Month: November 2004

Adam Curry and Steve Gillmor picked up my jam session with daughter Talia. Heh heh, thanks guys! Steve reports the correct song title. The tune is So What, not Freddie Freeloader. Oops. Different songs, same album. I find that while my verbal memory and musical memory are both pretty good, my ability to remember associations, e.g. names of songs, isn’t nearly as good.

Woah, check this out: “They’re Everywhere is one of the first major independent CDs to be released under a ‘Creative Commons’ license.”

Jim’s Big Ego: “You rule like a queen, in a land where queen is king, you rule like captain Jane-a-way”

Via JOHO, Zach Braff’s Garden State Blog. Ostensibly ZBGSB is a movie promo blog (a first?), but it’s cool that Braff is using the blog like a blog and not just an ad vehicle. Looks like the makings of a great blogger, if he sticks with it. Subscribed.

OpenACS 5.1.3 was released over the holiday weekend.

After the bakery we undertook some serious jazz study in this audio weblog post. 🙂

Talia and I ventured over to the Union Bakery today, a new padaria brasileira near our home in Somerville. It’s where the Grand Coffeehouse used to be. A little more samba, a little less Radiohead. But just as sweet.

I agree with Dave Winer on this one. Even with the disclaimers about newsreaders and such, there’s still a pretty good chance that the reader will wonder why there are two versions of the blog homepage. At the opposite end are the readers who “think the link is broken” when they see all those angle brackets. Here’s my claim: it’s okay, people will figure out that all those angle brackets make their life better and will eventually forget about them. That is, they will disappear into the background, but not because we went out of our way to hide them.
Before dismissing me as technology-elite, take a listen to this talk by Malcolm Gladwell at IT Converations. He talks about peoples’ reactions to new products and ideas. Quote:

There’s a class of products that are difficult for people to interpret. Some things really are ugly, and when we say that they’re ugly, they really are ugly and we’re always going to think that they’re ugly. Right? They’re never going to be beautiful. But there’s another class of products that we see and we don’t really know what we think. They challenge us. We don’t know how to describe them. And we end up, if we’re forced to explain ourselves, calling them ugly, because we can’t think of a better way to describe our feelings. And the real problem with asking people what they think about something is that we don’t have a good way of distinguishing between these two states. We don’t have a good way of distinguishing between the thing that really is ugly, and the thing that is radical and challenging, and simply new and unusual”

It’s probably a stretch to equate XML with the Aeron chair, but perhaps they’re not so different.

NY Times: “Isaac Newton in the Kitchen”.

Bowblog: “Gigadial threatens to absorb the next six months of my life.”