Over the past two months I’ve had three people work on my furnace. In order to use both outlets on the nearby drop box, one of these people unplugged the sump pump, then neglected to plug it back in.

Have I mentioned that it’s been raining a lot lately?

In order to take our minds off the joy of clean-up, I offer these links of interest. How much interest I can’t say, but definitely more than you would have in cleaning up a flooded basement.

• How to Leverage Twitter When You Have Little Time

  I have a general distaste for the idea of maximizing anything. Books or people who encourage me to get the most out of everything from my in-between moments to my entire life are invariably asking me to heighten my already heightened sense of awareness to the point of overload. I understand that time-saving procedures and efficient processes can produce benefits, but only if they are themselves simple to understand, implement and practice. As such, this link passes the minimalism test.

  Twitter can take a while to understand precisely because you can’t really understand it until you’re using it. So take what you want here and ignore the rest. It will help.

• “World Press Photo” Contest Winners Gallery 2010

  Found this link via my good friend, Jurie. I was particularly drawn to the images of street fighting from Kiev, Ukraine — a city I visited in 2008 while working on an interactive title.

  I didn’t get to see that side of town.

• Art Is Everywhere

  Note: this is an image-intensive site, and as such may take a while to fully load.

  Back when the internet first burst onto the scene, this is what it was like. You’d find a site where someone had dropped anchor in order to look around, and it was invariably interesting to experience that person’s point of view. Today the average garden-variety site is sophisticated, breathless, trendy and slick, in keeping with a culture that cares more about being looked at and talked about than doing or saying anything of interest.

  Give me a point of view any day:

  I started this blog to show that Art is Everywhere.

  That’s site-owner Ashley Spencer’s mission statement. And she’s right: it is.

• Roger Ebert: The Essential Man

  Speaking of sophisticated, breathless, trendy and slick, it’s clear that Esquire magazine lost its way at some point. Now a caricature of its former self, Esquire currently rides the cutting edge of metrosexuality, cutting ever closer to the bone. If you know what I mean.

  Real men don’t objectify women, and particularly not under the pathetic pretext of ogling revering them. If you can’t tell me why a woman is interesting as an individual without also showing me a two-page, soft-focus flesh-drape across a $9,000 divan, then your pictures are not actually worth thousands of reverential words.

  Which brings us to the eternal problem of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. In this case, the baby is a profile of Film Critic Roger Ebert, which answered a lot of questions for me. I knew he was sick, and that he’d lost the ability to speak, but I didn’t really know what hand he’d been dealt. I don’t think I ever really thought of the man as tough, even when it looked like he was going to come out of his chair and punch Gene Siskel in the mouth, but the man is tough.

  Like men used to be.

Stay dry.

— Mark Barrett