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February 28, 2005

The start of her library...


(The start of her library..., originally uploaded by judith)

There are a lot of babies being born in my extended circle of friends and as a result, a lot of baby showers to attend. After spending time at a few that offered various levels of gifting for parents-to-be, Kay and I realized that the small gifts that came with stories were much more interesting than bigger ticket items devoid of anything special.

When Heather, Judith, and Leslie offered to throw us a baby shower in San Francisco this past weekend, we skipped the obvious idea of having everyone buy stuff off a wishlist and instead we asked for something small and simple: bring your absolute favorite book you owned as a child.

They are a creative bunch of friends and we knew they had a diverse set of influences growing up, so our hope was to share some small aspect of that with our daughter. The idea was a success as we now have a library of over 30 books (only a quarter of which I've ever read/seen/heard of), with only a couple duplicates, and the books cover the gamut from mostly pictures to dense text and should grow right along with our baby.

We didn't force everyone to tell us why they picked the titles they did, but we learned quite a bit about our friends through their choices. Everyone shared what they most remembered about their book and more than one book triggered memories in others. Overall, the combination of books, friends, and stories made for a small afternoon party I won't soon forget.

Posted by 12:03 PM

sheepcakes!


(sheepcakes!, originally uploaded by judith)

The Glory that was sheepcakes.

Posted by 11:41 AM

February 27, 2005

Freedom and Comedy

A new feature I wrote on the BART train from the airport to my hotel: Two things that suck about Intellectual Property Law this week

Posted by 03:57 PM

February 25, 2005

links for 2005-02-25

Posted by 12:20 AM

February 24, 2005

ads in RSS

pb explains why he won't read RSS feeds with ads and though I won't unsubscribe from feeds with ads, I am annoyed with them for many reasons that pb states, but there's one other big aspect of it.

Ads in RSS are fundamentally misguided, at least all the examples I've seen. They're either a site-wide sponsor or a completely unrelated product, but the thing that is broken about them is that they don't offer anything to the reader.

I'm convinced that things like Google's adsense ads work because they're tied so well to the content of what someone is saying, and the best place for them to appear is in archived posts. When random folks do a search and find your post about a subject while they are researching the subject, ads that are closely related often help out the research. I've found myself searching for a gadget, ending up on a blog, and following an ad for a sale price on said gadget. This is one of the few times where advertising that is so targeted can be actually helpful.

Ads in RSS are mostly in the way. They don't key off the text very well, and I don't really use RSS for research purposes. I haven't seen a RSS ad yet for anything I would want to learn more about. I do click on many interesting random blogads if they're for something amusing (like a funny t-shirt) or compelling (like a new PBS program or issue-oriented site), so I guess maybe the good advertisers just haven't caught on to RSS yet.

There is something sinister deep down about stuffing ads into content that is purposely stripped of cruft. But I'm also aware that RSS feed reading is hitting the mainstream and many readers are no longer using browsers. I just don't think the majority of money in advertising is with your current daily reader base, but in your archives.

It's still pretty early in the RSS ads development. If folks can figure out ways to do site-specific classified-type advertising or figure out how to marry truly targetted ads, maybe it could work but for now they're obnoxious and in the way.

Posted by 08:31 AM

links for 2005-02-24

Posted by 12:20 AM

February 23, 2005

links for 2005-02-23

Posted by 12:22 AM

February 22, 2005

Good luck, Jason

I'm a kottke.org micropatron.

Posted by 08:17 AM

Spam a lot

About 14 months ago I started using Knowspam for email whitelisting, and I remember more than one person basically said "wow, email must be broken."

While whitelisting is a bit of a pain on random strangers that email me, it does mean that I get almost no spam in the 50-60 emails I get every day. I noticed tonight that I'm getting closer to a million spams blocked since I started, at 844,904 to be exact. Divided by 14 months, that's just a hair over 2,000 spams blocked per day.

Who knew? Email really is broken.

Posted by 01:18 AM

My s700i review

I just posted a review of my Sony Ericcson s700i cameraphone that I love to death. It's the first new feature I've written in months, but expect to see another one in a few days. I'm suddenly feeling like writing again.

Posted by 12:44 AM

links for 2005-02-22

Posted by 12:22 AM

February 20, 2005

Ajax on the rise, finally

My good friend Jesse just posted a great essay about javascript-powered web-apps he calls "ajax." It's the start of something big and I'm glad to see Google finally doing innovative stuff with this technology.

All this talk of persistent connections and javascript powered streaming data reminds me of my brief time at KnowNow back in early 2001. Adam and Rohit discovered and exploited a largely unused feature of the http 1.1 spec that allowed a browser to connect to a server and stay connected. New data would stream in via javascript and they built half a dozen of the most amazing applications I ever saw. I remember being sure that this technology would change web application development forever, and enable web apps that felt more like desktop apps, way back in 2001.

Google Maps and Google Suggest barely scratch the surface of what you can do with this technology. I don't know what the statute of limitations is on NDAs, but internally we had full blown IM environments, auction pages with real time bidding and chat with the seller, and a whole host of other demos all built in HTML and javascript that never saw the light of day. They did get seen at PC Forum back in 2001 and they caused waves. Where those waves went, no one knows.

Without going into any more details or burning any more bridges than I already have in this post, I also remember all the great ideas from the passionate engineers and designers getting squashed one by one by upper management and everyone with a good idea being squeezed out as the company lumbered from one hair-brained attempt to the next to become an enterprise software company. There was a tremendous opportunity for innovation and the company could have been at the forefront, but everyone was laid off or quit from boredom, and here, 4 years later we're finally starting to see a few apps get built using this technology.

Posted by 09:48 PM

February 19, 2005

links for 2005-02-19

Posted by 12:22 AM

February 18, 2005

links for 2005-02-18

Posted by 12:22 AM

February 17, 2005

Ye Olde School

Jason's latest retro feature reminded me that I too used to have a boring webcam on my site, and how folks used to setup multi-blogs with everyone's webcam shot going down the side with their posts intermingled. You could probably do the same today fairly easily with RSS and a bit of hacking.

So anyway, there's now a shot of me taken every 60 seconds from my office. Not much to see unless you work with me or IM me and wonder why I'm not answering ("oh, he's not on the cam, so he's probably eating or on the phone or something").

I've long weighed the issues between private and public life and tried to strike a balance. Five years ago, I was all free software, free love, and free information. I practically had to be stopped from posting my SSN on my site. A few hard lessons taught me to scale that back, but it's still my belief that deep down, once we all have blogs and all our thoughts and dreams are out there in the public database, we'll be less prone to privacy attacks. If everyone can see everyone's skeletons in their closet, they cease to be skeletons anymore.

At least that's what I tell myself when I inevitably see someone save a webcam shot of me picking my nose.

Posted by 12:11 PM

beep boop boop

This Week in God is the highlight of TV for the entire week for me. Those three minutes make paying $60/month for programming worth it.

Posted by 12:47 AM

links for 2005-02-17

Posted by 12:22 AM

February 16, 2005

links for 2005-02-16

Posted by 12:24 AM

February 15, 2005

links for 2005-02-15

Posted by 12:21 AM

February 14, 2005

Happy Valentines Day

I know it's a manufactured hallmark fake holiday, but this is the best valentines card ever:

12dogs.gif

Posted by 09:57 AM

links for 2005-02-14

Posted by 12:21 AM

February 12, 2005

This just in: gaming is good for you

I think I solved the ages-old problem of how console gaming makes you fat and lazy. Get yourself a PS2, xbox, or gamecube, and then get a good yoga/pilates/exercise ball and learn a few strength moves with it (I have one of these that is fantastic).

Then just sit on your ball and contine to play games while rolling forward every so often for an abdominal workout. It works especially good with driving games where you don't need to be moving around much (exercise on the straightaways).

Posted by 11:39 PM

links for 2005-02-12

Posted by 12:21 AM

February 11, 2005

Was the iPod even in Cambodia during xmas?

I can't help but notice that Napster's iPod attack ads bear an uncanny resemblance to political attack ads. The Napster ads don't tell you that their music files are loaded with DRM that won't let you really "own" the songs at all and they ignore that many folks rip their CD collection to their iPod for free.

They just shout from the highest mountaintops how their service is amazingly better (omitting all the obvious drawbacks) and the opponent device is the worst decision you could ever make. And like political opponents that have to face attack ads, if Apple does nothing, the Swift Napster Vets might actually gain traction and marketshare from the iPod. If Apple does come out with a response, they have to sink down to Napster's level and it doesn't jibe with ther type of advertising at all.

Hopefully all the folks that own iPods can educate their friends as to why the Napster ads are complete garbage and why it's an inferior format and device choice. But I have a strong feeling that like political ads, not everyone does their homework and looks for background on the merits and drawbacks of both choices, instead accepting ads on their face value.

I'm an iPod owner and I approve this message.

Posted by 11:02 AM

links for 2005-02-11

Posted by 12:21 AM

February 10, 2005

The Gates

I'm a big fan of Christo and Jeanne Claude's work and always wanted to see their stuff in person, but alas I don't have the chance to get to NYC in the next couple weeks for The Gates.

But luckily thanks to Flickr I can vicariously live through every NYC photographer that tags shots with thegates. I'm sure we'll see hundreds of beautiful photos in the next couple weeks.

Posted by 11:30 PM

Reverend Jim as my boss

"Sir, this is Professor Lawrence Lessig.
The Future of Ideas? That Lawrence Lessig?"

Ok, that was kind of weird, but amusing. Here's a 20Mb MPEG2 clip that's about a minute long from last night's West Wing.

Yep, if you check the last page of Lessig's CV, he had a hand in writing the constitution for Belarus.

Posted by 01:13 AM

links for 2005-02-10

Posted by 12:20 AM

February 09, 2005

Flickrgraph


(Flickrgraph, originally uploaded by mathowie)

A new flash/flickr app called flickrgraph looks pretty cool. Here's my user profile in it. Double click the names to see their photos and tags, click them once to re-center and pull in more of their contacts.

Posted by 01:16 PM

Wingin' it

When I saw this ad for West Wing on Lessig's site, I wasn't sure what it was for, but I heard you have to watch tonight and see. I've never watched it before, but I'll record it and post the relavant bits tomorrow here. Should be interesting.

Posted by 10:31 AM

links for 2005-02-09

Posted by 12:20 AM

February 08, 2005

Like a cancer on blogs

Buffington launches the great experiment: start a topical blog about something in the press to see what kind of adsense performance comes out of it. I know a lot of people have been joking about starting blogs about the top 10 most expensive keywords, but Michael was the first to actually try it out. Can't wait to see how it pans out.

Posted by 05:44 PM

You just got served

I've read Fast Food Nation and seen Supersize Me, so when I'm out running errands and feeling hungry, I go to a drive through with a healthy level of guilt.

While visions of my clogged arteries danced in my head, I pulled into a drive through the other day and was immediately greeted by the happiest order taker on earth. She started off by asking how I was doing, which I haven't heard since I went to an In-N-Out in California. And when I ordered, I swear I heard a "great choice!" followed by more over-the-top enthusiasm. It was enough to completely turn my mood around. Suddenly I was having a great day and happy to have made the right choice on what to eat this day.

My enthusiasm still peaking, I went around to the pay window, noticed the line was moving screamingly fast (bonus!) and looked forward to hearing from the happiest worker on earth. When I got to the window, it suddenly became clear that the staff seemed much older and more downtrodden than the bubbly voice I heard. Then I remembered reading about call centers in far away places taking orders for Oregon drive throughs and I realized I might have just got punk'd.

Still, if that was indeed the case, I've got to hand it to the corporations doing this -- it actually improved my experience (until I realized it may have been a bit of deception).

Posted by 11:35 AM

links for 2005-02-08

Posted by 12:20 AM

February 07, 2005

Google Maps set to blow minds

I've played with Google maps for five minutes but can already tell this will replace yahoo maps for me. Want to see it do something cool?

Here is a search for "hotels in austin, tx" which gives a great closeup map of the downtown, and all the hotels around the convention center where SXSW takes place. Pretty impressive stuff.

Posted by 09:14 PM

February 06, 2005

We got a great big convoy, ain't she a beautiful sight...

Urban CB - Temporary Walkie Talkie Communities is another great idea from Rajat that I could get behind. It seems like this should already be possible, given the technology is out there. I could see this becoming quite popular in LA, where you are essentially stuck on freeways for hours a day, surrounded by people, but entirely isolated and alone in your car. I could also see an Urban CB idea creating little smart mobs of folks that could point out crashes, cops, and other delays before any other technology.

Posted by 08:30 AM

Shuffling confusion

Steven Levy over at Newsweek has a great article on the iPod's seemingly non-random random function. See I wasn't crazy when I wrote about the rock block, but I do recall a couple people wrote me explaining much of the same thing Levy heard. I took a few courses on statistics and understand how these things can happen, though they seemed to happen with such frequency that it seemed uncanny. Of course, like Ev, I remember when the Pyra music server seemed to play Cake incessantly, even though there were hundreds of other artists on the drive.

Random really is random, and it's human nature to make sense of it all, looking for patterns wherever you see them and doing your best to make order from the chaos. It's what humans do well and what I notice myself doing everyday.

My 2000+ song libary still constantly surprises me by playing artists twice in a row, multiple times in the same 20 minute car ride, but I've resigned to thinking the random really is just that, and I'm just getting lucky rolls of the dice, remember those instances and forgetting the rest of the randomness.

Posted by 06:54 AM

February 05, 2005

links for 2005-02-05

Posted by 12:20 AM

February 04, 2005

Creating (and remembering) crazy hard passwords

I've got several levels of passwords I use, high security, medium, and low, depending on what I need it for (amazon? high. gmail? medium. a random bulletin board? low.). So I'm constantly having to make new ones up and make them good.

Lifehacker has a simple tip to making a good password that involves intertwining two words into one, but the best tip I ever got was from Rusty at kuro5hin.

Think of a classic song. Now write down the first letter of each word in the chorus. At one time, I had a super high security password that was something like "1itlntyed2cbaba1." That stood for

"One is the lonliest number that you'll ever do. Two...can be as bad as one..."

I replaced numbers mentioned in the song with number signs in my password for extra l33t-ness. It was super easy to remember this nearly impossible thing, because I could just sing it and write it down.

Posted by 04:53 PM

BetterSearch on delicious


(BetterSearch on delicious, originally uploaded by mathowie)

This is kickass. I tried this extension a couple months ago for improved looking google searches, but it even works at delicious which was a complete surprise. Very cool.

Posted by 03:14 PM

Steal it before it goes away

There no better news than hearing there's a new release from the Kleptones.

I haven't heard it yet, but just started the torrent downloading.

Update: It took hours to come down via BT (bittrickle). I've only gotten through three tracks, but it's amazing so far, tons of classic samples. And Andy's on it for a fast direct download. Highly recommended bit of illegal art.

Posted by 12:52 PM

. for Ossie

For me, Ossie Davis was a highlight of every Spike Lee film, and every film he appeared in for that matter, so I'm sad to see him go. I can't imagine Ruby Dee without Ossie -- are there any other marriages between actors that exceeded 56 years? Doubtful.

Posted by 11:04 AM

February 03, 2005

Battle Between Mammal and Cephalopod


(Battle Between Mammal and Cephalopod, originally uploaded by Mike Monteiro)

My parents threw out all my old drawings and stuff from when I was a kid, so I've always secretly envied Henry because he'll be able to look at his dad's arms and see his childhood drawings for life.

Posted by 10:29 PM

links for 2005-02-03

Posted by 12:19 AM

February 02, 2005

Just Plain Good Writing

I linked to Luke's wonderful new site before but moment 9 and moment 12 reminded me why I need to send his URL to all my friends.

Posted by 11:08 PM

The sleeping giant

Man, I didn't know that my little late night blurb written mostly to myself would spark such a reaction. I guess I woke a sleeping giant or something. Dave is annoyed, Tom blames it on tools, and Andre wants more flexibility.

The funniest thing is I kind of called for this to grow last summer, and I never really thought about how it affects end users. I uploaded a gallery of 20 photos or so to flickr a while back and a couple people said the feed was overrun with the shots, so much so that they wanted a way to remove them somehow.

For the last few years, I've had a site filled with stuff that I recently wiped in the hopes of starting over. Ideally, I'd like to get something close to Leonard's site, where all my feeds for separate services can live on one page, but there can still be a place to write longer text pieces like this one that dominate the space. I always envisioned One Feed To Rule Them All containing the parts from every sub-section, but after reading stuff like Dave wrote, maybe I'll default to the text blog feed, with other feeds sepate and one megafeed that you could subscribe to, but that tools wouldn't default to picking up.

Posted by 04:42 PM

Brilliant!

Amazon is now offering a $79 unlimited 2-day shipping option and I have to say that's absolutely brilliant. It probably would take only 4-5 items delivered in one year to pay for itself, and make xmas shopping much cheaper.

Lots of businesses have programs to reward their heavy customers while still making a profit off their casual ones but I never would have thought Amazon could come up with a compelling package like this. Pretty cool that you can share it with four folks as well.

Posted by 02:06 PM

No one can have nice things!

I was looking at an old blog entry here when I was surprised to find my first trackback spam. Free asian rape beastiality being offered directly from an old post! Then I dug around and sure enough, there were over 200 spammy trackbacks sent from January 5th through the 20th.

What's funny about it is that I can see how someone built and tweaked their spam cannon. On Jan 5, a person started at (probably using it as an open proxy) 24.247.37.201.up.mi.chartermi.net and sent a couple test pings of gibberish, then when they realized it worked, they waited eight hours for me to delete them. When I didn't delete anything the onslaught began, and over the course of three attacks, hundreds of old entries advertised all sorts of crap sites.

I read the recent interview with a link spammer and it sucks that people stoop to doing anything for a buck. So, instead of worrying about this any longer or having to check off 200+ delete boxes again, I turned off trackbacks. See you in hell, mr. jackass seo spammer who will never read this nor care.

Posted by 12:45 AM

links for 2005-02-02

Posted by 12:19 AM | TrackBack

February 01, 2005

Stinky links

A few friends started posting all their daily links to their blog like I've been doing for the past few months, and when I see their sites pop up into my blo.gs sidebar or my bloglines account, I get all excited that they wrote something, but then there's a bit of a let down when I realize it's another set of 4-5 links.

Then I looked at my own site, filled with ten posts of 3-4 dumb links and sighed. After five years of doing this, I never thought I'd be reduced to handfuls of interesting links sprinkled with a dab of jokey commentary. Maybe that's what killed Anil's site.

Posted by 10:55 PM | TrackBack

links for 2005-02-01

Posted by 12:19 AM | TrackBack