Wulf

My vacation to Portland is coming to a close, and it’s been a fantastic past few days. The wife and I stayed at the Hotel deLuxe (a affordable nice hotel), and now we’re enjoying the best that PDX has to offer. Unfortunately, our plane has been delayed well over an hour, so we’ll miss our connection flight to Houston as well.

Even though the trip is ending a bit more slowly than I’d hoped, it’s been a really great getaway. The highlight, for me, was the snow that lasted from morning till midday. Giant snowflakes fell for hours nearly all day today, and in some places in Portland even stuck to the ground, giving a beautiful white overcoat to the landscape.

The non-snow days of the trip were equally enjoyable. The wife and I had a great time walking and shopping around downtown. It’s such a more pedestrian friendly city than Houston, if for nothing else than the weather permits it! The temperature was in the mid to upper forties our whole trip. It was so nice to actually have a reason to wear long sleeves! Houston heat is near miserable even with 1 short-sleeve layer.

I’m looking forward to my next trip back to Portland, whenever that may be. It certainly has my recommendation!

I just received Michael Heller’s book Creative Tensions: Essays on Science and Religion, and I’m excited to give it a read. I’ve mentioned Heller before, and I’m confident he has some incredibly interesting things to say about how science and religion should coexist.

I’m also excited about two more Kierkegaard books: Fear and Trembling and Either / Or. With my newfound library, I’m hoping to churn through around 1 book a month. These books, combined with my already growing list, should keep me busy for a while.

Here’s the problem with this brand new magical social web 2.0: it’s hard enough for me to keep up with my friends in real life, let along in the brand new magical social web 2.0 life. I want a site that’ll keep track of my friends for me. I want to say “I’m friends with Buck Wilson“, and have that site tell me all of the magical web 2.0 things that Buck is doing. I don’t want to try and keep up to date on the latest and greatest new social website, sign up, find Buck, friend Buck, subscribe to any necessary RSS feed, and then do it all over again for the rest of my friends, and then do it all over again with the next brand new magical social web 2.0 site that comes along. I want one site, one friends list, one sign up, one RSS feed, for all of my real life friends. If they update something, or signup for some new fantastic service, I want that site to automagically find out.

Today is that day: I found friendfeed.com, thanks to Robert Scoble, and this site might actually unify this brand new magical fantastic web 2.0 world with the world filled with regular normal web 1.0 people.

I’ve finally broken down and decided to write out some of my thoughts out on the web. I’m a private person by nature, so don’t expect many posts about my family or job or anything of that sort. My goal is to stay strictly within the realms of impersonal topics such as philosophy and religion. Not that these are “impersonal” - hopefully quite the opposite - it’s just that I won’t be writing quaint stories about what I ate for breakfast. No, I intend to focus on topics that are not only quite relevant to my life, but more importantly [and hopefully] relevant to others lives as well.

With that said, “Welcome!” and by all means feel free to join the discussion.