Observations with Linzer Augen

The cookie was a Linzer Auge. I was eating it with a tiny pastry fork at the Linzer Bakery on the main plaza in Schaerding. A Linzer Auge is a sandwich cookie, two crenellated pieces of shortbread filled with red current jam. This was quite a good one, the shortbread was buttery and crumbly, the …


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I Love Postcards

No, dammit, the postcard is not dead. I still send them, I still love recieving them. And while, yes, you can’t beat those ruffled edged Kodakchrome color landscapes you can still buy from postcard racks and at garage sales, access to the wonders of digital means that you can create your own postcards with your …


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Stubbornly Clinging to the Organic Web

This is about blogging. It’s meta-crap. If you’re not interested in meta-crap about blogging  (and really, who can blame you!) you might enjoy this tiny story about a moment on the beach on Moloka’i instead.

About three weeks back, I pulled out of a Triberr group. Triberr, if I understand it correctly, allows you to build a “tribe” of like-minded folks. Once you’ve built your tribe, it automates the promotion of the work by anyone in your tribe.

I’d joined a group of top quality writers. Every time one of those writers published a new blog post, Triberr automatically published a link to those posts on Twitter. A few times a week, I’d see something attributed to me, on Twitter — an automatic posting under my name. I hadn’t read the post that was being promoted. It took me about four days to figure out what was going on. And then, I pulled out.


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America, Interpreted

Around 7 pm on July 4th — or maybe it was later, it’s hard to know for sure, it gets dark quite late in our alpine town — there was a blast of fireworks and firecrackers. It didn’t last long, 15 minutes, maybe 20. Then it was all over and I went back to reading …


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Mike with Lemons

Mike Sowden writes an excellent blog called Fevered Mutterings. He flew down from York, England to visit the temporarily relocated world headquarters of Nerd’s Eye View in Aigen, Austria. While he was here, we visited the baroque Benedictine library at Admont, wandered the aggressively picturesque streets of Hallstatt, vanquished several servings of epic cake (with …


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