onfocus

According to Bruce Sterling on his (now) old weblog, Wired is starting up some sort of blogging venture and he'll be moving his weblog there to help out. Keep an eye on http://blog.wired.com/ (not active yet).

Beto was an early Blogger user and he stopped by the office with a video camera one day in 1999. I figured that footage was lost, but he's turned it into a fun little movie: In the Beginning: A Video on Weblogs History. The beginning of the pseudofilm is hysterical. It's like watching home movies for me, and it's hard to imagine that anyone else would be interested—but the early Blogger users were a loosley connected community, and those were fun times. It's great to have a snapshot of that time and place—just an ordinary day at the office—and it brings back great memories of working with Ev and Meg. Thanks, Beto! [via megnut]

Here's my original post about this footage from 2000.

Amazon Hacks got a nice mention in the New York Times. Scroll down to "Amazon Fun" on that page. (NYT registration required.)

Thanks to Matt, I'm now working in a mixed-OS world where the mouse can flow freely between the machines, and one keyboard rules them all! (Made possible with Win2VNC.) Windows and Macs living together—mass hysteria!

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?