onfocus

We had a great thunderstorm this morning around 5am. With lightning and everything! (They're rare out here on the west coast.)

I'm mad at Word.

Note to self: Word won't ever ask you if you want to close the document. It's asking you if you want to save the document. (Big difference.) And most likely, you do want to save the document. Especially if you've been working on it feverishly for the last five hours. Don't ever answer no to saving changes; there will be no way to recover your hours of work despite the promises of ...enhanced reliability and data recovery tools. The AutoRecover files will vanish the instant you click no—along with your feeling that this is going to be a good day with lots of progress.

More Corvallis propaganda: this fair city won one of two gold-medals given by the League of American Bicyclists for being a bike-friendly city. The other winning city was Palo Alto, CA. Right now my bike is closer to Palo Alto than Corvallis. I'll have to fix that soon.

And this is a great lesson about Portland's architecture: The Rise and Fall of Modernism in Portland by Michael J. Totten. [via Anil]

As the terror alert level goes up, I think it's important to think about the psychology of terrorist alarms (pdf). This essay analyzes the terror warnings from a psychological perspective. It was written by a professor at Stanford.

Sea Lions in Newport...

I couldn't take my camera to my own wedding—so I don't have any pictures I can post. But it was a well-documented event and a great day. Matt posted a wedding mopho.

On the Willamette River

Mt. Hood and Portland

FreeNetworks Conference 2003. Cory Doctorow and Tim O'Reilly will be speaking there. And I think the conference will be interesting on a sociological level alone. I mean, what happens when you gather together a bunch of wireless hackers in Las Vegas?

And here's an in-depth description of the Wireless AP in a light fixture that Rob and Adam were showing at eTech.

No worries, found my charger. Charging will commence soon. As you were.

I lost my cell phone charger, so mophos (and cell phone calls) won't be coming in for a bit.

Just stumbled across an article (Deep Thinking about Weblogs) that mentions Weblog Bookwatch in its Weblogs and commerce section:

Their book list is compiled by a computer program that sifts the titles out of weblog posts across the Internet and ranks them by popularity. Once the final line of code for this program was written, the marginal cost for linking to fresh, kickback-generating sales became zero.

What the author doesn't know is that the kickback (Amazon affiliate fees) from Weblog Bookwatch is roughly $10-$20 per quarter. That's not exactly covering the costs of maintaining it. But he is right, it's a way to aggregate information fairly effortlessly (once the code is stable) that could theoretically lead to paying for its own bandwidth with enough visitors. Right now, more bandwidth is spent searching weblogs than serving up links of books with affiliate tags. If that ratio was reversed the commerce angle might be there.

I'm blogging this.

Interesting look at Oregon history through the brands of local products: Sold in Oregon. [via di-pole Moment]

I lied. I had one left.

I'm all out of flower pictures.