Woke up the other morning to find our landline + DSL dead. Connections look fine, but no dial tone. Began my safari through the SBC phone menu tree (via cell) to log a trouble ticket – a thoroughly unpleasant adventure which ultimately consumed 40 minutes spread over six attempts, using a combination of push-button input and voice recognition.
Have I reached the party to whom I am speaking?
Ask me about hosting with birdhouse.
March 29th, 2006
250,000 Rubber Balls
Yes, it’s a Sony commercial, but nevermind that. Who would have thought that throwing a quarter million superballs down a San Francisco street could have such a gorgeous, calming effect?
Longer, higher-resolution version at Salon, and a very high resolution at the source.
March 28th, 2006
Processing to Zero
No connection to 43 Things (other than the two sites time-sharing a prime number): 43 Folders (oh yeah, about the name) features heaps of genuinely useful articles and tips on time and stress management. That’s not a topic I generally consider an interest, but I’ve been on an approach to zero-message inbox nirvana for several months now, and it’s just amazing what a difference it makes in overall stress levels. Leaving work with nothing in the inbox makes you feel in control, less overwhelmed. Like you own the job, rather than the other way around.
Like Kirk’s “solution” to the Kobayashi Maru Scenario, there’s an easy but non-obvious way to win at this Catch-22: you cheat. You don’t answer them all. Not even most of them. You rewrite the rules. You adapt at a higher level. You have to, or else the Klingons will overwhelm you with their superior fire power and brute force — and then your email would remain unanswered for eternity. Think how sad that would be.
Other useful stuff: Building a better to-do list, learning how to write email messages that respect the recipient’s workflow, running dashes for quick productivity bursts.
Music: Joan Armatrading :: Down to Zero
March 28th, 2006
Microsoft Feels Your Pain
Well, at least we know we’re not alone. Extracted from CSS files living on microsoft.com web servers:
/* fix for the IE 1px-off margin error */
* html .StupidIEMarginHack
{
margin-right: 1px;
}
* html .StupidIEWidthHack
{
width: 100%;
}
But as we heard from several sources at SXSW, IE7 (due out soon) will improve CSS compatibility by leaps and bounds. Question then is, what happens to all of the legions of IE-specific CSS hacks in place out there? Will the fix break existing sites badly, or will MS provide some kind of mechanism to detect and ignore the mine-field of a million workarounds?
Thanks mneptok
Music: Billy Bragg & Wilco :: The Unwelcome Guest
March 27th, 2006
Cost of War, Revised
Back in December ‘04, I embedded a JavaScript counter tallying the cost of war in Iraq, which continues to tick away at a rate of around $2,000/second. The topic came up with friends the other night, triggering another look into the topic. nationalpriorities.org provides a very well annotated and sourced database comparing the cost of war in Iraq to the costs of other national expenses. The trade-offs below are based on a projected total cost of $315.8 billion for the war in Iraq, which would be equivalent to:
71,717,012 People Receiving Health Care or
5,472,330 Elementary School Teachers or
41,823,351 Head Start Places for Children or
185,783,623 Children Receiving Health Care or
2,843,180 Affordable Housing Units or
37,159 New Elementary Schools or
61,230,780 Scholarships for University Students or
5,441,915 Music and Arts Teachers or
7,114,877 Public Safety Officers or
558,642,585 Homes with Renewable Electricity or
4,946,324 Port Container Inspectors
Unfortunately, the database sessions at the site time out, making the reports tough to link to. For a current report, click Tradeoffs, then select United States | Cost of War | All.
Thanks baald
Music: Pete Townshend :: Parvardigar
March 26th, 2006
Attention or Eyeballs
Trying to come to some understanding of all this recent discussion about attention vs. intention vs. old-school eyeballs. Cluetrain, 1999: “We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. Deal with it.” Doc Searles’ wife: “Sales is real. Marketing is bullshit.” Nick Bradbury: “Right now we’re witnessing the growth of services who provide aggregated attention data, and statistics suggested by this data will increasingly impact those of us – journalists and techies alike – who hope to survive in the online world.” Mary Hodder, excerpted from notes on her decision to join the board of Attention Trust:
What’s the difference between the static web and the live web? Participation.What’s the difference between consumers and users/amateurs? Participation.
What’s the difference between attention and eyeballs? Participation.
So as we move from an eyeball-centric to an attention-centric web, and as companies realize the value of harnessing and harvesting individual attention streams, we (users/readers/consumers) stand to benefit. BUT it also becomes critical to retain control over our own databases of intention (attention?), lest they be used against us.
Music: Cardiacs :: The Leader of the Starry Skies
March 24th, 2006
New Media Lecture Series
Gearing up for another big work week — once again we’re hosting a compressed version of our multimedia training program for mid-career journalists. Sandwiched between training sessions are a series of talks by journalists and thinkers, including John Battelle, Bob Cauthorn, Dan Gillmor, Craig Newmark, and others. The talks are open to the public and will be webcast live, with archived versions scheduled to go online the following week.
March 24th, 2006
Magical Realism
Apparently I have a second wife, about which I knew nothing until the other night. Miles, describing his day over dinner:
This is mommy’s restaurant with the hot dogs and I was walking down the street with my gorilla on a leash so he doesn’t get away and an idea popped right into my head for the gorilla to eat upstairs and play with toys while I eat downstairs [we don't have an upstairs] and eat food. No gorillas allowed in the pet store because there’s only people allowed. I saw a bee on the way and it was buzzing around honey and drinking nectar. Because you’re not allowed to get food on the toys. No, it wasn’t mommy’s restaurant, it was the Bay Bridge Restaurant [there is no such restaurant] a long long way away and I had to drive a car there, up a hill and down a hill and I put the gorilla in the front seat, and I have one daddy and two mommies, that’s three parents, and my other mommy’s name is Catherine Henry Frank.
The life of imagination of a three-year-old is so rich, and so many characters from his books and movies become part of our daily life, as if they actually exist (though the gorilla/restaurant story did not seem to be based on anything he’s read/consumed — totally improvised). I sometimes wonder if he distinguishes between reality and fiction at all. It’s a blessed state.
Music: Iron & Wine :: Teeth in the Grass
March 23rd, 2006
Xyle Scope
A tip from one of the panelists at SXSW, in the CSS Problem Solving session: “If you’re working with CSS and need a good analysis/debugging tool, it doesn’t get any better than Xyle Scope. Mac only, but if you don’t own a Mac, Xyle Scope is a good reason to get one.”
Many CSS designs hide browser discrepancies by allowing white space to overlap, etc. The thing about the current Birdhouse design is that the divs are packed very tightly together, allowing no room for that kind of masking. Tearing out serious hair recently trying to get this style working in all browsers (don’t get me started on MSIE and CSS), with no div overlaps and no fugly gaps. Xyle Scope didn’t magically solve the problem, but it did give me a window onto the primary culprit last night, which I couldn’t have gotten any other way.
March 22nd, 2006
Breaking the Spell
Fascinating conversation between Moira Gunn and philosopher Daniel Dennett at IT Conversations (podcast). Dennett is a renowned determinist, but isn’t talking along those line here. His book “Breaking the Spell” makes the point that religion has been — and is — one of the most important forces (for change, or its opposite) in the world. As such, it deserves to be studied objectively, from the outside, as thoroughly and as rigorously as the banking industry, as politics, as world demographics. “The spell” is what prevents that kind of study from taking place — the tacit belief that religion is somehow in a different category, and that it’s somehow disrespectful or taboo to study religion itself. Religions like to be studied from the inside — using their own scriptures or lore as a framework for study. But they tend to resist study from the outside – a spell that Dennett wants to break.
He also makes some fascinating observations about the biological/genetic triggers for religion, leading to some interesting speculation on its cultural origins. Another synopsis on Dennett at Salon.
Totally tangential: Not even The Archbishop of Canterbury believes that creationism should be taught in schools. SF Chronicle:
I think creationism is, in a sense, a kind of category mistake, as if the Bible were a theory like other theories,” the Most Rev. Rowan Williams told the Guardian newspaper. … My worry is that creationism can end up reducing the doctrine of creation rather than enhancing it.
England does not have an evangelical movement to parallel the one in the U.S.
Music: Ornette Coleman :: Harlem’s Manhattan
March 20th, 2006
Marxist Thing
Hooked up with old Adamation crewmate and current vlogger Leslye James at SXSW. At 2:30 into SXSW Revisited, I show Leslye how to roll factory-perfect cigarettes while ambling down Austin sidewalks and commenting on how the massive pile of loose Legos they put out for attendees looked at the end of the week like the physical embodiment of a failed wiki.
Music: The Carter Family :: The Birds Were Singing Of You
March 20th, 2006
The Myth of Disarray
We’re at it again — this time ripping out the small “ship’s head” bathroom to replace sub-floor and joists. Years of water damage (thanks previous owner!) have finally caught up with the house. But happy to say that for this round, we’re paying for the work rather than doing it ourselves (thanks home equity line!). Last summer’s remodel of the main bathroom dragged on for six months, squeezing tasks into spare hours here and there – will be great to have this whole thing done in a few weeks.
Speaking of disarray, just listening to a radio pundit (missed the name) commenting on the usual bromides about how the Democratic party is in disarray, and thought he made a really good point: The semantic loop-de-loop is in the definition of “array”: The normal state of any political party is to have an array of viewpoints, with some loose unification. We don’t say that major league baseball is in disarray just because some teams are winning and others losing. An array of competing views represents health for a system, just like bio-diversity represents the health of an ecosystem. You could say that any political system is in disarray, when what you really mean is that its members aren’t robotically aligned on every point.
Somehow, the myth of disarray doesn’t quite map onto the situation in our small bathroom.
Music: Tom Tom Club :: Lorelei
March 20th, 2006
Help Test WPBlogMail
What started as a quick-n-dirty port of MTBlogMail to a WordPress-compatible version turned into a major ground-up re-write, to take advantage of native WordPress APIs and simplify configuration. WPBlogMail digests new WordPress posts at regular intervals and sends them to a subscribers mailing list. Not quite a plugin, but a script that runs parallel to a WordPress installation. Wanted to get a bit of feedback from others before uploading this to the WordPress plugins directories, so if this is useful to you, please give it a shot and let me know how it’s working out.
Use the subscribe field in the sidebar to the right to receive Birdhouse updates via email — now powered by wpblogmail.
Music: The Minutemen :: Times
March 20th, 2006
3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading
The irony of using supposedly time-saving aggregators and services like Reddit, Digg, Delicious, Populicious, RSS readers, etc. is that they don’t save you any time at all if you’re not disciplined in your application of them — otherwise you quickly lose any time advantage by filling the void with more and more feeds. Daniel Miessler:
One of the main problems we as information fetishists face is the lack of a solid, repeatable methodology for processing new input online. Too often we bounce back and forth between this site and that site, maybe check a blog or two, and then half-heartedly label the task of “reading news” as completed. This approach is not only a really poor way to stay on top of what’s new, but it’s also very anti-GTD.
Miessler has written up his personal methodology of news consumption as a sort of guide. Some good tips there, but not sure I could ever swing that way – for me, the fun of the surf is in bouncing around with some element of randomness. I seem to be attracted to exactly the behavior that Miessler finds inefficient.
Music: The Tahitian Choir :: Ua Putuputu Tatou E
March 19th, 2006
Chris Bliss
He’s not juggling 19 plates or anything like that, but even with just three objects, this is some of the most graceful, awe-inspiring juggling I’ve ever seen — and in perfect grace with the Beatles’ “Golden Slumbers.” The finale is intense. More at Chris Bliss.
Thanks Barry
March 17th, 2006
43 Things
Another interesting example of folksonomies in action: 43 Things lets people list the top 43 things they want to accomplish before they die / before they turn 43 / before they make another list, etc. Haven’t created a list there, but tempted to (but all my lists are already in Ta-Da!) Actually, not sure it’s fair to say this is folksonomic, since the tag cloud there consists of entire phrases rather than single tags, but the concept is similar.
Music: Iron & Wine :: Jesus the Mexican Boy
March 17th, 2006
Yeti Crab Walks the Earth
More than a mile down, hanging out near thermal vents off the coast of Easter Island, scientists have discovered a creature “so distinct from other species that they’ve created a new taxonomic family for it.” The “furry lobster,” which has pincer arms twice as long as its body and which has only vestigial membranes for eyes, may use its fur to trap bacteria, which it then consumes. Or maybe not. This kind of thing fills me with awe.
Mark Morford of the SF Chronicle:
Just look. Kiwa hirsuta is just a little bit mesmerizing, strange, stirs up something deep and potent. An eyeless, albino, crablike animal, sublime and magical and perfect in its alien weirdness … like something straight out of a medieval bestiary, a Sendak book, a Castaneda shaman’s peyote dream. It’s not a lobster. It’s not a crab. It’s not anything anyone really understands — and why is it covered in silky blond hair? They don’t know that, either. It just is. Just one of those things. Like why the whales sing. Like why some parrots can tell you who’s calling before you pick up the phone. Like the existence of dark matter. We just don’t know. And what’s more, the sheer volume, the breathtaking amount of information we don’t know is so mind-boggling and perspective-humping that you take one look at the Kiwa and only say, Hi again, wicked gorgeous unimaginable vastness of the universe.
Music: The Congos :: Fisherman
March 16th, 2006
E-Mail Updates Are Back
Got some great feedback at SXSW about the weekly Birdhouse email updates… ironically just after I broke them by switching to WordPress. Took a look around at available plugins to replicate the functionality in WP, but came up short, so last night modified my mtblogmail script to work with WordPress (as wpblogmail, of course). E-mail updates should resume this Sunday night, and the Subscribe box has been restored to the sidebar. Not sure whether I’ll release wpblogmail as a public script… will take some cleaning up and rejiggering to get it ready.
Also got a number of comments about the current generic theme we’re using here — this is a temporary thing, and I’m still officially Naked in Public until I get some variant of the old theme really nailed down.
Music: Jones Evans and Turner :: Someone at the Door
March 15th, 2006
Federated Media Bloggers Network
Federated Media is delivering collective bargaining power for bloggers. John Battelle’s media startup has been brewing (on Birdhouse) for months, and has just announced a major round of financing through JP Morgan Partners. The idea, as I understand it, is to allow a distributed network of bloggers to pool their traffic for optimized placement with major advertisers. The network will also aggregate and spotlight content selected from its bloggers as a virtual news/info site.
I think they’re onto something great here. Congrats John!
Music: Sun Ra Arkestra :: Interstellar Lo-Ways
Technorati Tags: battellemedia.com, www.federatedmedia.net
March 15th, 2006
Wiki Tending
The magic of Wikipedia works for just one reason: Care. Gobs and gobs of care. Hundreds of volunteers working tirelessly to fine-tune content and keep the garbage out. As long as there are more good guys than bad guys tending the garden, the system works. But the majority case, I’m finding, is that most wikis are not exactly self-healing. Most of the time, the original fear about wikis plays itself out, and a few bad apples spoil the bunch.
There are multiple wikis installed in Birdhouse customer accounts, and several others on the J-School server. As the admin of these two boxes, I’m the one who gets to hear about it when things go sour. And, sadly, over the past six months I’ve been asked to password-protect every single open wiki running on these two machines. The sad truth, as the LA Times discovered, is that once the spammers find you, it’s open season — a daily admin chore to weed out the crap. Only wikis with groups of good folks actively monitoring ultimately succeed. Wiki owners who think they can “set it and forget it” quickly learn otherwise.
It’s not a total wash though — much of the time, wiki owners care more about having a collaborative platform for a known group, rather than for the general public. And in those cases, password-protection or user registration is a fine solution.
Music: Marc Bolan and T.Rex :: Beltane Walk
March 15th, 2006
SXSW 2006: Loose Notes
For the archives: A complete list of all of my “loose notes” on SXSW 2006 [technorati]
- Ajax — What Do I Need to Know?
- Creating Building Blocks for Independents
- Beyond Folksonomies
- Jim Coudal/Jason Fried
- How To Bluff Your Way In DOM Scripting
- Design and Social Responsibility
- DIY Now More Than Ever
- Standardzilla vs. Tablella
- Jason Kottke/Heather Armstrong
- Tagging 2.0
- Standard Deviation
- CSS Problem Solving
- Design Eye for the List Guy
- WASP Task Force
- How to Add Video To Your Blog
- Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps
- Craig Newmark Interview
- Burnie Burns Keynote
And misc SXSW-related posts:
Technorati Tags: sxsw2006
March 15th, 2006
Creative Commons Skullcap
Back of the head of one of the volunteers at SXSW. When I asked if I could take a picture (camera phone), he agreed, but only under the proviso that if I posted it, I would do so under a fully open Creative Commons license. So here t’is – republish to your heart’s content.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution2.5 License.
March 15th, 2006
Macs at SXSW
Although there was nothing remotely Mac-related about the SXSW sessions, amazing to see that 70-80% of all laptops in the crowd were PowerBooks or iBooks. Traditionally, this would probably be explained by pointing to “the creative types,” but the crowd breakdown was weighted more to developers than to creatives. As Tim O’Reilly started noting a couple of years ago, the “alpha geeks” have been adopting the Mac at a rate much, much higher than the general computing population. And SXSW was alpha-geek-central. Other than not having to feel like a leper, some nice side-benefits of being at Mac-heavy conference:
- Being able to use Bonjour/iChat for the back-channel.
- The SXSW organizers built a really cool scheduling system: Once logged into their site, add sessions to your online calendar. The SXSW database kept track of how many people had logged interest in the session. Then subscribe via iCal to your own SXSW preferences and get an ideal iCal interface mapping out your week. Click an event and see not only the room number, but also how many attendees were expected to show up. Now overlay a second calendar for parties and a third for personal meetings, and you have a very slick organizational tool for conferences.
March 15th, 2006
SXSW Notes: Burnie Burns Keynote
March 15th, 2006
SXSW Notes: Craig Newmark Interview
Loose notes from the SXSW 2006 session: Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales Interviews Craig Newmark
Missed most of this session due to other obligations, and I’ve seen him speak quite a few times already, but wanted to post one of his remarks (not a direct quote; from memory):
I’d like to be more involved with some of the higher-level stuff, like exploring the journalism connections, but I spend all my time sorting out arguments in the dog-owners forums. You’d think the really heated debates would be in the political forums, but those are nothing compared to the ones between the people who think it’s OK to breed dogs at home vs. those who don’t.
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