Zipping up the Internet

Here’s the thing: I keep all my photos in Google’s Picasa. Picasa synchs and publishes to Blogger beautifully but I have been using WordPress and had wanted to switch to Tumblr, which plays beautifully with Twitter, but not with WordPress or Vox. I’m writing this on MacJournal, which publishes to Blogger and WordPress easily, but not to Tumblr, Twitter, or Vox. And getting photos from Picasa to MacJournal is a lot harder than it ought to be. Not to mention the fact that I like to put all my photos on the web using Flickr which is just a pain in the ass to get photos to anyway.

I like to play music in Songbird, which, while not without flaws, has a number of features that I really like. Like publishing to Last.fm and Twitter. Doesn’t play as well with Blogger and WordPress, however.

These days, I surf the internet in Flock – great with Blogger, not so great with Vox, WordPress, and Tumblr. I’ve thought about switching to Chrome because it’s fast and small, but it doesn’t work very well with Diigo or StumbleUpon or Evernote. Evernote is great for keeping notes in, but not great for archiving and I prefer Yojimbo’s tag system anyway, with the result that half my notes are in Yojimbo, half in Evernote and none of them get to and from MacJournal, Picasa, or Songbird as easily as I like.

Let’s just not even mention trying to post to Facebook.

And this is all on a Mac, which makes the seams smaller, tighter, and more automated, and using Quicksilver, which strives to reduce the seams to nothingness. And does nothing to erase my frustration over knowing that there are several suites of software that work incredibly well together (Google, Mariner, BareBones) but also realizing that none of them play nearly as well with software from other companies as they do with their siblings.

So.

What the internet needs now is zippers. If you have several pieces of cloth, cut into squares, and with zippers on all side, the possible combinations you can make are endless. And easy. And fast. I want my software to work like those pieces of cloth. I want to choose the programs I want to use and know that they are going to synch and integrate my data with a minimum of fuss and hassle.

To be fair, people are working on it. The emergence of frameworks (like Adobe Air) and the increasing number of open APIs is helping, but there is still a lot of work to be done. So get to it, internets. Get me some zippers and let me put it all together in the way that best suits me.

Remember Me

A couple of years ago, a young man named Joe Murphy died from a rare and nasty form of cancer. I didn’t know Joe. Rather, I knew him only from the podcasts he co-hosted and I was a fan. During his illness and after his death, fans of his work made a wikipedia page for him. It was quickly nominated for deletion due to lack of appropriate citations for Joe’s noteworthy-ness. Fans rallied and added sources to the claims made in the article.

While researching this post, I did a quick check on Joe’s page and found that it had, in fact, been deleted:

“Article was nominated once for deletion in 2007 and kept with the assertion that material added during that AFD satisfied notability concerns, However, a review of that sourcing indicates that it does not. One is an obituary in his hometown paper, one is to an XM Radio page that no longer exists (Joe Murphy is not found in a search of the XM site), one confirms his nomination for a podcasting award (he did not win) and one is a band’s blog (not a reliable source). There do not appear to be independent reliable sources that are substantively about this person, rather there are many blogs and podcasts that offer tributes following his untimely passing. Wikipedia is not a memorial and the gentleman does not pass WP:N or WP:BIO. Otto4711 (talk) 13:37, 10 May 2009 (UTC)”

Clicking on the link “not a memorial” brings up the following:

“Memorials. Wikipedia is not the place to memorialize deceased friends, relatives, acquaintances, or others. Subjects of encyclopedia articles must satisfy Wikipedia’s notability requirements. Note that this policy does not apply outside of the main article space. Whilst using user space to create a memorial is generally not acceptable, limited exemption applies to the user space of established Wikipedians who have died. At a minimum it is expected that they were regular contributors, and that more than one tenured Wikipedian will have used the deceased user’s page (or an appropriate sub-page) to add comments in the event, and after verification of, their death.”

Ok. Fair enough. At the same time, it does seem like the barrier for entry for celebrity-hood is becoming transparently thin. The recent spate of celebrity deaths shows a distinct hierarchy of status, with Michael Jackson at the top and Billy Mays hitting close to the bottom, and yet there has been more than enough material written about both men to qualify for Wikipedia articles easily. The thing is, to take those two examples, Michael Jackson single handedly remade pop music and helped turn music videos into an art form. Billy Mays was a pitchman. He made commercials. (And please note that I am not disparaging Billy Mays at all, I’m merely using him as a recent example.) What Wikipedia’s “noteworthiness” really means is media appearances. Which seems terribly skewed away from people who are actually noteworthy towards people who are merely known to more people, publicly, than the rest of us.

Slate’s recent Culturefest (the Everybody’s Dead Edition, posted July 1, 2009) seems to be pondering related ideas. The three hosts spoke about the modern obituary and how the internet has changed the obituary pages. While they had a number of good points, throughout the whole episode, I found myself thinking about Joe Murphy and Wikipedia. I started to wonder why there was not a resource for the rest of us, why the “little people” should not be remembered as fondly, nor as publicly as celebrities, for whatever value of celebrity one happens to have.

A quick search revealed two sites: Wikiobits and Wikibios.

Wikiobits says of itself: “Wiki Obits has a one simple goal: We live to provide a one-stop site where you can find obituaries and biography information for every person on earth – dead or alive – famous or not, celebrity or not.” A great idea, but at the moment it is a piece of basic Wiki software with very little customization. There is very little to distinguish it as a service or directory. As a test, I ran a search on Michael Jackson and got a table full of biographical data much like I would expect from raw number search engines like Wolfram Alpha and Google Squared rather than an article collection like Wikipedia.

Wikibios, on the other hand states right on the front page: “Our belief is simple: you don’t have to be a famous celebrity to have a life worth documenting. That’s why we created WikiBios, a place where your friends become the storytellers of your life.” Which is an idea I can get behind. The problem is, is that for now at least, the majority of pages I came across (using the random bio button) seem to be yet to have been filled in by the person’s friends and families. It also illustrates another problem which is that wikis are, by definition, editable by the public at large and, here on the internet, the public is not always as kind and friendly as it might be.

So, while I applaud the efforts, it’s still not what I want. Aside from the issues of getting and maintaining an audience share not to mention the kind of brand recognition that would make these viable, long term solutions, I’m not sure if this is an area that is not better served by LiveJournal or FaceBook or Google Profile. it seems that those three brands have the audience and name recognition to be able to add obituaries / memorials as a valid part of their service; I know there are instances of both LJ and FB users being memorialized on their own pages after death, yet even those are not perfect – they don’t give friends and relatives and fans the chance to both eulogize and research the deaths of their friends in that if you were not connected to that person before their death, you may not be able to access their page on the social networks.

What I mean is, a few years ago, I lost another friend. He was someone I had known well in high school, but had not seen in several years. Then, at my sister’s wedding, we reconnected. A few months later, I read the obituary in our hometown newspaper and there were still so many questions I had that have never been answered. And I have no where to turn. Rob was not anywhere media-ized enough to show up on Wikipedia, nor was he, to my knowledge, on LJ or FB. So where do I go to write about and talk about my friend? Where do I go to read what others have written? If he did, in fact, have an LJ or FB, once he was gone there was no way for me to be added to his friends list so that I could see what others were saying and doing, in short, without a wikipedia page how will anyone know he existed?

Perhaps Google will step into the breach. Perhaps LJ or FB or WikiObits or WikiBios will do something that let’s us all eulogize and memorialize those who were like us and of us and who were never on t.v. long enough to get a Wikipedia page of our very own.

Essential iPhone Apps (‘Cause Everyone Else is Doing It)

It’s June. That means I’ve had my iPhone for about four months and it has already become extremely hard to live without. In fact, I have no intention of trying to live without it. Not only does it sit in my pocket for most of the day, it recharges right next to my bed every evening. In short, you can have my iPhone when you pry it out of my cold, internet deprived, hands.

On the other hand, one of the single best things about the iPhone is the Apple App Store. And what could be better than sharing out a list of my favorite apps?

So here’s my list of favorite apps, in no particular order. Rather, these are the ones that I use on a regular basis; these are the apps I go to as primary functions in my phone.

Bloom – Brian Eno’s ambient music maker is a fantastic bit of stress relief kit. The interface is simple, clean, and, if I may say so, pretty. When launched, the app gives the user a blank field of pastel color. Touching the screen will produce a chime or bell, whose pitch and tone vary with where on the screen the user has touched. Generally, the pitch is lower at the bottom of the screen and higher at the top, with tone density going from heavy to light when going from right to left on the screen. Once a sound is produced it repeats itself, along with any others produced in short loops creating ambient, atonal rhythms from the touches the user has made. And the loops can be quite beautiful, and totally relaxing in a very zen way. I find it works beautifully as stress relief during a hard day. If I can find just five minutes along to play with Bloom, things seem much more workable.

Tweetie – A very functional Twitter client, this is probably the one app I use more than any other. (Yes, I am a Twitter fiend.) What I like about this particular client as opposed to the dozens of others available is the interface. I found it very easy to become used to, almost to the point of preferring it to actually using my computer.

Google – How anyone can live without Google at this point is completely beyond me. In addition to gMail, I am a fervent devotee of both Google Reader and Google Docs and I can get all three of those services through the Google app.

Kanji – As anyone who has studied Japanese can tell you, Kanji are one of the hardest aspects of becoming proficient in the language. This app is quite simple, but brilliantly designed. The visual interface is based on Tuttle’s Kanji Cards, with each screen focusing on one kanji. Touching the screen brings up additional information, including the various readings and words that use that character. There is an option in the top right to mark wether or not the kanji has been memorized or not. (It is also uncheckable in case the user has forgotten a kanji or two.) The other great aspect of this app is the organization of the “cards” based on JLPT level or Japanese school grade level. This is just a must have app for anyone who’s studying the language.

Kotoba – Another app I use everyday for studying, Kotoba is, simply, a very good dictionary for Japanese to English and vice versa.

BBC NewsReader – The Beeb’s app is different from other news apps in that it keeps a running update of the stories already loaded into the phone. Everytime you start the app, it begins downloading both recent information and updates to previous downloads. This makes loading pictures and older stories much faster on slow networks. The app breaks the news into three broad categories – Magazine, UK, and Americas. Within that, the user can define what kind of news they’re most interested in. The one thing I’m not quite happy with, especially in comparison to the two other news apps on my list, is that tapping on a story takes you to a BBC page that has to be resized before it could be considered remotely readable. However, for quick access to news that has a perspective different from the U.S. one, this app is a must.

New York Times – The NY Times has received a lot of (deserved) praise for their iPhone app. It serves as a prime example of how newspapers can remake themselves for the web and, in this case, the mobile web. The home screen breaks the paper down into its familiar sections – World, U.S., Politics, etc. From there, users have the option to scroll through stories in a given section or to choose the Latest, Popular, or Saved stories. And it’s this last option that really sets the app apart. The ability to save stories for later reading (as well as being able to e-mai them) adds a necessary functionality that recognizes that being mobile does not mean always having all the time you’d like to read up on the news. Further, the stories are automatically formated for the iPhone screen so that resizing before reading is not necessary.

New York Times Crossword – This is easily the most expensive app on my list. At roughly 10 bucks you have to love crosswords to make this worth the money. What’s more, you have to love the NY Times Crossword as there are cheaper (lesser) apps available in the iTunes app store. However, on the plus side, this is the same puzzle that appears in the daily paper. Players can submit their answers to an online database and find out if they have gotten all the cells correct or not. The controls are intuitive and easy to use; the screen uses a keyboard to input characters, but allows finger gestures for resizing the puzzles and for moving around the puzzle area. The puzzles start at a relatively easy level on Monday and get progressively harder throughout the week. For myself, this is my favorite lunchtime application. I find that nothing wakes my brain up as taking thirty minutes to play through a puzzle before heading back into the classroom.

Doodle Jump – You know those games that take 10 seconds to learn but can eat up hours on end being played? Well, the iPhone has a lot of them and Doodle Jump is my favorite. The object is very simple. Maneuver your Doodle through a series of obstacles to see how high you can take him. The game functions by giving your character an automatic bounce off of platforms; the only control the player has is to move the Doodle from side to side by turning your wrist and taking advantage of the iPhone’s motion sensors. Great fun.

Brushes – This is the newest on my list of must have applications. I picked it up earlier this week after seeing the story where the cover of New Yorker magazine had been made with it. Not only was it a cool cover but the idea that this could be done on an iPhone was pretty spectacular.

CameraBag – While the iPhone camera is not the best cameraphone available, apps like CameraBag make it a lot of fun. I won’t say too much about it here as I have already written about it and posted photos I took using the app on this blog.

Text – I live in Japan. Japan is somewhat notorious for preferring phone based e-mail to text messaging. In fact, my last three phones did not have texting software on them at all. So having a phone that can finally text, combined with Softbank’s data plan which lets users text each other for free, is really, really, cool. Having texting available means I feel like I can finally keep up with services like Twitter and the now, sadly defunct, I Want Sandy, in the manner for which they were designed.

Stanza – People are still skeptical about the value of ebooks but this app should push at least a few people decidedly into the “for” column. Stanza works with several different online services to download books to the phone, where they can be read offline, one screen at a time. I’ve found that the small screen makes books feel longer than they are, but, on the other hand, that the rapid pace with which the screen changes makes them just fly by. In short, while this is not my favorite way to read, it is an acceptable and convenient way to read.

WordPress – Obviously, I’m a blogger. Not quite as heavy a blogger as I once was, but I do still enjoy keeping a blog up and running for those occasions when I want to say something that won’t fit into 140 characters. That’s where WordPress’ iPhone app comes in. It has a nice, clean design that makes it easy to log in and update any blogs you have hosted on WP. This is kind of a no brainer for anyone who has both an iPhone and a WP blog.

Wolfram Alpha – One of the best features of the iPhone / Safari combo, in my opinion, is the ability to put a bookmark on the home screen of the phone. What this means is that when I want to search for something on Wolfram Alpha, I do not need to open up Safari and scroll through my bookmarks. Rather I just touch one icon and there’s WA, ready for input. And while I’m not a heavy WA user (not yet anyway) I have been curious about the service and wanting to try it out. So, while the individual site may change, eventually, the capacity to keep it right on my homescreen won’t and that is something that I just love about the iPhone.

MLB.com’s At Bat – I’m not much of a sports fan. I enjoy watching the games but I don’t really keep up with the statistics or even the player rosters too much. But I love baseball. I love the romanticism and history associated with the game and I do try to keep up with at least the Padres every season. At Bat makes it much, much easier to do so. The app provides schedules, play by play, recaps, standings, stats, photos, live game coverage, and soon, live video streaming of games. The only downside is that those clever bastards at MLB.com have decided to charge by the season, rather than a one time fee. Still, as a way to follow baseball that doesn’t require you to be in front of your t.v. at a set time or wading through tons of newsfeeds, this is the app to get.

Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha has been around for a few weeks now, having debuted to a squawking chorus of voices. The initial reports from Mashable and Lifehacker sounded intriguing and promising but the talk on podcasts like TWiT and the virtual water cooler that is Twitter was more confused than relevatory. The single most coherent and reasoned explanation of / musings on was on Buildings and Food (a great site anyway).

The first question most people had was, what is Wolfram Alpha? The answer is that it is a knowledge computation engine, whatever that means. From the website:

“Wolfram|Alpha aims to bring expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people—spanning all professions and education levels. Our goal is to accept completely free-form input, and to serve as a knowledge engine that generates powerful results and presents them with maximum clarity.”

Wolfram Alpha was designed by mathematician Stephen Wolfram; the database/search functions are based on the programing language Mathematica which he also designed, way back when.

Taking the play-with-it-until-it-breaks approach exemplified by Gina Trappiani’s original Lifehacker post, here are the things I learned via WA.

I am 33 years, 10 months, and 8 days old today.

I live 5663 miles from my mother’s house, which itself, is 243.4 miles from where I went to university.

My name, Joel, has some interesting data attached to it: there are currently 222,373 people sharing my name. It was most popular as a birth name during 1979 / 1980.

By comparing my first and middle names, we learn that my middle name is much more popular as a given name than is my first name.

Arizona became a state 97 years ago. Its highest point is Humphrey’s Peak at 3850 meters, while its lowest is the Colorado River at just 21 meters.

The average lifespan of American men vs. Japanese women is 75.92 years to 85.59 years, meaning that my wife is going to outlive me by ten years. But we already knew that.

There are also a number of things I couldn’t find. For example….

A search for the average rate of oxygen consumption used by SCUBA Divers at one atmosphere resulted in this:

Searching for the average lifespan of labrador retrievers brought back no results at all, only a suggestion to search on the word “dogs.”

Searching for “ the average number of e-mail addresses of teenagers” likewise brought back no meaningful results.

And finally, there are the Easter Eggs (which I found via this post, and this follow-up post on Mashable):

In the meantime, WA has released it’s first update, which has a few changes to the system, namely updating the linguistic structures recognized so that more queries will be returned. (Again, Mashable has the full list.)

In the meantime, Google has its new Google Squared, and Microsoft has launched Bing, both of which aim to change and modify how we search the web.

Songbird

While it isn’t quite ready for prime time, Songbird is an excellent music player with the potential to be a one stop music application.

The biggest thing that differentiates Songbird from other library managers like iTunes is the built in browser. Based on the Mozilla engine, the browser works just like any other, only that when you surf to a music site, Songbird automatically searches the site for .mp3 files that can be downloaded and arranges them in a window at the bottom of the screen. This makes reading music blogs a whole lot cooler as you can immediately download the file you are reading about (if it has been posted to the site). Legal issues aside, it is a great way to find new music.

The initial download comes with a few bookmarks preloaded; there are a ton of music sites and blogs that are greatly enhanced by viewing them through Songbird. Some of my favorites are Muxtape, eMusic, and Gumdrop.

Songbird also recently added their own version of Coverflow, letting users scroll through their library by album cover, much like in iTunes. While this is very cool, there are still some issues – like getting all the album art – that need to be worked out.

Hopefully, too, future versions will add video support and better integration with the major music shopping sites as well as podcast management. For now though, Songbird is a decent player and library manager but it is not quite a replacement for iTunes. Yet.

*I’ve written about Songbird before, here.

Testin Y’all Testin

Nevermind this post. Seriously. This is just a quick test of the WordPress application for the iPhone. We’ll have to see what this looks like and take it from there.

The New York Times Crossword for iPhone / iPod Touch

There is something compelling, even obsessive about a good crossword puzzle. And the New York Times is one of the best crosswords around. So finding out that they had put together an app for the iPhone was fantastic news. However, the price tag, a hefty $10, left a me little cautious. After all, once bitten, twice shy and while the NY Times had yet to bite, plenty of other applications had.

A quick glance through the online reviews assuaged some of my fears and I purchased the app.

It has been worth every penny so far.

The first, and most important note is that this is the NY Times Crossword, just as it appears in the newspaper, delivered straight to your phone every day. The puzzles are generally easier at the beginning of the week and the weekend puzzles are slightly larger. The puzzles are difficult but doable, the clues are clever, and the app is easy to use.

Although it does take a second to load, once it’s up, users are given options to Play, Connect, Rankings, Extras, and Help.

The Play option, naturally enough, takes users right into the main area of the application. From there, players can continue they puzzle they had been working on, choose the newest (daily) puzzle, or browse through the archives. Once inside a puzzle, the options are useful and clearly defined without an distractions or unnecessary information cluttering up the onscreen real estate.

Players can check letters, words, or complete puzzles, with the option to fully unlock each puzzle 24 hours after it has been released. Some of the more useful features include using the iPhone’s multi-touch option to resize the screen, making it easier to highlight the correct space, and being able to circle letters for easy reference. Other, lesser features, include being able to “write” with a pen or pencil, although both allow the player to change their answers, and reading a list of clues.

The Connect feature adds a bit of sociabilty to the application by letting users compare themselves to other users via a “Legends” page as well as maintaining a profile. The profile area lets users track their daily stats and provide a bit of information about themselves. Related to the Connect menu is the Rankings menu, allowing users to view online scores and to (again) check their daily stats.

Under the Extras menu, users can view the front page of the New York Times and check the Magmic Social Network, etc.

The one negative is that at $9.99, the application is quite pricey. Especially when there are $.99 crossword puzzle applications available in the iTunes store. However, when you consider that a subscription to the print edition of the New York Times can run $50 a year, and even the online edition is $30, $10 for the crossword and the free NY Times news app seems like a bargain.

All told, the New York Times Crossword is a fantastic application for crossword lovers.

Refinements

The last time I went book shopping I didn’t actually buy anything. Instead I took pictures of the things I wanted then went back home and got online: Wikipedia to Amazon to iTunes and back around comparison shopping and information gathering until I found the best deal and best format for the book I wanted (David Sedaris’ “When You Are Engulfed in Flames.”)

While bouncing between these sites I came across a few refinements that I (as a loyal customer) want to see.

And the first thing is this – why doesn’t Amazon have a library function built into it?

Amazon should be able to let users make easily accessible library files that are searchable by Amazon’s robots to let readers know which books they’re missing or when new books come out. In other words, I don’t want to wade through the stacks and piles of books to see if I still have a copy of another Sedaris book while I’m online. I want to know, right then, if I have a copy or if I should take advantage of Amazon’s “buy together” deals. Amazon bought Shelfari a while ago, so I’m hoping that maybe they’ll add some more social functionality to their sites sometime soon.

Addtionally, Amazon should be able to host bookclubs and discussion groups fairly easily, shouldn’t they? Somewhere where users / readers can get together to discuss the books they’ve bought in something a little more organized that the current reviews system?

I’m also hoping they make something like the iTunes Genius sidebar, but for Amazon for better recommendations of new books.

Then again, speaking of iTunes, why is there no wishlist? One of the best parts of the Amazon shopping experience is being able to bookmark books one is interested in into either a shopping list or a wishlist. I’m getting frustrated by going into the iTunes store, finding something that I want to buy in the future and having to save the name in a file completely separate from my iTunes account. And how about gifts? It would be very nice to have the gift lists that Amazon has.

Basically, I want Amazon’s shopping functionality in iTunes and iTunes library management in Amazon and better social integreation
and user interaction in both.

And then there’s Wikipedia. I’m a bit of a completist, a bit of a collector. It’s pretty common for me to surf to Wikipedia to get a full bibliography on whichever author I’m interested in at the moment. But because of Wikipedia’s lack of built in bookmarking, I find that I end up searching for the same information over and over, or cluttering up my browswer bookmarks with Wikipedia links.

I want a tag cloud so I can bookmark my favorite articles and references within Wikipedia. I want to be able to build my own wiki of most referenced articles, and I want a way to pull that information into shopping sites / applications.

All of this may seem a little demanding, and it is. After all, I’m just a customer, with no knowledge of how difficult it would be to implement any of these ideas in any of these places. At the same time, I’m a customer, and a good one. I spend a fair portion of my disposable income in both Amazon and iTunes and Wikipedia is my go to source for information.

Which is to say that I am not entitled to these changes, but that it is in the best interest of all three services to continue to explore ways to make the experience better for the end user and this is just my two cents on how to please this particular shopper.

Searching for Reasons

Several people seem to have followed the move to Tumblr as a single place in which to read all my collected postings and doings around the internet.  However, there have been some complaints as to the dual nature of the posts:  the actual posts and essays vs. the one line tweets and links.  So, I have split them up.

For the time being and until it changes again, posts, essays, articles, and anything else longer than one or two sentences will be cross-posted to smiley.tumblr.com.

All one line bookmarks, song recommendations, tweets, jaikus, and whatever else, will be cross-posted to smiley.jaiku.com.

In the meantime, I have received more than a few queries as to why this blog has yet to be updated with a meaningful post and whatever happened to that whole 25 – 30 thing anyway?

And the answer is, well, two things:  one, I had originally intended to write the stories as close to the truth as possible, only changing names and distinguishing features, and two, I got sidetracked.

The first part is the more easily explainable, if not the easier to understand.  Basically, it became too painful in some cases and too embarrassing in others to write the stories I wanted to write.  There are too many people who would know exactly who and when I was writing about, even with disguises and name changes, and that could be unfortunate for a lot of people, myself included.  In addition, some events I had thought I was well past turned out to be very painful, still, in the act of writing them down.  I found that I had, and have, no desire to post what I have written (which is a fair bit, actually).

I’m not sure what I will do with it all yet, whether it gets re-written into semi-autobiographical fiction, or if I just figure to hell with it all and post it as is.

In the meantime, there is good old excuse number two.  I got sidetracked.  While all this non-blogging was happening, I started working on a novel, longhand, in a notebook.  It is slow going, but going very well.  I think I might actually have some idea of where it is headed…but it has surprised me once or twice already.  Once the longhand draft is finished, I’ll do a proper first draft on the computer and then we’ll see where we’re at.

(I’m using a trick called zero-drafting.  The longhand version is sloppy, uses telling instead of showing, and is all in first person.  The point is to get dialogue and basic plot points down, rather than working on details or nuances.)

So, yeah, that’s that.  Thanks for being patient and don’t worry, there will be stories on this site again, eventually.

Time to Start Thinking Ahead Again

Here’s a list of places and/or organizations to whom I am considering giving money to in the next twelve months:

• CBLDF – The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is one of those organizations near and dear to my overfed and often overwhelmed geek heart.  Their sole purpose is to defend comic book creators, publishers, sellers, buyers, and readers from lawsuits and litigation based on first amendment principles.
• EFF – The Electronic Frontier Foundation is another group, like the CBLDF, that defends people in first amendment court cases.  However, they focus on a broader group and make a lot of policy-making cases as they encounter new technologies in their cases.
• Words Without Borders – Supporting free and open communication and protection of journalists through the world, while simultaneously trying to expand the scope of public debate in first world countries by bringing in new and possibly unheard or ignored voices from the rest of the world.
• Nanowrimo – National Novel Writing Month is a challenge, contest, community to which I happily belong.  Every year, the organization challenges people to write a novel in one month, thereby encouraging creativity and freedom of expression.

There may be more as the month progresses and I start figuring out what I want to focus on in the next year or so, but, for the moment, I’m leaning towards the above organizations, all of which support freedom of speech, as a platform from which to base my personal politics, and thus, my actions in life.

Joe’s Goals

Well kids, it’s been a while since I told you all about the latest Web 2.0 / Social Internet sites I have been playing with, so here is a quicky post all about one of my current favorites:

Joe’s Goals, located at, funnily enough, www.joesgoals.com, is an online goal tracking system. It has a really nice UI (user interface) and a pretty nice layout. Joe’s Goals allows one to add a weight to each goal, denoting how important it is on the grand scale of things. Once the data is entered, one can manipulate it in a few, limited, ways, like seeing what one’s overall score is for a week or a month or however long you feel like checking.

As you can see in the screenshot above, I am pretty good about updating the blogs on a daily basis. I am not so good at just about everything else. In fact, I am pretty bad at drinking soda and eating sugar everyday.

And this is what I really like about the service. It is easy to see, at a glance, how well one is doing with one’s goals. I can see that I really need to up the workouts and cut back on the sugar and sodas again.

The service is still being improved on a regular basis, based mainly on user feedback and requests. One newer, more social aspect, is the tagging of goals into a tag cloud much like those used by del.icio.us. and flickr.com. If I am thinking about adding a goal to my list, I can go to the tag cloud to see what others are striving for. Of course, with this improvement comes the option to keep some goals private.

If you have some projects or goals in your life, Joe’s Goals is a good resource for helping you to make sure that you are actively working toward them.

technorati tags:goals, joesgoals, effort, lifehack, organize, accomplish

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Random Thought About Peat Bogs

The ancient, or at least historical bodies the scientists pull out of peat bogs – they’re all criminals aren’t they?  I mean, good, honest, well-liked people got buried or entombed or cremated, right?  So, the guys they pull out of the peat bogs with all the stab marks and ropes still around their necks, they were bad guys, right?

I should mention that this thought was prompted by an excellent piece from Slate, regarding the nature of peat bogs and how they keep things fresh for centuries, sometimes millenia.

Just something to think about.

technorati tags:slate, peatbog, deadguys, criminals

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Sword of Damocles Redux

Well, not to be outdone by the One Man, who has opened up a great cafepress store to make his artwork more available to all of you out there in the world, I created a new cafepress store today, celebrating my drawing of the Sword of Damocles.

For anyone who is not up on their Greek legend, Damocles was a courtier in the court of Dionysius the King, and was prone to flattering the King far beyond what was neccessary, or even wanted.  Damocles often remarked how nice it would be to be king – to have anything one wanted so readily available.  So, one day, Dionysius asked Damocles if he would like to come up and sit on the throne and be king for a day.  Of course, Damocles was delighted and accepted immediately. 

Food was brought for Damocles, as well as fine entertainments, courtesians, wine, everything Damocles could wish for.  Long into the day, Damocles looked up and saw a sword hanging over his throne by a single thread.  At that moment, Damocles lost all interest in the entertainments; the food and drink lost their flavors and Damocles knew what it felt like to be king.

Now, in my experience and, admitedly, cynical viewpoint, a sword is much too overt.  We are prepared for the attack; we expect to forced to defend ourselves against violence and others coveting our holdings.  No, in my view, it would never be a sword above our heads, seated there on the throne, it will always be something altogether more innocent and subtle that will be the end of us.

If you like the picture, even after my somewhat gruesome explanation of its origins, buy something.  I make a little bit of money off of the products – somewhere between fifty cents to five dollars, depending on the product.  If you don’t care for the image, or just don’t want to spend the cash, well, no hard feellings.

Cheers.

technorati tags:drawing, art, sale, cafepress, print, charcoal, swordofdamocles, damocles

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Dangerous New Toy

Have you seen this? Stalkerati.com is a new site that will run simultaneous searches on most of the prevalent social networks (MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, etc) as well as Google Blog Search and Google Image Search.

The only drawback is that most of the people I know either wouldn’t use these services, or are much too paranoid to use their real names.

Still, I found a few people, very, very easily. Scary.

And that’s it. I know the posts on here have sucked for the past month or so, and I apologize. I need to get something more…real, I guess…put up here but I’m still running low on energy and have about a billion projects that need more urgent attention than this blog does. Not too mention my work schedule is about to kick into overdrive. And my foot is still messed up (I managed to get a blister on about 1/3 of the ball, and it tore open, leaving a large, open gash on the bottom of my foot. Didn’t you just need to know that?) so I’m hobbling around my apartment feeling sorry for myself.

Tomorrow, however, I have the day off, so, with any luck, I can get some stuff done and maybe get back to some real posting. On the other hand, Amazon just came by with some new paperbacks, so, maybe, tomorrow, I’ll do nothing and let myself feel good about it.

Go stalk someone.

Bzzz Agenting

Another something from the world wide weirdness that I find interesting:  BzzAgent.com.

I came across it after doing some research on word-of-mouth marketing campaigns for an MBA studies course that I teach.  The site, essentially, is a marketing company focusing on using street teams to lead new product launches.

The company sends each Agent a product kit with some information and a sample or two.  The Agent tries it out and forms their own opinions.  Once they have a solid opinion, they recommend the products to their friends, family, co-workers, anyone, just like they would recommend a favorite cafe or a new CD.  The Agent then takes any information they have gathered about whether people seem receptive or repulsed and files a report on the website.  Agents who file more reports get more points. Points can be redeemed for products (prizes).

The whole concept is based around the idea that we are all so immune to traditional advertising these days, due to over-exposure, that for any suggestion to be effective, it must come from someone we trust.  In other words, we don't necessarily feel that we should buy those new shoes when Nike tells us to, but when your friend Bob on the basketball team recommends them, well, tell us where to shop.

Luckily I'm spared the agonizing decision of whether or not to become a shill by the fact that they don't operate in Japan.  But I'm still following this site because it is just such an interesting new dynamic.  I can't help but wonder how much this will affect traditional advertising, if at all, and how we will feel about our friends reccos. when we know that they might be getting those recommended products for free. 

Self-Referential

Just an uber-quick post today:  I've added the Flickr and Delicious widgets to the right hand sidebar, if anybody feels like taking a look.  If you don't, that's cool too.  I added them more to try out the functionality than anything else, and I'm happy that WordPress is adding more and more widgets every day.  One of the few things I miss from using Blogger was the ability to change the sidebar, although learning to do so took a lot of time I hadn't wanted to spend doing so.  

Anyway.  Good job WordPress team.

Also, I changed the categories to be a little more interesting.  I think.  Kinda.