Category: Geek


Weekend Update: Tom’s Birthday, TVC + Long Nap, Site Redesign

Filed Under: Friends, Personal, kennsarah.net
Jun.05, 2006

Spent Saturday doing mostly-web-stuff, which was mostly-fun, before going to Tom’s Birthday party in the city. It was a blast, but, when the party moved from laid-back, Zen-vibe Park to quasi-hipster Brass Monkey, Schmoo and I had a hard time keeping up. Maybe because we’re getting old, but probably because the music was so loud we had to yell at each other at the top of our lungs (at times in Scottish brogue).

Sunday at the Village Church where Sam gave a 60-minute presentation on the capital-e End times and I gave a 4-minute presentation about our “web presence”:http://villagechurchnyc.com/. Got some feedback and an offer of some help from “Josh Clayton”:http://typefield.com/ to post some photography on the site. I can’t wait to kick around some ideas with him.

Napped for a few hours, which subsequently means I haven’t been able to sleep yet, so, of course, it’s time for a site redesign. ;-) “Fickle”:http://kennsarah.net/2005/12/22/facelift/, I know, but while discussing our site design with Tom on Saturday — okay, after wildly gesturing and lip-reading over the booming techno — he reminded me of our initial design before the conversion to WordPress. It looked “something like this”:http://kennsarah.net/archives1/2005/01/09/would_you_buy_a_500_mac/index.php but featured a big, fun photo at the top of the page that I periodically updated. Tom and I agreed that the idea was still good, so the gears began to turn.

During my geek-out session on Saturday, I discovered the “plaintxtBlog”:http://www.plaintxt.org/themes/plaintxtblog/, a clever minimalist theme with a penchant for typography. After installing and playing with it, I was sold: I took the new theme and did some hacking to pull in the latest photo from Flickr from our account tagged with the word “featured”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/kennsarah/tags/featured/. All I have to do to update the photo is upload it to Flickr and tag it and it’s automatically resized and shows up on the site — which feels really maintainable.

There are some things I miss about the other design, and I’m not totally happy with everything with the new design, but I think this design has got some potential. What do you think?

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On the Radar: Mostly Apple Geekery

Filed Under: Geek, On the Radar
Jun.02, 2006

* Google Video: “George Lucas in Love”:http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5058529870025933880&q=George+Lucas+in+Love (“via Cori”:http://cori.sojourn-of-grace.net/?p=84). “Augh! My Hand!” “John Bell”:http://www.effluxity.com/ showed this to me on VHS when we were roommates Back in the Day. Glad to see it made it to the web.
* ??Everything2??: “A Simple Way to Make the Best Coffee You’ve Ever Had”:http://www.everything2.org/?node_id=1181742. So, after about a year from first having received it from “Jen & Jode”:http://sojourn-of-grace.net/, I’ve started to use my French Press. I love it — four cups of excellent coffee, no stupid gurgling machine with a ginormous carafe to clean out. Thanks again, Poleys!
* ??Gamespot??: “LEGO Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy”:http://www.gamespot.com/gamecube/action/legostarwarstheoriginaltrilogy/index.html. Speaking of George Lucas, there’s a sequel coming for the Lego Star Wars game. Sarah and I were totally ADDICTED to this game for four weeks while we played it through entirely. I can’t wait for the new one.
* ??Mark Pligrm??: “Bye, Apple”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/05/30/bye-apple. Mark ditches Apple in favor of an IBM desktop + Linux. I dunno — I played with Linux a lot in college and found myself screwing around with it more than I was getting work done. Besides, Mac OS and Windows XP both work with my iPod nano. *Update:* Mark “follows up”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/06/02/when-the-bough-breaks on his decision to walk away from Apple. His argument is compelling, but I’m not so sure going pure-Linux is. Maybe it’s time to start playing with this “Ubuntu”:http://www.ubuntu.com/ everyone’s been “talking about”:http://lunapark6.com/?p=1235.
* ??Engadget??: “Jobs’ glass elevator locks in group customers”:http://www.engadget.com/2006/05/29/jobs-glass-elevator-locks-in-group-customers/ (“via Slashdot”:http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/31/1319243&from=rss). There’s a joke about first-gen Apple technology here, I just _know_ it.
* ??Alex Basko??: “Rustic Vacation: Definition & Introduction”:http://alexbasko.blogspot.com/2006/06/rustic-vacation-definition.html. (RV – cell phone) + fly fishing = sanity
* ??Heather Armstrong??: “He learned this while visiting the University of Wisconsin”:http://www.dooce.com/archives/daily_photo/06_02_2006.html. We need to teach this to “Dina”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/kennsarah/143197375/.
* ??Steve Smith??: “Jackson Smith at Ordered List”:http://jackson.orderedlist.com/. Now THAT’s what I call a baby site (see also “Jai & Beck’s”:http://brinkofski.com/annie, “Russ & Sarah’s”:http://evan.posegate.org)! I’m taking notes for the day we get to make our own announcements. ;-)
* Wikipedia: “Microsoft Access”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Access. I’ve been using MS Access at work again. Access gets a lot of disdain from REAL programmers because, well, it’s a dumbed-down version of SQL + a dumbed-down version of Visual Basic. But, you can do some pretty tricked-out things with Access in a relatively short timeframe. Someone should register pimpmyaccess.com. :)

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On the Radar: Apple Retail, Vendetta vs. Da Vinci, and WordPress Tweaks

Filed Under: Culture, Geek, On the Radar
May.26, 2006

* ??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?

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Future Posts

Filed Under: Geek, kennsarah.net
May.24, 2006

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?

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Rethinking the TVC Calendar

Filed Under: Geek
May.22, 2006

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. ;-)

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On the Radar: Massive Hollywood Snore

Filed Under: Geek, On the Radar
May.20, 2006

* 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.

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On the Radar: Web Calendars, Lip-Syncing and Love (oh, my)

Filed Under: Faith, Geek, Management, Newark, On the Radar
May.04, 2006

* “Boil the ocean”:http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=%22boil+the+ocean%22&btnG=Search, an egregious consulting term used to limit the scope of a project: “we’re not looking to boil the ocean with this.” Fast Company took “a shrewd look”:http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/88/debunk.html at the phrase, and Bob Congdon digs up its “earliest use”:http://www.bobcongdon.net/blog/2004/06/boil-ocean.html.
* “Moleskine Bible”:http://www.esv.org/blog/2006/04/journaling.bible.coming (“via Tim”:http://www.challies.com/sideblog/archives/001828.php). Very forward-thinking book design on the part of the Standard Bible Society. Bibles used to be beautifully constructed books that were admired, but rarely touched. That’s beginning to change as people want to — literally — interweave the story of their lives with the Scripture.
* YouTube: “Two Chinese Boys”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbdpTCJgnwc (“via Slate”:http://www.slate.com/id/2140697/). Be sucked into the vortex of incomparable splendor that is YouTube.
* ??Fortune Magazine??: “The Great Escape”:http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/03/20/8371767/. Forty million American employees toil in soulless cubicles. How did they get there — and can business ever break out of the box? Probably not.
* ??Crain’s Chicago Business??: “The new face of technology”:http://chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/mag/article.pl?article_id=25714&bt=37Signals&arc=n&searchType=all (“via Jason”:http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/crains_chicago_business_cover_story.php). Start-up! Start-up! Start-up! ;-)
* ??Kathy Sierra??: “The myth of keeping up”:http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/04/the_myth_of_kee.html. You can’t keep up. There is no way. And trying to keep up will probably just make you dumber.You can never be current on everything you think you should be. Good to know I’m in good company.
* ??Michael Idov?? for ??Slate??: “Bitter Brew”:http://www.slate.com/id/2132576/. You know that charming little cafe on New York’s Lower East Side that just closed after a mere six months in business — where coffee was served on silver trays with a glass of water and a little chocolate cookie? The one that, as you calmly and correctly observed, was doomed from its inception because it was too precious and too offbeat? The one you still kind of fell for, the way one falls for a tubercular maiden? Yeah, that one was mine. Pragmatic advice for anyone who handles money. Worth listening to…twice.
* ??Sam Andreades??: “The Redefinition of Simon Peter”:www.villagechurchnyc.com/worship/sermons/2006/01/the-redefinition-of-simon-peter/. Are you really free from how others look at you? I don’t just mean saying ‘I don’t care what other people think of me’–there are plenty of people in New York saying that. … Are you really free of carrying the responsibility of your reputation with others?
* Apple: “Get a Mac”:http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/?ilife_medium (“via Dan”:http://hivelogic.com/links/133). Quietly brilliant new “switcher” ads by Apple. Is it me, or does PC look a little like Mr. Gates? :)
* ??John Gruber??: “Good Journalism”:http://daringfireball.net/2006/05/good_journalism. One can only hope that Apple will one day handle security issues as well as Microsoft does now. Wow, you can _taste_ the bitterness in this article.
* ??Evan Ratliff??: “Now for a Quick Lesson in International Relations”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/fashion/sundaystyles/30love.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin (“via Angela”:http://hereisangela.blogspot.com/2006/04/modern-love.html). Feeling suddenly like a shy 10-year-old in the playground, I pretended not to understand. But he walked off, and there was nothing to do but follow. I was already uneasy in Dhaka, unable to blend in or communicate, and now self-consciousness was joined by a simultaneous thrill and fear that I was walking into some vortex of cultural misunderstanding.
* ??Angela Wu??: “Religious map of America”:http://hereisangela.blogspot.com/2006/05/religious-map-of-america.html. Like, if you grew up going to church all your life and everybody else you knew did, too, you might fervently believe lots of things… (bonus: “cows”:http://hereisangela.blogspot.com/2006/05/beating-dead-cow.html)
* The Village Church just might be getting “a new calendar”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/events/ based on the open-source “WebCalendar”:http://www.k5n.us/webcalendar.php?topic=About. WebCalendar has been okay to work with, but not trivial to integrate with the site — due in part because it’s “ugly as a dog”:http://www.k5n.us/webcal-screenshots/wcss-month.png out of the box. Still, it will export an iCal feed, so if you’ve got 30 Boxes or Google Calendar, you can “subscribe”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/events/publish.php?user=public.
* ??Fast Company??: ” Varnished History”:http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/94/pr.html. The documentary itself won’t be featured in any film classes — but in the tawdry realm of corporate propaganda, there has been worse.
* ??InterVarsity??: “Ministry Exchange Overview”:http://www.intervarsity.org/mx/item/3674/. IV constructs a massive content management system to share ministry materials, providng features as web-2.0 savvy as tagging and RSS feeds. Well done–this is worth watching for a while.
* ??Ken Walker??: “The Debate Over Newark, Part II”:http://blog.newarker.info/2006/05/04/the-debate-over-newark-part-ii/. Have you heard? We’re getting a new mayor in Newark after 20 years of the same administration. The candidates recently debated — here’s how it went.

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On the Radar: All Those Pretty Widgets Edition

Filed Under: Geek, Newark, On the Radar
Apr.28, 2006

* ??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).

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On the Radar: Up Late Waiting for iDVD to Encode

Filed Under: Business, Geek, On the Radar
Apr.21, 2006

* ??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. ;-)

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Web 2.0 Calendar Showdown

Filed Under: Geek
Apr.14, 2006

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.

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