onfocus

Great idea for a weblog: PR Bop. Tara is picking out the "best" of the thousands of press releases each day. [via several weblogs]

I'm not sure what it means, but I like the sound of it: Schleichwege durch Amazonien. I ran this article from Financial Times Deutschland through Babelfish and standard (mis)translation hilarity ensued: "The US programmer Paul Bausch has himself such offered for its InterNetable Handy built...Perhaps for read rats the best book-tap at present." I agree, read-rats will find this InterNetable book about the Amazon handy-built.

I chatted with Doug Kaye about Amazon Hacks last Wednesday and you can listen in. It was for his great IT Conversations series. (He also has a good interview with Jeff Barr from Amazon about web services if you want an Amazon double-feature.)

Yesterday was my birthday and I turned the big 3-0. sk and I made a trip to Powells, where I broke down and bought Christopher Alexander's latest, The Nature of Order. (The first in a series.) I thought I could live without it, but I was fascinated looking through it at the store. As I turned the pages, I thought of The Mythic Image by Joseph Campbell—not because the content is similar, but their structure. They both seem to be vast meditations making connection after connection between seemingly disparate things. I can't wait to dive into it and find out. Last night I read through half of a gift from sk, City of Glass—Douglas Coupland's book about Vancouver. She also gave me Al Franken's latest which should be a fun one. I just finished re-reading Pure Heart, Enlightened Mind. It's my 2nd or 3rd time to read it, and I did much better following the Japanese names this time. I got the uneasy feeling halfway through that she wouldn't have wanted her journal published. I have mixed feelings about the book now.

I saw lots of fun stuff at the Oregon state fair in Salem today, and here are a few snapshots to prove it:


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Several weblogs by people at Jupiter Research. (Old news, I guess. They announced these in January.)

Way back when I played guitar, I bought Ernie Ball strings. I hadn't heard that name for a long time, and I enjoyed this interview with Ernie Ball CEO Steve Ball about his company's switch to open source software. [via biohabit] Ball tells it like it is: "It shows how ridiculous it is that I can get press because I switched to OpenOffice. And the reason why is because the myth has been built so big that you can't survive without Microsoft, so that somebody who does get by without Microsoft is a story." I've heard about these auditing raids he describes before, but I didn't realize just how terrible they could be. This alone makes a strong business case for going with open source software. Why would you want to be fined and publicly humiliated by your software vendor?

It looks like Yahoo! is being drug onto the blogwagon and offering their own weblog service. From what I gather from this analysis of Yahoo! blogs on a Spanish-language weblog, they're testing the service in Korea first. According to the report, the service has all of the major weblog features including blogrolling, an about page, and RSS generation. [via Blogpopuli] Here's more info (in English) with an opaque quote that sounds like it has the stamp of approval by Yahoo! marketing, "Yahoo! will continue to look into a blogging initiative along with services that can be built around it for customers."

Somewhere in Yamhill County

A judge has ruled that the Fox suit against Al Franken was neither fair nor balanced: "The judge said he thought it ironic that a media company that should be fighting to protect free speech would seek to undermine the First Amendment. He also said he thought the 'fair and balanced' trademark is weak because the phrase is used so often." I wonder how Fox will report this.

I have EF lenses just waiting to be used with one of these new canon digital rebels. now, where did I put that $900? (Maybe it's a good time to go low-tech.)