Today's meme, began by Matt Haughey, is the Memorymap. An emergent collaboration between Google Maps and Flickr, people are taking satellite snapshots of their hometowns and annotating spots with memories from their past.

Brilliant.

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To anyone who thought AOLiza was an evil way of messing with people who randomly IM you, it's nothing compared to what's going to happen to Laura Pahl.

Update: Turns out the thing was a hoax, an April Fools joke they say, though I say no, since it's not yet April first. Ah well. Caught me!

Update to the update: Okay, purportedly not a hoax after all, but a story with some form of a conclusion now. Witness the drama, and the value of having a nice mom.

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Those of you who've taken a look at Randompixel can tell that PostSecret is a project so cool I wish I made it. The only downside is that anyone can submit a secret, so the liklihood of made-up secrets from the attention-getter set skyrockets, but at least the attention-getters tend to be artistic. The premise is simple. Write your secret on an index card and mail it in. Fair warning though, there are a few disturbing pieces in there.

What's your secret?

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I've noticed when watching people (as it is often my wont to do) that lots of people I know have default faces, the faces they show when they stand in the elevator going to lunch while trying to remember what they ate for lunch the day before, or reading a book, or stopped at a stoplight. These faces can be happy, pensive, dour, vapid, or intense, and I get the feeling that most people have no idea of what their own default face looks like to other people, or the giant effects that other people's impressions of their default face have on the course of their lives overall.

Do you have a default face? What do you think it is? Ask around. Are you right?

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Want to go to the expo, but you're not in the Bay Area or cant get off work? As is so often the case nowadays, Flickr members offer the next best thing.

Check out the Flickr slideshow of all images tagged 'macworld'. I'm going on Friday and will be sure to contribute a few pics of my own.

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Here we are, 24 hours from the General Election, and despite an unexpected appearance from Osama, neither candidate has dropped a bomb in the last couple weeks. The weekly 'hot point' issues like the missing Al Qa Qaa explosives and Sinclair's airing of 'Stolen Honor' have been spun by the candidates and hung out to dry by the media. While presidential elections have often been plagued by the dreaded 'October Surprise,' times aren't what they were four years ago, and the campaigns may be adapting.

Four years ago, the average media cycle took around two days to take hold. The time from an incident or anouncement to media's pickup of the event, to transmission to the public through the nightly news or daily paper would usually take a full day, with second-order meta-commentary about what the event means and how we should feel about it not coming down for another two or three days. Actual public opinion change is strongest after a general concensus is made and it could take four days to a week for an incident's aftermath to fully manifest itself in polling numbers.

Over the past four years the way people get and disseminate new information has shifted dramatically. A reasonably large percentage of the public is online at work or at home during the day, and can find out new developments within hours of their occurance. When important news breaks, these wired readers are quick to spread word through IM, email, cellphones, or a shout over the cube wall. While media's incidence-to-opinion period has dropped from several days to several hours, the public's ability to propogate news quickly has grown at an even faster rate.

With the presidential race closer than any since 1916, it doesn't take a big surge to put either candidate over the top, and while the media opinion of any large announcement is hard to predict, the snap first-impression of the public is far more ascertainable, both due to focus testing and because it's more deterministic, where media opinion is more chaotic with a small number of influencers' opinions changing others until a concensus (or conventional wisdom) is discovered and reported.

Since the need is so small, and the safest way to influence the voters is by using the media as a reporting mechanism instead of a mechanism of commentary, it seems that the weapon of choice for this election is the November Surprise, most likely the 'Election Morning' surprise. A large and urgent announcement, not directly related to the presidential race, made immediately after the morning radio talkshows have gone off the air in the Central time zone (the vital races are in Central and Eastern and every hour is critical) between 11am and 12pm Eastern time, would likely be heard by 30% of voters before they have gone to the polls. Depending on the nature of the announcement, it could cause a significant sway in undecideds, possibly enough to turn a state or two.

The veracity of the claim wouldn't be known until after the election is completed. While claiming that Osama has been captured would be difficult to defend against when the truth came out a few days later, saying that several dozen people were killed in a stronghold where he was believed to be hiding out ("more information to come as we get it!") is more plausable, accomplishes much the same effect, and is easier for the administration to distance themselves from after the fact, when he turns out to still be alive.

To protect against a snap-backfire -- a media which includes along with their first report an opinion that this may be an election tactic -- the announcement's timing would have to seem plausably uncontrollable, so the above Osama scenario would be more difficult to pull off. In light of last week's Osama video it becomes more plausable, however, when the CIA claims that their intel on his location is related either to information contained with the video, or a retracing of the path by which the video came in to U.S. hands.

One thing is certain, however; such a 'November Surprise' scenario could not be taken by Kerry, since his duties don't have the scope that would allow for a 'breaking news' level announcement that is not directly related to the election.

The other possibility is a replay of Spain's pre-election bombings, though I doubt it, since it's unclear who such an attack would benefit. It's possible that Osama's timing of his video was to test the waters. If the video pushed Kerry up a point or two, then an attack would be likely to increase that margin. The scenario is reversed if the video helped Bush. Who Osama would prefer in the white house is an open question, though most people hold their own opinions, which coincidentally are almost always that he wants whoever they aren't planning on voting for.

I hope there isn't a November Surprise, though I'd bet that even in the absence of an administration announcement, other groups will try for one.

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Commentspam up the wazoo, a new home, still moving out of an old home, about 300 bites from biting midges (all on the same night on a lonely cove in Baja), a busy and exciting workplace and a blog left neglected.

I think I post so little nowadays because my vision for what Fury should be is becoming so much more concrete, and is so different than what's presently here, that it feels like a step backwards to post.

But then, a step backwards is still more a part of the dance than standing still, and so I'm posting now, and will try to keep it up as I reshape the site behind the curtain.

In other news, despite the upcoming presidential election taking up a huge portion of my personal mindshare for the last year, today was the first time the candidates actually pushed in to my living room, and within 20 minutes of each other. The first was a call from the KErry campaign, encouraging me to vote on Tuesday (like I'd miss it), and the second was the new 'wolves' ad from the Bush campaign. The scariest part of that commercial is that it's playing in California, telling me that they eitehr actually think they have a shot of taking the state, or that they have enough money in their final week that they can blow advertising dollars in decided markets. I don't particularly like either possibility...

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No, for once, I'm not asking my friends to help me move, much to their releif! The house closes THIS FRIDAY and then the fun begins, but before that fun starts, there's plenty of planning that needs to be done. Since outfitting a home for long-term residency and ownership is so very different than the transience of the rental lifestyle, Rachel and I have been very busy, refrigerator and washer/dryer shopping, planning for movers and carpet cleaners, speccing out a new water heater and other stuff.

On the telecommunications front, I'm considering going out on the bleeding edge of technology and I'd love to hear any relevant experiences you've had. Instead of DSL or cable, I'm investigating hooking up with a wireless provider, most likely Etheric Networks, for a connection less fettered and faster than either cable or DSL. On top of that, I'm considering using voice over IP (VoIP) instead of a regular landline for telephone service. For that I'm leaning toward Vonage, or possibly AT&T's offering.

This would mean I wouldn't have a telephone line coming into my house at all, which is taking a lot of faith on relatively new technology. I'm wondering if anyone has any experience, anecdotal or otherwise, about using either of these companies, or the technologies in general. One downside of this plan is that if the power or net goes out, so does our phone. This can be a significant issue if we decide to hook in with a security company that requires a landline to hook to the system.

Basically, I'm really tired of the telephone company, and excited to find the next big thing, especially if it means cheaper (or free) in-state calling, because calling down to Los Angeles is already far too expensive.

Got any advice? Thanks!

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So last night I was the victim of a storm of commentspam beyond that which I can take care of by hand. For the next few days, comments will sadly be down entirely until I finish my new commenting system which will prevent this kind of thing.

Second on the list of to-dos will be to import old comments into the new system. Sorry for forcing y'all to run silent for a few days!

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Is anyone else annoyed (or did anyone else even notice) that AOL's instant messenger completely changed their model for handling multiple computers? Used to be that if you left yourself signed in somewhere and you logged in on a different machine, it would kick you off the first machine, and log you in where you actually are. Now it leaves both sessions open, giving you an annoying 'system message' telling you you're logged in in multiple locations, and doesn't let you log out remotely, so if you left yourself logged in at work Friday evening, the only way to make sure you don't miss an important IM is to stay logged in at home as well, with an away message saying you're not actually online.

As far as I can tell, there's no way to go back to the old model, and if you accidentally leave yourself logged in someplace like a net cafe or a school computer, you have to gain physical access to the machine to prevent them from staying logged in and reading every message sent to your handle. This is a strong departure from the conventional wisdom that logins should favor shyness over stickiness by default, and I hate it.

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It's one thing to find someone cute in Trader Joe's or the subway, and wish you'd had the guts to go beyond eye contact, but it's quite another to spend more than a third of your life following someone around the world. (Probably fake. God I hope so.)

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I want Kerry to win more than anything, which is why the following is so frustrating: A few weeks ago I got my first ever piece of real, physical political correspondence from the Kerry campaign. The first sentence reads, "All our hard work and determination -- all the energy and enthusiasm that you and so many other dedicated people have brought to our campaign -- are finally paying off."

Are?! Admittedly, this is a difficult sentence, since 'all our pennies are shiny' but in that case, 'our pennies' is plural. In the above case, "our hard work and determination" is singular, and the modifier 'all' doesn't group together many disparate items, but rather refers to the grand sum of a single item, as in 'all our work was for naught,' as opposed to 'all our work were for naught.'

Ugh. I hope part of my campaign contribution goes to a proofreader. In a battle like the one running for the next six months, it's stupid to miss points for something like this.

Update: Thanks to Andrew, for convincing me that the letter was correct after all. Hard work and determination are two individual things, so 'all' groups them together, making the total plural.

<Gilda>Nevermind!</Gilda>

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I now have 90 sites in my daily (nee multi-hourly) RSS readthrough. At the moment they're all in a flat heirarchy except for a folder of sites pertaining to Gmail (Battelle, outer-court, etc.) and I've been meaning to sort them into folders by topic, 'friends', 'blogosphere', 'news' etc., but I just realized the important categorization I should make is 'sites where I'm expected to have read every post' and everything else.

For example, I have about 14 friends who, when they post on their blogs, have the same expectation that their friends will have read the post as if they had sent the post in email to the friends. While skimming through the roughly 400 posts a day, it would be nice if I had this 'must' list so I could stay in low gear in one folder, then return to 'skim' gear for the rest.

Then again, maybe I should set up Bloglines to email new items in the 'must' blogs to me, where I can filter them to a 'friendblogs' label and address them as if they really were emails sent to me.

This would also let me search past posts, restricted either by label, by specific friend, or both, so I can 'catch up' quickly when I missed something important...

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Today I took a look at the information you're required to supply before Yahoo, Hotmail, or Gmail will give you an email account:

Yahoo	Hotmail	Gmail
* First Name * Last Name * Zip code * Gender * Industry * Job Title * Specialization * Birth Date [] Send me special offers from selected Yahoo! partners (checked by default)	* First Name * Last Name * Language * Country * State * Zip Code * Time Zone * Gender * Birth Date * Occupation [] which of 40 newsletters you want to receive in your inbox [] which of 55 topics interst you, so that 'featured offers' from Hotmail partners can be delivered into your inbox	* First Name * Last Name

That's a whole lot of data the other guys want, and they use it to target information. Yahoo admits in their privacy policy that they provide it to third party partners for marketing purposes.

Google, on the other hand, explicitly states: "We will never rent, sell or share information that personally identifies you for marketing purposes without your express permission."

For the curious, I'll likely have some more Gmail information to post tomorrow, so you might want to check back, or grab my RSS feed to keep up to date.

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No, really.

Real real real. Not "I have a friend who reads this guy's blog who claims to know for a fact" real. Not even "I read this guy's blog and he says it's not an April Fool's joke" real. Well, maybe for you, gentle reader, it's exactly that real, but for me it's "I came to work for Google and got handed a dream assignment to design the UI for a product that's going to change the world" real, and now I'm thrilled that my best kept secret was kept so well that even my close friends took the "it's gotta be a joke" path yesterday.

Nearly two months ago my Mom sent me an email, saying she read a piece in the newspaper speculating that Google was working on an email product.

"Really, Mom? That's interesting. It's funny how they press makes all kinds of speculations. First we're going IPO, then we're not, then we are, then we're waiting. We never said anything but the press likes to make stuff up."

Then I sent her email around to the team. Today several of them asked me if I'd come clean to my own Mom yet. I did. This morning. :-)

Where was I? Oh yeah. Free email, a gig of it. If you've been reading the paper or the blogs today, you've read about it, spun either as an April fools joke (though if it were only that it would be a pretty short-sighted jest: "Here's this great product! Ha-ha, fooled you!"), or a piece of ill-timed PR. In truth, as guessed by a few of the more circumspect bloggers, it was both and neither. A double-April-fools joke. Metapranking, if you will. Google-style fun with a big pot of gold at the end.

To me it's showing the world the wider viability of the Google aesthetic. Clean design, unobtrusive yet useful ads, a fast, powerful product that will literally change the way you "do email." Oh yeah, and a gig of space, too.

I'm reminded of a quote from Scott Adams:

"I say we should listen to the customers and give them what they want."

"What they want is better products for free."

Only here that kind of thinking isn't a Dilbert punchline.

Yay, Google.

(oh, and this screenshot, though cute, is totally fake)

Here are some real Gmail screenshots I took this afternoon. Link away!

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For those of you wondering why Fury's been kind of slow this year; For those of you who get annoyed when I say I can't talk about what I'm working on; For those of you who wondered 'when?' when I told them I'd be able to tell them soon, that day is finally here!

I'm so very, very happy to point you all to Gmail, or at least the related Gmail press release, since the service isn't publicly available just yet.

I love this time of year...

April 2, 2004: Read the update

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What would you do if you randomly were assigned Chris Rock's mobile number?

Kudos if you're half as cool as this lady.

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So yesterday Google soft-launched Orkut, a new online community site along the lines of Friendster and Tribe.

Like Tribe, Orkut supports communities, but this is still a starting point. I expect it'll get better as it grows. The site's launched invite-only, so only members can invite new users. Rather than try to figure everyone I know, I'm happy to invite Fury readers who I know even the littlest bit (you know, old friends, the frequent commetners, stuff like that).

Drop me an email if you're interested and I haven't invited you yet!

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It's tempting when designing a page to just design 'above the fold', that is, the things that the user sees without scrolling. The term comes from the newspaper industry, where half of the front page is 'above the fold' and the less important half is 'below the fold'.

It's interesting because in newspapers it's a 50/50 split. In tri-fold letters it's a 33/33/33 split. On web pages though, especially weblogs, the majority of content usually exists below the fold.

Sippey gives a great viewpoint of exactly what several popular weblogs look like if 'the fold' didn't exist. It's got me thinking about how the value and function of sidebar navigations changes as one descends into the depths of a page.

Scott McCloud (of Understanding Comics fame) uses this perspective extremely well in his online comics, starting from the beginning.

My mind boggles at the possibility of melding Scott's comic model with the inverse chronology of a weblog...

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I left my cellphone (and jacket) at Em's all weekend by accident and picked it up yesterday to find someone in Sacramento had tried to call me 4 times but left no message.

Today I got their call. It was a marketeer from the drawing I entered outside Dickens Fair (the bait was a trip for two to London), calling to verify my address, marital status, and income. I knew it was going to be an "I'm-not-interested-buh-bye" call when she told me that they wanted to offer me some 'fahbooluhs prizes' for attending a 90-minute seminar. It's jus amazing how long those folks can talk without stopping for breath.

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I try not to post what everyone else posts, but when there's such a confluence of memes, it's hard to resist.

According to Edward Tufte, PowerPoint is evil. It helps speakers present and audiences tune out (in PowerPoint form). PowerPoint is responsible for the destruction of the Space Shuttle Columbia, and its principles can be seen in the destruction of the Challenger as well (in powerpoint format, ironically). In short, PowerPoint makes you dumb.

What if Lincoln had access to PowerPoint at Gettysburg? (by Peter Norvig who, in addition to co-authoring my undergrad artificial intelligence textbook, is also a fellow Googler)

David Byrne, however, has found a saving grace in demonstrating that PowerPoint can be an artistic medium. If anyone has a link to the actual content, I'd love to see it.

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After getting such positive feedback last year, and a reminder email today from a reader (as well as from my mom, one of the singers) I'm happy to remind folks that the Verdugo Hills Showtime Chorus will be delivering live telephone singing holiday cards this holiday season.

The deal is that for just $5-9 (local, long distance, or international), you can have a group of professional-quality chorus singers call whomever you wish and sing them holiday wishes. These are live (and very nice) people, who enjoy giving holiday wishes as much as your friends and family will enjoy getting them.

All of the holidaygrams will be sung on Saturday, December 13th, and they're happy to sing on the answering machine if your recipient isn't home. Actually, some recipients prefer that so they can listen again and again.

Happy Holidays!

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How to write a thank you note. I like it.

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Probably my hottest passion in HCI is the concept of ambient displays. Ambient displays abound in nature. The way the spectrum of light changes a few minutes before rain starts falling, the way birds waking up at 4am let you know you've been studying too late again, your sense of balance. These are all examples of ambient displays.

In the HCI realm, the hot geek project de l'annee has been to create novel man-made ambient displays. Classic examples are the network activity dangling string and a thicket of waterfall and windchime-oriented projects. In the past few years most of these projects have been filed under the concept of 'ubiquitous computing' though I think this is a bit of a misnomer, since if an ambient display is truly ubiquitou, the 'computing' portion of it should be invisible to the user and therefore should no more have the label 'computing' than a car or DVD player should. The advancement of the field comes in the expression, not the computing.

At any rate, I've been wanting to create ambient displays at home for quite a while, but time, money, or other factors always got in the way. Now that I'm settling in to a new home, the desire to create an ambient informatic environment has risen anew, and I've spent the last several days thinking about two things: What form could these displays take, and what information do I want to display?

Though I don't have a shortage of answers for either of these two questions, I often find a disconnect between the two lists. Without any 'in the world' relationship between, say, traffic to fury.com and the sound of flowing water, that relationship has to exist in my head. Therein lies the problem, because there is a deliberate cognitive step that has to happen in my head when I hear the water surge briefly to understand what that display maps to in the real world. Further, someone who hasn't explicitly been told about the relationship between flowing water and my web site traffic (or in the linked example, the dangling string and the office's overall network activity), would never make that connection. This brought me to my first realization:

All ambient displays are learned.

Whether it's the flat sunlight before an imminent downpour, or the birds chirping at 4am, these displays only become effective as the user makes the connection (causal or otherwise) between the two phenomena. In the most effective ambient displays, this connection happens unconsciously, so that not only does the subject not know how they know it's about to rain, but they don't even notice that the light outside has changed.

In the network-string example, it's likely that the information needed to correlate the string to network traffic isn't available to the user, unless they start to realize that their web-browsing gets slower at the same time as the string gets more energetic. In the website traffic and water example, there is even less data to correlate because my website traffic is a metric completely hidden from someone sitting in my living room. The data that the subconscious brain needs to create this binding simply isn't available, and so explicit knowledge is required, negating the very nature of ubiquity.

To take it a step further, I believe that the linkage between the display and the underlying data should not only be available to the subject, but it must be available in a way where it is internalized inexplicitly. In other words, just having a sign saying "this string's activity indicates network traffic" won't do, because the knowledge of the linkage, while in the world, still has to be internalized consciously, and after the first handful of interactions with the display, the user will carry the knowledge in their head, but in their conscious attention.

This creates a direct obstacle to ubiquitous assimilation of the display's information, because a short-circuit to the conscious level has been created. When the subject encounters the ambient display, they think about the display and their explicit learned linkage, eliminating the opportunity for the display to affect them of its own accord.

It's like stopping hiccups: The most successful and difficult method to succeed is to think about something else entirely, only you can't, because you keep polling yourself to see if it worked, at which point you hiccup. By trying to use an ambient display ambiently, people will often try to see 'if it's working' which means it can't. When a linkage between display and data happens in the subconscious, there isn't that conscious recurrent check to see if it's working, because the conscious mind was never given a role in the experience.

So what makes an effective ambient display? What is effectiveness? Is ambience and/or ubiquity the most important facet? Or is it the fidelity to which the changing data is realized in the subject? It must be a middle ground, where explicit data is sacrificed for the sake of 'calm'. A cellphone ring is not an ambient display, while a static painting falls on the 'overly calm' side of the spectrum: a display that might have a deep meaning, but no change over time.

I'm still doing a lot of thinking on the subject, but rather than running headstrong into waterfalls and colored balls, I'm taking a step back and approaching from a research perspective. I'm going to start keeping a log of the ambient displays I sense every day, how I interact with them, and how I learned the relationship between the display and the information behind it.

My next step will be stretching a few of these displays a bit farther from their data, and see if they still work. For example, right now it's very quiet in my apartment because it's 1am. The ambient noise level is a display telling me very roughly what time it is. If I tied this kind of relationship to my radio, so that it grew softer as the evening wore on, and grew louder in the morning, mirroring the average change in ambient background noise, it might give me a better indication of the time of day, both when I'm staying up too late blogging, and when I should be getting up to start the day. In this respect it might serve as both an ambient alarm clock and 'time to sleep' notification, without any of the abruptness of a clock-radio. The most important difference here is that this radio doesn't attempt to tell you what to do or when, it simply gives you a better sense of the world around you.

Approaching the problem from the other end, I should take a look at the pieces of data I want that aren't adequately addressed by ambient displays. Then I need to find the right way to extend that data into the real world, as opposed to creating a display and an arbitrary linkage.

These are slow steps, but hopefully the results will have a greater utility to wow-factor ratio than most of the ambient work I've done so far.

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I watch my traffic logs. It's one of those things bloggers don't really talk about. There are those who try to keep their blogs quiet, a small publishing venue for friend and family. There are those who don't care who reads, but aren't out there trying to get the world to read them. These are the ones who don't look at their server logs, don't have webmonitor bugs on their pages, and don't really look into the audience while they're speaking to the world. Less catwalk, more mountaintop.

I'm one of the other kinds of bloggers; the ones who have their stats page bookmarked, the ones who can tell you without skipping a beat that their weekend traffic is 2/3rds of their weekday traffic, the ones who feel a pang during Thanksgiving and Christmas because they know they'll see it as a dip in their weekly traffic.

There are a lot more of us than you'd think. It's one of those things a lot of bloggers do, but none of them really talk about. What's a lot of traffic? 10 people a day? 100? 10,000? It's like talking salaries. If you do it to make yourself feel better, you'll easily find someone who's got you beat, and so much for that (strangely, I don't feel that way about salaries, but I figure some people do so maybe it's a useful analogy).

Back to traffic though. It's tough. Keeping the daily watches on where people come from, and how many people come by gives me a good read on the pulse of the site. I know that it takes one particularly good story to increase my daily traffic by 80%, but that it'll fade back to normal within 4 days. It takes about three weeks of consistant above-average content to start building my regular rolling average, and about two weeks of poor or no content for the numbers to start dropping, but when they drop, they have inertia.

I have two lists, one in my pocket, one in my head, of things to do on the site to double my traffic. Part of me wants to do it for the egotism, part for the knowledge that I must be doing a better job of content creation if I get more visitors.

But the other part worries.

Traffic is more than eyeballs. It's people. One surprising and valuable thing I learned these last couple years is that simmering the pot makes for a great soup of users. If I post things that might get a little bit of attention outside the regular readership, they'll come in and take a look around, read the comments, post a little, and stay if they feel like this is a place for them. This tends to create a relatively like-minded group.

On the other hand, when there's something that gets a lot of attention, a lot of traffic, the whole culture of the site gets overexposed for a few weeks or a month. First time visitors read the comments of other first-time visitors and the maturity of the site folds in half. Some of the regular readrs get discouraged and drop off, and some of the newbies stick around, thinking this is the norm and liking it. This is a full boil, and it can scaldan otherwise great soup.

I've been reluctant to bring the site up from a simmer, mostly for fear of scalding the pot, and to a lesser extent because I'm worried of failure; that I'll do amazing things and nobody will care.

I'm working on solutions to the first, one of which is to create less tenuous ties with you the reader. I'm working on making very easy logins, (possibly passwordless) and letting anyone leave comments, but those comments only appear on the site once they click a link in an email the site sends to their stated email account. The email account can be totally anonymous on the site, but it'll stop the user who just wants to graffiti, or who cares too little about their own content to click the one-time verification link. This site-reader relationship would have a lot of advantages to the reader as well, but we'll get to that later.

Another possibility is something more along the lines of Derek's POWlist. I love ths list because sometimes Derek's site falls off my radar and once a month or so I'll get an email from the list with a particular good or important post, and I face the decision of unsubscribing, visiting the site, or keeping with the status quo of getting these periodic updates. I love it because it's push without being pushy, and I can't even tell how many readers I've lost from Fury when their computer crashed, they switched browsers and lost their bookmarks, or gradually forgot to check Fury, when they never really intended to leave. It's a wonderfully soft way of keeping friends.

I want to cut loose with some bigger projects that would get attention from outside the blogging community. I'm sure that coming across AOLiza articles from the Wall Street Journal while moving yesterday is no small part of this resurgence. So I'm thinking about the best and fastest ways to cement the readers I have, in a worse-comes-to-worst eventuality, I can whisper to you "Psst! Let's ditch these new folks and make it like it was! The new site's over here!)

Or I could just put the new stuff on one of the domains I've owned for years and haven't gotten around to utilizing yet.

Anyhow, it's another late night at the Googleplex, and I should probably call it a night. I'm deciding whether to go to my new place with my newly-purchased bedding, make my bed, and sleep in the new place that feels so empty of both stuff and spirit, though an excellent canvas for both, given a little time, or trod over to Rick and Ammy's, where my toiletries and their guest bed are.

Heh. Ammy? I'm comin' over. The new place will wait one more day. Just so long as I put some things away before the second wave comes from Pittsburgh.

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I ought to spend more time at ThinkGeek. I went there today to buy a C.H.I.M.P. for my cube, but got floored by seeing that they sell a watch based on the same idea as a clock I designed for a ubiquitous interface project three years ago at Cal.

At $450 it's more than I want to spend on something that bangs around on my wrist, but I'm satisfying my geek urges by buying this nifty Pocket WiFi Finder. Now if it could only tell the difference between closed and open networks...

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Well, it's the end of week one, and where else would I be on a Sunday afternoon but at work?

No, it's completely by choice. I wanted to get a head start (sooo many meetings last week) and it's always nice to get a little work done when the office is quiet.

In other news, as my Mom has already mentioned in the comments of the previous posts, I got the two bedroom, 2.5 bath townhouse I really wanted. My landlord-to-be bought the place when it was built, and has lived there for the last 18 years, only now his sister and her husband are relocating to Guadalahara for three or four years, for work purposes, and he's moving in to their house, where he just has to pay utilities.

So moving out of his place and renting it out means he gets to live in a million dollar house in Los Altos and gets to collect rent on his own place in the meantime. Quite the sweet deal.

Sweet for me too, since it means I'm living in a townhouse worth nearly a half-million (gak!). It has beautiful new hardwood floors and the place has been kept-up perfectly. I get to move in a week from today!

Last night my cousins Steve and Susan, Jill, and Randy and Debbie were all in town at the same time, like some planetary alignment. (Well, Jill lives in Palo Alto, so that's no huge coincidence.) I came over for dinner and to hang out with the next generation. I was the only one there without kids!

Spending time with them, I felt closer to them than in a long time. I'm absolutely going to make a point of spending more time with Jill and the kids, in addition to driving down to LA more often.

Stuff stuff stuff stuff. So come Sunday I'l have the keys to an empty living space, and I'll need to fill it. My stuff from Pittsburgh should be in a truck and on it's way before the end of the week, but in the meantime I have a two-bedroom apartment's worth of stuff in storage in Berkeley, and here and there in a few friends' houses. I'm going to take a look at getting a U-Haul to trundle the furniture and boxes down from Berkeley to Mountain View, or I could hire movers. I've got to go to the space and do a little accounting of what I have, what I want, and what, if anything, I'll need to leave in storage a bit longer.

Then there's the stuff in Los Angeles. The ten days of going through Dad's house with Mom and Susie has yeilded about 10 boxes of 'near-term' items I want to incorporate into my own life, as well as a few more 'long-term' items for when I end up getting a house of my own.

Luckily, the townhouse has a garage that's longer than a car, so I may have some room to put things. Or there's always storage.

This morning was more hangoutage with the cousins, and this evening is friend hangoutage and spaghetti dinner. I meant to get a new cellphone today, realizing that both my phone's form factor (bar of soap) and service provider (T-Mobile) are ill-equipped to serve as my mobile communication solution. I'm interested in trying out the Treo 600, but it doesn't come out until October at the earliest. Now that I'm working full-time again, portable IM and email aren't as important as they were on campus. AT&T has one of the best coverage blankets in the Bay Area, and I'm thinking of the Nokia 3650 or the Ericsson T616. They both have bluetooth, and both have cameras (yeah, a gimick, I know. That is, until I set up the phonecam-to-weblog gateway and can blog pictures on the fly).

I just want a phone that fits in my jeans pocket, and though none of them approach the sveltitude of my old Nokia 8290, that phone only works on Cingular and T-Mobile, both of which share the same spotty network in the Bay Area (unlike in Pittsburgh, where T-Mobile covers you like a bolt of wool!). I'll take a look at the phones in person and give one a 30-day trial. It couldn't be worse than the Sidekick, which dropped my call no les than 5 times in 90 minutes while talking to Rachel today.

Well, that's it for now. Tomorrow is the one-two punch of Plough and Death Guild, which Karen says is okay because everyone expects you to come in bleary-eyed on the Tuesday after Labor Day.

I hope everyone has a nice, calming, fruitful month in September! Don't forget your 'Rabbit, rabbit!' tonight, if you're a latenighter, or in the morning otherwise. You'll thank yourself for it!

Oh yeah, and tomorrow I'll write in and tell you about my unexpected dental visit on Friday, and my plan to save a cherished tooth through sheer will.

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Am.. blogger.. therefore... must... post!

I'll confess it's been hard to get back into the blogging mentality. Maybe it's that I've been holding my thoughts too close to my chest, or that I have such an amount of things to do, or that with all the emotional colors in my spectrum so intensified, not blogging is the equivalent of mental sunglasses.

Whatever the reason, I'm back to the blog. Maybe one of the things I like about living alone is that I'm not really alone. my 'alone time' is really time for the blog, and those who I only communicate virtually, be it through the web, IM, email, or the telephone.

Right now anyone I'm going to communicate with will be via sleep.

Night, night, and good luck to Karen tomorrow or Wednesday with her Google interview. In the words of the MCP: "All my functions are now yours. Take'em."

End of line.

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I haven't been crying much recently but for the last week my eyes keep feeling tight around the corners, like I'd just finished.

I feel like I'm a nuclear core, with control rods to help stop a cascade of grief. The control rods can be work, a book, sleep, or for all last week the labor of going through dad's house, and making arrangements.

Being around family, I felt like the control rods were even more important because if any of us let go it would cascade to the others. We each grieve in our own way, and I've been worrying about letting mine out, because I don't want to make anyone else feel worse. I wish I could tell them that grieving is a good thing, and that my own expression of it shouldn't make anyone else feel worse. It's easier to hold it in like a balloon with a slow leak. I think about him in a thousand small ways, every minute, each time crying a little inside. It shames me that I even worry what other people think, that I'm worried about showing my pain too much, while at the same time worrying that I'm showing it too little.

I feel it, inside, and that's what tells me that I'm not a bad person.

Yet I still feel the compulsion to write this post. The irony's not lost...

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On the morning of my birthday, July 4th, my dad stayed up late writing me a letter. The letter touched me very deeply, and when I called him later that morning we shared a wonderful conversation, confiding how proud we each were with each other.

I told him how I bought two iSight cameras, one for each of us, so that despite being at opposite ends of the country we'd be able to see each other and talk like we were in the same room. He told me that he'd ordered a slew of multicolor-led Google pens, a few shirts, and baseball caps, in honor of my starting there next month.

We talked about our writings, about visiting me when I get my apartment in Mountain View, and about using both his and my frequent flier miles to get Rachel and me plane tickets to visit Los Angeles in the next couple weekends.

After the call, I went to a BBQ at a friend's new house, followed by tremendous fireworks in downtown Pittsburgh. My Dad went to a party at my uncle's house in Malibu, where he had a great day with family and friends, staying late and driving a friend home late that evening before returning to his own home.

Some time early in the following morning, July 5th, 2003, he suffered a severe heart attack and passed away at his home.

At the memorial service the following Friday, Susie and I were the last people to speak after my mom, grandfather, cousins Steve, Craig, and Jill, and Dad's brother, my Uncle Alan. After the service, a handful of people asked if I could send them the text of the eulogy I gave:

"The last time I spoke to David was last Friday, on my birthday. Earlier in the day he wrote me a letter, and gave me a gift more important than he could possibly have known. I'd like to read it to you:

To My Son Kevin on his 30th Birthday

It's 5 a.m. on your 30th Birthday and I'm still pondering what present to honor you with. My first present, very carefully selected with your mother's help, was your birth name – Kevin David Fox. Kevin because I wanted to do my best to provide you with a first name kids wouldn't be able to tease you about-- like they did to Dana Steven Fox who had to abandon Dana and retreat into Steven/Steve to escape. And because I wanted you to have a name that was substantial and more than ordinary, but not too unusual.

I'm not nearly as clear about why I held out for David. My deep sense is I somehow wanted you to know I would always do my best to be there with you and for you through all the scary and difficult times whenever and wherever they might envelope you.

Your plunge into sharing your "true voice" experiences on the verge of your 30th Birthday has inspired be to jump in after you. Here's a true voice poem I wrote five years ago.

Ordinary Terror

This morning I went to my appointment at the Department of Motor Vehicles to pick-up my personalized license plates. I didn't know why they were important to me.

While I waited for my name to be called, I was jarred by the appearance of scores of people without appointments waiting in dreary lines. They were on the short side and didn't stand out in any way. They were nothing more than ordinary, living out unremarkable lives.

Down deep I'm terrified of being ordinary. They seemed content.

The first time I felt the horror of ordinary gushing through my body came when I was seven. I was asleep in the basement room of our two-story up-side-down house when the cold water pipe hugging the ceiling above my bed burst at 3:00 a.m. I was frightened and confused. I screamed for mom and dad while I slapped at the light switch until the nightstand lamp snapped on.

The plumber arrived about an hour later. He was old and grizzly with knarled calloused hands, but he liked me. While he wrenched off the old lead pipes and wrenched on their shinny copper replacements, I asked him what it was like to be a plumber for a lifetime.

I was shocked by his answer. He said it was difficult for the first few years until he learned how to fix each different plumbing problem. But after that, he said it had been easy for the next 30 years because he just kept doing what he already knew how to do.

Right then I vowed never to be a plumber! To be doomed to a lifetime of fixing the same pipe problems over and over until I died with my knarled, calloused hands clutching my favorite wrench. How awful – how ordinary. He didn't seem to mind.

I'm walking toward my car with the desperate hope the personalized plates my hands are wrapped around will some how, some way shield me from the terror of ordinary, and open my pipeline to salvation.

David Fox     March, 1998

I feel much different today. If I write a new true voice poem the title that appeals to me is "Ordinary Joy." Further bulletins will follow in celebration of your 30th birth year.

I just grabbed "14,000 things to be happy about." off my bookshelf and opened it at random to pages 100-101: "...the intimacy of humor...flashlights that work...a bowl of tiny mandarin oranges...a breeze tiptoeing into the room, afraid to intrude...Timbuktu...opening stuck windows...steak fries...the splendor of fall...deep-set windowsills...electric morning coffee-maker...every seventh wave being a big one...the pleasure of water...V-formation of migrating geese...." And there are 13,984 more in Barbara Kipfer's book.

How many more known and yet to be known are there in my "book? or you book?" Could be bazillion, or even kabillion more! (I've been wanting to use bazillion and kabillion somehow somewhere for months, and now I have Ta Dah! (I've also been wanting to use Ta Dah!). This is such fun!

And thank you for adding a bunch from your book: "having the canola...the extra mile...following a dream...Winter's blankets of snow...cacophonous cicada...thundershowers before sunset...lush green grass...surreptitiously placing Easter eggs....the midnight moon...picnicking on the grass...following foot-deep footholes in the snow...fireflies flicking on and off, talking to each other...paper cut-outs...sneaking into IKEA...the last day of classes...snowscaped graveyards...dancing with abandon... ...all nighters...pockets...tandem skydiving...keyboards...cloverleaf intersections... kettle drums ...Mardi Gras beads...a kitten sleeping in your lap having mouse-chasing dreams........" and so many many more. What I am happiest about right now is you on your 30th Birthday – TAH DAH!!!!

Love, hugs and so much more,

Dad

Dad derived his greatest happiness from finding joy, and bringing that joy to those around him.

He loved the immediate pleasure of teaching people something new, whether it was cribbage or kite-flying, computing or how to cook the perfect quesadilla.

He passionately shared the photographs he took at every opportunity, pulling out his powerbook in any free moment to give a personal tour of China, the Galapagos, or just a day at the beach. He loved sharing the beauty he saw in the world and in everyone he met.

Most importantly, Dad found his deepest satisfaction in helping people realize and pursue their own dreams. When he and I chose the name for his company 12 years ago, David wanted to keep it as open-ended as possible, reflecting his mission of helping people achieve their own goals -- in this instance, occupational goals -- hence the name "Professional Advancement Success Systems" or "PASS."

To David, the meaning of life is in the journey.

Dad never expected anyone to follow in his footsteps, but he hoped that they would walk in the same direction -- following their ambitions and dreams, and helping others to do the same.

My dad was the most supportive person I've ever known and, even after his passing, he's still supporting us, as we -- each and every one of us -- has been bettered by the impact he's had on our lives.

The finest memorial we can give to David is to keep on walking in his life's direction, to keep finding the joy and the beauty in life every day, and doubling that joy by selflessly sharing it with everyone we touch in our own lives.

Thanks for reading. As I've mentioned before, I have a lot more to say, and I'll be putting together a site of some of his writings, photos, and memories. I'll be talking about it here as it progresses. If you're just visiting Fury and aren't a regular reader, email me and I'll drop you a return email when there's more about David.

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In my apartment this morning...

Ring... Ring.... (Actually, that's not true. This is the sound my phone makes.)

Just as it gets to the truly funky part, I get to the phone, carefully unplug it from the charger, check the caller ID (614? where's 614?), and even more carefully press in on the scroll wheel to pick up the call without accidentally scroll-clicking them to voicemail, which I manage to do fully a third of the time. "Hello?"

...pause... "So what kind of cheese do you like?"

It's a man's voice, which tells me almost nothing. I'm bad at recognizing voices over the phone, especially since I've been using the phone markedly less over the past several months, and moreover since my phone has a cruddy speaker, barely better than the loudspeakers on aircraft carriers that make anyone on the PA sound like a cross between God and Roz from Monsters Inc.

In short, I have no idea who I'm talking to, but this is familiar territory.

I immediately reply, "Actually, for the past few days I've been taken with this Amish Butter Cheese." Not only is this absolutely true, (and trust me, the cheese is great, and is remarkable as it's a Jack variant that you don't get tired of. I mean it. Rachel and I could have eaten a whole bar in one go, but we stopped ourselves), as I was saying, not only was this true, but I didn't even go on to elaborate on the Irish White Cheddar we'd found last month, or the Dutch Havarti we'd just broken in to last night, but is already a favorite.

Details such as these are reserved for the closest of friends, or at least people whose names I know... or who read my weblog, I suppose.

The guy paused. I think he thought he had me. Much like Ammy's collect call from love, my mystery telephonic compadre probably thought his opener was the punchline, and didn't expect a rejoinder. I could feel his brainwaves over the phone, thinking: Does this guy really like cheese that much? Is he a freak? ...a beat passes... "I was searching the web this week and I came across your resume. I'm uh, a recruiter for [a fortune 500 company] and we're looking for an interaction designer with a strong participatory design background..."

The funny bits were when he told me he'd wished he'd read my weblog earlier, since then he wouldn't have wasted a phone call on Micah, as he'd have known that Micah just accepted the eBay job. I made a short list in my head of people he might want to talk to, and before I could share it he told me the other people he had already contacted from my program, matching hit for hit. I told him I'm already signed on for Google, and we bantered a bit anyhow, talking about the Edsel, the dot-com bust and the revitalization, etc.

The other funny bit is that it's the fourth recruiter contact I've received in the last two days, after no such attention for the previous month. I've got no interest in anywhere else, as I've found my perfect place, but it's amusing nonetheless. I've considered taking my resume [PDF] down, but I've found it to be useful in a number of occasions having nothing to do with getting myself a job. Call it a formalized extended bio (which reminds me, my bio is terribly out of date. I've got to update that thing...) or call it a template that at least a dozen people I know have used when redesigning their own resumes, but having recruiters call still gives a little tingle, a little 'might have been' window into a parallel universe that I can feel spinning off when I tell them thanks but no thanks.

A few days ago I had this whole epiphany. Actually, it came over the course of several days, in a few quick moments, so I suppose it's more of a stuttered epiphany, if the definition of epiphany can be stretched enough to accommodate that. It's about work, joy, and the circus. I'll try and write about that next time.

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Handspring has posted a sneak preview of the Treo 600, a palm-based phone with a keyboard, color screen, color camera, and SD slot in a small package (and no flip cover!)

I'm realizing more and more that my Sidekick isn't very good at being a phone, though it rocks on email and instant messaging. I've got to figure out what my long term plan is: getting a phone and using the new data-only option for my sidekick? Ditching my email dependence and dropping the sidekick altogether? or maybe a different hybrid, like this Treo.

Luckily, the Treo 600 doesn't come out until this Fall, so I've got plenty of time to mull it over.

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So last Tuesday Rachel and I went shopping for some stuff at the Murray St. Giant Eagle (fyi for the non-yinzers, pretty much all supermarkets around here are Giant Eagles). Walking down the sidewalk back toward the car, we heard this guy yelling, I mean really yelling, about two blocks away.

At first, I thought it was a fight in the making. I was reminded of one of the people I was most happy to leave behind in Berkeley, this guy who just roars incredibly loudly on Telegraph, encouraging others to try to roar as loudly as he does, at least three times a week for 7 years. Anyhow, as this guy got louder, I spotted him: a guy yelling in to his cellphone. I was just wating for him to break critical mass and fling the phone into a nearby building when, less than half a block away from us now, he yelled "OKAY! BYE!" and pressed the end-call button.

The wierd thing was that he wasn't mad at all. His phone conversation ended without a torrent of emotion, but still with a great deal of volume. It's hard to explain: He wasn't yelling in to the phone as though he was trying to make himself be heard through a faint connection, and he wasn't yelling (as it turned out once we could hear the context) in fury, but he was just yelling his words.

Rachel and I both looked at each other and talked the rest of the way to the car about how weird that was.

Today, walking down Walnut Avenue, Rachel and I heard someone yelling and, sure enough, here he comes down the street again, cellphone in hand on ear. In his wake he left a path of people turning to each other (even to nearby strangers) and whispering "what is that guy doing?" A few minutes later he'd turned around and passed by us on the sidewalk, still at full volume.

This time we were ready.

Keep in mind when watching this that the microphone in my camera is intended for close up use, and that to be heard when he's 20 feet away, and facing the opposite direction, he's actually a lot louder than implied in this clip.

Shopping in a nearby store, we heard him pace back and forth several more times over the next 20 minutes. Spectators speculated that he wasn't actually talking into the phone at all, and that his mock-tirade about multimillion dollar business deals was just a show. Me, I've seen a lot of crazy people who spout endless solliloquies off the cuff, and this guy seemed more natural than any of them, like he wasn't making anything up.

Still, just because there's actually someone on the other end of the phone doesn't make you any less of a freak. Thank god the guy sitting three rows behind us in X2 last night, whose phone went off five times during the movie wasn't such a loud talker, though even so, grrr.

The idea of picking up a cellphone jammer the next time I'm in Japan sounds more and more tempting...

Oh yeah, and I love my digital camera. Unexpected movies are the best.

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I've been pretty free about spreading my email address around, deciding that since my email address is already on spammers lists, hiding it now would be like trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle. When I see people list email addresses as 'hello at fury dot com' and such, I wonder how well that kind of obfuscation thwarts email harvesting spiders.

The Center for Democracy & Technology knows where spam comes from. This article is the most insightful look into how the online world works that I've seen this year. It's truly fascinating reading.

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Camposites, collages created from webcam pictures emailed to the artist, are some of the most surreal images I've ever seen.

I love how distortion of the images can cause a corresponding distortion of the emotion. For a quick overview, check out the gallery page [nsfw, contains nudity].

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Ahh, the inside jokes of working at Yahoo...

Before messenger clients go out to the masses in beta testing, we usually run alpha testing in-house. We post it inside the firewall for all the yahoos to download and use (and believe me, the average yahoo types far more words in instant messaging than says out loud on a given day) and see if any problems come up.

One day a server bug struck several dozen people using alpha copies. No matter what they typed into the composition window, all the other person would see is '3'.

Friend: Wanna grab some lunch?
Me: 3
Friend: isnt that a little late?
Me: 3

the problem was fixed by the end of the day, but for months amongst a small group of yahoos, the bug 'lingered on', always at the most opportune moments.

Manager: how're the mocks coming?
Me: 3
Manager: Quit it.
Me: 3

I miss the 'hoo.

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(Executive summary: Internationally renowned women's chorus (and my mom) sings holiday greetings to the persons of your choosing, anywhere in the world, for $7-10)

I probably don't post about my family as much as I ought to, and I keep meaning to write about how proud I am of my sister for becoming a foster parent this year, or the rest of my family for their wide-reaching accomplishments, but today I'm writing to tell you how proud I am of my mom, and to let you know about a really cool gift you can get for your loved ones. Yes, this is a plug, but it's a really worthwhile one. If you think so too, I hope that you'll tell your family and friends, and/or post it on your own weblog. These nice folks deserve all the exposure they can get.

My mom's a member of the Verdugo Hills Showtime Chorus, a member chorus of Sweet Adelines International. Along with about a hundred other accomplished vocalists in her chorus, she regularly performs in large competitions. I had the privilidge of hearing them perform at the Buckeye Invitational competition in Columbus, Ohio last August, where they swept all the award categories. They're really good.

Okay Kevin, cut to the chase:

For the past several years, every holiday season, the girls have done singing holiday cards. You give them the name and phone number of the person you want to serenade, and the best time to call, and on December 14th they'll call that person up, anywhere in the world, home, cellphone, whatever, and they'll sing your choice of one of ten holiday songs (repertoire includes Silent Night, Jingle Bell Rock, We Wish You a Merry Christmas, the Hanukkah song, and others listed on the order page). No recordings, no canned anything. The real deal.

The lowdown: Twenty-five singers performing live in four-part harmony (barbershop style): tenor, lead, baritone and base, singing specifically to your recipient. People really love it. It has a very personal touch, and won't be a throwaway gift that'll gather dust in the closet, but a memory that they'll keep with them.

So how much does it cost? Just $7. Less than you'd spend on a doohicky they'd never use. If your recipient is outside of Southern California, it's just $8 (long distance charges included in the price). International is only $10.

Renting a philharmonic orchestra costs $70,000 a day, so having a chorus of highly talented singers spreading holiday cheer for one ten-thousandth of that is quite a deal!

I recommend ordering early. The order deadline is December 11th, as long as they don't fill up before then. If they get enough interest, they may add have a second day, but there's no guarantee.

So that's my plug. They're really great folks, and their specialty is spreading holiday cheer, and they even accept PayPal. I'll be giving singing holiday cards to a slew of my friends this year. Also, they have no advertising budget, so this is all spread word of mouth. If you agree that this is a cool gift, please pass this permalink along to family and friends (weblogs, etc), as my testimonial gives a lot more detail about the service than their order page provides.

Happy Holidays!

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Hey y'all! Continuing in the three-year-old thread of writing bots for AOL Instant Messenger, I've written an applescript interface between AIM and iTunes.

While offices can use it to let anyone at any desk control the office iTunes jukebox, and stores can use it to control their music from computers in the front of the store, I wrote it so I could control my stereo from my couch, using my hiptop's AIM client.

Anyhow, it's getting pretty polished and I'd like to know if any folks out there use AIM and use iTunes, and would be interested in doing a little usability testing and QA on it before I release the first full version next week.

Interested, or know someone who is? Drop me a line!

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I'm always collecting things in my head to blog, and once in a while two seem to match up in an odd way, forcing them to the front of the queue. Today's tidbits are about minimal languages, Toki Pona and K, minimal verbal and programming languages, respectively.

My friend, Pigdog's Mr. Bad, recently introduced me to the wonderful language of Toki Pona. Unlike Esperanto (another of Señor Bad's hobbies), Toki Pona is a constructed language that favors simplicity over clarity, and touts itself as "the language of good. The simple way of life."

The Toki Pona language consists of 119 words. By virtue of Toki Pona's extremely small vocabulary, and order-independent syntax, the language is good at talking about feelings and simple relationships, but not about the finer points of politics or silicon-on-insulator microchip fabrication techniques. Tokiponists believe this is exactly as it should be.

It only takes about a day of effort to learn, though the trouble comes when you have nobody to speak with but yourself. Mr. Bad himself admits that he has onl had Toki Pona conversations in email and instant message conversations which, sadly, rips away the simplicity latent on the very phonemes and the way the mouth moves to pronounce them.

Perhaps Toki Pona will become my Chinese as it's used in Firefly, the underlanguage for muttering under my breath. Then again, what place does a happy language have as a muttering language. Well, it could be an interesting experiment anyhow.

...

On the other side of the minimalist coin is a programming language I only found out about this morning called K. There's an excellent K introduction and primer on (appropriately enough) Kuro5hin.org.

I haven't played with K, but it seems to be for lists what perl is for well, big files. And, um I thought Lisp was the language for lists... But this looks pretty cool anyhow. The interesting part is the syntax of K, a language where operators are called verbs, objects are nouns, and linguistic analogistic structures like adverbs take the place of more traditional looping structures.

Sadly, they don't have a version for the Mac yet, just windows, Solaris, and Linux, but a port can't be far behind.

At any rate, if you're a programmer, the primer is a good read, if it serves no other purpose than to be a reminder that just because so many of the coding languages we use have such a similar structure (Is concatenation done with '+', '.', or '&' in [language I'm coding in today]?) that doesn't mean that entirely other syntaxes exist and can prove valuable tools for specific problems.

the part that's amusing to me is that both of the above examples seek to distill existing languages down to core elements, but for entirely different reasons. Toki Pona strives to shape emotion by carving away parts of a language that breed stress, while K tries to distill languages down to core atomic components so that more complex questions can be answered with less chaff.

Either way, an interesting look at how narrowing a vocabulary can change the message conveyed.

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Well, maybe not. But I could.

Combine a close lightning strike every few seconds with an apartment with ungrounded outlets (despite being 3-pronged), and the reasonable thing to do is turn off and unplug the computer, and so I have.

Let me just mention how cool my hiptop (err, 'sidekick') is, that I can, with no modification, browse to my weblog's composition page, and hammer (well, thumb) out a blog post, despite not having a computer turned on anywhere around.

There will be a hiptop review and, after spending a week or two with it, I'll be able to go into so much greater detail than I could have with 15 minutes in a conference room.

I love it, and there are a lot of areas that need improvement, almost all software, thankfully. The biggest testament for the hiptop interface may merely be that it isn't a pain to use it to compose a post of this length!

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Well, despite paying for overnight shipping, my sidekick's slowboating it here from Texas, and I'm without cell service at all until Thursday, at the earliest. I had to cancel my AT&T service before ordering the new phone because I wasn't sure that I could cancel it without paying the early termination fee, despite the terrible reception I get at home with that phone.

Anyhow, my only phone for the moment is my home phone, and that doesn't even have voicemail. Looks like email's the way to get a hold of me for a while.

Come Thursday though, I'll be a cornucopia of connectivity, with email, real web access, SMS messaging, instant messaging (on AIM :-/ ) and of course cellphone service, all in my pocket.

Technology's so cool, but I just don't have the patience...

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On one hand, I'm stressed because I didn't get to sleep until 4am, and had to get up at 7:15am for class this morning. I have work due in three classes that I need to get done by the end of the day (Communication Design Fundamentals, Computer Music, and HCI Methods) along with 7 hours of class. Ugh. I just want today to be both over and done with. Actually, I'm pretty excited about the Computer Music project. It's my final project for the class (an interim report is due today), and as soon as I foist off today's shackle, I'll talk about it on here. It's only fitting: in a roundabout way, you're all a part of it.

Helping me get through the day (in addition to the anticipation of new powerbooks tomorrow) is this which, at this moment, is here.

Comments? (15)

Well, first off, RSS is (as of October 13th, 2002) the most recent feature addition to Fury.com. More importantly, RSS is probably the optimal way to track all the sites you read (that have RSS feeds), seeing what new items have been posted since your last visit, and getting a quick look at the headlines and excerpts before jumping over to the site.

Don't get me wrong, I like people hitting the main page as often as possible. In fact, I regularly check my stats page to see just how many front page views there are on any given day. Keeping that number up is one of my motivations for making sure I don't go more than a day or two without posting.

Nevertheless, there are better ways to surf the