Essay - A Whole Lotta Nothing

Why adsense for feeds is a bad idea (at least for now)

I've been thinking about advertising in RSS for a while (and Google's foray most specifically) and always with a general distaste for it. It wasn't until recently that I was able to put my finger on exactly why I think it's misguided,

Essay

South by Etech recollections

During breaks in travel last week, I wrote a bunch of notes about both SXSW and Etech conferences and finished it off last night while waiting for a flight. What follows is a loose bunch of thoughts on various subjects. SXSW SXSW was fun, and good to catch up with

Essay

Two things that suck about Intellectual Property Law this week

Earlier this week I heard Seth Green on Fresh Air, talking about his new stop-motion sketch comedy show, Robotic Chicken. It debuted last week but I caught a rerun and enjoyed it. The show basically follows the model that Saturday Night Live, In Living Color, and MAD TV have followed

Essay

The Sony Ericcson s700i/710a Review

There's been a lot of buzz over the new Sony Ericsson 700i/710a in recent months. As soon as I heard about this 1.3 megapixel bluetooth cameraphone on Gizmodo last year, I coveted this device. In late summer of 2004, a few people got early versions and

Essay

Pieces of the Future

I haven't rented movies in months (seen plenty on HBO thanks to TiVo and *cough* downloaded from the internet) but recently grabbed a couple gems. Pieces of April was something I wanted to see last summer, but its life was short-lived on the Oregon art house movie circuit,

Essay

All Hail Bluetooth

While I've known about bluetooth phones for the past few years and heard you could do cool stuff like use it as a modem, control your pc, and sync your computers with your phone, I didn't really give it a try until I got back from

Essay

Social Software ideas

While social software may be the internet revolution du jour among venture capitalists, as a user I'm still waiting for the killer social software app that lives up to all the market hype. Recently I've been thinking about how the current crop of options could be

Essay

Blogging for Dollars

In mid-July of this year, the new weblog service Typepad launched, and after a couple months of beta-testing I was hooked on the features. Rather than try and move my highly-customized blog over to the service, I decided starting a new site would be much easier, so I decided my

Essay

Beyond the Blog

I've spent the past year and a half playing with the possibilities in Movable Type (MT), through my personal and client sites. Like all weblog management tools, MT is basically just a lightweight content manager, but it's power is in its flexibility. This article is aimed

Essay

SXSW 2003

I didn't start out feeling gung ho about this year's south by southwest interactive festival, in fact I wasn't having that good of a time until the last day. Last year was fun enough, but I sort of felt that maybe the conference had

Essay

Mozilla: Blogging's Killer App

Last summer, I found that IE on my mac was so completely screwed up I was forced to use another browser until they released an update. While I had only occasionally used mozilla for testing, after a couple weeks as a browser refugee I was a mozilla convert, and have

Essay

Yosemite, 2003

Yosemite is a magical place for many. The thing that draws me there is the absolute awe that comes from being surrounded by so many natural wonders. Of all the places I've camped and hiked, most memorable places have one or two amazing views or remarkable formations. What

Essay

Copyright and the Commons

Today's the big day in court. After four years of work, Larry's finally getting his chance to turn the tide, almost singlehandedly. I have high hopes for the Eldred case, though many predictions are for a landslide loss. The curious thing for me is hearing friends

Essay

TiVo's Next Move

TiVo's 3.0 operating system began quietly rolling out earlier this week, and among the improvements is the ability to load schedule data via both cable and ethernet. While it appears this feature is simply a way to streamline the unit, and get rid of the requirement for

Essay

The future of music

The problem with music and mp3s todayI was introduced to the format in spring of 1997, when my then domain host sent a mass mail to all users saying that .mp3 files were banned and sites serving files would be shut down without notice. I hadn't even heard

Essay

Reading list

On a weblist, I responded to the question: What books have been most influential about the way you see the web now and in the future? with the following, and felt it was worth sharing. 1 - In 1996, I read Douglas Coupland's Microserfs and it got me

Essay

Stroke

She shook him awake and said "Matthew is here." "There's Thay?" he mumbled out. "What?" I had to ask. "Thor thife, thor thife" he said, to clear things up. "Oh, my wife! She's in San Francisco, has

Essay

Riding again

From the age of about 7 to about the age of 22, I rode a bicycle everyday. Between the ages of 14 to 20 I would ride it two or three hours each day, in small flat areas, and always twirling, twirling, twirling. Fast forward to age 21 - after

Essay

Towed

Working on the web the past few years, I've grown hyperaware of the interfaces I use everyday, and not just those limited to web sites. I'm talking about typical things like supermarket checkouts, automated telephone menu systems, and freeway on-ramps. Why are they constructed the way

Essay

Participant/Observer

A thought just ran though my head that I felt like writing down. Driving home from this past wedding weekend, I was thinking hard about memories vs. "living in the now." I thought about the difference between documenting something and participating in it. I think about this whenever

Essay

Weight of the world

"Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"(Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5)Over the past few months, and especially over the past couple weeks, MetaFilter has been a forum of heated debate about societal ills. Racism, homophobia, sexism, violence,

Essay

A bathroom tale

Ed. note: The following is a pathetic recounting of my adventures in a bathroom Sunday night. It started out as a simple blog entry, but then grew to immense proportions and I had to put it here. Consider yourself warned. Earlier this evening, I enjoyed a fine little shindig at

Essay

Reflections on SXSW

I've been home now a couple days, and I'm just now starting to feel 100% again, but I wanted to compile a bunch of random things I've been thinking about during and after the South by Southwest Conference. Not everything is specific to the

Essay

I quit my job

Like any breakup, it was hard to make the decision, and I didn't take it lightly. My job at UCLA was the first one I ever loved, and much like a first serious relationship, it was hard to call it quits. But there's someone new, someone