onfocus

right now I like fcuker in gray. purple is running a close second..

I had no idea that tucows was playing in the online music game. I'm not sure how it relates to their original name: The Ultimate Collection Of Winsock Software...but, hey, that's evolution.

You may be sick of hearing about the Amazon patent fiasco, but it's very important that they are stopped from stifling innovation on the Internet. Please take a moment to read and think about Tim O'Reilly's Open Letter to Jeff Bezos.

I would like to announce the launch of my one-click affiliates program. (patent pend.)

web queeries is a new, very active team blog. great name!

Almost Cut My Hair: "I could have said it was in my way."

AMG: "Combining light funk with frothy pop, Haircut 100 was one of the cleanest and most accessible new wave groups."

People I Could Do Without: #32. "...If I get a haircut and I really like it, I've been known to tip 40%. If I'm at a restaurant and the waitress doesn't even make eye contact or at least pretend to care about how my food is, I can be a real bastard. I know that some people don't tip much or at all, but nobody should expect me to tip more than what someone is worth. Whoever made up that 15% stuff is full of shit."

New Choices: Hairstylist: 15 percent of your bill.

Tipping the person who cuts my hair wigs me out. (pun intended.) I always wonder: Should I tip? If so, how much should I tip? And What constitutes a tip-able haircut? Conversation? Craftsmanship? No blood? It's really a puzzling event. I mean, going out to eat we have rules: 10-20% of your bill based on your dining experience and service. But haircuts? hmm...

Yesterday I was talking with some friends about web.crushes. Everyone admitted to having a crush on someone's online persona or to having them in the past. And with the current proliferation of weblogs, I think web.crushes will be even more common. I'm not sure where I'm going with this. I just like to say web.crush over and over again. It's kinda cute.

I wonder how singing bowls are related to Eolian Harps. I bet the romantics would have dug them.

skp gave me the gift of zen moments in the form of a tibetan singing bowl. It's always interesting to me which tone it "chooses" to play and how it moves to different tones while you "play" it. The harmonics sound good too. When I play the bowl, I play the bowl.

Wally News: "Wally is the quintessential every man who uses humor to pull the listener in and irony and sincerity to provoke thought and warm the heart. His live shows are like escaping to a planet where everyone is nice. And it's well worth the trip!" and how.

some free advice: never buy a processed cinnamon roll sold in a cellophane wrapper. (sorry stomach, it sounded so good at the gas station.)

yeah jake, I miss my wally pleasant cd. ;) one of my favorite lyrics: I went to the mall one sad day because I needed a haircut in a bad way. When she was done I looked in the mirror and almost fainted because my head looked like something Picasso painted. I had a bad haircut. bad haircut. b-b-b-bad haircut. bad haircut.

I hadn't used CVS until this week. Now that I'm used to it, I think it's very helpful. (And I feel all official and stuff when I make code changes.) I'm very curious about web based tools to extend CVS features to distributed teams.

remember Garbage Pail Kids?

in the cd player this morning: Paul Weller - Wild Wood.

I like my morning routine: drinking a cup of tea, eating a bagel, reading some blogs.

The Web the Way It Was: "Thanks to new easy-to-use software, the number of weblogs on the Net seems to be growing at an unprecedented rate." (I used Blogger's BlogThis!^TM feature to make this post. ;)) hehe.

Now I am posting via IE. I like IE.

I'm posting this from a Windows machine running an XServer on a remote Linux Box through Netscape as a test. Linux is cool. (Netscape is not.)

for the record, I took ev's pic of today. :)

I vote "yes" on all odd ballot measures and "no" on all even ballot measures.

which site should be the Blogger blog of the week? now you can vote.

PyraCam II

I didn't know that hype is slang for a narcotics addict.

the sf office

brig has some thoughtful comments on friendship. mediated relationships are relationships. they are emotional. perhaps not as rich, satisfying, or complex as direct relationships. but they are not meaningless. they are not bits in ether. they are people communicating with people. I could not be one person here and another person there. I am me. mediated.

I've heard that you can't enter a place you've never left.

I really need to go on an exclamation point fast! Last one! Nope! One more!

the sebastopol office

It'll be great to be able to work with Derek. I've been a big fan of his design for a long, long time. (It turns out that he's a nice guy too!) You've seen his work before, but my mom hasn't. Hi Mom! Derek has done powazek.com, fray.com, kvetch.com, and sfstories.com...among others.

Nice new look you've got there, Meg.

The only complaining worth doing on the Internet is complaining about all of the complaining that goes on. So, geez, how about all this complaining? Is it driving you nuts too?

Do you stockpile Edward Tufte books, have a metaphor for Brenda Laurel, think Mac OS 6 was elegant, mock up text documents in Photoshop first, AND stand behind one-way glass and take notes while computer illiterates point and click and such? If so, you may be participating in Interface Culture and not even know it. All of this is my vague idea of what Interface Culture is like anyway. I usually stay away from interfaces (so it's not my culture). I'd like to know what these folks are really like, though. peterme asks what this interface community is interested in on sxswbaby!. It seems like they're interested in tabs.

mp3audiobooks.com seems long and clumsy for $8 million. I hope they can take it back if it doesn't work for them. They should have made up a name. Like librio.com. Then they could have spent that $8 million on marketing and brand building. Librio: Your one stop for MP3 audio books. Because, come on, who's going to type in that long clumsy domain randomly for fun? They're still going to have to advert the hell out of that sucker.

My socks don't match. I usually wear black socks. They are all slightly different shades. I couldn't find two alike this morning. I don't care.

Lots of good stuff coming up at the Fillmore in SF. Gomez, Los Lobos, Guster, and more!

My post made me think of this quote from Thich Nhat Hanh - "We have many Zen centers. We need more Zen corners."

I purchased a signed copy of a book called Crooked Cucumber for my friend Meg a while back. She liked it so much that I figured I should get one for myself. So tonight skp and I went to Petaluma and listened to David Chadwick read from the book and tell stories. He was funny. I also found out that he lives in the same town as me. His book is a biography of Suzuki Roshi -- the Zen master who came from Japan to San Francisco in 1959 and founded the Zen center there. A good anecdote from his talk: "Someone asked Suzuki Roshi, What is Zen? He answered: What is brown rice? I like this question better."

my hotmail account gets a lot of spam. the ammount is astounding, really. It makes me wonder if Microsoft somehow helps spammers reach their audience. I like this: "Now you can receive FREE Jokes, FREE Horoscopes, FREE Info on Free Stuff, FREE Weird But True News in your e-mail!!" Holy Shit! No way! Sign me up for life! How do they do it for FREE?! I wanna party with that list!

Do they still make music videos? Whenever I flip past mtv, the only thing I ever see is a bunch of people in bathing suits in a huge hut-like structure on a beach somewhere lip-synching to songs that were popular about a year ago or the Real World. never videos. but I see ads. lots of ads. I keep expecting a backlash against corporations. Kids! Corporations are not cool! music videos are ads for CDs and tapes and artists. and mtv is a very well funded home shopping network.

I recently picked up bjork's volumen. I hadn't seen most of her videos before.

go spike jonze! I really like the bjork video (2.5 mb mov) he did a while back. shh! shh! shh! [clip from websense]

Here is a good quote for today.

the MX birds are stealing my emails and using them to build nests. bad birds!

I do not buy things/view ads from companies that send spam. mp3.com is now off my browsing list.

The sun was out for about five minutes. come back!

True Stories is one of my favorite movies. Because sometimes you need to build a stage in the middle of Texas and have an ordinary celebration of specialness. One of the best moments: Earl Culver (an owner of a high tech computer company played by Spalding Gray) excitedly relates his revelations about working to his family at the dinner table: "Economics has become a spiritual thing. I have to admit it frightens me a little bit. They can't tell the difference between home and work. It's all become a part of one's life. Linda! Larry! There's no concept of weekends anymore!"

this picture was taken -- cough! -- in -- cough, cough! -- oh nevermind. I'm going back to bed...

I think the Internet needs a group hug. c'mon, let's hug.

death and eros and good time grooves: decomposing beck.

2600: "How convenient. An unseen villain. No need for any actual FACTS to be revealed, but plenty of blame to be cast on hackers everywhere."

champagne sounds kinda good, even though I'm sick.

I believe I'm too sick to be online today. (now that's sick! ugh!) Maybe I can write code in a notebook...

Erik's post makes we want to resurrect my list of possible band names. now where did I put that?

How to further confuse cats.

whoa.

Thanks, Derek, for giving me 15 minutes of fame. (I hope you are laughing with me and not at me.)

shutdown -h now

I used IRC for the first time since '94 tonight. very strange. /msg self brush up on IRC shorcuts.

ev's quote reminds me of this quote.

I picked up two books the other day. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America by Daniel J. Boorstin and The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord. (complete text online.) They were both published in the 60's, but appear to speak volumes about modern society. I've started the Boorstin book; its definition and views of "news" and "pseudo-events" are very accurate.

yo-yos confuse cats.

Of course, Database Nation is not to be confused with *my* forthcoming book Weblog Nation: Posting our Lives. Now if I could just find a publisher. heh. just a joke. no such book in the works.

Here's the USA Today review of the new book by Simson Garfinkel called Database Nation. Garfinkel will be live and in person at the Borders in Stonestown Galleria in San Francisco tomorrow at 7:30pm. He also writes a weekly column for the Boston Globe. Disclosure: My girlfriend works at O'Reilly & Associates, the publisher of his books. But I really do like Garfinkel's writing. even before I met her. honest.

Santa Rosa Press Democrat: Ban on Net wine sales challenged. Interstate wine sales regulation is about money, not morality.

When you type up a really long icq to someone, and then it's too long to send, you are faced with two options. 1) Send through Email. 2) Cancel. I did not want to send this message through email. (partly because I don't have my email settings in icq.) I wanted to return to the icq editing window to edit its length. Unfortunately, when you press "Cancel", your long message is gone forever. Bad design.

You can tell the picture above [near the train station at 4th and Townsend in San Francisco] was taken last summer because there is a parking space available.

soon, we may have this: Weblog Summit 2001. Some possible panel discussions: point and clique, date formats: the right choice, opening links in new windows: pros and cons, the neale problem: real-world solutions, do-it-yourself team weblogs, weblog addiction anonymous.

sxsw is turning into the first big weblog event. I mentioned to ev and meg last night that it's like a weblog coming out party. I'm wondering if companies will see this community of talented, energetic, self-publishing people as a market that needs to be addressed and/or catered to. Things could start changing rapidly once our little secret is out.

ev's pic of today is stunning.

Derek pointed out that Canon is adding a digital model to their EOS series. I'm all giddy and drooling. Most of the pictures you see on this site were taken with a Canon EOS camera.

Thanks for sticking up for my poetry, meg. Actually, any attention is good for my poems...they get so little. ;)

In the CD player this morning: The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, Hipocrisy is the Greatest Luxury.

this is the kind of tree I am. today.

I hope we're at the end of recycled culture. Because we were at the end of an arbitrary time period, I think culture felt the need to re-experience everything that came before as one last hurrah. That's why 20somethings were swing dancing, rap music was sampling 70's funk, movies were old TV shows, there was a "Woodstock" II, on and on. I hope we finally have the past out of our system. It's time for something new. It's time for something unpredictable, spontaneous.

e.e. commerce - Internet Poet: "He guts the Internet as a fisherman does a perch, yet the perch is better for the gutting, for his knife is love." [via tbtf log]