January 28, 2007

Oversized Babies

I had lunch with coworkers Clay and Lloyd the other day, and somehow this harmless little blog became the subject of general criticism. I'm paraphrasing, but the conversation went something like this:

L: "You're always writing about this soup you made or whatever."
C: "Yeah, go out on a limb -- write something edgy. You could do that."
Me: "Can't do that. You sent the URL to everyone at work, remember? I'm doomed to write about safe topics. Anyone could be reading it."
L: "Why don't you write about oversized babies? That's a big thing."
Me: "Uh, okay. Oh wait -- you should write a guest entry about that!"
Lloyd: "I can do that? Really?"
Me: "Sure. I'll write an intro about how Lloyd says this blog should be more interesting, so here's his post about oversized babies."
Clay (agreeing): "Exactly! The blog isn't edgy, so here's a post from my friend about his cute, healthy baby."

So much help these people are.

Posted by csageday at 01:55 PM | Comments (4)

February 18, 2006

Update

Oops. It's been a while. Obviously there's way too much going on if I missed nearly a month of blogging. I did actually write a few blog entries, but I never got around to posting them. I'm posting them now with the dates I wrote them -- see below.

I can't guarantee that it'll be much better soon, either, although the long weekend may yield better results. Work is great, but time-consuming, and since I'm throwing a lot of energy into that now I don't have as much left over for blogging. I think this is good for me, but maybe not so good for people who previously enjoyed the blog (sorry!). Hopefully I'll be able to work out a schedule that involves photography and blogging a bit more.

Posted by csageday at 03:47 PM | Comments (0)

January 23, 2006

Happy Birthday Blue Sage

Today marks the one year anniversary of Blue Sage. I was going to do a little retrospective but I'm feeling lazy (I also frittered away all of my blogging time looking at the 2006 Bloggies). So it'll have to wait. Thanks to everyone who reads this and thank you especially to those of you that comment! It's been a pleasure to have this as an outlet for things that otherwise clog up my brain. It's wonderful to know that a few people read it, too!

Update: Wow, I share the same blogiversary date with The Yarn Harlot. Only she's much more eloquent about anniversaries.

Posted by csageday at 10:14 PM | Comments (4)

October 19, 2005

Comment Spammers: Scram!

The comment spam was driving me bonkers. I've turned off comments for a while so I can live my life without fear of 300 comment spam emails flooding my inbox. Go post a comment on a Flickr photo if you must express an opinion about something.

Or, entertain yourself with photos of knitted robots, courtesy Make via Derek. (Make was made for Derek. I'm hoping it will inspire him to actually make something, like, say, a motorized ball winder made out of legos.)

Update: My goodness, and you can also go look at knitted zombies! (Thanks Kirsten.)

Posted by csageday at 01:50 PM | Comments (0)

July 26, 2005

Google Gushing

Okay, Google maps was cool, I'm a gmail convert, and Google Earth is just fucking amazing, but they just keep coming up with more stuff. I use the Google personalized homepage regularly -- I check headlines, stock quotes, and my email there because it's centralized and it loads quickly. This morning, though, I clicked on "Add Content", which I'd used before but not recently. The page gracefully transformed itself to display a column on the left with news feeds to add, plus a field where I could add an RSS feed URL of my choice. Since I also read Gothamist I added that. Then, because I have a rather outsized ego, I added Blue Sage for kicks (and noticed I really need to post more). Screenshot:

goog_home.gif

And finally, there's a place to store all your bookmarks. Since I switch off between computers (mac, pc, home, work) all the time, I've been looking for a better place to store links (using my outdated blogroll wasn't ideal). I love Google.

Posted by csageday at 10:00 AM | Comments (0)

July 11, 2005

Regularly Scheduled Blogging Will Resume Shortly....

James Earl Jones has kindly informed us -- via a message on our answering machine -- that Verizon DSL has been enabled in our new apartment. And since we finally moved my humungous desk into an upright position last night and cleared a path between the boxes to get to it, we're one step closer to finding the computer and plugging it in and not posting pathetic little blog reports during our lunch hour at work.

Bored? Go look at these awesome photos of dogs.

Posted by csageday at 01:08 PM | Comments (0)

June 08, 2005

Eco-Friendliness

After my eco-friendly dumpster diving adventure, I read up on about two weeks-worth of Treehugger posts and found a ton of interesting things. Apple has announced an iPod recycling program, so at least those don't have to end up in the dumpster in 2015. I had no idea that eco-friendly web hosting existed (it's wind and solar powered), but it does and now there's even green broadband. There seems to be a growing interest in working for environmentally and socially responsible organizations, and some specialized job-seeking sites and books are appearing to support that. For the uninitiated, here are Ten Steps to Reduce Your Global Warming Impact. If you only click on one of these links make it that one.

Posted by csageday at 11:42 AM | Comments (1)

May 27, 2005

Curiosities

A few interesting things I've come across lately.

Joe produces modern art in the museum of the same name.

Someone has configured their many-button mouse to perform gmail functions.

Fairway does have persnickity service.

I can't wait to go to Habana Outpost, where there's solar power and composting and eco-friendly packaging and a bicycle blender.

There's an old-fashioned showdown going on in the blogosphere.

Here's a good illustrated short history of the gorgeous, shiny, dressed-for-the-oscars Chrystler building, which is celebrating an anniversary.

Have a great long weekend!

Posted by csageday at 01:51 PM | Comments (0)

May 25, 2005

Flashback (oops)

I touched base with an old friend today via email and sent along my blog URL, which is becoming a habit (skip the long email -- send the blog!). When I got a reply I realized my clever friend, looking for some other clue about what the hell I've been up to in the past 10 years -- the blog, though entertaining at times and full of great plumbing advice, is not heavy on facts about me -- removed the "/blog" part of the URL. Unfortunately, this reveals the rather uninspired 2001 "online Christmas card" I put up three-and-a-half years ago.

I probably should have figured out that enterprising blog readers might go hunting and find vestiges of bad design and photography from my past. Oh well. At least I look younger in those photos. Anyway, it's fixed. Now, you can go to an exciting new About Me page and learn all about me. In total, you can learn my name, relationship status, and location. I can't think of anything else to add. I'm not very interesting. You can also visit my Flicker site. And as an added bonus, there's a particularly strange photo of Derek and me from last week -- it's the only recent photo of the two of us that's sort of passable (well, not really. I look like a Stepford wife. I might have been drunk.).

With that out of the way, maybe I'll be able to find myself a domain name instead of mooching off the family site. bluesage-dot-anything isn't an option, although cindyday.net is available. Kinda lame, though. Suggestions are welcome.

Update: The photo was just too weird. I updated it. Now Derek looks drugged, but it's my blog.

Posted by csageday at 12:47 AM | Comments (0)

May 10, 2005

In a Huff

The Huffington Post launched today. First impression: It's like a whole bunch of famous people are at a cocktail party and they're tipsy enough to start talking about their favorite subject.

Posted by csageday at 02:08 AM | Comments (0)

May 06, 2005

Photoblogs and Kid-Sized Bento Boxes

bento.jpgBecause Gothamist posted this awesome subway graffiti photo today from joe's nyc, I went on a tour of photoblogs. There are a bunch of fantastic sites out there but after checking out a few I think I like joe's nyc the best -- possibly because of the twins set and the park slope photos. Bluejake has some nice shots of the Cherry Blossom Festival, though.

Next, because someone mentioned moblogs today and I didn't know anything about them, I did a bit of clicking around. Moblogging is updating a site -- with text or a photo -- using a mobile device. It's been around long enough that a moblogging news site (Busy Thumbs) is talking about the next trend -- vlogging (video blogging).

Cell phone photo moblogs (photomoblogs?) seem to be pretty popular. One of the first sites I found was this bento moblog. Go and take a look. There are endless photos of perfectly packaged Japanese/American lunches prepared for this blogger's kids. It's fascinating. Each one is a little work of art -- neatly organized with balanced colors and a complementary food groups. It's full of culinary culture clashes, too. And I love the little sauce containers. There are more things in these lunches than I know how to make -- the variation is impressive. And the kid-sized portions and perfect presentation make these look like little gifts or postcards. This person has transformed an everyday task into a creative exercise. The blog is also interesting because a daily domestic task is something you really can't quantify, but the combination of all the photos on the opening page makes it feel like an accomplishment. Does that make any sense? And damn, these kids eat well. Hopefully the other kids in their lunchroom at school aren't the kind that prize Lunchables and scorn anything they can't pronounce.

Posted by csageday at 01:25 AM | Comments (1)

March 22, 2005

NYC Blogging Epidemic

bunsen_honeydew.gifYou still can't find Blue Sage on Google, but there's a link to my last entry on Technocrati's New York page. Hurrah!

I also discovered nycbloggers.com, which is busy finding local bloggers and plotting their locations on the subway map. My stop -- the 7th Avenue F stop -- is chock full of bloggers. One blogger says Methodist sucks, one has a funny baseball/steroids hearing writeup, and Only The Blog Knows Brooklyn looks like a good resource. Blogging doesn't seem to be catching on in Staten Island.

This is a must read, forwarded from a coworker today: How to Blog Good.

Gothamist has a post about Daylo, an alternative to craigslist if you're searching for neighborhood services. The range of services in my zip code is impressive -- I'm not interested in the harmonica lessons or custom-made buttons, but if Derek's not in earshot I can ask Dr. Bunsen Honeydew of Muppet Labs.

Posted by csageday at 07:01 PM | Comments (2)

March 18, 2005

Lloyd Speaks

Finally, the rest of the world can share Lloyd's unique insight into the world of film (and the waitstaffs of the restaurants he visits). He has started a blog. Must say he has a knack for it: "The audience was enraptured -- everyone except for the fellow who exited the theater midway through the screening, blasting out a klaxon of a fart. Probably a critic."

Posted by csageday at 12:00 PM | Comments (0)

February 03, 2005

Blog Tourism

Since Gothamist and Dooce were nominated for the 2005 Bloggies (Weblog awards), I took a look at some of the blogs nominated in other categories and discovered two new "blogospheres" -- an eco-friendly one and a web development one, the latter of which I should be really familiar with, considering current employment.

The best find so far, which I've seen links to a dozen times but never checked out, is Londonist. It's Gothamist, but for London. It's like someone took Gothamist and rewrote it with a British twist for kicks. There are mentions of "adverts" and "parking wardens" (traffic cops), and there's talk of building a stadium for the 2012 Olympics (except, in London). Best of all, there's this bit about the Tube, every word of which could be used to describe our lovely underground equivalent (except for the "happy slapping" stuff, which is just weird).

Posted by csageday at 12:08 AM | Comments (0)

February 01, 2005

What's In a Name

Since the name Blue Sage is sticking, I googled it again and paid attention to the results. I chose the name because: I'm a member of the extensive, lunatic Sage family; I like all things blue; I like sage, the herb; "blue sage" is actually a wild variety of sage that grows in Wyoming, where some Sage family members live; and I'm usually depressed (blue) about something. And there's the whole implication of wisdom which really doesn't work here.

Back to google. My syndication options are limited. A whole bunch of people have already thought of the name, and probably even the lame BS joke. There's a bluegrass band called Blue Sage (which makes sense) and there's a rock band named Blue Sage (no explanation) with a fan base of girls in Abercrombie shirts. There's also a finance group (yawn), and a vegetarian restaurant in Philly.

Google came up with some photos of the plant and its cousins, Mealy Blue Sage and Giant Blue Sage (I'll stick with the plain variety, thanks). Then I found this site, which belongs to a self-described "tall freak with a bandana, glowsticks, and a Bastek badge," who "[feels] most comfortable representing [him/herself] as an animal rather than a human." Must be a relative.

There's a catering service, a coffee house, a spa, a real estate broker, an arts center, and a glass blowing studio. Lots of results seem to be associated with Utah. This guy calls himself Blue Sage on backpacker.com. Lucky for me, no Blue Sage Blog yet. Something close, but not quite. So at least I've cornered that market.

Posted by csageday at 09:04 PM | Comments (0)

January 31, 2005

The Blog Effect

It's been over a week now since I started this blog. It's completely addictive. If I don't have anything interesting to post, I shouldn't post anything, but I'm finding that really hard. I'm a publicity whore.

So here's a list about the glorious side effects of blogging:

Posted by csageday at 11:40 PM | Comments (1)

January 27, 2005

The Genesis of BS

Still trying to get a hold on what a blog can be, and what this one should be, especially after reading Dooce's difficult time with comments this morning. It's not the place for my usual crisis rants (too personal), but I don't want to bog it down with a theme. I'll keep posting whatever interests me (or makes me mad) on a given day. At the moment it's a blog about blogs. My audience is pretty slim (Derek is already bored with it so, um, that leaves ... me). Overachieving perfectionist that I am, I'm doing my homework first. Here's how the blogging experiment came to be...

MT and Politics

First, a coworker raved about MovableType and showed me his blog (which is far more sophisticated in its simplicity than this will ever be). I thought: I need to do that. I should really do that. Maybe if I install MT, I too will write things like "On Photography is a wonderful book, at once a treatise on this enigmatic art form and a call to action," but it didn't happen.

Then there was MoveOn, which isn't a blog so much as a kick in the ass for people who want to get involved in politics but are lazy. That led to Wonkette and Daily Kos, which I checked now and then up to The Disaster in November.

The Yarn Phase

Disillusioned, I had an obsessive knitting phase, which naturally led me to an obsessive knitting blog phase. It started with Yarnivore, a blog written by a friend of a friend who recently opened a yarn store in Brooklyn. Then I found some serious knitting bloggers, and like many knitblog-addicts, ended up reading Yarn Harlot every day. I visited the blue blog and Mason-Dixon Knitting but always felt like an outsider because I'm not quite that serious about knitting 24/7 (a good thing).

Foodies

Boing Boing and some New York-related blogs are on my daily list now, but pictures of food and restaurant reviews are luring me into another subset of the blogging universe -- the food bloggers. There have always been the Chowhound people. But blogging has produced phenomena like Obsession with Food and The Amateur Gourmet. New York foodies now have a place to vent and an audience. Like the knitters, the food bloggers share photos about every stage of a project and organize group efforts. Is My Blog Burning? is a monthly event where a recipe theme (beans, terrine) and a date is established, and cooks all over the world blog about what they made on the chosen day. It's like Iron Chef done slowly, online.

There's a point here somewhere...

So the political blogging phase begat the knitblog plase which begat the foodblog phase. The problem is, I still feel lost because there are thousands of bloggers online and it's hard to summarize what they do.

Blogging is a medium in transition, and it is used differently by different groups. There are loose rules of etiquette and form to follow -- you have a title and tagline and a collection of links, you write in the first person, and your readers add a wide range of comments (unless you're me). A blog cannot escape being a reflection of the author's personality and priorities. How bloggers choose topics to write about, day after day, reveals what they value in their daily lives. For instance, my preoccupation with what other people think of me is abundantly clear... why else would I devote a whole essay to my relationships with blogs and my struggle to make this one decent? If I distance myself enough from my role as an author, maybe I can escape the vulnerability that bloggers inherently have.

Non Sequitor

It's restaurant week and places are so crowded that diners are psyched to get a seat on a crate in an igloo outside.

Posted by csageday at 01:01 AM | Comments (1)

January 23, 2005

Blogger Debut

What the hell is a blog? Judging from blogs I've read, the content of a blog can range from intensely personal disclosure (to an uncomfortable degree) and entirely impersonal, well-crafted journalism that reveals almost nothing about the author's personal experience. Common blog traits include humor (usually in the form of sarcasm), a theme (knitting, politics, dogs), and links to other sites. To contribute to this relatively nascent form of expression, I should probably adopt these loose rules. Maybe I can write sarcastically about themed-blogs and link to them and get away without introducing any new information or insight at all ... but that would be lame and has probably been done already.

Basically, I enjoy writing and don't do enough of it, and I've become addicted recently to reading blogs, so it was only a matter of time before I crowded the blogging universe with my own interpretation of the medium. So here it is.

If I borrow from daily experience, this blog will be about what I'm reading, New York (Brooklyn in particular), various gourmet-food addictions enabled by New York (Brooklyn in particular), passable knitting, sailing (possibly), and my consistently thwarted attempts to travel.

Enough about what the blog will be. Here's what happened today on 11th street.

It snowed all day yesterday and D and I watched inches of white stuff pile up on the fire escape while staying as close to the fire as possible. Today, we headed straight to Prospect Park (as soon as we could drag ourselves out of bed) and found hundreds of Slope kids sledding. Everywhere. There were toddlers on sleds being pulled by their parents every five feet. Sleds were even piled up in the entryway of Applewood when we went there for brunch later. The dogs all seemed a little manic -- endlessly digging in the snow, excavating frisbees from snow drifts, chasing their tails, and trying to gallop through two-foot deep snow drifts only to be submerged up to their necks after one leap. The mood was generally festive -- we rarely get this much snow. We headed to one known sledding hill and watched all sorts of kids sledding on all sorts of sleds and with varying levels of skill. Despite the chronic lack of storage space in NYC, there were wooden toboggans and classic wooden sleds (not sure what they're called). Various cross-country skiers appeared and we saw one couple with snowshoes. Where these people find room for this type of stuff -- which comes in handy two, maybe three days a year -- in their apartments is beyond me. I nearly threw out the single piece of flat plastic that functions as our sled while cleaning this summer.

Since my digital camera is kaput, I have resurrected the good film camera I have. I finished off a color roll in the apartment, taking pics of books and the kitchen counter for fun. The point was to get a new roll in there for photos of the snow -- snow on brownstone buildings in Brooklyn can produce a very Victorian-looking and photogenic landscape. I realized when we got outside that the sun wasn't quite where it needed to be though, and the wind had blown all the white peaks off the wrought-iron gates. In the park, I took pictures of the snow anyway (and as many of people and dogs as I could without getting dirty looks), but since I've forgotten all those annoying details about light and exposure and film types I will probably end up with a bunch of washed out, uninteresting shots.

This week, if work doesn't take up every minute of every day, I'll try to see As You Like It at BAM, visit Jacques Torres, and start in on a pair of mittens to match the hat I finished yesterday. Given, I should really redo the hat because it's way too big, but the stitches are tiny and so perfect that I can't bring myself to tear them out yet. Since I've finished Augusten Burrough's Running With Scissors, I'll move on to this week's New Yorker and Vegetarian Times. Because we watched Ingmar Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly on Friday and it struck a major chord with me, another Bergman film may been squeezed into one of our evenings. An ambitious plan, and who knows whether I'll be motivated to comment on these endeavors in this blog, or whether I'll remember I have a blog in the first place, but we'll see soon enough.

Posted by csageday at 07:45 PM | Comments (0)