Jai & Becky had their beautiful baby girl, Brianna Marie Brinkofski, yesterday, May 28^th^, at 4:00 PM. She weighed in at 7lbs, 4 oz and was 19 inches long. As any good web geek, Jai already has photos and video online. Congratulations Jai & Beck!
(Love the “punk rock”:http://brinkofski.com/annie/big.php?photo=pics/annie-060.jpg photo, by the way.)
After long bouts of emailing, we finally had the chance to meet up with “Kim & Danny Iverson”:http://www.fromscarlet.com/ here in Newark, NJ. They’re a couple from Atlanta who are passionately laboring to build a church just 10 minutes away in a decidedly shady part of Newark. Ever since Sarah met Kim at a baby shower for a mutal friend, we’ve been meaning to get together with them and had a really great time.
The night yielded a number of coincidences that suprised all of us, not the least of which being that Danny has been reading my “Everything Newark”:http://blog.newarker.info blog for weeks. We heard about their desires to meet the needs of the really poor and needy in their area and mentor kids from the run-down junior high school across the street — real front-line, inner-city work. I found out that Danny’s also a Mac-head who wants to put together a compelling tech-oriented program for kids to record and produce music and video.
Sarah and I were really encouraged to spend time with a couple so engaged in rebuilding their neighborhood for the sake of the Gospel and, by the evening, were trying to figure out ways we could help out. 
Sunday, we got to congratulate “Tom & Alissa”:http://kennsarah.net/2006/05/22/proposal/ in person, hear Sam “tell a story”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/worship/sermons/2006/05/no-moss-gathered/, and head over to the Posegates’ for lunch with the family. It was really good to see everyone again. Being in the city and working these jobs often means we don’t get out to the ‘burbs nearly “often enough”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/kennsarah/tags/memorialday/.
Oh, and today I’m selling my Palm Vx, so “go bid on it”:http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=9733830024!
* ??NorthJersey??: “Citigroup pulling plug on its AT&T Cash Rewards Card”:http://www.northjersey.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjczN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXkyOSZmZ2JlbDdmN3ZxZWVFRXl5NjkzODY4NyZ5cmlyeTdmNzE3Zjd2cWVlRUV5eTI. Wow, directly relevant to a “brief conversation”:http://kennsarah.net/2006/05/20/on-the-radar-2/#comments about finances on this site, it looks like the AT&T card is now, officially, too good to be true.
* ??The New Yorker??: “Heaven Can Wait”:http://www.newyorker.com/critics/cinema/?060529crci_cinema (“via Alissa”:http://www.alissaclark.com/?p=324). Awesome, snarky review of the sucky Da Vinci code. It’s amazing that this movie has garnered such vilification. Is it because it’s ratio of quality to marketing dollars is so low?
* ??Wired Magazine??: “The Resurrection of Al Gore”:http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.05/gore.html. Funny, I just read an article in another magazine that said Al lost the election largely because his handlers told him to marginalize the environment — the one true issue that Gore is passionate about — in his platform against Bush. Yeah, I think if he sounded less like a robot, he would have scored some extra votes, but I don’t think Bush won the election on the basis of his personality. *Bonus*: out today, NPR takes a look at the art and science of Al Gore’s documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5428154.
* ??Fortune Magazine??: “Real Estate Survival Guide”:http://money.cnn.com/2006/05/03/news/economy/realestateguide_fortune/index.htm. Fascinating series of articles from Fortune about the impending market correction. A lot of people got in over their heads with the real estate bubble, taking on massive debts in exotic mortgages on property that isn’t worth what they paid for it. The crisis will occur when those mortgages (such as interest-only loans) turn into “real” mortgages and double the monthly payment for a lot of people. It won’t be pretty.
* YouTube: “CNBC Interviews Steve Jobs”:http://youtube.com/watch?v=y6BFhRkUJEI&search=apple,%205th%20avenue (“via John”:http://daringfireball.net/linked/2006/may#tue-23-cnbc). CNBC grills Jobs on Apple’s retail strategy, growth, and even the rumored iPhone. A bit weird to see Steve not totally in control of a media situation.
* ??New York Times??: “Apple, a Success at Stores, Bets Big on Fifth Avenue”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/19/technology/19apple.html. In retrospect, success has a way of looking inevitable. But there was considerable skepticism at the outset about what Apple was doing. And others have failed; Gateway closed its retail stores two years ago.
* ??Signal vs. Noise??: “Is Don Norman right about Google?”:http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/is_don_norman_right_about_google.php. Matt writes up some interesting thoughts on organizations, innovation, and what the intersection of those two things looks like for Google.
* ??Joe Tan??: “WordPress Flickr Post Bar”:http://tantannoodles.com/toolkit/wp-flickr-post-bar/. Joe provides a WordPress plugin that lets you post your Flickr photos into blog entries with a helpful upload bar. I used it for “this entry”:http://kennsarah.net/2006/05/20/how-sarah-topped-the-philharmonic/, and it saved a bit of time flipping back and forth from our Flickr acocunt.
* ??WordPress Widgets??: “Drop Down Archives”:http://widgets.wordpress.com/2006/05/23/drop-down-archives/. The XHTML is not quite valid, but a nice little widget that gives you a drop-down of that growing list of archive months. I used it to tidy up this site a bit: our sidebar was becoming a monster, and I didn’t want to devote so much real-estate to links that weren’t getting many clicks. I also shortened the number of blogs we’re displaying on the homepage — less is more.
* ??Metaphilm??: “V for Vindictive”:http://metaphilm.com/philm.php?id=475_0_2_0. ??Jim Rovira?? takes an incisive look at V for Vendetta against the backdrop of the Wachowski’s previous power vs. freedom dialectic in the Matrices. Interesting reading — I think maybe I’ll go see the movie now.
* ??Tyler Hall??: “How To Backup Your Mac Intelligently”:http://www.sitening.com/blog/2006/05/23/how-to-backup-your-mac-intelligently/ (“via Lifehacker”:http://www.lifehacker.com/software/backup/backup-your-mac-the-smart-way-176314.php). We don’t have a good backup solution right now. I just spent an hour pulling data off of Sarah’s old IBM 570 laptop (which is now officially retired) and onto the Powerbook. I do have a backup of our music and documents on an external hard drive that’s at least a month old, but, beyond that, we don’t have a good incremental solution.
* ??John Gruber??: “Confidence Game”:http://daringfireball.net/2006/05/confidence_game. Gruber analyzes Apple’s hitting on all cylinders in the context of Microsoft’s lackluster performance — at least in terms of products. It’s a great article, but if Microsoft were really coming unglued, how is it that they’re returning profits at a growing rate?
Here’s a thought to help out with blogging discipline. I’ve been trying to post here at least twice a week: Fridays with the “On the Radar” linkdump series, and Mondays with a more personal “Weekend Update” series. Anything that gets written in between is bonus material. This has been helpful in two ways. One, it helps with getting those links _out the door_. I have had “a bad habit”:http://kennsarah.net/2005/06/11/links-that-came-in-handy/ in the past to store up dozens of links and have them sit in a stale blog draft, only to cost me hours of reparsing them to put them online. Two, it helps me write more personal stuff that, I dunno, my mom might be interested in reading.
I think it’s been a successful experiment so far: blog postings are up to eight per month rather than one per month, and I think people are sticking around because of it. However, the time commitment, at least for the On the Radar blogs, is still a bit costly. My process for collecting links goes something like this:
# *Early in the week:* set up a draft On the Radar blog entry
# *Throughout the week:* find an interesting link, cut ‘n’ paste it into the draft (maybe with formatting and comments, maybe not)
# *Friday:* add in all the commentary and formatting I didn’t do through the week, name the entry and post it
That last step can take a good couple hours, depending on how lax I was through the week. The other day, though, I stumbled over a feature in WordPress that might help. I was messing around with the datestamp of a blog entry on the Everything Newark blog and rediscovered the “future posting” feature. From the “WordPress codex”:http://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_Posts.
All posts dated in the future will not appear on the site until that time has passed. If you wish to write posts that will automatically appear on your schedule, set the date and time here.
I’d forgotten that setting a future timestamp will actually keep that blog out of view until that time passes. It occurred to me that, when I start a new On the Radar entry, I could just set the datestamp for Friday and Publish so, regardless of how finished or unfinished it is, that blog will be posted on this site on that date. It’s really more of a positive reinforcement than anything: when I realize that a blog entry will show up automatically on the site on Friday, I might be more prone to be more thorough with Step 2 and save myself a bit of time at the end of the week.
I just set the datestamp for this week’s entry for Friday. Let’s see how this goes. While we’re on the subject — what do you think of the format? Are you digging it? Sick of links? What do you do to keep you blog fresh?
Congratulations, “Tom”:http://canaanbound.blogspot.com/2006/05/eeeeeeeeeeeeeee.html and “Alissa”:http://www.alissaclark.com/?p=322! And, impressive cross-blog photo posting, as well. 
I can’t wait to hear the story.
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So, a few weeks into using “Web Calendar”:http://webcalendar.sourceforge.net/ for the the “Village Church”:http://villagechurchnyc.com/events/month.php, I’m not really pleased with it. After muscling the CSS into submission, I’ve come to find that there are a few more issues that will really prevent us from using it over the long term. A few issues are requirements-related — for example, we needed to think through how to create multiple calendars for the church (one for ministry leaders, one for the public, etc.) without creating the extra burden of login account management. WebCalendar could let us create multiple calendars by using login groups or categories, but adds the expense of tracking who’s who in a login database, what their email is, asking them to log in, etc. We currently have to track this information in at least three seperate places, and this would just add one more.
Beyond that, though, WebCalendar fails to meet our needs in two other areas. The administrative functions are just not, well, the most user-friendly interface I’ve ever seen. Navigating through dozens of screens to find the right setting to turn on feeds, tweak the colors, or add users to the database makes for more work. What’s worse, though, is that I found that the TVC web calendar was generating an invalid iCal feed. Not an iCal feed that wouldn’t be read by other programs, but one that would actually have _incorrect information_. I got a reminder for Mother’s Day from the TVC calendar for two weeks after Mother’s Day. Not good.
We’ll be starting over with a new approach to this problem, but, thankfully, we’re not quite at square one. What I would like to do is take an existing Web 2.0 calendar — one of the fine products I “recently blogged about”:http://kennsarah.net/2006/04/14/web-20-calendar-showdown/ — get a valid iCal feed out of it, and slap a “phpiCalendar”:http://phpicalendar.net/documentation/index.php/Main_Page user interface over top of it. The result: we have a sophisticated calendar on the back end, maintained by Google or 30 Boxes or anybody other than me, and something that looks like the TVC web presence on the front end. It’s almost perfect, but there is a gotcha: phpiCalendar doesn’t seem to support iCal feeds that don’t end in “.ics”.
Why the programmatic limit? I have no idea. But there is a work-around: Adam Gurno “helpfully describes”:http://gurno.com/dru/?q=node/94 a cron job to periodically download an iCal feed to an actual .ics iCal file, which phpiCalendar will happily consume. This approach is completely different than going with the WebCalendar solution, but most of the work with that was CSS and design, which I should be able to leverage in a “phpiCalendar template”:http://phpicalendar.net/documentation/index.php/Templates.
Hey, I wasn’t busy enough, anyway.
From “her blog”:http://kennsarah.net/2006/04/11/brag-moment/:
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??
How she did it:
*Step 1.* Eat delectable burritos at Chipotle at 14th Street and 6th Avenue.
*Step 2.* Subway to Caroline’s Comedy club on Broadway to see none other than comedic rockstar “Brian Regan”:http://brianregan.com/ (get a 20-minute sketch of his “at iTunes for $1.99″:http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewVideo?id=128360160&p=119830874&s=143441).
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You know, that guy who, ever since “Jai & Becky”:http://www.jaiandbecky.com introduced us to his comedy, I couldn’t stop downloading from the web and quoting to Sarah from time to time? Yeah, we saw him live. I laughed until tears were streaming down my face — it was awesome.
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*Step 3.* Walk 10 blocks to the new, pretty Apple store on Fifth Avenue that Steve Jobs personally designed.
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*Step 4.* Drool over the new MacBooks.
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Schmoo is the best wife _ever_.
* So, you’re digging through your start menu trying to find that application you want to launch to get your work done, but you forget where it is. On a Mac, you’d be using “QuickSilver”:http://quicksilver.blacktree.com, but what about on a PC? Enter “Launchy”:http://www.launchy.net/. Hit Ctrl + Space, type the name of your app, and — boom — it launches. Sweet. (“via Lifehacker”:http://www.lifehacker.com/software/keyword-launcher/download-of-the-day-launchy-172527.php)
* “NetNewsWire 2.1 Released”:http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/changenotes/netnewswire2.1.php. Syncing with NewsGator, performance enhancements and bugfixes: the best news reader for the Mac just got better.
* “Jode is psyched”:http://existential-stillborn.net/?p=3 about the “Moleskine Bible”:http://www.esv.org/blog/2006/04/journaling.bible.coming (“so is Alissa”:http://www.alissaclark.com/?p=309) and links over to a “web 2.0 eBible”:http://ebible.com/ application set to launch whenever. They’ve even “got a Typo-powered blog”:http://blog.ebible.com/, but aren’t really saying _what_ it will be. Hm.
* “Google Trends”:http://google.com/trends?q=newark&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all is out and provides very basic tracking on search terms. At first, I thought this was huge (online marketers _drool_ over statistics like this), but then I saw that they’re not providing any numbers — just graphing trends. (“via LifeHacker”:http://www.lifehacker.com/software/google/google-morning-google-trends-173038.php)
* “Alissa notes”:http://www.alissaclark.com/?p=319 that the Da Vinci Code movie just sucks. I lean towards the church on the issues of Dan Brown’s stirring up the Gnostic gospels debate (our pastor “just podcasted about this”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/worship/sermons/2006/05/the-life-of-jesus-christ-from-afar/ if you want to hear some defense of that argument), so I can’t say I’m sorry. But you know when Tom Hanks starts making fun of the marketing machine behind the movie, like he did on NPR’s “Wait, Wait — Don’t Tell Me”:http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=35&prgDate=05-13-2006&view=storyview, that it’s just another massively hyped Hollywood snore.
* “Slashdot reports”:http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot?m=5413 that the sequel to my favorite game ever, ever, ever will be available on the Nintendo Wii, and it “looks totally awesome”:http://media.revolution.ign.com/media/748/748545/imgs_1.html.
* Apple’s got “a new MacBook out”:http://www.apple.com/macbook/macbook.html which I totally want (can you believe I only got my 12″ PowerBook G4 a year ago?), and a new store on Fifth Avenue which “looks incredible”:http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/05/18/pictures/index.php. Anyone want to go to the store this weekend?
* Speaking of the PowerBook, I love “this photo of us”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/82312386@N00/52530035/ that Tom took of us at the Poleys.
* ??Sam Anderson?? for ??Slate??: “By the Power of Grayskull!”:http://www.slate.com/id/2141626/ Hilarious reflections on a show I used to love while growing up.
* “JGNash”:http://jgnash.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Road_Map is an interesting cash management and budgeting application with a miserable name. It stores its data in an open XML format and, since it runs on Java, is cross-platform. I’ve been using Microsoft Money since 1999 (!) and have, at times, wrestled with being hopelessly dependant on yet another Microsoft application — Money is the only app that I haven’t replaced since moving to a Mac. Switching to a new application would require a huge effort, and very little actual benefit to our household finances, so we’re not making the jump. But, if you’re starting from scratch…
* Speaking of finances, Sarah and I loved the little “filter your selection”:http://www201.americanexpress.com/apply/Fmacfservlet?csi=0/22000/b/2/1258083950/13720005790/20/n&from=0 user interface provided by American Express to figure out which card is best for you.
* ??NPR??: “Beyond Frou Frou”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5200569. Imogen Heap, who is my new favorite self-produced, plays-everything artist (in the vein of Trent Reznor and Billy Corgan) was featured on WXPN’s World Cafe. I first heard of Imogen on Steven Garrity’s “Acts of Volition Radio (Session 24)”:http://actsofvolition.com/archives/2006/april/actsofvolition, which ends with one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard. Check her out, then “buy her music on iTunes”:http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?id=83486513&s=143441.
* “Our photos on Flickr”:http://flickr.com/photos/kennsarah/. It took me a LONG time to grok Flickr, which speaks poorly of my ability to commune with the force. Truth be told, I had initially thought I could find photo-hosting software that I could publish here and style myself to produce “wonderful, stunning photo albums”:http://dbowman.com/photos/london05/. Shortly after that, though, I realized that not all of us could be Doug Bowman and “outsourced our site design”:http://kennsarah.net/2005/12/22/facelift/. Only then was I willing to use a photo-sharing service like Flickr — and, man, did I see what I was missing. Very, very cool app. If you’ve got a Mac, check out “Flickr Export”:http://connectedflow.com/flickrexport/ to upload your photos from iPhoto with ease. If you’re the PC-type, check out this article how to “upload your photos from Picasa”:http://www.lifehacker.com/software/digital-photos/upload-images-to-flickr-with-picasa-and-gmail-039095.php.
* “Graeme Hinde on Myspace”:http://www.myspace.com/graemehinde. About two weeks ago I get an email from Myspace telling me I’ve got a new friend request. Thinking it was just spam, I was very pleased to find out that it was, in fact, one of my oldest friends from growing up. He’s landed in an apartment in Brooklyn, so we hooked up for breakfast in the Village. As we caught up on life and mutual acquaintences, it was good to find out that, in many ways, he’s the same Graeme and that I’m the same Ken.
* ??Heather Armstrong??: “Superior cleaning power”:http://www.dooce.com/archives/nubbin/05_19_2006.html. I, too, am in this market demographic.
* ??Mark Pilgrim??: “Digital cameras, again”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/05/19/digital-cameras-again. Mark’s looking to upgrade his camera. I’ve also got a budget item that I’m trying to get through the Walker Household Budget Committee for a “new digital camera”:http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canonsd450/. Our Sony Cybershot has served us well over the past four years that we’ve been married, but, with plans to visit Europe this fall, I’d like something way more portable, with way more battery life, and way more capacity.
This past weekend was madness, pure madness. We were planning to attend one graduation and party on Saturday, another on Sunday, and then host my Mom and Aunt who were up from Florida on Monday night (and celebrating a belated Mother’s Day). So, most of the latter part of the week was spent somewhere between denial (“we’re going to be HOW busy this weekend?”) and slavishly cleaning up the apartment, doing laundry, and catching up on all the things we would normally do if we were in town.
My sister asked me to babysit my dad for her graduation day on Saturday. This involved, in part, keeping him a safe distance from my mom because, after their divorce, my parents apparently became highly reactive agents that could detonate in each other’s presence under the right conditions. It also meant politely discussing the finer points of non sequitur topics such as company incorporation, the stock market, holding companies, getting a mortgage, the housing market, and the the value of the “1943 steel penny”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1943_steel_penny.
Jaime’s graduation was a three-hour waiting game full of uninspiring speeches and awards for people I didn’t recognize. The best and most important part, of course, was when my sister had received her Masters of Science in Management after five long years of work. In comparison to her effort, it was a moment so fleeting that the best I could do was capture a “blurry glimpse”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/kennsarah/149090731/ as she took her degree from the dean. That afternoon, I lunched with dad and headed over to Jaime’s “graduation party”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/kennsarah/149078512/ for a much-needed beer.
Later that evening, I met up with Schmoo to head out to Ithaca for my brother-in-law’s commencement for _his_ Master’s degree. We stayed on campus in one of the dorms where I really got to see Russ’ tuition dollars at work. The Ithaca College ceremony was shorter and more interesting. The student-body president’s speech paled in comparison to the message given by US Senator Bill Bradley, but that didn’t stop him from rambling on about “those good times, man” at Ithaca College and asking his mom to stand up in recognition of Mother’s Day. Three-quarters of the way through, Russ sends me a text message with the perfect summary for what we were all thinking: “Kill me.”
We got to spend a good amount of time with “Russ, Sarah and Evan”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/kennsarah/148459770/, having planned to take Monday off for the drive back. We rarely get to spend more than a rushed holiday meal together with them, so it was nice to enjoy leisurely strolls to Wegman’s together and talk.
Monday afternoon we headed back to spend some more time with my mom and aunt — also nice because quality time comes even less often with their being in Florida. Over dinner, my mom told us some family news that made it an even bigger week for my sister than she might have expected. Last night, I got an excited call from Jaime that confirmed the news: her “boyfriend of five years”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/kennsarah/149097021/ took her out to the beach in Sarasota and popped the question. She said yes.
A few readers of Our Story have maybe been perplexed my interest in the city of Newark over the past few weeks, and might think our local politics aren’t really interesting to anyone outside our physical borders. I think, though, that if you take a look at what’s happening here, that you might find yourself fascinated by the tale of a city about to experience a resurgence similar to Baltimore and New York. Newark is an underdog that, for decades, has languished in flagging attempts to recover from damage done by the 1967 riots. For the past forty years, the city has been trying to rebuild, heal the wounds of poverty and racism, and recover from its reputation as politically corrupt and a hotbed for crime.
Newark has been “turning a corner” since as far back as 1990 — bringing in new development, arts, and culture — but its growth over the past decade has come in fits and starts as the city continues to struggle with crime and poverty. For many, a change in administration has come to mean a new era for the development of the city.
In 1995, Stanford-educated Rhodes scholar Cory Booker saw the potential of this city, and a place where he could make a difference with his life. He moved into one of the most run-down neighborhoods to identify with the people living there and find out how best he can help turn it around. His social concern developed into a political interest, and, four years ago, he ran for mayor and narrowly lost in a brutal campaign against five-term incumbent Mayor Sharpe James.
But, after staying under the radar and continuing to develop grass-roots support in the city, Booker ran again in the 2006 mayoral race. This time, his 10-year commitment to the poor of this city, his idealism, and his new approach to governing seems to have struck a chord with Newarkers looking for the next phase in the city’s history. Last night, Booker won the mayoral election in a 72% landslide.
??New York Times?? reporter ??Damien Cave?? has summarized this story in an article entitled, “Cory Anthony Booker: On a Path That Could Have No Limits”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/10/nyregion/10man.html?_r=1&oref=slogin. Booker’s success could mean a real change for the city of Newark: safer streets, better education, and real growth for this city of 280,000 just five miles from Manhattan.
The “Everything Newark”:http://blog.newarker.info blog will continue to follow the story of the historic changes on which the city is about to embark. So, stick around — things are just about to get interesting.
