Category: Geek


Full Circle

Filed Under: Family, Friends, Geek
Jan.06, 2007

We went to our first birthing class last night to, you know, figure out how to have a baby. It was hosted over at “realbirth”:http://realbirth.com, and taught by a good friend of ours at The Village Church.

While I’ve talked to Hallie quite a bit, it was _amazing_ to watch her teach a class on childbirth. She spoke with passion and a frankness that visibly relieved the worries of many of the parents-to-be in the room. Better, it was high-bandwidth communication: we sat there and absorbed every word, every gesture, and every silence she dealt out with the hope of getting a better handle on this wild and messy process.

Better still, I got the special privilege of seeing my work benefit countless couples in the city. A number of times throughout the class, Hallie pointed us back to “her site”:http://halliegreider.com for reference material and resources for expectant parents. Just tonight, I went back to flip through halliegreider.com and remember how “Scott”:http://greiders.blogspot.com/ and I put it together: the design was Scott’s, the Movable Type templates, PHP magic, markup and stylesheets were my responsibility. We shot for the moon when it came to extensibility — everything from the color schemes to the content to the photographs are changeable without writing a single line of code or modifying a stylesheet.

There have been a few times since we finished where Hallie mentioned how great the site has been for her, and it’s always a wonderful feeling to hear from a client two years after the fact that your work is _still valuable_ to them. But, being in that room full of young, scared, and hopeful New Yorkers and together dutifully jotting down her site address for future reference, it was apparent that all the effort from those nights and weekends had come full circle.

***

Sarah’s been feeling really good with the pregnancy, and we’ve been having fun getting together to talk about baby stuff: baby names, baby food, baby strollers, baby toys, “babies everywhere”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbjDj3G14YI. We’ve got mad, mad plans for the apt (which we’re staying in for now). The “office” will become half office, half nursery with crib, changing table, wardrobe, uh, desk and, er, filing cabinet. I’m hoping to introduce the geekdom early into our child’s education.

We never cease to be amused at the world of baby: the clever marketing tactic that Babies R Us uses to “highlight items”:http://www.toysrus.com/registry/truParentsCheckList.jsp you maybe “forgot” to register for, or the “$700 designer strollers”:http://www.bugaboostrollers.com/ you can buy, or the “endless”:http://money.cnn.com/2007/01/04/autos/car_seats/index.htm?postversion=2007010418, “fearful”:http://www.nichd.nih.gov/sids/ reminders to enforce Baby Rule #1: do not kill the baby.

Thankfully, Sarah’s been doing a ton of research and we’ve been reading some very level-headed books, so we feel as though we can transcend some of the baby madness. Russ & Sarah, Irene, Marla (our midwife — whose name I can’t help think of without adding “you _tourist_”), Hallie, and a dozen couples at the Village Church have all been really helpful with advice and insight so we can maybe move on to Baby Rule #2: do not screw up the baby’s life.

One day my son or daughter will look at me and say, “your blog was so boring before you were a dad.”

***

Steve Jobs speaks next week (Tuesday! 12PM EST!) at Macworld. The world waits with baited breath. Well, okay, maybe that’s just me. But with good reason as we’re considering adding a new Mac to our household. You know. For the baby.

***

The redesign of the site continues with Flickr photos up top. Jai’s right, the stylesheet needs some love so the site doesn’t look like an embarrassment for a 1997 web designer. I’ve still got to integrate some RSS feeds into the timeline to build out the “attention stream,” just as soon as I figure out how. I was considering using “Planet”:http://www.planetplanet.org/, but it’s kind of a kludgey solution given that I have no real love for the command-line. Why can’t someone just build this in PHP and slap a web-interface over top of it?

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Making up for December

Filed Under: Business, Family, Geek, Newark, On the Radar, Our Story, Personal
Jan.03, 2007

A dear friend whom we missed very much during the holidays poked me today: is this thing still on? Are we dead? I told her we were just busy, which is stupid: of course we’re busy — who isn’t busy?

The new year and holidays came and went mercifully well, though we honestly wondered if we were going to make it through this one. 2006, a year I thought couldn’t have come sooner on Dec 31, 2005, left as quietly as it arrived. The year was not without its heartaches, which often brought us to tears of grief and loss. But, it was also a year in which there were no murders on our street, no car accidents, no layoffs, no massive hurricanes cutting a swath through my mom’s backyard.

I took a new job, the city of Newark saw its first glimpse of hope in Cory Booker, and we saw Europe for the first time.

And, of course, we got knocked up.

***

Listening to back-episodes of the Gillmor Gang lately has got me wondering what this site would look like if it was more like an attention stream than a blog. There are a dozen web services that I use on a regular basis — all of which have RSS capability. Aggregating that content on this site, I think, would provide a more useful picture of what I’ve been paying attention to over the past several weeks.

I also wanted a web design that wouldn’t just look like I just cobbled together a bunch of text from disparate sites, and I wanted to use a metaphor that would fit in one screen, so you can literally see the stream of my diggs, pictures, blogs (here and elsewhere), and twittering in the context of time. Hence the timeline up top (a free AJAX widget provided by those bright guys at MIT). Ultimately, the timeline will show different colors for the varying web services, the current design is a start — what do you think?

***

I actually get paid to play with the web in my job. A large portion of my responsibilities lie with the team Intranet site, which our managing director wants to use as our main communication medium and platform for tools inside our organization. There’s a lot of room to breathe with this new gig, and I’ve been able to come up with some interesting and creative ideas, leveraging ajaxy web 2.0 goodness like MIT’s timeline. Did you know that the Yahoo Maps API lets you use their software inside a firewall? At a commercial organization? For FREE?

It also occurred to me the other day that we can use Microsoft Access as a content management system for the site — and not how you would think, either. We’re currently restricted by our web host to HTML, CSS and JavaScript (with some server side include capability), and /that’s it/: no ASP, no Java, and don’t even think about open-source. With daily pressure to get graphs, charts, figures, news, and documents on the intranet daily, what’s an overworked web-monkey to do?

Well, one might surmise that said monkey could build some tables inside of Access to accomodate news items; maybe design some sweet forms to do the data entry for the news “blog”. Writing code to export that content in the form of an SHTML include file in Visual Basic is trivial, and the monkey knows how to write a batch file that will FTP the exported file to the right location on the intranet. Done. Now any member of the team (technical or no), can log into this Access database, type in their stuff and click “Publish”. And the beautiful part is that it works just like Moveable Type. Sure, it’s not very web 2.0, but it’s agile, doesn’t require a bureaucratic change request process, and will be up and running by tomorrow (I started working on it today).

You can also import all sorts of data, analyze it with queries, and output HTML tables which, combined with the PlotKit JavaScript library, can be graphed and charted with ease, which I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.

***

Sarah got me a few books on fatherhood for Christmas this year, which I’ve just started plodding through (I figure they’re due by March 27th!). Aside from adding a number of to-dos to my list of things to talk about during our “Family Meeting Night”, it’s been a welcome sanity-check on just what we’re getting ourselves into. I told Schmoo tonight: “did you realize that that baby has to come /through/ your pelvis?” To which she replied, “well, how else did you expect it to come out?” And, of course I knew this had to be so. Only, it was only /too/ clear when I saw a drawing of an inverted baby floating through a skeletal pelvis on page 51 of The Birth Partner.

***

I mentioned the Gillmor Gang, which, if you check out my Digg profile, is one of my dugg podcasts (note in passing to the Digg crew: please make it easy to check for the latest podcasts in my digg profile, thanks). It’s actually defunct now as Steve’s funding or time or patience had run out with his podcast provider, the last “Thanksgiving Gang” having been recorded way back in November. Undaunted, I’ve been making my way through his past episodes, whiling away the hours hacking databases and spreadsheets at work, listening to the crew of marketers, journalists, and entrepreneurs talk about their work, their predictions for the industry, and generally b.s. about the personalities behind the press releases.

It’s a brilliant model for a podcast: six or seven industry insiders get on a conference line and talk about whatever they feel about talking about. I’d love to use it one day — it reminds me of the days back at Ironworks when we’d just hang out and talk about the world’s problems until the middle of the night.

“Jason Calacanis”:http://www.calacanis.com, one of the resident entrepreneurs on the show, has been downright inspiring. His narrative of growing up a poor kid in the Burroughs and covering the tech scene in New York during the bubble before he launched his own blog network resonates with me. Between him and web 2.0 wonder-boy Mike Arrington and totally random (emergent?) Christian cartoon ex-Silicon Valley blogger Hugh MacLeod, I sometimes find them grasping towards the intersection of art and business — that place you get to when you find you’re doing great work, what you later will consider your life’s work. These guys love what they do, and I think for many of them, the day-to-day job — of writing, of deal-making, of building, of whatever — has transcended getting a paycheck into a craft. It’s always encouraging to those of us in the trenches to hear that it doesn’t always have to be this way: that there’s more important and interesting work out there waiting to be found.

***

I discovered Wesabe the other day: it’s like Microsoft Money for the web, with half the features. If it hasn’t been said before, let me be the first: CONSUMER BANKS (ESPECIALLY THE BIG ONES) NEED TO PROVIDE THIS KIND OF SERVICE IN THE NEXT 18 MONTHS OR DIE OF IRRELEVANCE. It’s actually offensive to me now that my bank doesn’t automatically provide me with analysis tools to track my spending and investment habits.

I actually did receive a year-end statement from my Credit Union last year that attempted to break out my spending into various categories for the first time ever, which I very much appreciated. But the first thing I did when they asked me to fill out a survey was to tell them: great job with the year-end spending breakout, now please do it every month, and put it online within a year.

Microsoft Money is a tragedy of an accident of a failure of a software product. I’ve been using it since 1998 and, much like the rest of Office, have come to loathe it in the last two or three years. They’ve added features I don’t use, they’ve left reporting bugs that drive me crazy, they’ve attempted every bit of lock-in they could think of to prevent me from getting my own personal financial data, and they’ve screwed with the user interface — which once looked like I was logging into a sophisticated, stately banking application — so that it now looks like a bad imitation of a Fischer-Price toy.

Wesabe is the first salvo of web 2.0 coming to banking apps, and I fully expect this trend to continue as the privacy issues are hashed out. I’ve already switched completely: how could I pass on instant financial analysis available anywhere I have a secure web connection? Now I’m just trying to figure out how to get five years of data out of Money to load into Wesabe.

***

Well, if you made it this far through the brain-dump that is this blog, I wanted to thank you, dear readers, for sticking around through these past nearing-five years of Our Story. That some people with whom I’ve had passing encounters (such as “Nikkiana”:http://everytomorrow.org, “Sean”:http://semanticbible.org and “Dale”:http://wp.theoblogical.org/) continue to read this blog just amazes and humbles me. Thanks for reading.

***

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

– ??Steve Jobs??

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One Thing: Rethinking ‘On the Radar’

Filed Under: Geek, On the Radar, kennsarah.net
Jul.30, 2006

After blogging dozens of On the Radar type posts “like Thursday’s”:http://kennsarah.net/2006/07/27/on-the-radar-10/ for the past four years, I have to admit it: it’s a lot of work. Slavishly cutting and pasting select quotes, formatting, and writing the copy is something I’ve thought of as fun ever since I first saw Mark Pilgrim’s “earlier efforts”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/10/28/i_need_a_name_for_these_lists back in 2002, weeks before I started blogging myself. But, lately, I’m not so sure.

Please blog me

My desire to troll my news reader every week for the purpose of reposting the links on my own site has started to seem downright insideous: sucking away valuable time that I should be _creating_ content, not regurgitating it. Even the word “content” is troublesome — as if it were this soulless ether that we just pump out for the purpose of consumption by the blogosphere. I think the word I really mean to use here is “stories.”

The web — and its predecessor, the “Bulletin Board System”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system — has always fascinated me in its ability to connect people through thoughts and ideas. I spent countless hours as a slacker teenager BBSing in front of MTV and arguing about the merits of…well, the “SysOp”:http://the-forgotten.org/ only knows what. But it gave me the opportunity to connect in a very real way with a community where thoughtful dialog was valued. We were telling our stories, whether they were actual stories, or debates, or artwork, or source code.

Six months, a year ago, I would have talked about what I think made Wonkette successful and makes Gawker successful, to a certain extent, and other blogs: A strong, defined personality with a sense of humor about themselves. An ability to filter news quickly and to recognize, you know, what is interesting to other people as well as interesting to themselves, and finding the balance between those things.

What I think is changing is that people have now become addicted to the rapid update. You know, the not just 12 times a day; 18 times a day, 24 times a day. And it’s almost physically impossible for one person to do that.

– ??Ana Marie Cox?? on David Pogue’s blog, “Wonkette’s Ingredients for a Successful Blog”:http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=102

When we were introduced to the Internet in the early nineties, the prospect of cheap, instant communication across vast distances was exhilarating. I found myself spending hours and hours in front of the ad supported, dial-up email from “Juno”:http://www.ebuddies.org/informed/computers/juno.html, writing friends all over the world. Those were thrilling, innocent times, before Wikipedia and Google and Digg and blogs. Before we realized that too much information can be a “bad thing”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_overload. Before we used words like “attention economy”:http://www.google.com/search?q=attention%20economy.

I’m highly suspect of the attention economy — the idea that your attention, your thoughts themselves, will be monetized and commodified, and that even attention itself can become a sort of currency for the exchange of goods. I’ve found that many places on the web are steadily heading in this direction, creating a culture that is becoming numb to all but the most immediate and easy-to-digest information, lacking depth and insight. Digg has just launched “Swarm”:http://labs.digg.com/swarm/, web app that lets you watch news stories break and gain attention in real time. I find it to be both brilliant and terrifying, but this is the future: the web will continue to demand more and more of our attention as we learn to process information at an ever-increasing pace. And, by “process”, I mean just about anything other than “think deeply about.”

It is a wonder of the world, the Web. I have facts at hand by the thousands about everything from the different kinds of government to the names of the stars of television shows I’ve never even seen. I’m smarter, then, with my computer on, but not much deeper. I worry that my knowledge of the world is actually growing shallower, in fact, because for every idea there are a dozen articles and Wikipedia entries to read that allow me to avoid thinking for myself.

– ??Paul Ford??, “Followup/Distraction”:http://www.ftrain.com/Followup.html

All this to say that I’m starting to wonder about the process of my contributions to the echo chamber. These On the Radar linkdumps have kept me well informed, but less thoughtful, always providing an easy escape from the mild discomfort of rerouting a few synapses. If this blog is to really convey something meaningful about our story, I think I’d like to devote time to writing more thoughtfully, rather than collecting the detritus of a thousand other bloggers.

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On the Radar: Giving the blog some love again

Filed Under: Culture, Dog Training, Faith, Family, Geek, Money, On the Radar
Jul.27, 2006

* ??Mark Glaser?? for ??PBS??: “Should Community-Edited News Sites Pay Top Editors?”:http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2006/07/digging_deepershould_community.html (via “Digg”:http://digg.com/tech_news/Kevin_Rose_Responds_to_Jason_Calacanis_Rant_from_Netscape → “Kevin”:http://krose.typepad.com/kevinrose/2006/07/calacanis.html → “Jason”:http://www.calacanis.com/2006/07/25/kevin-rose-cracks-or-how-to-know-when-youve-won-the-debate/). Aside from the Digg vs. Netscape drama that’s been erupting over the past couple of weeks, Calacanis raises some interesting questions about how people in the *attention economy* are compensated for their time and hard work. The next 18 months as these two players in community-driven news hash it out should be really interesting.
* ??John Gruber??: “Magic 8-Ball Answers Your Questions Regarding Microsoft’s ‘Zune’”:http://daringfireball.net/2006/07/magic_8ball_zune. That 8-ball. He sure knows a lot about the *digital music* industry.
* ??NPR??: “Avoiding the Housing Market ‘Dead Zone’”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5565128 and “Location, Location: What to Buy, and Where”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5565119. The nesting instinct kicks in: these interviews were pretty insightful about the state of the housing market right now. Of course, there are derivations for where you are, but the overall buyer’s recommendation is to wait until some of the *already-present market pressures* (housing surplus, higher interest rates, and exotic mortgages held by peers) bring prices down — perhaps even way down.
* ??Everything Newark??: “‘Newark is an Emerging Market””:http://blog.newarker.info/2006/07/19/newark-is-an-emerging-market/. The ??New York Post??, of all places, has a practically beaming article about Newark’s comeback. Booker’s enthusiasm, that Newark is a place of *untapped potential*, hangs on the very critical results of his stopping crime in the city.
* ??Washington Post??: “Religious Left Gears Up to Face Right Counterpart”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/25/AR2006072500437.html (“via Digg”:http://digg.com/politics/Religious_Left_Gears_Up_To_Face_Right_Counterpart). Favorite quote: ‘I’m an evangelical Christian who thinks that justice is a biblical imperative,’ said Wallis. ‘The *monologue of the religious right* is finally over and a new dialogue has just begun.’ I really hope Wallis is right.
* ??The Motley Fool??: “Opportunity Knocking for Citigroup”:http://www.fool.com/news/commentary/2006/commentary06072514.htm. Citigroup may (or may not) be on the rise if the Fed stops raising interest rates to counteract inflation, which would be nice for shareholders given the “latest anxiety”:http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aWJ3CLLNPUp4&refer=us over rising costs. A thought for Mr. Prince: consumer banking is sucking wind because *the customer experience is just awful*. The ATMs are nice, and the marketing is fun, but customer service just pales in comparison to banks like Wachovia.
* ??37signals??: “Writing Words vs. Writing Software”:http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/writing_words_vs_writing_software.php. I love these guys: Everyone and his cousin is working on a web app. But how many are actually finishing? That’s why we argue for biting off less. Write a short story/small app instead of a novel/massive app. *Shrinking scope means you actually finish*. And finishing is huge. When you finish something, you show up. And, like Woody Allen said, ‘Eighty percent of success is showing up.’
* ??Rosecrans Baldwin?? for ??The Morning News??: “The Maine Attraction”:http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/the_nonexpert/the_maine_attraction.php. Never been, but this sure was funny: Crystal Meth is easier to obtain in rural Maine than it is back home. So are crystals, and posters of *wolves kissing dolphins* in outer space.
* ??Paul Ford?? for ??43folders??: “Are there ‘good’ distractions?”:http://www.43folders.com/2005/10/24/paul-ford-distractions/ Paul’s struggle between accomplishing something with his life vs. “swimming in a sea of data” really touched a chord. I’ll have more thoughts on this later, but, if you read only one of these linky-things, make it this one. When I’m not getting enough done I get unhappy and depressed and think about the billions of years I’ll be dead before the heat death of the universe erases everything. I want to feel like *I did something during my brief life* besides check my email.
* LAUNCHED: Sarah goes independent with “Side by Side Dog Training”:http://sidebysidetraining.com/. The quick-and-not-so-dirty site brought to you by the wonders of “Wordpress”:http://wordpress.org, “Quilm”:http://oriol.f2o.org/qwilm-a-wordpress-theme/ theme, and the “DreamHost”:http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?63570 “1-click install”:http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/Goodies_Control_Panel#One-Click_Installs. Feel free to pass the site along to your friends with dogs — especially the ones that accessorize their dogs with *Louis Vuitton dog carriers and DKNY collars*.
* ??Jon Katz?? for ??Slate??: “The Loneliness of Rose”:http://www.slate.com/id/2146000/. Rose is not cute. She is a working dog, a farm dog. She herds sheep, keeps the donkeys apart from the other animals during graining, alerts me when lambs are born, watches my back when the ram is around. *She battles the donkeys*, the ewes who protect their lambs, and stray dogs who approach the farm. She and I take the sheep out to graze two or three times a day. On Sundays, we sometimes march the flock down to the Presbyterian Church to hear the organ music and present ourselves through the big windows. ‘Hey, Rose,’ the kids sometimes shout after the service is over. With Rose, we don’t need fences. As my friend Peter Hanks said, Rose is the fence.
* ??Washington Post??: “US waives sanctions on Saudi over religious rights”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/19/AR2006071901178.html (“via Angela”:http://hereisangela.com/2006/07/25/galatians-221-turbans-teaching-and-temperance/) The United States has extended a waiver that avoids imposing sanctions on Saudi Arabia because it has made efforts to *improve religious tolerance* in the kingdom, U.S. officials said on Wednesday. The US ignores the religious freedoms of millions to suck up to one of its few allies in the Middle East.
* ??New York Times??: “What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/fashion/25love.html (via Angela over IM). If you read _two_ of these linky-things, make this the other one. :) It was only a matter of time before he was again tearing around the house searching for his keys, at which point I said nothing and kept at what I was doing. It took a lot of discipline to maintain my calm, but results were immediate and stunning. His temper fell far shy of its usual pitch and then waned like a fast-moving storm. I felt as if *I should throw him a mackerel*. Incidentally, this is how Sarah trains Dina (and maybe me).

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Schmoo Header ↑

Filed Under: On the Radar, kennsarah.net
Jul.13, 2006

I just have to say it: I love that picture of Schmoo.

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On the Radar: Laziness Edition

Filed Under: Faith, Geek, On the Radar, Politics
Jul.07, 2006

* Youtube: “Jon Stewart’s Infamous Crossfire Interview”:http://youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE. This is from the 2004 election, but it’s indictment of corporate media is timeless.
* Simile: “Christianity Timeline”:http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/examples/religions/christianity.html. A demonstration of “Timeline”:http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/, which is to time like Google Maps is to place. Very interesting effect!
* GE: “Imagination Cubed”:http://www.imaginationcubed.com/LaunchPage (“via Web 2.0 Show”:http://www.web20show.com/articles/2006/07/06/web-2-0-show-episode-22-bram-cohen). Interactive pens are fun!
* ??Metropolis Magazine1??: “Behind the Glass Curtain”:http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=2123 (“via Digg”:http://www.digg.com/tech_news/Google_s_new_headquarters_-_the_perfect_working_space). Corin Anderson does not work like most of the world: his office is a glass tent, which he shares with two other people. His desk hides behind a complex Rube Goldberg-esque maze, built by Anderson out of a toy called the Chaos Tower, a sort of theme park for marbles. Each day he sits in the midst of figurines, Legos, and stuffed animals, eyes fixed on his computer screen and earphones strapped on, for hours at a stretch.
* ??Ask a Ninja??: “Ninternships”:http://www.askaninja.com/node/1146. I gotta be honest with you: there are only three people who have ever lived through the ninternship. There was, uh, Joan of Arc — that girl can kill. If you can inspire French people to fight? I mean, my goodness, that’s pretty intense! One of the better ones.
* ??seattlepi.com??: “Q&A with Firefox’s Blake Ross: Extended version”:http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/104679.asp (“via Digg”:http://digg.com/tech_news/Firefox_creator_s_thoughts_on_IE7,_and_Future_of_Firefox). They did exactly what we were expecting them to do, which was take a bunch of time and get IE7 up to feature parity with Firefox. I haven’t seen any real innovation above and beyond what we delivered in Firefox. I think that it’s a solid product, but I think that by the time it comes out, we’re going to be another world ahead of them again, so I think it’s kind of a step or two behind us. We really are trying to make it less of a religious thing. The whole browser space in general has traditionally been very religious.

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On the Radar: Digg Dug Edition

Filed Under: Friends, Geek, Money, On the Radar
Jun.30, 2006

* ??Chris Welch??: “Misconception: Renting is for Suckers”:http://www.investorgeeks.com/articles/2006/05/23/renting-is-for-suckers (“via Matt”:http://photomatt.net/2006/06/25/renting-is-for-suckers/). Many of my friends are reaching that point in their lives where they’re considering buying a home. However it’s unfortunate that so many choose to buy over rent, especially in this expensive market, because many well-intentioned people are buying homes that are actually damaging their finances.
* ??Fresh Pursuits?? “Canvas”:http://www.freshpursuits.com/canvas/. Canvas brings the freedom to express yourself through design without needing to know CSS or PHP. With Canvas and Ink for Wordpress, you can easily rearrange, reconfigure, and colorize your entire blog without ever touching a line of code.
* ??Michael Barrish??: “Hell Freezes Over”:http://lumino.us/weblog/hell_freezes_over. Revamped and redesigned, it uses haikus in place of business copy (I couldn’t bear to write business copy) and features a new weblog about making websites (you’re soaking in it). Wondering what “Michael”:http://oblivio.com is up to, I find his new, angsty, neurotic web design company website. Brilliant work.
* I’ve really begun to dig “digg”:http://digg.com lately. As usual, I’m behind the curve (“digg just launched version 3 of their site”:http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/06/22/digg-30-to-launch-monday-exclusive-screenshots-and-stats/), but I think I’m just one of those people that has to see something working well before I can grok it. For the uninitiated, digg is a news site that has its content submitted by users. I had initially dismissed it as another “mob rule by the masses” type app (you know, enhancing the “echo chamber”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/23/echo effect of blogs), but it regularly produces some interesting results. Check it out, and “add me as a friend”:.http://www.digg.com/users/kwalker411.
* ??Granite Consulting??: “Late Binding in Microsoft Access”:http://www.granite.ab.ca/access/latebinding.htm. In essence: if you’re exporting to Microsoft Excel from Access programmatically, just use late binding.
* ??Joshua Porter??: “The MySpace problem”:http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/design/the-myspace-problem. Joshua gives some thought to what aspect of “design” MySpace really excels at. Hint: it’s not the graphical type. Instead of wondering what MySpace could be, let’s learn from what it is. Let’s assume (forgetting visuals for a moment) that MySpace is well-designed instead of condemning it as a visual failure. Let’s ask the obvious questions: why is it so popular? What makes it so successful? The answers to these questions might make us rethink our basic assumptions, but will make our future designs stronger as a result.
* ??Jason Calacanis??: “The new publishing model”:http://www.calacanis.com/2006/06/28/the-new-publishing-model-or-on-rafat-om-federated-media-ad/ (“via Matt”:http://photomatt.net/2006/06/28/new-publishing-model/). Here is the new model: 1. Start a blog with adsense and make spare change. 2. Scale a blog to 250k to 1M pages a month and become big enough for Federated Media, AdBrite, and Blogads to care about you (i.e. sell you’re inventory)–now you’re making a living. 3. Scale over 1M pages a month and become big enough that you can afford your own sales group and fire Federated Media for taking 40% of your money because your cost of sales will be 15-20% as a stand alone business.
* YouTube: “Pirates of The Caribbean Ride”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTQ5eWBlApY (“via Mike”:http://overloadednoggin.com/2006/06/28/captain-jack-meets-captain-jack/). Johnny Depp meets an animatronic version of himself as Captain Jack on Disney’s new Pirates ride. Very cool.
* ??Lifehacker??: “Windows Vista Beta: A tour in screenshots”:http://lifehacker.com/software/windows-vista-beta/windows-vista-beta-a-tour-in-screenshots-183883.php. Wow, not bad, Microsoft. I mean, after some five years of development, you’d hope that Vista wouldn’t be incredibly atrocious. There’s quite a bit of OS X influence in the finder here (nudge–hey Apple: time to get past “brushed metal”:http://daringfireball.net/2006/01/brushed_metal in “the finder”:http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/finder/, by the way), and I’m glad they’re getting away from the “Fisher Price”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP#User_interface_and_performance school of design.
* ??Angela Wu??: “So much rage”:http://hereisangela.com/2006/06/29/so-much-rage/. I’ll agree to this mission if I can be assured that your rage level (which was off the charts that unforgettable night which still haunts me) will stay at a reasonable level. It’s true: I’m hosting Anglela’s website because she strong-armed me into it. Fear the rage.
* ??Jen Poley??: “1966 Plymouth Fury II”:http://sojourn-of-grace.net/2006/06/30/1966-plymouth-fury-ii/. What can I say? Jode and Nathan wanted a car to work on….we found this in Lincoln, and bought it. We hope to restore it, but if you can believe it, for now we are just really enjoying driving it around town. I can just imagine how much Jode is enjoying this.

Dig-Dug

Update: if you loaded this page in the last hour or so and saw a bunch of garbage — yeah, that was me. I was trying to set up the “FlickrRSS”:eightface.com/wordpress/flickrrss/ cache so this site would load a little faster. I think I got it working; the the site is loading a lot faster!

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On the Radar: Slow Week Edition

Filed Under: Friends, Geek, On the Radar, Politics
Jun.23, 2006

Uninteresting week? Or has Ken been busy? You decide.

* ??Slate??: “The Misunderestimated Man”:http://www.slate.com/id/2100064/fr/podcast/. Fascinating piece about Bush’s “aggressive anti-intellectualism,” viewed through the lens of his relationship with his dad.
* Don’t drink and blog. Some revelers from Portugal day a couple of weeks ago found the Newark blog and “voiced some opinions about the party”:http://blog.newarker.info/2006/06/09/portugal-day-celebration/#comments. I’m glad they found the site, but it looks like they were maybe a wee bit tipsy…
* ??Jen Poley??: “Route 34, three liars, road kill, and the truth”:http://jenny.sojourn-of-grace.net/?p=84. Oh, those Poleys…
* ??Jason Fried??: “Getting in too-much touch (interruption is not collaboration)”:http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/getting_in_toomuch_touch_interruption_is_not_collaboration.php. Being productive isn’t something that just happens. You don’t just sit down and be productive. Real productivity takes time. It’s a process. You make your way into it. Sometimes it takes 15 minutes or a half hour or an hour or more to really get in that zone. And when you’re in that zone you are actually getting real work done.
* ??Mark Liberman??: “PHPEnkoder for Wordpress”:http://www.weaselhat.com/phpenkoder/. Ooh, this could help us fight spam for emails posted on the “Village Church site”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com.
* Oh, and check out “these photos”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/kennsarah/tags/owenpesnell/ of Owen Pesnell from “last weekend”:http://kennsarah.net/2006/06/19/weekend-update-revenge-of-the-babysat/.

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On the Radar: It’s not you, it’s me

Filed Under: Friends, Geek, On the Radar
Jun.16, 2006

* ??Alissa Clark??: “New York Blessings”:http://www.relevantmagazine.com/life_article.php?id=7212. On love letters for cities.
* “WeatherIcon”:http://www.viper007bond.com/wordpress-plugins/weathericon/. I wanted to use a widget for weather on “Everything Newark”:http://blog.newarker.info, but I realized that my theme, “K2″:http://getk2.com, disappointingly, still doesn’t support plugins.
* ??John Gruber??: “Macworld Expo 2006 in Review”:http://daringfireball.net/2006/01/mwsf_2006. John mentions in passing that you can mount a WebDAV drive in Mac OS X. Seeing that I have 26 GB (!) available on my web-hosting account (“Dreamhost rocks, people”), I thought I might try to investigate that as a backup strategy.
* Play anything on any operating system with “VLC Player”:http://www.videolan.org/vlc/. This thing is awesome. Schmoo and I were set to watch a movie on the Thinkpad-from-work (the lappy is in the shop right now), and I realized that my computer didn’t have software to play it. A quick Google search for “open source watch DVD” led me to this player, which I have also installed on the Mac. A quick download, slapped the DVD back in the drive, and it just worked. Brilliant.
* ??Hugh MacLeod??: “A man’s heart”:http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/002913.html. So true.
* ??Jeffrey Zeldman??: “Silent phone, secret phone”:http://www.zeldman.com/2006/06/12/silent-phone-secret-phone/. Best snarky Verizon complaint, ever. As far as I can tell, the problem involves phone lines, so you can see why it would take one of America’s largest phone companies five days to tackle a brain teaser like that.
* ??Matt Mullenweg??: “Beeping”:http://photomatt.net/2006/06/13/beeping/ Your assignment today is to take a walk around your blog, application, website, whatever you work with on a daily basis, and allow yourself to be supremely annoyed with the beeping smoke detector in the corner.
* ??Wired Magazine??: “Judging Apple Sweatshop Charge”:http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71138-0.html?tw=wn_index_3. Steve Jobs’ Think Different campaign celebrated labor leaders like Gandhi, who used strikes as a form of civil protest, and Ceasar Chavez, who organized poor, migrant farm workers. But a British newspaper at the weekend published a rather shocking report about the factories in China that make his company’s iPods.
* “Quinn Tetris for the Mac”:http://www.simonhaertel.de/quinn/home (“via John”:http://daringfireball.net/linked/2006/june#mon-12-quinn). Free, open source, and oh-so-pretty version of Tetris for the Mac.
* ??Angela Wu??: “How I got here: blogger break-up”:http://hereisangela.com/2006/06/15/how-i-got-here/ All those times you had “outages,” you never explained yourself, and I started to feel insecure. I know you didn’t mean it to be like that, and I still think you’re a good bloghost. You’ll be great for someone after me, I just know it. Maybe I’ve just outgrown you. Maybe it’s me, not you… Reset your bookmarks to hereisangela.com.
* Breitbart: “Microsoft’s Gates to Leave Daily Role”:http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/06/15/D8I8SD100.html (“via Jason”:http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/gates_plans_his_exit_from_microsoft_whats_next.php) Bill Gates is stepping down from Microsoft. WOW.
* ??John Gruber??: counterpoint, “And Oranges”:http://daringfireball.net/2006/06/and_oranges. ??Mark Pilgrim??: counter-counterpoint, “Juggling oranges”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/06/16/juggling-oranges. The tennis ball has been bouncing between two of my favorite bloggers over this matter of open formats. Pilgrim’s argument — proprietary and DRM formats will, one day, trap _everything you’ve ever enjoyed about your computer_ (music, video, photos, email, documents, etc.) if you let them — has been compelling and got me playing with Linux again. Gruber’s responses to this have been frustrating — he still won’t address the point of lock-in head-on. I wonder if Mark’s ultimate statement about DRM hasn’t already been best stated in his 2001 blog entry, “My crush on Spyro, what Flash animations remind me of, and what the past will look like someday”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2001/07/29/my_crush_on_spyro_what_flash_animations_remind_me_of_and_what_the_past_will_look_like_someday.

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On the Radar: Linux, Chicago, Space Quest

Filed Under: Culture, Faith, Friends, Geek, On the Radar
Jun.09, 2006

* ??Overheard in New York??: “That Really Gets My Goat”:http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/archives/005665.html (“via Angela”:http://hereisangela.blogspot.com/2006/06/common-knowledge.html). That has got to be one of the funniest Overheard moments I’ve ever read.
* Google Maps “Send to Phone”:http://local.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=32461 and the “Firefox Extension”:http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/sendtophone/index.html. Send information (“even from maps”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/acmelab/120622272) to your phone directly from Google. This is freaking awesome.
* ??Mark Pilgrim??’s “recent declaration”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/06/02/when-the-bough-breaks to switch to Linux has got me looking at playing with Linux again. I decided to skip the “Powerbook installation from hell”:http://joh.deworks.net/powerbook/ and just create a partition on my Thinkpad from work. Impressions coming soon, but, overall, “linux gives us the power we need to crush those who oppose us”:http://ubergeek.tv/article.php?pid=54.
* ??Dean Allen??: “Things That Happened”:http://www.cardigan.com/2001/03-18/. Dean Allen’s old Cardigan Industries blog, dead since 2001, still has a lot great entries, many of which are too dirty to highlight here. ;-)
* ??Killing the Buddha??: “Jesus and I Broke Up”:http://www.killingthebuddha.com/confession/jesusandi.htm. I’m frighteningly single. At least once a week I hit the religion section of the local bookstore, pick up the first title that catches my eye and take it home. Rumi one night. Buddha the next. I know it sounds cheap, but each time I hope it’s love. It never is.
* Wikipedia: “Space Quest”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Quest. My favorite video game growing up! Rumors are circulating that Sierra will be releasing a new compliation of these games come December, which is good because their 15^th^ anniversary game is now going for over $100 on eBay (it retailed at $40 a few years ago).
* ??Corissa Poley??: “Identity issues…continued”:http://cori.sojourn-of-grace.net/?p=90. Cori doesn’t exist — coulda fooled me.
* ??NPR??: “Life After Foster Care: A Tale of Two Boys”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5443614http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5443614. These two kids — both 13 years old in 1994, both separated from their families, troubled and already acting up — told me with astonishing innocence and optimism about their lives in the group home and what their lives were like before they got there. I wondered what happened to them after that and what they made of their years in foster care.
* ??Eric Blair??: “Google Calendar and PHPiCalendar”:http://www.raoli.com/archives/2006/04/000561.php. The Village Church “calendar”:http://villagechurchnyc.com drama continues. My “brilliant idea”:http://kennsarah.net/2006/05/22/rethinking-the-tvc-calendar/ to use Google calendar has been working. I set up a cron job to pull in a file from Gcal, got the template to look right, uploaded the files, created a Gmail account, and created the events. All that, only to find that Gcal exports all events as “Private” even though they’re tagged as public. Here’s the part where I create a wonky “regular expression”:http://www.regular-expressions.info/ solution!
* ??Luckymonk??: “About the Luckymonk”:http://luckymonk.com/pages/contact. Best description of Chicago, ever. The second best was when I asked “Graeme”:http://www.myspace.com/graemehinde why he left Chicago to move to New York. He said, “You know, after three years of dating a girl, that you’ve either got to marry her or break up? Well, I wasn’t ready to marry Chicago.”
* ??Angela Wu??: ” A religious exemption for same sex marriage”:http://hereisangela.blogspot.com/2006/06/religious-exemption-for-same-sex.html. Sarah and I have wondered at the whole “legislating morality” issue before, and there seem to be two prevailing conservative schools of thought. Sam recently “touched on”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/worship/sermons/series/mark/2006/06/the-end-of-the-world-is-near/ this in passing: let the civic leaders stave off the inevitable decline of society. Angela’s approach — let the country do what it wants but let the church preserve its identity (and, perhaps, clean up the mess) — is much more laissez faire. Which creates a more just society, and is that the point?

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