Lee.org

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.

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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.

I submitted a T-Shirt idea to J!nx today. I’m just logging it here so archive.org picks it up if the idea ever sees the light of day. The abbreviation for the idea is: ISTOTI.

I’ve been listening to audio podcasts the last week or so on my way to work and around town. I’ve been very impressed. It’s an idea who’s time has totally come.

I have iPodder software and I’ve subscribed to… yow a whole lotta shows. A partial list of some of my favorites include Accidental Hash, Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code, Audio Dharma, Catholic Insider, Decoder Ring Theater, Gillmor Gang, several NPR shows… I count almost 50 shows I’m subscribed to.

Cool.

How I do it: iPodder –> CD-RW –> my new car stereo which can read mp3 discs. I swap CDs (holds 10-20 hrs) every couple days.

I sent this complaint to the Reynolds aluminum foil people on 12-13-05. They mailed me back a coupon for free Reynolds foil last week. No word on modifying their boxes.
(more…)

I’m working at home today. My new landline phone has been ringing off the hook all day with telemarketer calls. In the last 4 hours, I’ve gotten Comcast, MCI, the California Professional Firefighters Association (a scam if I ever heard one) and innumerable automated-dialer hangups.

I’m signing up for the National Do Not Call Registry today but it takes 3 months for that thing to kick in. Hurumph.

Let’s see how a running tally goes
4:15pm California Organization of Police and Sheriffs
1-11-05 8:30am neighborhood by mci

(attn. doubters) I went for a walk tonight and found my local sushi restaurant. Kiji on Guerrero and 22nd. Super high quality. Authentic. Comfortable. Friendly. Fairly expensive.

The place has been there only barely longer than I have been in my new place.

At the prompting of my neighbor at the bar Jeremy and the guy at the end of the bar, I had saba (mackerel), uni (sea urchin) and sake. It was as excellent sashimi should be, a symphony to the senses.

I’ll be back.

PS. -This- is why SF is an expensive city. Sanctuaries like this command your attendance.