a lot of questions about the 1930's in bohemian New York and similar topics. But, as my father used to say, "if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a taxi cab," and Aunt Clara, who was never to know the thrill of incoming email, died decades ago. The last time I saw her, which was when she was visiting San Francisco, she pointed towards the Golden Gate, and said, "Oh I see they built a bridge there!" (I didn't make that up. Yes, she had been here before. Long before.)...
Yahoo Pipes
- 4:53 PM Sunday, February 25, 2007
[Milking the good stuff out of a website.]
When I was a kid one of my favorite playthings was my Erector set, a boxful of metal parts and fasteners for constructing machines, bridges, towers, and other goodies. (Do they still make Erector sets? Yeah, sorta.) With an Erector set a kid could be a civil or mechanical engineer. Now Yahoo has made it possible for an aging kid like me to be a software engineer....
Almost two years ago I wrote an item for Jonathan's Coffeeblog about online social networking, which I called cyberschmoozing. Later I blogged about photo-sharing sites such as Flickr, and about "Web 2.0", a somewhat controversial catchall term for websites which enhance networking of people by enabling tagging and social relationship technology. In Flickr, for example, each member can designate contacts, who may or may not be friends or family members....
Size Queens
- 7:23 PM Friday, January 12, 2007
[The iPhone *is* a new computer.]
By now you've heard it. Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone at MacWorld Expo in San Francisco last week. I went and I saw the precious device rotating in the bell jar. I knew even before I went that Jobs might be announcing a new phone, and a new TV. Yawn. Snore. I expected to be disappointed. I wasn't. I was (forgive me) electrified....
Espresso Roma was closed today, so here I sit inside Royal Grounds. It's nice and sunny and not too cold out: an auspicious day for 2007 blogging. Last night at eleven we visited a friend who sets off fireworks every year in his front yard. As I write this I'm importing video clips of the fireworks into iMovie, which have been uploaded from my cameraphone. If there's anything worth keeping I'll send the finished movie to YouTube or Vox. Hey. it's 2007. Video rules....
Numa Numa
- 5:43 PM Friday, December 29, 2006
[The making of a "meme".]
Love from the linden trees. For Americans like me it doesn't make a lot of sense. I remember from ninth grade shop class that basswood, a high-quality hardwood, came from American linden trees. If I had been born in Northern Europe or a Slavic country, I might have learned that the linden (lipa in Czech and Slovak, lime tree in the UK) was a very special tree, associated with the love-goddess Freyja, with village councils, and as a material for making ikons in Russia. And if I had been born in Moldova or Romania, I would have understood the lyrics to a song called "Dragostea din Tei." In the rest of the world, the song, which might sound like nonsense for non-Romanian-speakers, is known as the song for the Numa Numa Dance, and it is at the root of what Wikipedia calls the second most popular meme on the Internet....
Another cold start. I've been writing more about new media and new gadgetry lately. Or more precisely, I've been writing about things that the "old" gadgetry can do that I just discovered. Old gadgetry? Consider the mobile phone, which is old in the sense that it has its roots in the Walkie Talkies of the Second World War, but now it's a multipurpose wireless data capture and communication device, if one goes to the trouble and expense, as I have, of buying one with multimedia functions and subscribing to a data plan, which costs more than just phone service....
As of today, Jonathan's Coffeeblog makes its debut as Jonathan's CoffeeVlog. That's right, instead of the usual static image, there's a video, courtesy of YouTube. If you can get the YouTube link to run, you will see a talking head clip of your trusty CoffeeVlogger pondering the difficult question of whether the term vlog is monosyllablic, with a V instead of a B, or polysyllabic, pronounced vee-log in English....
Nooks & Crannies
- 8:01 PM Tuesday, November 28, 2006
[Dead-time use of high-tech gadgets.]
The routine of life is full of much "dead time"—seconds, minutes, or even hours or days when one feels like time is being wasted and lost: nooks and crannies in the flow of the day. Dead time is different from dolce far niente, when the pleasure of laying back and being idle can be savored and relished. Dead time feels like a waste, and is annoying. Examples of dead time include waiting for a traffic light to change or stalled traffic to start moving again, waiting in a dentist or doctor's waiting room, waiting for a plane to board, waiting for the plane to reach its destination, waiting for a scheduled event to start, etc., etc....
Vox Your Socks Off
- 3:30 PM Saturday, November 25, 2006
[Video, more intimate, friend-friendly as it were.]
Whilst surfing the Laughing Squid blog a few weeks ago I came across an announcement of a new blogging service called Vox. (This was Laughing Squid's take on it). Since I do the Coffeeblog with Tinderbox on my own computer, I was initially underwhelmed. However, there was a lot of high local geek power behind Vox, so I decided to check it out anyhow, and I'm damn glad I did. Vox, in addition to being a friend-to-friend blog service like its older sister, Live Journal, from the Six Apart folks who also do Movable Type, it has some very cool stuff, specifically audio (is that why they call it Vox, Latin for "voice"?) and video. Yeah, there's YouTube, of course, but Vox is more intimate, friend-friendly as it were. So I joined Vox.
Over the weekend I attended a conference (more about that some other time) where I learned that the vast majority of the world's population has limited or no access to computers, but they do have mobile phones which they use for text messaging. In other words, Internet access via mobile telephones is the wave of the future for most Earthlings, if not already the wave of the present. This information led me to try to access Jonathan's Coffeeblog on my own Sony-Ericcson W600i. I did. But with all the bells, whistles, chiclets, links, gewgaws, and javascript jazz that I have added to the ol' Cblog, it took a long time to load and was very frustrating to read....
Technorati is a company in the San Francisco Bay Area which has supported the blogosphere by providing search services for weblogs. Web search services like Google search the whole Internet, not just weblogs. Someone seeking their ideal blog on a specific topic is likely to be overwhelmed with too many hits if they use Google. Technorati not only searches keywords, such as "coffeeblog", it can search tags which will bring up photographs on Flickr and Buzznet as well as bookmarks on de.licio.us and Furl which have been given the same tag by readers....
Up to now, when I've written something for the Coffeeblog, I've waited until I have a time block long enough to muse, write, rewrite, daydream, and brood. Now, I have to be somewhere important in 53 minutes with a 15-minute drive. Can I write this? Can I get it all done with no need for major revisions before I go out the door? Will the deadline aid and abet creativity or stifle it? We'll find out. Synchronicity, rock on!...
Feed Frenzy
- 7:36 PM Sunday, July 10, 2005
[RSS mess, XML hell, but now: all is well?]
Just a short note to you kind folks who read the Coffeeblog with a news aggregator (or Yahoo's RSS feature, or Tiger's version of Safari, or the Bloglines website). I've had validation problems with my feed, but I think that's been fixed now. (It works for me, but what about you readers? Please use comments to reply.) My feeds now come in two flavors: basic xml at this link:
A Thousand Hits
- 12:59 PM Wednesday, April 27, 2005
[Andy Warhol was right!]
At 12:44 PM Pacific Time today, according to my Site Meter, the Coffeeblog has racked up its thousandth site visit. That means that on one thousand separate occasions, someone other than me has visited the site over the Internet. And they're not only visiting, they're actually looking at the different pages. And they're not just Californians or Americans, but readers in Australia, Japan, Germany, the UK, Mexico, the Netherlands, Denmark, New Zealand, Switzerland, Belgium, Russia, France, Sweden, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Cool, huh? I'm very proud of my fifteen minutes of fame....
It's time to activate the Coffee page link in the navigation bar and the "Go" sidebar. (After all, this is the Coffeeblog). My grand plan is to add a lot more items about coffee and its history, characteristics, producers, consumers, and their ilk to the new Coffee Page, as well as the home page. (There is already a "Cafes" page where the coffeehouse-related articles are listed.)...
When was the last time you were at Starbucks and either 1) had sex or 2) heard rock and roll? Never, right? So what is the common thread that links these three phenomena of contemporary culture? More than you might think....
Cyberschmoozing
- 3:25 PM Saturday, March 19, 2005
[A kiss is just a kiss?]
In February, 2005, a self-styled summit on online social networking was held in cyberspace, with no identifiable geographical locus. Blogosphere old-timers as well as newcomers like me have become familiar with Flickr, del.icio.us, Technorati, and other Internet entities (internentitites?) for establishing connections between people, at the core of which, are blogs themselves. (See my recent post on Blogger's Block.)...
Jonathan's Coffeeblog was not prefabricated, but custom-built with Tinderbox, a nice piece of software which lets me build, remodel, and renovate the blog as I go along. Today I am adding a new category for my blog posts, called "People". To read all the "People" posts, just click on the navigation link at the top and the end of the blog posts, or use the Go menu in the sidebar.—JDL
This hair-raising story of a feminist Iranian blogger arrested for doing what bloggers do (blogging) was reported in the Los Angeles Times (for the full article click here.) The woman is known as Farouz Farzami, not her real name.—JDL
The Dawn of 2005
- 8:19 PM Saturday, January 1, 2005
[Four percent of the 21st Century has come and gone]
I have been through many New Year's Eves, 61 to be exact, but somehow this one seemed a little different. For the first time I feel solidly within the 21st Century. I did not feel that way after that absurd celebration of the millennium on New Year's Eve 2000, nor even last year. Probably it just took time to sink in. But now I am feeling that the 20th Century is over, completely over....
A Christmas Miracle
- 12:49 PM Saturday, December 25, 2004
[But they said it's closed all day on New Year's]
Espresso Roma, Berkeley. Add another miracle to the historic list of those occurring on December 25. A cafe (not just any cafe, but my "headquarters" Espresso Roma) was open—at least until 1 PM....
This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004)....
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
... 
