ugh. it's time to get off the computer. i don't want to go. i'm too attached. how will i survive? it's really sad that i'm going to be spending a week on an island on the great barrier reef and all i can wish for is that i could have my computer on my lap on the beach. i can't decide whether it's an addiction, like a drug, or a necessity, like food. brain food. i'm going to be starving. oh well. don't expect any posts until april 9th. unless by some miracle i get net access. i can always hope. 12:15 pm

i had another vivid dream last night. i think it has to do with hormones. some times during the month i tend to have more exceptionally vivid dreams. this one was much less traumatic than the last. there were some dolphins trapped in a riverbed, the water level had dropped and they couldn't make it the six feet to the large lake nearby. so i helped them because they asked me to. dreams are odd. it's no wonder people try to analyze them. 11:56 am

why is it that when i take a sip of something extremely hot, say coffee for example, and it's so hot that i burn my tongue, i then feel the need to swallow it so i can burn my throat too. 11:06 am

cruel. but funny. 10:20 am

i've discovered a serious flaw in blogger. posts that are longer than 7600 characters get cropped. don't use blogger for really long posts. bad blogger bad. 09:15 pm

cool as wireless ethernet is, i did *not* need the mental of image of where cam is updating his site from. 06:14 pm

cyborg names. 05:43 pm

it's too late! i'm already a cyberperson. and i'm happy about it dammit. thanks john. 02:12 pm

New Species, Old Struggle. while i think the writer's accurate about all the dot-coms that will probably be failing soon, i think that the new breed is being overlooked. via tomalak. 02:01 pm

more women, "relationships" and business. can anyone imagine bringing home a salary of $116.8 million? 01:02 pm

looks like we now have a weblog authority.

"please create your own personal web site.
.please do not create a weblog unless it's something like this or this.

personal media ecosystem??? i'm sorry, but any product that trademarks a marketing speak name like that would have to work real hard to convince me to use it. somehow, i get the feeling that a lot of companies think that if they put up a blog on their site and talk about being in the "relationship" business and "open source marketing", they will attract the <sarcasm> "blog community" </sarcasm> and bank on themselves being a meme. based on this article, i have a feeling "relationships" will be the next big buzzword. lifeset link found in a blatant self-promotion post on metafilter. article link via john. 11:30 am

i hate it when a blog slips off my radar for a few weeks. especially when i'm bored and need more stuff to read. john made a really good point last week (5/22) about using the macworld article for credibility. now, i'm thinking the resume would be a good place for that... 08:44 pm

i haven't laughed so hard since bloat first appeared last year. kevin wrote a letter to sally tennpenny (3/28) complaining about the cheerleading that sally has been doing for the status quo. adam then ripped it apart quite thoroughly. and, sally responded to it. i never thought i'd see bloat accused of blogger elitism.

one thing that did stand out was sally's comment:

"People are always saying you should "log for yourself" but that's bullshit. You don't log for yourself, you log for other people, that's the whole point. What those people really mean is that you should surf for yourself. Find the links that interest you, not your readers, not other webloggers, and tell us why they're interesting. If you do it well, you will open up minds and gain active readers."

shit. i hate it when i'm forced to write comments explaining previous comments because those comments have been misinterpreted. 02:22 pm

the comment below has nothing to do with this topic. it is in no way meant to imply that i am one of those "better and more popular" people. it was in fact written based on a conversation about companies. 02:19 pm

i wonder why people get so upset and jump to accuse others of being trendy and exclusive when it's really just jealousy over the fact that they're better and more popular? 01:47 pm

weird. sexuality is related to finger length. 01:19 pm

i want one of these. wearable devices are too cool. 01:12 pm

deep linking is ok. 12:56 pm

i should go to bed. i don't feel like going to bed tho. i feel like writing. i have nothing to write about, since i just finished another long post which i ended because i had nothing else to write about. i'm getting better tho. this one was 1100 words. 12:33 pm

this whole article about kosmo never making money is completely undermined by the statement: "if they can count from one to 50 backwards and don’t turn up for their interviews sporting eyebrow rings and Mohawk hairdos, they can get jobs as software engineers".

the author clearly doesn't know what he's talking about. eyebrow rings and mohawks deterrants to getting jobs as software engineers? ha. now if they showed up in a suit and tie... thanks anil. 12:30 pm

dammit. now i have to pack my blogger t-shirt so i can get a picture taken wearing it in australia. then i can win the prize for picture taken furthest away. oh wait, there are no prizes. :) 11:52 am

i love derek's new design, which is being talked about everywhere. seeing something like this really drills home the amazing creativity that i find myself lacking. 11:48 am

i think i've discovered that bad side of taking medication that is a stimulant. you end up staying up really late, even tho you've got to get up early in the morning. and, there's no point in going to bed because you won't actually sleep, you'll just lie there thinking about stuff instead of sleeping. i guess i can't complain, it's better than a depressant. with a depressant, you *need* to sleep 10 hours and feel like shit if you don't. 01:28 am

disclaimer: just because i've started a site where i write long stuff, doesn't mean i expect people to read it or even like what i'm writing. i'll be the first to admit that the writing on brig.nu sucks. but, if i don't write it, it'll never improve. 11:36 pm

whoever claimed that my writing was supposed to be impressive? certainly not me. 07:16 pm

can someone explain the latest bloat to me. i can't tell whether my design or my hair is being insulted, or both. 06:55 pm

i'm *really* beginning to think the religious analogy was a bad one. especially since, as crazy uncle joe points out, it seems to have been misconstrued that neale and ben were god's in this theory. then again, ben could change his title from pop icon/rock star to web god. 05:23 pm

i wonder what the appeal is of elevating ben to web-star status. i just feel the need to keep propagating the love. maybe it's the ridiculous irony of being able to propel someone to fame merely by linking to them constantly and talking about them. or the illusion of that. maybe we should invent our own idoru. then we won't have to worry about ben's head exploding. 02:45 pm

hmm. in retrospect, maybe the religion analogy isn't actually very good. although some of the rantings about this stuff, have taken on a sermon-like tone. 02:40 pm

permanent links. bah. who needs permanent links. 02:34 pm

this article about online bookmark managers, merely underscores the reasons i got out of clip2. thanks john. 12:37 pm

today seems to be a day for copping links from others. 12:03 pm

i wonder if sxsw inspired this article. Technology Has Made Some People Money, but Is That All There Is? by denise caruso. my favorite quote: "think about starting companies and building products that they believe will change the world, rather than merely amassing wealth". thanks lilly. 12:01 pm

Ceiva Internet-Enabled Photo Frame. i want to be on pb's photo mailing list. link and mailing list idea blatantly stolen from tom. 11:48 am

i think that's the first thought provoking thing i've written in months. sad. 11:43 am

talking to matt just now, i've decided that the weblog/journal thing is like religions. ben's trying to convert us to the long post religion, neale's trying to keep us in the short post religion, and some of us are standing in the middle saying "we can do both". oh, and the definition of a weblog is like the arguments over the meaning of lines in the bible. 11:42 am

um. neale forcefully proclaiming why weblogs shouldn't become journals. at least i think that's what he's saying. article one : put the keyboard down and back away from the weblog. 11:35 am

this really sucks: Anti-spam e-mail suit tossed out. thanks matt. 11:18 am

i think i'm bored. actually i know i'm bored. i can tell this because i've read every email in my inbox, including all those mailing lists that i haven't looked at in a few weeks, i've unsubscribed from the really boring lists that i was on but never bothered to unsubscribe from, i've updated the weblog list and added all the backlogged submissions, i've gone through all my bookmarks 3 times today, and now i'm just sitting here intently playing with silly putty contemplating the boring evening i have ahead of me.

i miss jason. living alone is great for the first couple of days, then you just want to have another body around, for companionship, to eat dinner with, to keep the bed warm. sigh. 07:16 pm

don't ask me why, but i never bothered to read this redesigning of america article when everyone was linking to it last week. the most interesting line to me was in the first paragraph. "...we would constantly redesign the space around us just to recover the joy of living." sounds like web design to me. 06:58 pm

laganoia: the fear, engendered by network lag of being ignored, shunned or left behind. 06:02 pm

New Wave In Surf City. too bad they didn't bother to make a list of all those santa cruz companies. i want to work for one. 02:21 pm

i just finished lord of emperors by guy gavriel kay. it was an amazing book. i hate it when publishers decide to split a single book in to 2 or 3 parts, especially when they so clearly are a whole work. sailing to sarantium was just the lead-in, introducing the characters, setting the stage. lord of emperors was the heart of the book. kay has a talent for making you love all the characters in his books, he looks at them from all sides, so even if someone is clearly a "bad guy", you understand *why*, the events that led him to do the things he did. everyone is loved by someone, and kay manages to show you a character from that point of view. sigh. back to waiting for the next one. 12:03 pm

matt took a picture of my house. all his other pictures are nice reminders of why i live in santa cruz. 11:46 am

Keep a Web journal, get fired ... or worse. a good article on the problems of keeping an online journal. it also mentions both halcyon (who works for "well-funded heaven's gate), and mark. via metafilter. 11:38 am

how to blog. boxes within boxes within boxes. 11:43 pm

andy brings up some interesting questions about gender bias. 11:11 pm

Get loose! Do a Weblog! um. yeah. i get the feeling this "trend" has taken on a life of its own. 10:50 pm

so, my hair is now blue again, it's not as vibrant as the purple, but, as matt can attest, hot pink is not my color. although the blue fades to a rather nasty greyish/bluish color, that's much easier to deal with than hot pink. 10:18 am

it's interesting how much you can take your surroundings for granted. for the first 6 months or so of living in my house, i was astounded by the beauty of nature, having deer and coyotes walk through the back yard, walking out on the deck to bask in the sun, listening to the sound of the birds, or at night listening to the complete and utter silence. then i got used to it and now i hardly ever notice it. but, showing matt around santa cruz yesterday was like seeing it all with fresh eyes. how beautiful the ocean is, how beautiful santa cruz is, and comparing it to san jose or sf, and realizing that i really *don't* want to live there. sure, there are wonderful things about the city, but it can't compare to the serenity of santa cruz. 10:15 am

i have this problem. sometimes i borrow stuff from friends, say a book, or a movie, and then i don't see them for 6 months, or when i do see them, i always forget to bring said item with me. then i feel bad because i know how it feels when people do that to me. just now, it finally occurred to me that there was a simple solution. if i like whatever it is i borrowed enough to buy my own copy, i can buy a new copy for my friend and have it delivered to them, even if i don't know their mailing address. as much as amazon has it's problems, they do have the nicest services. 03:04 pm

come to think of it, jeremy's 15 minutes of fame shouldn't really count as fame, since he's employed by the company who owns slashdot. 02:51 pm

meg points us to the ultimate worship site: ilovebenbrown.com. or is that self-worship? 02:46 pm

ugh. a free keyboard with handy aol keys. why not just create an aol computer? boot it up and it takes you to the places you *need* to go. 01:45 pm

zeldman tells us why gecko matters in the latest alistapart. 12:59 pm

stating the obvious asks the veen about collaborative technologies. a topic that was discussed at the interface culture panel at sxsw. 12:08 pm

so, if someone you're friends with gets 15 minutes of slashdot fame, does some of that fame rub off? no, you're just a dork who wants to say they know someone famous. 11:53 am

john was kind enough to send me this rant. it made me feel much better to know that not everyone thinks it's a myth. 07:30 pm

nothing pisses me off more than men saying that equality is reverse discrimination against males. or claiming that men get hired/promoted/paid better over women because they're better qualified. grrr. 01:56 pm

i can't believe someone seriously thinks that they can trade a web domain for housing. 01:13 pm

jason leaves for australia today. i leave next friday. i don't think they have internet access on the island. i'm already getting nervous about going a whole week without it. anyone else see the horrible parallels between net addiction and drug addiction? i have a one night layover in sydney on sat. april 8th, so, if anyone wants to hook up, let me know. everyone except neale, of course, i'm afraid of mr. happy. 12:15 pm

couple more things to add on the diablo thing. they asked for gender on the sign up form, so they did know that they were skewing it. and, even if only 6% of the applicants were female, that doesn't justify an uneven distribution. it's discrimination. and as mac users who are only around 3% of web site users know, being neglected because of low numbers is not ok. 11:50 am

only about 6% of diablo beta testers are women. i find it hard to believe that they couldn't have made the gender distribution more even. 11:15 am

dori came up with an online version of the Macworld mention. and also explains it. tom negrino her backupbrain partner in blogging wrote it. 06:37 pm

i get very concerned when i hear people talking about product features/directions that have nothing to do with enhancing the product, but everything to do with accomodating investors interest-du-jour. 03:58 pm

when ordinary coffee isn't enough extremecoffee.com. 03:45 pm

admittedly, discussion forums are a necessary aspect that would add value to weblogs, but i find it disturbing that a company has seen fit to define something that the creators have trouble defining.

"It is an online magazine with no content of its own, but instead selectively chosen links to content elsewhere."

"his time and money investment is so tiny"

"Most weblogs turn no revenue at all because they don't need to."

so when are you guys adding discussion? via cam. 12:01 pm

a very interesting interview with Noam Chomsky. thanks dan. 11:42 am

according to RasterWeb my portal was listed in macworld print edition. damn. i was about to say, "now i have to go out and buy one", and then i realized how incredibly stupid & pretentious that would be. aside from that, what exactly would i do with it? frame it? i can show people around my house and say, "and here, on this wall, is the framed cover of macworld, and the 1 line mention of my site". it's late, ok. i should be sleeping... 11:23 pm

so, jason said today that someone reading my weblog, who didn't really know me, wouldn't understand how cynical i am, and would think i was serious about things like, oh say, bribing me to be your friend. and thinking i was serious, would think that i was a complete egotistical bastard. i don't really care too much, because there's not much i can do about it, but i am considering putting out a general disclaimer every month or so. something like: please imagine that the writer is the most cynical person you've ever known. no scratch that. please imagine that the writer is the most cynical person you can imagine. read all posts with this in mind. 10:47 pm

me (at sxsw): my husband doesn't read my weblog.
jason (today): so i was reading your weblog...
this is just like last month when i said my dad would never read it. sigh. 10:41 pm

we all know that the new date formats for blogger are just a ploy to get jason to start using it. notice how that feature was the first thing they implemented once they got back... 10:38 pm

if anyone has been getting javascript errors, it's because of blogger being down. i yanked the script include from my pages so you shouldn't be getting any now. are you? 02:55 pm

wow. it may not be soft english teeth, it may just be bacteria passed from mother to child. thanks rebecca. 02:17 pm

option vesting plans are getting shorter. 09:19 am

i'm sitting here munching on mini-creme eggs. that my bestest, favoritest friend nick sent to me. they are just as yummy as he said they were. just think, you too could become my best friend, i'm so easily bribed. 09:58 pm

there's such an illusion that science knows everything about our world, but stories about finding extinct lizards, and tiny primates have to make you wonder. tiny primates found by rebecca. 07:01 pm

hee. someone was kind enough to make a few corrections. ex-beyond employees bitter? noooo. 06:29 pm

The 10 Second Internet Man@ger - survive, thrive & drive your company in the information age by mark breier, president & ceo, beyond.com. heeheehee. 10 seconds is about all the thought he put into being a manager. shouldn't they put "former ceo" or "resigned before they fired my ass ceo". too funny. 05:36 pm

this is for the women out there, A Woman’s Guide on How to Pee Standing. tell me you haven't wished for the convenience... 03:19 pm

after sxsw you wouldn't think i'd get weirded out by a stranger saying "i read your blog". but, sadly it's still odd. i think it's the lack of reciprocity (is that a word?). the fact that someone's looking into your life, but you haven't had the same opportunity to look into theirs. not that i'm saying people shouldn't be reading this if i don't read them, just that it's very odd meeting people who know so much more about you than you know about them. 12:33 pm

don't forget, today's the day to signup for the diablo ii beta. 11:38 am

what he said. 11:37 am

brad did a wonderful travelog of sxsw. he managed to capture the essence of sxsw so well. 11:12 pm

lane posits this theory about weblogs being "fast time" where as journals are more "slow time". he's got a really good point, although i would alter the line "weblogs are the bare minimum of creativity" to "weblogs are abbreviated creativity". there's just as much creativity going into the posts, just in short, brief bursts as opposed to long, extended entries. 10:16 pm

robert has redesigned. it's cool, but i miss the rubber ducky. 09:59 pm

jack so aptly points out how sad it is that we needed ben to snap us out of our rigid format. he's right, but at least we snapped out of it. 02:33 pm

well, the virtual domain isn't set up properly yet, so it's currently redirecting, but i finally figured out what to do with brig.nu. i wasn't sure what to do with it, i'd make it a more personal/intimate place for my writing, except i can't get much more personal than my blog, unless i got into talking about my sex life or my bathroom experiences, and i'm definitely not going to go there. so i was stumped. until the weblog panel at sxsw. it was then that i realized that sometimes i have more to say. more than can easily fit in a blog entry. i needed to do this for myself, and for my writing. the challenge being to write interesting long entries, as opposed to the more easy interesting short entries. and thus, 3000+ has been born. here you go ben. 11:53 am

i just realized that i have almost 60 sites that i visit every day. no wonder i'm spending so much time goofing off instead of working. 10:25 am

i'm pissed. sometime during sxsw my laptop decided to lose a line of pixels on it's display. right across the middle of the screen. jason tells me i should get it fixed, not buy a new one. but, i can't live without my laptop for a week. besides, it's way too much effort to take it to the repair shop. me a consumer of disposable goods? never. 10:22 am

i finished ship of destiny by robin hobb today. you can order it from amazon.co.uk now instead of waiting 'til september. it was a great book, a wonderful finale to the series which left me wishing for more. 10:16 pm

i also realized that i was sitting in a room with a bunch of engineers who were designing and building a piece of software. this piece of software would happen to run on the web instead of an os, but that's what i was listening to. it made me truly regret ever wanting to be a coder. i don't want to get that far removed from design. 08:04 pm

friday i sat through an engineering meeting that went something like "database blah blah schema blah blah blah packages blah blah classes blah blah ant blah blah jms blah blah blah blah". the only thing that remotely interested me was when someone said they hadn't started doing the registration code because there was no html mockup yet. "what, you can't code a form?", "well, it won't be formatted correctly...". bored. bored. bored. did i mention i was bored? it's much worse because of the sharp contrast of sxsw. where i left conversations inspired not dejected. 08:01 pm

blogger's been down. well, it's a good excuse for a lack of posts anyway. 07:55 pm

johnny was kind enough to send me this link to the diablo II Beta. 04:58 pm

this pocketmail backflip might be a nice palm accessory. then again, i could just get a palm vii... 03:14 pm

liz isn't having a very good birthday. everyone should send her a card to cheer her up. happy birthday liz! 11:52 am

it took me a while to figure out the reason i was banging my head against a wall trying to redesign. no graphics is not necessarily a good thing on a web page. 07:05 pm

i finally broke through my design wall. 06:58 pm

austin was great. enough like a city to be cool, and enough like a suburb to not be stressful. definitely on my list of places to live, if i ever leave california. besides, austin has sxsw. this was the best conference i've ever been to, most of the panels were interesting, the people were wonderful and i walked away with renewed faith in the web. the valley has degenerated into suits and power lunchs and marketing types, these were very much not in evidence in austin. 01:18 pm

apparently, i wasn't supposed to go to sxsw to have fun, i was supposed to be schmoozing for a job. i've seen at least 3 people either mention that someone wanted to hire them, or that they could have gotten a job if they'd brought their resume. (yes, i'm much too lazy to dig up links to them.) on second thought, if i have to schmooze to get a job, i don't want it. i'll just sit here and be jealous of matt, and try to figure out what i want to do with my life. 01:04 pm

Constructor, another toy to waste time with at work. 12:04 pm

the only point in coming to work today is the t1. after getting up at 5am, i cannot think coherently. 01:02 pm

exhaustion. over-saturation. over-stimulation. over-socialization. sadness. happiness. friendships. dehydration. needs assimilation. absorbtion. can't write complete sentences. must blog. sxsw over, done. sleep. 08:44 pm

my writing has definitely gone downhill. 11:32 pm

this has been a really unique experience for me, to meet so many people who i know so well and who know me so well. and also to be surrounded by so many people who "get the web", i am so rarely surrounded by "peers" who i can turn to and make a comment and have them understand without me explaining stuff. 11:30 pm

i really don't know what anyone is going to talk about tomorrow at the weblog roundtable, hopefully derek has some kind of agenda. 11:18 pm

i've met so many people in the last few days that i never imagined i'd meet. both people with a "the" in front of their names and people without. this morning, matt and i had breakfast at a table right next matt stone. he was talking about how noone in hollywood would give him an honest opinion about whether something is funny. i have always thought that people who accost famous people are losers, but sitting near him, i couldn't help feeling the urge to go up and worship. i managed to control myself tho. so, i missed out on the opportunity to talk to one of the creators of south park, but i didn't embarrass myself and feel like a loser. which is better? 11:16 pm

ugh. i'm exhausted. total sensory/social overload. 11:10 pm

brad has elevated me to "The" status. i think it's a typo. actually, it's probably a reward for telling him that he was the most popular weblogger so many times. 11:04 pm

hey, ev, didn't we just talk at dinner last night about kodak coming out with a camera that attaches to your palm... 11:00 pm

all i can say about today is: condoms do not belong in people's noses, you do not ever want to watch someone floss his nose with a condom, you do not want to see someone put that same condom back in his mouth and blow it out his nose or have that condom land perilously close to you. it's just not right. 10:51 pm

awww. poor neale. a mention in wired proves how much he deserves "all-star" status, but no one's around to blog it. 07:37 am

it's really bizarre actually meeting people who you've "known" for so long. some people actually look like you'd expect, some people you've seen pictures of, but they look just different enough to be new, and then others who you just have no idea about until you meet them. there's this first uncomfortable, meeting someone new moment, and then after a while you realize that you know this person too well to really be uncomfortable. very odd experience. 11:49 pm

since we're all in austin, everyone should go read neale since he will definitely *not* be posting sxsw stuff. besides, he's gone into "all-star blogger mode". 11:42 pm

the deepleap party was fun. you could look around the room and write up a "who's who" in the web world. matt and i bailed around 12pm tho, too much smoke. living in california, you forget what it's like to be around so much smoke. 11:29 pm

nikolai and lane both won sxsw web awards. the rest of the awards were boring except, of course, for halcyon who was just too cool for words. 11:11 pm

blogger redesigned. as always, derek's work is amazing. 09:25 am

i hate airlines. in fact i'm beginning to hate flying. i spent 2.5 hours sitting in the airport yesterday waiting for a plane to arrive from dallas, so i could leave san jose to get to austin. sigh. 09:23 am

i'm getting the feeling i'm missing something by never having tried a krispy kreme donut. 01:33 pm

if you haven't realized this already, i'm leaving for austin in a few hours. which means updates for the next 5 days will be sporadic at best. even if they're not sporadic, they'll be all about drunken debauchery at sxsw, so you probably won't want to read them. 01:22 pm

i was dreaming night before last that jason's stock shot through the roof (well not through the roof is was only at 80 or 90/share) but in my warped dream i whipped out a calculator and figured out that i now had $10 million (i don't know where jason was, since it was all my money in the dream). it was completely ludicrous because jason would have to have 100x more shares than he does or the stock would have to go 100x higher than it did. it was an odd dream, and still lingers which is unusual. 01:20 pm

voyeurism at it's best. almost.org: tales of near-sex experiences. via ratbastard. 01:11 pm

ugh. companies making money off of software that monitors surfing by the employees of the company that purchases it. 12:19 pm

i wonder if anyone's thought of the implications of so many bloggers going to austin for 5 days. think of all the neglected blogs. will everyone die of boredom? oh wait, most readers are bloggers so they'll be in austin. 12:15 pm

the most stupid tatoo comment yet: "so, are those colored in?", "they're tatoos.", "i know that, but are they just outline tatoos which you color in every day?". i think i'm just going to have to start telling people are paint them on every morning... 11:53 am

sometimes i hate trying to redesign. i'm sick of the black, but i just can't seem to get the colors that i want. which then makes me wonder if it's the layout that's the problem, which then makes me wonder why i'm bothering anyway, and then i come back to i'm sick of so much black. 05:52 pm

why is it that if you get a tatoo in a prominent place (say your wrists for example) people's first reaction is "are those real?" to which i really want to answer "no, i painstakingly paint them on every morning", their second reaction is either "how much did it cost?" or "did it hurt?", the cost question is understandable, but the hurting one is just dumb, "of course it hurt, do you really think that repeatedly being jabbed with a needle for 4 hours doesn't hurt?". sorry i had to get that out. 03:01 pm

a memorial for netscape. 02:43 pm

it's good to see more women in executive positions because of startups, but it's definitely purely supply and demand. not enough white males to go around. 02:28 pm

oh, and anyone who wants to actually arrange to meet somewhere (as opposed to just winging it, or waiting for the weblog panel) should email me. 02:23 pm

for anyone that will be there and actually cares, i'm arriving in austin friday night and will probably show up at the tail end of the gsd&m party or the city of ideas reception. i'm staying at the four seasons, my cellphone is 408.921.5550 and i'll try and remember to keep it charged. 02:18 pm

i hate going to the dentist. i hate having baking soda sprayed all over my face, i hate the disgusting taste of fluoride, and i hate being told i need two crowns. oh, and i hate having soft, english teeth that cause all this trouble in the first place. 12:31 pm

<bitch> i'm so tired of hitting pages that don't show up in netscape because people code badly and then check their site using ie. i think i've hit at least 4 or 5 today. if you can't write good code, can you at least check it with a browser that will show your errors?</bitch> 06:20 pm

furniture porn. nuff said. 04:27 pm

but, of course, metacubed will always be the furthest removed from the actual content... 03:12 pm

i've come to the conclusion that silly putty is the best toy to have on your desk. i can't stop playing with it. 03:06 pm

in the blink of an eye, there are 3 weblogs blogging weblogs. weblog nation, webloglog, and logspotting. 03:02 pm

i wonder if this could be a full-time job? "what do you do for a living?", "oh, i sell my eggs, i made 6 figures last year". 12:49 pm

yay! jjg is back! via metafilter. 12:02 pm

steve outing encourages media sites to start weblogs. 11:06 am

oh god. the portal is now well over 100k. maybe i need to start breaking it down by letter.... 07:45 pm

i find my amusement in odd places. i've been *finally* adding to the portal, and entry #666 was for this blog. i'm not making it up. really. 07:37 pm

sigh. another good product idea thrown away because of greed, not understanding who the customer really is, and desire to get to the ipo asap. i think 6 weeks before disillusionment and disgust is a record for me. i'm depressed. or i would be, if i wasn't going to austin on friday, i'll wait 'til next week to be depressed. maybe i'll start implementing that redesign... 06:43 pm

bored.bored.bored. i'm so bored, i'm watching my silly putty ooze down my monitor screen. hmm. maybe i should go home. 06:30 pm

ugh. a good reason *not* to surf with your cellphone. pretty soon there'll be telemarketers calling your cellphone. 06:26 pm

while i can understand why the guy would wnat to do this, i really can't comprehend why pet owners would feel the need to provide their dogs with artificial testicles. via rebecca. 06:18 pm

along with my sandpaper purchase last night, i also bought some metallic gold silly putty, which i learned was created especially for the 50th anniversary. and i just thought it was a cool color. via rebecca's pocket. 06:08 pm

verisign buys network solutions. i don't know why this surprises me, but it does. 01:00 pm

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12:41 pm

since it was requested, and it was a good idea anyway, i've put up pictures of my tatoos. 12:41 pm

i've come to the conclusion that i really want to work on products that are targeted at and truly useful for the web-user. as opposed to being targeted at companies and made useful exclusively to them at the expense of the web-user. this conclusion was coincidently reached after sitting in several meetings discussing how we could adapt the really cool consumer product we are building so it can be sold to companies. you know the magic b2b word. as opposed to the passe b2consumer word. about half way through the meeting after having explained what businesses will *want* to make the system do, and how that's bad for the consumer, i realized that if this product was targeted to businesses, i didn't want to build it. i was sold on the vision of a consumer product, not a company product. i don't know if i should feel bad about feeling like i could switch jobs so easily based on a change in direction. 10:32 pm

upon further reflection, i've come to the conclusion that i was a little too aggressive in my sanding, evidenced by the fact that my legs now sting and look mildly sunburned. so that's why the instructions said don't press too hard... 10:25 pm

ok, so i just got done sanding my legs. why, you may ask, did i just use sandpaper on your legs? well, you see, i was in the drugstore, picking up a prescription, and buying some lubriderm that *didn't* cause extreme pain when applied, and thought to myself "hey, i should probably get a razor, so i can shave before australia". conveniently the razors were right across the aisle from the lubriderm. anyway, i wander over and what do i see sitting so enticingly on the shelf, the hair off mitten. this amazing mitten "gently massages away unwanted hair. like magic it's exclusive silcoat finish removes hair...". well, i had to get it, obsessed with unwanted hair that i am, actually, i'm not, i just wanted to try it out. so, i get home and immediately decide to test this amazing product. opening the package, i notice that the mitten has an extremely familiar feel, kind of like very finegrade sandpaper. amazingly, it works, but, i'm wondering if i couldn't just go down to the hardware store... 10:06 pm

catscan. thanks liz. 07:23 pm

ewww. deformed frogs. via strange brew. 06:47 pm

an interesting RCFoC. lots more on wireless apps, and broadband. i can't wait for a dirc network. 05:29 pm

ceo's listen to sci-fi writers at a interent everywhere confrerence. 05:12 pm

Fortune: New Ethics... or No Ethics? this article makes me want to insist on a monthly vesting cycle, no 6mo/1yr cliff, next time i'm job shopping. if the vc's and ceo's are just trying to run to the ipo cash out, where does that leave the employees who still have 8 months 'til they vest? 03:16 pm

i think there is always one person on a team who constantly comes up with bizarre errors that nobody else has. i seem to be that person here. either that or it's just because i'm too lazy to learn the environment thoroughly enough to troubleshoot issues. 02:51 pm

so i'm finally trying out the noise-cancelling headphones, after managing to reclaim them from jason who was testing them all weekend. they work exceptionally well, i can't hear myself typing on the keyboard, or any other distracting sounds in a room full of 8 developers. my ears are kind of sore, i spent a couple of minutes trying to put the wrong earpiece in the wrong ear, for some reason it wouldn't stay in. duh. 02:41 pm

i have come to the conclusion that i spend way too much time reading other people's websites instead of doing work. my work day (oh god, i'm talking about my day again. stop reading.) seems to go something like get in read email, read blogs, surf, then around 2:30pm start thinking about doing some work, but then realize i've got a 3pm meeting, so there's no point in starting any work, so i then i just write boring entries in weblog talking about my day, which no one really wants to hear about, but for some strange reason, you're still reading this, and then finally get around to doing some work around 4:30pm. hmmm. i wonder if this would be considered a bad work ethic, or could i pawn it off as keeping up on industry news/technology. 02:25 pm

the deepleap folks have but more info up on their site. it's definitely as cool as they make it out to be and definitely *not* like a certain extremely annoying paperclip. 12:56 pm

never put lubriderm seriously sensitive lotion on a fresh tatoo. it is seriously painful. regular lubriderm feels quite good. for some reason i thought sensitive skin lubriderm would feel even better. i like pain, i like pain, i like p.... 12:41 pm

i was right. i had definitely forgotten how painful it is to get a tatoo. it's amazing how sensitive the insides of your wrists are. 09:15 pm

ok never mind, i figured it out. the 5k design contest article links to the weblog story. what's interesting is that 1000 people who didn't read the first weblog story, looked at the 5k story, and then discovered the weblog story. 12:49 pm

i don't get it. on friday, i got almost 1000 hits from this article which was written 2 weeks ago. i'd stopped getting hits from it. weird. 12:44 pm

i'm *really* beginning to wish i had a mr. happy toothbrush. 09:27 pm

so, i played Guess The Dictator/Sit-Com Character as myself (following herdishly along behind jason and ev). it came up with "Gary Hobbson from Early Edition/ USA". who the hell is gary hobbson? 09:24 pm

i finished the last three of daniel pinkwater's 5 novels today. very enjoyable, very bizarre, and very much targeted towards misfit teenagers. i'm thinking of taking up dadaism. 09:15 pm

what i want to know is how you *can* look like your blog. or does that only apply to the camera happy bloggers? 09:06 pm

dan writes an exceptional rant on discrimination. wish i'd written it myself. 08:54 pm

yay! blogger's back! now my postings are all screwed up tho, the two i wrote last night just got published and the stuff i wrote this morning duplicates some of that. so, skip over the bits you've seen before, or just don't bother to read it, it's not that interesting anyway.

posted this morning by hand:

i can't get to blogger's site. which partially explains the lack of updates, the other reason is that i blew off work yesterday and didn't look at a computer until last night. so i'm back to hand-coding, which is way too much effort. sad. good tools make you lazy.

bryan had an article written about him. i have a feeling that the fame comparison will not make his life any more pleasant.

i wrote an entry, which i couldn't publish, last night, about how leander kehany of wired seems to be trolling weblogs for news stories which he then sells to wired. he's done 3 in the last 10 days, but i'm too lazy to dig up the links again. the 2 latest are on jason's site.

i also experienced a miracle yesterday. i went to fry's and the salesperson in the video game aisle was helpful, spoke english, knew what he was talking about, had actually played a lot of the games, and was really nice. maybe i just dreamed it.

we bought jason a copy of the sims, since he kept playing mine which would, of course, make me want to play it too. and then picked up a couple of copies of age of empires 2. even tho i'd heard good things about it, i was avoiding it on the principle that a microsoft product couldn't possibly good. apparently, i was wrong, based on the fact that i played it for 4 hours last night.

this is turning into a blow by blow of my day. i hate that. but, i also made an appointment to get a couple of tatoos done on sunday. i got one on my ankle 5 years ago, and have wanted to get one on the other ankle and on each wrist since then. well, i'm finally getting the wrist one's done. and i've managed to forget how painful it was. which is probably a bad thing.

it's rather odd, but over the last 4 years i've gotten more and more conservative in both dress and style, trying to play the business game. wearing nice jackets to appear more professional etc.. all the time wishing that i was cool again. it wasn't until the end of my last job, and the beginning of this one, that i started to realize that i was so good at what i did, that i could look and dress however i wanted and they'd put up with it. i've become too valuable, i can be as eccentric as i want. what i'm realizing now is that i could probably have been this way before, but i needed to overcome that old school drone thinking and have enough confidence in my work to not care. so now i've got bright "pimpin' purple" hair, and i'm going to get some very visible tatoos, and i'll probably pull my doc's out of the closet and dust them off. either that, or i'm going through a mid-life crisis, and trying to recapture my youth... 08:50 pm

someone has finally figured out how to make money off of weblogs. the trick is, read lots of weblogs, then write stories either about weblogs or about the stuff they write about. leander kahney wrote this article on the 5k contest today, coincidentally mentioned in several blogs this week, this article on url hacking yesterday, something jorn was talking about last week, this article on weblogs last week, and a trusted resource tells me that another interview is in the works, although that resource has been known to play with people's minds. still, even without the unwritten article, it's still 3 articles in 10 days, all gleaned from weblogs. 08:59 pm

disclaimer: incredibly boring description of my day. today was quite a day. in a good way. i didn't even look at a computer until 30 minutes ago. the one bad thing, is that i can't access blogger from my computer. pacbell seems to have some dns issues. so i'm using jason's.

what was supposed to be a 1 hour appt. with our financial planner this morning turned into a 4 hour session which we got out of around 2pm. what's the point of showing up to work at 3 and then leaving at 7? so we both pissed off work and ran some errands and went to dinner at the outback. you can actually get a table at 5pm, unlike the hour wait at 6pm. if you have never tried their 'chocolate thunder from down under' dessert, you are missing out on the most incredible dessert experience ever. heavenly.

the other notable thing was after dinner, we went to fry's to look for new games, and encountered an alien species in the game aisle. well, a species never previously seen in fry's before, a competent, intelligent, helpful sales person who *actually knew what he was talking about*. at this point i started to wonder if i was going to wake up and realize it was friday morning and i had a full day of work ahead of me. too strange.

so now i'm just getting my blogging/internet/email fix by writing incredibly boring stuff about my day. hey, your the one still reading this thing. 08:41 pm

my sony headphones arrived. but, i can't try them out. they need a battery, even for listening to music. how hard would it have been to include one? 10:18 pm

mktg. person: "hey, guys, we're doing a focus group so ask all your friends, they'll get $50."

me: "you know, your data will be skewed because friends & family don't like to say 'your product sucks'".

mktg: "oh, we'll just tell them to make sure they give their honest opinions."

me: "what a good idea. i don't know why other companies never thought of that."

mktg: "hey guys, make sure you tell your friends that we want their honest opinions." 10:11 pm

two weeks of bloat with sally tenpenny writing. good thing jason doesn't read it (or this) otherwise he'd realize what a sucker he was. 05:48 pm

today and yesterday seem to be exceptionally slow web days. i'm not finding anything even mildly interesting. i may be forced to actually do some work for once. 12:42 pm

i don't know why, but i'd never noticed amazon's community page before. all i can say is creepy. some of the text is downright scary. "This area of Amazon.com Community brings together Amazonians from around the globe." ugh 09:54 pm

the latest rcfoc has lots of interesting stuff about bandwidth. 06:19 pm

the new greek reads like a marketing textbook. which means you'll score brownie points by using it in your mockups. via zeldman. 05:34 pm

neale is starting to scare me. Mr. Happy?

"How am I supposed to start the day without his little yellow face smiling at me? I depended upon his sunny features to make each morning special. This is a devastating loss for me."

it's official. i will not be scuba diving in australia. i can't say i'm too terribly disappointed, i was expecting that response. although it would have been nice to dive the reef. on the positive side, i will hopefully get a $500 refund on scuba lessons, and i won't have to buy $200 worth of "personal" equipment. 01:32 pm