Lee.org

I have two tickets to Burning Man in my hands. Along with 2 Atomic Fireball suckers. Man it’s hot!

—- Didn’t Fix Computers
I tried to fix Deann’s computer tonight and failed. Bean found a fix for her problem on her own. And last night I was unable to fix Sam’s computer. And I thought I had gotten out of the Computer Guy business. Grr.

—- Missed Kite Fight
I was at Bernal Hill for Kite Fight again. Again, there was no one there. It turns out that while Kite Fight happens every 2 weeks, it doesn’t happen on the same day of the week. This time it was on Saturday. Grrr.

—- Missed Lunch
I got to Boogaloo’s at 3 for a late lunch. I walked in and they told me they were closed. Grrrr.

—- Found Pointless Stores
I wandered into several stores on Mission looking for nothing in particular… for stuff on my long list of “it’s be nice if I had”’s. police tape, tupperware, a thing to tell when I should stop my car in my small garage so I don’t hit the wall, a small dish rack for the office, whole peppercorns… crap. I found none of what I was looking for. I was most pissed off when I saw they had a giant selection of tupper-like products and none of them were well made. Grrrrr.

—- Almost Got in a Fight Over a 12 Yr Old Litterbug
I was standing in front of one of those pointless stores and watched as a twelve year-old girl took the batteries out of her CD Walkman one by and and chucked them across the sidewalk. They skittered across the concrete and then just lay there. I considered saying nothing. I didn’t. “What are you doing?” And with the kind of derision an older sister would offer a younger brother, she said, “The batteries are dead. ” “Use the garbage can. Are you stupid?” She shrugged and walked into the pointless store.

I looked around to evaluate the situation and a man standing near me gave me an appreciative smile. I could see through the window that the girl was standing next to someone older that looked related. I walked in and told the man, “You should suggest to her to use the garbage can. There’s one right [pointing to the can that she almost hit with her errant batteries] there. I stood for a moment and then left.

A few moments later, as I was walking down the sidewalk, I heard some yelling behind me. I turned to see the father. With more than a hint of anger in his voice, he said, “Did you call her stupid?” In a neutral voice, I said, “Yes.” His ire catching up with him, he said, “If I punched you in the face right now, would that be stupid?” As I had already started planning tactics and what I’d say in the police report, I wanted to say ‘yes’. But that wouldn’t have given the girl the right impression about littering. So I carefully thought about a defusing thing to say. “I couldn’t say,” is what came out. Apparently, it was the right thing to say. He was caught off guard and blinked. “Well, you should apologize for saying that.” I nodded and said, in a more earnest tone than before, “I apologize.” Placated, he came back with some mutter of, “Ok,” turned and went back to the pointless store.

I think I got the littering message across but it took way more effort than I was planning! Grrrrrr.

—- Missed the Library
I walked into the library at 4:58, just in time for them to tell me they were closing. Grrrrrrr.

—- Laura was good to me
Laura helped me unwind with some visualization on the phone. :-)

—- Saw a fun movie & Got a Part in a Play
I went to Bad Movie Night at The Dark Room. They showed The Astounding She-Monster. As the title promises, it was astoundingly bad and we had a great time laughing at it.

Most extrordinarily, I was chatting with some folks after the film. I was plugging Emporer Norton to this one group so much that they wanted to see it and were asking if it was still playing. After the new Nortonians left, I was rewarded with a wet nap by one of the Dark Room guys. Overjoyed, I did the old, “read the back of the wet nap dramatically” bit. Turns out, I was talking with the producer of some upcoming Dark Room shows and they liked my delivery so much, I may just get a bit part in an upcoming show. Wee!

I got a mattress. I slept well last night. The Swedes are helping feel a bit more at home with their Sultan Hasselbäck. And thanks to Linden for helping me get the bed home… again! He helped get the first, failed bed home as well.

Next up, a bed frame that costs almost 3 times what the mattress costs.

But I’m returning the $1,500 rug. I just can’t conscience walking on something that expensive in this place. I’ll buy a vacation in the desert or something with the money saved.

Pony Trouble is a very werid movie from my good, werid friend Warren. You should watch this movie while on drugs.

See the new Pony Trouble trailer

I went with Laura to the Fancy Food Show with Laura today. What a great time. And yum! It’s all about the samples. I think I might end up buying a few pallets of yummy things. Oh wait, I’m not in the industry.

I was most impressed with:
Bongo Microwavable donuts - It’s got Krispy Kreme appeal, from your freezer! They’ll be in Costco shortly.

Walnut spread..butter - From this Italian company who has no distribution in the US :-(

Peanut Better - They had some powerful savories there. Though the Spicy Southwestern 0wnerized my palate for 10 minutes.

Delallo antipasto - great selection, great taste (doesn’t that sound like an ad for them)

New Tree Gourmet Belgian Chocolate - 73% chocolate bars that weren’t bitter at all. They also had these 99% chocolate covered somethings that kicked savory ass.

Pizza Romana from North La Brea Ave, LA, CA had pretty awsome pizzas. I think they just sell “frozen imported par baked wood fired pizza crusts”.

Mark & Stephen’s Handcrafted jams & mustards - Wasabi Lime Mustard, Hot & Sweet Mustard, Course Grain Mustard with Garlic and White Wine… lemon marmalade that wasn’t bitter. All very good.

Western Specialty - has all manner of containers in glass, metal and plastic

Remember the movie Chocolat? Chuao Spicy Maya Hot Chocolate is a good candidate for that ultimate hot chocolate drink. I’m getting some.

Labels West makes labels of all types

Macarob has a very interesting carob syrup and powder from Australia.

Highland Sugarworks is a Vermont producer of maple syrup (think “American Grade B”!) and they have a northern California distributor called Renaissance Speciality Foods in SF. I’m gettin me some.

We saw Yan (who Can Cook) and Chef Paul Prudhomme hanging out and then Yan cooking and joking.

I swapped out the photos in the upper right corner of the blog. I’ve had Burning Man 2005 photos up for a couple months. Now we’ve got photos mostly taken from the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day site.

Note that you can click on the photos to enlarge them.

I changed the color scheme of the last few months from that brash green to flat gray.

Cool friggin beans. Songtapper.com lets you search for a song, by tapping the rhythm of its words (lyrics).

And the darn thing works.

I’ve been thinking about what kinds of technologies have been extremely effective in the last several years. I had also heard some things about this on a couple podcasts… I can’t remember which.

The kinds of things that do well are things that “bring it to the people”.

eBay - sell it yourself

Amazon - trusting in the recommendations of other purchasers

blogging - lee.org/blog, boingboing - indivuals and little guys as news & entertainment sources and sources of discussion.

music file sharing - people exchanging popular music freely (of course, saving money by stealing is also a factor here)

podcasting - Adam Curry Daily Source Code - individuals as audio program sources

video podcasting - Rocketboom, Michael Verde - written by individuals and little businesses

social networks - Friendster, Match.com, Tribe - people meeting people

Craigslist - The newspaper classified ad killer… written and edited by its users

wikipedia - written and edited by its users

Open source software - written and modified by its users

XML - “extensible” is in its name. It’s designed to be added to.

Direct to consumer advertising of pharmacuticals

I suppose an obvious omission is Google as a search engine. That’s the tasty school glue that holds loose collaberation together… and when Googlezon gets going, it will be all about the people again.

—————–
So, our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to find or create the next “take it to the people” application. It doesn’t take a billion dollar company to make this happen. Actually, taking a look at all those trends above, I noticed that none of them existed 10 years ago. So, what do you say? Wanna brainstorm?

So is there actually a good news reader out there? I tried switching from Firefox Sage to something snazzier and I’ve been scorned twice now.

RSS Bandit is very pretty and has really nice management but you can’t tell how many comments are in a post using the UI. (this seems related to shoddy support/implementation of <slash :comments>).

RSSReader… I forget why I dumped RSSReader.

I’m swiching back to Sage. It’s silly though. I pull up a feed and then middle-click middle-click middle-click middle-click middle-click middle-click middle-click all the entries to open them up. That seems ineffient or something but it works.

Here is how to set your RSS news reader to read Protected (Friends-Only) posts.
I mention this because I had some trouble getting this to work with the available instructions out there.

This is tested on RSS Bandit.

Create a new feed entry with a URL like this: http://www.livejournal.com/users/YourFriend’sUsername/data/rss?auth=digest
(replace “YourFriend’sUsername” with… I’ll let you guess)
Go to the Authentication tab and type in your Livejournal username and password.
Done :-) You can now use that feed entry to read your friend’s posts.

I read in several places that you should do this:
http://Username:Password@www.livejournal.com/users/YourFriend’sUsername/data/rss?auth=digest
(replace Username, Password and YourFriend’sUsername)
I haven’t found this to work.