Monthly Archives: April 2006

On the Radar: All Those Pretty Widgets Edition

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* ??Heather Armstrong??: “How to medicate with legal substances”:http://www.dooce.com/archives/daily/04_21_2006.html. Two, we spread a layer of peanut butter on top because we ran out of spreadable cocaine.
* YouTube: “Apple Music Event 2001-The First Ever iPod Introduction”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN0SVBCJqLs. Steve Jobs introduces his little digital wonder to the world.
* ??Steve Pavlina??: “How to Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Goes Off”:http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/04/how-to-get-up-right-away-when-your-alarm-goes-off/ (“via”:http://www.lifehacker.com/software/sleep/how-to-get-up-when-you-really-want-to-169533.php). I’d love to try this out, but I have a feeling that simply _going to sleep at a decent hour_ might be just as effective.
* “Widgets”:http://automattic.com/code/widgets/, “widgets”:http://widgets.wordpress.com/, “widgets”:http://wordpress.org/development/2006/03/widgets-plugin/, “widgets”:http://wordpress.com/blog/2006/02/25/wordpress-widgets/, “widgets”:http://photomatt.net/2006/03/29/wordpress-widgets/ — the WordPress world is in love with them, and for good reason. Widgets make customizing WordPress even more accessible for mere mortals. A nice side benefit: they also make upgrading your theme much more painless. With the “ExecPHP”:http://widgets.wordpress.com/2006/04/10/execphp/ and default text widgets, you can make sidebar mods (such as advertising, etc.) without worrying about them getting overwritten after a theme upgrade. Great work.
* ??Seth Godin??: “Ode: How to tell a great story”:http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/04/ode_how_to_tell.html. Great stories are subtle. Surprisingly, the fewer details a marketer spells out, the more powerful the story becomes. Talented marketers understand that allowing people to draw their own conclusions is far more effective than announcing the punch line.
* ??Ken Walker??: “He Smells Like the Future”:http://blog.newarker.info/2006/04/26/he-smellslike-the-future/. On watching the Newark debut of Marshall Curry’s “Street Fight” (two years after the movie’s release) and Q&A with the director at Rutgers-Newark.
* ??LifeHacker??: “Download of the Day 2: Google SketchUp”:http://www.lifehacker.com/software/downloads/download-of-the-day-2-google-sketchup-170027.php. What the…?! Where did this program come from? I played with this a bit–it’s definitely complex, but interesting. Why would Google want us to play around with 3D modelling?
* ??Ben Goodger??: “Firefox 2: Safer, Faster, Better”:http://www.bengoodger.com/software/mb/2.0/firefox2-vision.html. It won’t have the much-coveted (and advertised) “Places”:http://wiki.mozilla.org/Places functionality, but Ben tells you why Firefox will _still_ be cool in 2.0. Can’t wait ’til “August”:http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox2/Schedule!
* ??Steve Smith??: “Staying Small in a Big Place: Part 1″:http://orderedlist.com/articles/staying-small-in-a-big-place-part-1/. Kind of like “Getting the Basics Right”:http://relevantmagazine.com/life_article.php?id=7104 for teams. Good read.
* “Uno”:http://gui.interacto.net/ is an attempt to cut down on the GUI dissonance you might experience while using a Mac — all of the windows are made to look the same (rather than the ongoing conflict between “brushed metal”:http://daringfireball.net/2005/09/anthropomorphized and the “other guy”:http://daringfireball.net/2006/01/brushed_metal). There’s even a matching “Firefox theme”:http://takebacktheweb.org/, which makes FF look a lot less ugly in OS X.

One nice example of using widgets to hack your WP templates: I just set up a widget to carry some CSS code embedded in a “style” tag in my sidebar. I know, it’s right smack in the middle of my HTML which is “totally illegitimate”:http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/present/styles.html#edef-STYLE. But, hey, if the pros can occassionally “thumb their noses at the validator”:http://www.stopdesign.com/log/2004/02/05/bebad.html, why can’t I? :) (Okay, okay: Doug was thumbing his nose at a _bug_ in the validator…but, still).

Posegate Nano

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On April 22^nd^, 2006 at 1:17 AM, Evan Charles Posegate was introduced into our world. Weighing in at 7 lbs and at 19 ¾ inches long, Evan waited for a full 22 hours of labor–apparently so he could be born on Earth Day, proving his Ithaca pedigree. “Mom”:http://sarah.posegate.org and “Dad”:http://russell.posegate.org and “baby”:http://evan.posegate.org are all doing great.

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Russ & Evan Posegate

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On the Radar: Up Late Waiting for iDVD to Encode

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* ??Alissa Clark??: “Weekends and Things”:http://www.alissaclark.com/?p=261. And this, my dears, is why God made coffee for his beloved. It’s a common grace thing, like the rain.
* “Ask a Ninja”:http://askaninja.com/. Don’t ask me why, but I think this is hilarious (“iTunes podcast”:http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=115933673&s=143441).
* “ScrewTape on the Da Vinci Code”:http://churchofthemasses.blogspot.com/2006/04/screwtape-on-dvc.html. If anyone’s going to revive ScrewTape, I’m glad it’s Eric Metexas. Ask your average fellow in the street the slightest detail of a daft sitcom of forty years ago and he will move heaven and earth to to supply you with the answer, and then will likely prate on with other similarly inane details — as if knowing who lived at 1313 Mockingbird Lane was his very passport to the Elysian Fields.
* ??Russell Posegate??: “Graduate Recital”:http://russell.posegate.org/podcasts/recital-060327/. My brother-in-law is a rockstar. See him listed in “iTunes”:http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=148258780&s=143441 among the other rockstars.
* ??Rands in Repose??: “1.0″:http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2006/04/20/10.html. Who wants to do a startup?
* ??Jamie Zawinski??: “The Netscape Dorm”:http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html. It is two days later and I am still at the office. I did not go and chase coots. There is too much work to do. I want to die. Who _still_ wants to do a startup? ;-) (“via Rands comments”:http://www.randsinrepose.com/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=408)
* ??The Onion??: “Beaver Overthinking Dam”:http://www.theonion.com/content/node/47469. Work-work-work. Gnaw-gnaw-gnaw. Build-build-build. Must hurry. (“via 37signals”:http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/the_onion_beaver_overthinking_dam.php)
* ??Michael H. Goldhaber??: “Attention Shoppers!”:http://www.wired.com/wired/5.12/es_attention_pr.html Really, really compelling article about the future of the web, and of how we value things in the attention economy.
* ??Fortune Magazine??: “The boom is back”:http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/05/01/8375405/index.htm. Wow, I could have told you about these companies a year ago.
* ??Steve Jobs??: “Commencement Address at Stanford (iTunes)”:https://deimos.apple.com/WebObjects/ITCSBrowse.woa/wa/Browse/StanfordPublic-1770144-1770146–1770159–1770745_84019178?i=1741752008. I think I’ve linked to the transcript before, but John Gruber found the “audio version more inspiring”:http://daringfireball.net/2006/04/initiative. I agree, and the video version is even better.
* ??Mike Davidson??: “Hacking a More Tasteful Myspace”:http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2006/04/hacking-myspace-layouts. Wow–Mike’s MySpace page actually isn’t horrifyingly ugly. Not sure I want to spend the time tweaking my own, though.
* ??Steven Garrity??: “Acts of Volition Radio: Session 24″:http://actsofvolition.com/archives/2006/april/actsofvolition. I’ve really been digging Steven’s “podcasts” (now that they’re called that). This latest one ends with one of the most amazing songs I’ve ever heard.
* ??Heather Armstrong??: “Even I can’t believe I’m allowed to have a dog”:http://www.dooce.com/archives/nubbin/04_05_2006.html. This is exactly why having a dog is so much fun.
* ??Mark Pilgrim??: “All the dogs I have known and loved”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/04/14/dogs. Mark Pilgrim is writing a blog again. Also regarding dogs.

In other news, I’ve set up a “NewsGator”:http://newsgator.com account for Sarah and made it her home page so she can keep up on our friends’ blogs. It’s become a family ritual now, where she and I sit side-by-side, scrolling through the morass of bloggy goodness before going to sleep. Well, except for those nights when I’m burning DVDs until 2 AM, anyway. ;-)

Web 2.0 Calendar Showdown

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Faithful readers “may recall a link”:http://kennsarah.net/2004/02/29/jon-udell-the-calendar-fiasco/ back in 2004 to ??Jon Udell??’s apt lamentation of the state of digital calendars. Even with the web and RSS and iCal, there just simply has not been a sustainable way for me to share a family calendar with my wife in the same way I can share my work calendar with my coworkers. Everything available has been a half-way solution, only to crumble under the weight of it’s hacky workarounds: read-only iCal feeds, maddening data incompatabilities (“what do you _mean_ my Palm event categories won’t sync to my Mac?”), and wonky user interfaces make adding an event to your calendar a 12-field process on the Palm, Mac or PC. And God help you if you found something new you want to try and have to migrate your data.

The next evolution of calendars are finally starting to surface. “30 Boxes”:http://30boxes.com, the shiny new web 2.0 venture that “made the rounds”:http://photomatt.net/2006/02/02/30-boxes/ a few months ago took me some time to fully grok (partly because it couldn’t import my data until very recently), but now I love it. And here’s why: I can set up my calendar and share it with my friends in a simple, straightforward interface. No tabbing through a dozen fields: their one-field user interface lets me enter plain-English events such as “Dinner with Sarah’s Friends on 4/13 at 6 PM to 10 PM” and 30B figures out what I mean. I can set up “buddies” who can see all of my calendar, or only certain events that I tag. I can get reminders on my cell phone. It’s web-based so I can use it anywhere. It supports iCal, so, when the “Village Church”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com supports it (real soon now), I can subscribe to the church calendar and have their events show up in my own calendar. And, perhaps most admirably, it doesn’t lock up my data in a proprietary format in case I want to jump ship and try another product (unlike Palm and Outlook). This kind of thing almost makes me wish I didn’t buy a smart phone: if I can interact with my calendar over SMS, who needs to sync annoying devices with lame user interfaces?

Yesterday, Google “finally announced”:http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/04/its-about-time.html the “already leaked”:http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/03/08/exclusive-screenshots-google-calendar/ Google “Calendar service”:http://calendar.google.com. So slick, so corporate, and already supports many of the features in 30 Boxes. In a way, I’m kind of sad they launched–Google’s brand and advertising leverage is surely going to cut a huge swath out of the market, making it tougher for the nights-and-weekends 30B crew to compete. They’re up for the challenge, though, having blogged that they’re “planning to out-innovate Google”:http://30boxes.com/blog/index.php/2006/04/13/30-boxes-vs-google-calendar/: “Whatever Google brings to the table, we’ll do it better.” Good on ya, 30B, and godspeed.

Interestingly, Google Calendar also follows on the heels of 37signals’ announcement that they “will be integrating a calendar”:http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/backpack_survey_results.php into their “Backpack”:http://www.backpackit.com product, with which I’ve had a love/hate relationship for a year now (sometimes as a paying customer, sometimes as a free-account user). My concern with the Backpack Calendar (bCal?) is that 37signals may charge too much to make it usable. Given that their business model is to charge subscription rates for quality software, they’re really going to have to come up with some serious pricing innovation to make their calendar compelling with respect to the 800 lb. Google gorilla. Either way, I’m very interested to see what the team who came up with “painless project management”:http://www.basecamphq.com and wrote “Getting Real”:http://getreal.37signals.com does with the digital calendar.

At the moment, though, if you’re looking for a killer app that will help you get your life organized, I would highly recommend you check out “30 Boxes”:http://30boxes.com.

Outside

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In NYC today, making sure the project managers for our division are getting up to speed on the new “project management system from hell”:http://kennsarah.net/2006/04/05/pebfad/, (which shall remain nameless). It goes like this: I check my mail and find that I’ve received 30 new messages in the last hour since I was last at my desk. I pick the three most important — either because I can pass them off to someone else and let them work in parallel, or because it’s a critical thing that can’t wait for another hour — and forward the email, make a phone call, or do a desk visit. If I’m at my desk for more than 30 minutes, someone stops by to ask for help, and away I go. This goes on for the whole day.

Except for my 2 o’clock lunch. I ignore the one-line email (“Are you there?”) and slink out the office to the elevators. Thirty-one floors later, I’m through the lobby and standing at the lunch truck. A couple in their fifties are there, slinging hotdogs and hamburgers for a few bucks. They’re cheap, fast, and they’ve been there forever. He doesn’t say a word, and she’ll chat with you only as long as it takes to get you your burger– everyone calls her Mama.

A young man orders in front of me; he’s got his head on a swivel. Mama asks him whether he wants mustard and, looking the other direction, he replies, “My God, look at my _wife_.” I turn to look, expecting to see a woman waiting nearby, perhaps with a child. Instead, I only catch the glimpse of a woman in a skirt as she glides by — apparently he was speaking in the future tense. Mama summons him back to reality: “HEY, FOCUS. You want mustard?”

I order, take my lunch from Mama, and drink in the warm, blue sky. I decide with gravity that the day is too beautiful to waste inside of an office, and, with equal gravity, that I shouldn’t be gone for more than ten minutes. I grab a bench in the little park outside the austere office building we call “388″. Men in expensive suits stream in and out of the revolving doors, passing by Tribeca mommies (nannies?) pushing their strollers. Little kids are playing hopscotch across the stonework in the park. Working men in uniforms tell colorful stories in even-more-colorful language nearby.

Another day of “eating nuclear waste” to keep the business running. Nice thing about being busy is that, at the end of the day, you feel like you’re taking names and kicking arse — plus, it fights off the layoff jitters. I’m glad my manager gave me the opportunity to be the “key guy” on this project. I’m even more glad, though, that tomorrow is a holiday. I miss sleep.

Ten minutes come and go quickly, but are well spent. I grab what’s left of my lunch and head back into the fray.

Brag Moment

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Just in case I wasn’t aware that I have the best husband (and not because he never fails to prompt me when he does something especially clever), I was reminded of just how subversively romantic and impressive he is this past month.

So we decided a while ago that we are going to set aside time every month for a special date that we take turns planning for each other. The only catch is that the date has to be something that the other person has never done before. (Many thanks to Jeff and Barb Long who inspired this). So far, this date experience has been fun, interesting, and in general just a good night out together that wasn’t spent at an overpriced movie with overpriced popcorn. Some examples of dates that we have been on since we started this whole thing are:

* The Chocolate Show
* Dave and Buster’s
* Bodies: The Exhibition
* Spanish Tapas at Mompou

So you can see the precedent isn’t too high here, but last month, when it was Ken’s turn, all I knew was that we were headed to The City for something at least semi-formal. What I ended up getting was an incredibly romantic meal at The Mandarin Hotel on Columbus Circle in French-Japanese fusion restaurant Asiate while watching the moon rise over Central Park out the window, and then a fantastic performance by the New York Philharmonic and Garrison Keillor at Lincoln Center. Wow.

How am I supposed to follow that up this month??

Xian Blogs that Don’t Suck

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I’m not sure why, but it seems like the majority of blogs written about Christian issues (as opposed to blogs simply written _by_ Christians, like this one) are really, really lame. If they’re not whining about other theological camps — such as how calvinists, fundamentalists, Catholics, premillennialists, or emergents are stupid — then they’re filled with uninteresting self-loathing and lukewarm spiritual insights.

I initially subscribed to “Angela’s blog”:http://hereisangela.blogspot.com/ because I know her, but I’ve stuck around because of her truly interesting work in international law and religious freedom. Really, really interesting. I’m not sure if it’s because she’s a compelling writer, or because her work is a direct application of her faith (and therefore easier to grasp), but the intertwining of the issues at hand and how those directly make a difference in her life has put her blog high on my list of Daily Reads. Well done.

Anyone have other recommendations? Esoteric topics in Xianity (the role of Mary in Eastern Orthodox liturgical practices over the last 200 years, for example) are okay, but the more context I have for living in the present, the more likely I’ll subscribe. Blogs that speak to one point of view in the faith are okay, too, but if I detect a rabid foaming at the mouth I’ll not likely stick around for that, either. Thanks.

PEBFAD

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Started this morning by getting up late. Been trying to get up earlier so I can do this journalling thing at a decent time–to spend the morning remembering why it is I’m going to carry out my day. Didn’t do that. Not even close.

Woke up just in time to drive Sarah to the train station and come home to shower. Only to realize that the hot water wasn’t working. Hemmed and hawed until I decided that a cold shower was better than no shower. Did the lather-rinse-repeat thing while uttering unvoluntarily at the shock of icy water. Called in the issue to the landlord’s English-speaking son on the way to work.

It’s been like this. No time for the important things because the urgent things crowd the mind. Work’s been insane. My manager is betting the farm on a pet project and speaks with the head honchos at corporate headquarters tomorrow — so he’s been out of play for weeks. My coworker’s father-in-law, who had been just hanging on after two successive heart attacks and quadruple-bypass surgery, finally passed away yesterday. A majorly disruptive project management system goes into production for our group of over 150 people on Monday, and I’m the only one left to support it. We’re officially in a contingency situation.

I went to a senior manager’s two-hour town hall today with some 300 other coworkers. He explained to us flatly that our technology division’s sole raison d’être is to MAKE THE BANKERS MORE MONEY. He spoke of “giving a shit” and “eating nuclear waste” (his words) to ensure we meet our commitments. He told anecdotes of working 70-hour weeks and weekend upon weekend to address production outages and deliver projects on time. So much for work-life balance.

The landlord discovered nothing was wrong with the water heater, so I looked at it again after I dragged myself back through the door at 8:00 PM. A quick test and a trip to the basement made me realize that the problem was in fact a PEBFAD (“problem exists between faucet and drain”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEBKAC). We’ve been living in this apartment for almost three years and I had been turning the wrong knob for hot water.