No new Randompixel camera today, but think of it as an investment in the future.

Comments?

So now two of my friends chided me, grousing that each Tuesday the new Randompixel goes up later and later. Now it's 10:39pm, but it's still Tuesday! And in the spirit of Tuesday, I bring you Rick, this week's Randompixel camera!

Comments?

San Jose Mercury News, that is.

Today Michael Bazeley did a great write-up (registration req'd) of the Randompixel project for his bi-weekly tech column in the business section. He was also gracious enough to mention the tremendous help that Rachel, Ammy, and Rick have been contributing.

The story is on page 3 of today's Business section if you get or have access to the paper version. Go, go Randompixel!

Comments?

If it's Tuesday, it must be Randompixel! This week we follow Bob, from Berkeley to Stanford to parts unknown.

For those of you in the SF Bay area, watch out for a piece on Randompixel in tomorrow's San Jose Mercury News! I can't wait, and I'll post the link to the online version when I see it.

Comments?

The many stages of my cool day (elapsed time: 15 minutes):

• My friend (and my best friend's sweetie) Paul got offered a job here at Google!
• The Gmail team had a small a one month anniversary (mensiversary) party!
• Al Gore showed up at the end to say 'hi'!
• I got to shake his hand!
• I gave him a Randompixel camera!
• He took a picture of Sergey and handed it to him!
• Sergey asked me, "You're a part of this Randompixel thing? I saw that and it looks neat"!

Oh yeah, and there was cake. :-)

Comments?

In a remarkable feat of sticktoitiveness, today I post Ammy to Randompixel:

Hah. and the real Ammy didn't think I could do it. :-P

Comments?

Nearly six years in the making, today marks the debut of Randompixel!

For those of you who haven't heard about the project before, Randompixel is a collection of disposable cameras, each swaddled in stickers instructing the weilder to take some pictures, then hand the camera off to someone else, a stranger, a friend, anyone. They take pictures, hand it off, and so on.

When the camera's full, they drop it in a mailbox and it makes its way back to me, where I get it developed and scanned, then post it for all the web to see.

Today the first camera, 'Emily' is posted, journalling a trip from Berkeley to the very corner of the nation. new cameras will be posted every Tuesday which means, among other things, that I need to gear up and ship out a bunch more cameras soon, because I only have enough returned cameras for a few months worth of galleries.

There's still a lot more to be done to the Randompixel site, but I wanted to get a camera up there and learn from the experience. I hope you enjoy it, and spread the word!

Comments?

So I've been good for the past couple days, setting aside some time in the evenings for project time. I have so many cool things that I want to build, update, or expand on, that it's been crippling for the last few years. Loads of creativity don't mesh well with a gnat's attention span.

Nevertheless, I've been refocusing, telling myself "yes, and we'll get to that new idea when it's turn comes" and concentrating on the oldest of my projects. I should have something out by the end of the week, if I get another couple evenings of work in on it.

Then of course there's also all the things I want to blog. The real problem is that I now read, via RSS or otherwise, over 100 sites daily, above and beyond the computing I do at work. I have this tide that flows in and out on roughly an annual cycle, flowing between being a consumer of information and being a publisher.

Inside there's this concern that if I take my fingers off the heartbeat of the blogosphere it'll run off without me, but at the same time I'm too busy counting beats to report my findings. Then there's the worry that a reporter of findings just becomes one more bare wall in the blogworld's already hollow echo chamber.

New content, fresh content, content from outside the digital realm...

Anyhow, I'm hot to finish this project, but I've also got to run to work. I have almost as many meetings as fingers today. If I'm destined to have those numbers equate, I wouldn't mind another few meetings.

Hope everyone local's enjoying the weather, and I hope those not in California are enjoying the promise that the arrival of Spring bestows, even if it's still, as yet, a promise.

Comments?

The AntiBloggies, answer to the Bloggies, has published it's list of categories, letting you vote for the most deserving sites.

If ever there was an award Fury was cut out for it's Most Unfinished Projects. To refresh the mind of the gentle reader:

1. Randompixel (aka Cameo)
2. AOLiza
3. Metacookie
4. QWER
5. Blogger Purity Survey (2001 Edition!)
6. Fury 4.0
7. AIMtunes
8. Fury - Mobile Edition
9. Public version of FuryNodes
10. Fury MicroBlog
11. Underblog
12. LogMusic
13. Tao Dice
14. The Mara Story
15. The Butterfly Orgasm Story
16. Trip log for The Kevin and Ammy Cross-Country Show
17. So very, very many galleries sitting in iPhoto
18. Things I've forgotten but will doubtlessly be reminded of by you
19. More stuff I can't even talk about yet...

So go vote! You can vote once every 60 minutes, so vote early, vote often!!!

Comments?

Well, not actually weekend, as it's just Friday, but I just wanted to toss out some bulletpoints:

• Stayed working late last night, left at midnight.
• Gonna get a Poang chair for my office. Good for thinking, and napping... Mmm... Napping...
• Comments are fixed. Long story, messy, but suffice to say that UNIX is a magical beast, and not all magical beasts are nice, or fully understandable.
• Comments will be ported to mySQL soon, and will be incorporated into the permalink-version of posts (more like Dave does it.
• I have finalized an order of priorities for projects, as well as a work schedule (well, and 'around-work' schedule) for getting them done during evenings and commutes. The priorities are:
  1. Metacookie
  2. Blogger Purity Survey
  3. Randompixel
  4. Underblog
  5. qwer.org
  6. more...
• Working on my self-evaluation for the annual performance review
• I am sooo telecommuting on Monday. Heck, Yahoo even got an award from the EPA for that stuff.

Okay, lunchtime. Hasta!

Comments?

I wanted to give a big thanks to the three people who responded to my plea a couple weeks ago for a tape of the West Wing season premiere, especially one anonymous reader from New York who mailed his copy out to me! Thank you!

Now don't I feel like an ass. My TiVo didn't record it this week either, because it wasn't listed either in TiVo's memory or in the TV Guide. Very, very frustrating.

So: As a thank you to Mr NY who sent me his tape, I'm sending back two Cameo cameras along with his tape. I'd like to do the same for anyone who happened to record last night's ep and is willing to let me borrow it. I'll pay postage. Anyone in the bay area record West Wing last night? Anyone anywhere? Taunt me.

I feel like such a schmoe... Hey, at least it gets Cameo cameras out there!

Comments?

Ho, hum. Let's see, working on simultaneous redesigns of the AOLiza page and the Cameo site. The funky horizontal layout of AOLiza doesn't scale well now that there are over 40 convos online. I have it all planned out, but I'm still coding the global, cross-site navigation to make everything nice and ultra-modular. Once that's done there are a lot more features I'll be able to put in to the weblog, including a search function for entries, and a bunch of other stuff.

When, you ask? Well, I'm guessing the reworked AOLiza will go up by midnight tonight, and Cameo by this weekend. I should really stop giving cameo estimates, shouldn't I? Peter has chided me for letting redesigns inhibit content publishing, and he's absolutely right. Hey, at least I'm writing in here!

Comments?

Everything happens at once! I'm working fervently on the Cameo design (and rebranding) and am also being innundated by hits from MemePool and cherished readers of Harpers magazine (still haven't seen the issue yet. Time for me to scavenge from my neighbor's mail!).

Also working on the promised additions to AOLiza. I'm working on a redesign there too, but I won't let that delay putting up 5 or 10 new conversations this evening.

And of course there's school, grad school applications, and possible job interviews (covering all my bases. It must be Monday!

Comments?

Sorry for being boring the past couple days, but I've had midterms and stress! Usually my stress makes me write to the weblog more often, but not this time. anyhow, as if to kick me in the pants (like Ammy did today), my horoscope for today reads:

"CANCER (June 21-July 22): What was started and then abandoned will again be brought to life. Focus on creativity, willingness to let go of losing proposition. Return to what you do best."

And so, apparently, I'm back. I dropped of Sol at the developer today, and am gearing up for Cameo again. I'll post the basic web galleries this week, and not wait until I get to finish the design. I'll iterate and fold the design in later. I know most of you just care about the pictures!

Thanks for hanging in there!

Comments?

I'm looking for ways to improve the site, and I already have a lot of things in queue (not the least of which is getting the Cameo picture online!) but I'd like to hear what you guys would like. How can the site be improved? An AvantGo channel? WAP access? More tech stuff? Less tech stuff? More personal stuff? Less? More AOLiza? Less AOLiza?

Are you interested in the randomness of topics covered here, or is there something in particular that you enjoy? Speak out and email me at hello@fury.com so I can get a reading on the pulse of all you folks out there! Along with your suggestion, please let me know how long you've been reading fury.com for and how you found out about it (if you remember).

Thanks!

Comments?

Ammy, the fourth camera to come back from the August drop, arrived last Saturday and was immediately sent in for developing and scanning! It came back from the developer today, and I'm very excited to put the pictures up, along with those from Emily and Rick, which came back earlier.

Part of the reason I had been holding back the last week is that the heavy traffic from AOLiza press was taxing the servers, and that's all small text stuff. Putting up quality JPEG pictures would quickly max out the bandwidth I have available.

The good news was that traffic was starting to die down to the point where I could put this content up. The bad news (or other good news) is that AOLiza will be getting another major press boot some time next week.

So what does this all mean? Well, I have another server, one without traffic limits (at least in the short term) and with an ethernet connection ot a T-3 backbone, which should provide all the connectivity I need at present, and I'm setting it up with content, so hopefully I can put the cameo pictures up.

As before, if you're not a frequent visitor to the site and you'd like an email sent when the camera's pictures go up, enter your email address in the form on the Cameo Home Page and I'll let you know when it's done.

Finally, the fifth camera (out of ten sent out!) came back on Wednesday. Josh went in for developing and scanning yesterday, and I expect to have the photos back around Tuesday or Wednesday next week. I'm actually surprised to have gotten half of the cameras back, especially since it's completely possible that more are on the way! This is all very cool.

Comments?

Those of you who've been reading for a little while are familiar with Project Cameo. I started it in October of 1998 and, after an 18 month hiatus, I began phase II, sending out 20 more cameras, just about three weeks ago.

A couple weeks ago a reader, Ian, with his own weblog, traded a few emails with me about the Cameo project, talking about overcoming international postage problems and the like, and then he writes me back, telling me he's adapting the project for his own use, and he'll be sending out a bunch of cameras in Australia and all over the world. He then writes it up on his site.

On one hand, I feel a sense of ownership over the idea, and I'm defensive that someone else is taking my idea. I thought of it, I worked on it, it's just coming together and someone sees it and wants to do one just like it because it's cool.

Of course, on the other hand, this is exactly how the web works, and if it didn't, we wouldn't have weblogs and so many cool things, many of which have fostered their own communities and bettered the web immensely. In that light, I'm just a greedy pig.

Then of course there's a third site, Photo Trust, which just started up a few days ago. I have no idea if this person heard about mine directly, via word of mouth, or is just a case of great minds.

I'm not writing here to lambast anyone or to squash any creativity. I'm writing this entry, as the title says, to ask for you to lend me your perspective. I wrote a letter to both folks, quasi-expressing my feelings, and mentioned hopes of banding together, keeping the projects distinctly seperate, but recognising their unity as a new kind of web project, and thus could help gain attention to our efforts.

I'm still working on why I'm so stressed about this, but I really would love to hear your thoughts. Send your comments to me at hello@fury.com and I'll summarize the opinions here, for better or worse.

Thanks for helping out.

-Kevin

Comments?

Well, two of my classes are finished, and I've only a final on Monday and another on Tuesday then I'm done and can get back to the interesting projects. If you haven't signed up at the Cameo project yet, check it out and put your email in to be notified when new cameras come in. I'll be putting a lot more into it this summer and we can look forward to some cool (and probably unexpected) results.

If you haven't taken a look at the cameo project yet, do it. The pages up there haven't been updated for a long time, but it's about to go into high gear!

Comments?