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We have 21 feeds
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| | 200 Words a Day |
| Last night Gerri and I left the house as soon as she got home to attend a “meet the author” thing at Bound To Be Read, a bookstore in East Atlanta. The author was Michael Wiley and his first book, The Last Striptease, was nominated for a Shamus award. He gave a little workshop on [...] |
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| Saturday’s Poem |
| In six different ways in this past week
I have told of my love in poet speak.
Now the end of the week is drawing near
There is one last thing you need to hear.
I love you Gerri more than anything.
Being near you makes me just want to sing.
For a week I’ve given my creative best.
But for now [...] |
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| The Morning |
| I wake up each morning and you are there.
I snuggle up to you craving your warmth.
Your softness comforts me. Why can’t this last?
We must get up and start our day. But wait!
Let this moment last just a bit longer.
I love this time lying here beside you. |
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| Joy |
| When we first met I never dreamed
the simple delights in store for me.
You’ve given me years of happiness,
on so many times I just can’t address.
Those early years in St. Augustine,
Our time spent there was so serene.
At Washington Gardens we’d spend the day,
Or a walk up the beach, nothing to pay.
Planning the new kitchen for our [...] |
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| Sleep |
| I wake up anxious.
I hear you softly breathing.
You comfort my sleep. |
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| Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and social control of mothers |
| Dan Lyke: In light of a whole boatload of discussions I've had recently about things like causes of autism, this seemed interesting: Sociological Images on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and the social control of mothers:It turns out that only about 5% of alcoholic women give birth to babies who are later diagnosed with FAS. This means that many mothers drink excessively, and many more drink somewhat (at least 16 percent of mothers drink during pregnancy), and yet many, many children born to these women show no diagnosable signs of FAS. Twin studies, further, have shown that sometimes one fraternal twin is diagnosed with FAS, but the other twin, who shared the same uterine environment, is fine. |
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| Conservatives banish Jefferson from history |
| Dan Lyke: NY Times: Texas Approves
Curriculum Revised by Conservatives:Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from
Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian
beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jeffersonfrom a list of figures whose writings inspired
revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas
Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among the
conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and
state.”)Not only is satire dead, but what passes for the modern "conservative"movement insists on
repeatedly pissing on its grave. |
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| Alinco DJ-G7T |
| Dan Lyke: A few years ago, Charlene and I got our amateur radio licenses. I've tried to use mine once, driving SAG for the Wine Country Century, but the radio they lent me wasn't working right. And we've never bought radios of our own and taken this thing to the next level.Today MarkV mentionedthe Alinco DJ-G7T tri-band (2M, 440MHz and 1.2GHz) full-duplex transceiver. Looks cool. |
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| Incompetech royalty free music |
| Dan Lyke: The recent experiments with the neighbor kids and hydrogenreminded me of the Doctor Doctor episode involving the hydrogen Alhambra rocket, which led me to Incompetech.comwhich has all sorts of royalty free music, next time you're looking for a soundtrack for some project.
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| FruitSticker.com |
| Dan Lyke: Fruit Sticker.com - understand the PLU codes on fruit. If it starts with a 9 it's organic, 8 it's genetically modified. But in all cases it's reducing your fruit to a commodity... |
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| Huge food recall coming |
| Dan Lyke: Prepare for the largest food recall in North American history. Salmonella in HVP (hydrolyzed vegetable protein) made by Basic Food Flavors may have made it into 10k products.Make it yourself, and know your growers.
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| inspiring final lines of a speech that douchebags will quote in their Facebook profiles |
| Dan Lyke: Academy Award Winning Movie Trailer (YouTube), or, an explanation of why I'm disappointed almost every time I see a movie, in trailer form.
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| Windows 7 |
| Dan Lyke: Okay, so far Windows 7 doesn't suck more than Vista (aside from the fact that the .NET framework handles 2d matrices differently in ways that broke my software), but the upgrade process?Went to Staples. Guy met me when I walked in the door, asked if he could help, I said "Windows 7 upgrade", he called specialist. I thought "great, don't have to learn anything, just let guy solve problem!". They were out of "Windows 7 Ultimate"upgrade, so he suggested "Professional"for my "Vista 64 Home Premium". Got home, opened case, saw 32 bit disk, drove back to Staples, someone figured out that, indeed, stuffed in under the packaging was the 64 bit disk.Came home, put disk in machine, started install, disk told me that I could only install if I wiped the drive and started again, but if I'd bought the Windows 7 Home Premium or Ultimate upgrades then I wouldn't have had to do this.Drove back to Staples, where they told me that since the disk package was opened I couldn't return it.Drove home, commenced backing up my machine in preparation for total reinstall (+ 2 days of feeding the stupid things disks for software I've already installed on it), got pissy, left a nasty email with Staples web site.Later that evening, while machine was still backing up to server, got call from Staples headquarters that they'd relented and would let me return the "Professional"for "Home Premium". While there, we looked at the packaging, and there were nowarnings on the box that you had to match the upgrade to the original version, in fact the box implied everything would work.Got home with "Home Premium"and realized that there was an additional layer of wrapping that hadn't been on the "Professional"upgrade I'd bought. So someone else had returned the "Professional"upgrade before me.Hopefully Staples will filter this back up to Microsoft, but: Dear Microsoft, you can't possibly convince me that as use cases for the packaging was being discussed someone didn't say "here's the scenario, I bought a PC with Vista on it, I walk into retail store looking for upgrade, how do I find the right version?"Damn, I'm glad I only have to deal with that sucky-ass excuse for an operating system when I'm getting paid to do so.And what's with the graphic design? My status bar feels like I got time-warped back into the late '80s. |
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| Carry your WiFi with you |
| Dan Lyke: This article about Verizon's attempt to grab iPad traffic for its own networkalerted me to the existence of Verizon's MiFi 2200, a WiFi to Verizon's data service device. That's kinda cool...
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| baking bread |
| Dan Lyke: Harold McGee looks at kneading and breads. Summarizing so I can find it again, for an aerated bread like those currently in vogue, you don't need to do much to the bread beyond what gets the water incorporated. Knead more if if you're using whole grains. 60%-75% water to flour by weight, with up to 2% salt for the wetter doughs.I'll be experimenting some, my trend with dough has been towards the "how much water can I get this flour to absorb"end of things. |
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| Connecticut Roads |
| Dan Lyke: In our road trip around the east coast, it felt like Connecticut had sold its soul to the strip mall. Places that used to be quaint towns, that used to have downtowns, were replaced with strip sprawl. A high school friend suggested that next time we check out Connecticut Roadsfirst. |
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| Handmaid's Tale made real |
| Dan Lyke: Utah governor signs law allowing women who miscarry to be charged with murder.
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| Detente |
| meuon: good artists copy, great artists steala blog post by Jonathan Schwartz (former Sun CEO) - says what I have heard many people say, but he puts it in elegant simple terms with a up close personal perspective. A great read about patents, and IP and how they are used. |
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| Scott and Scurvy |
| Dan Lyke: I always find circumstances where technology or scientific knowledge is lost fascinating. Maciej Cegłowski looks at how the Brits lost the connection between vitamin C and scurvy that lead to scurvy becoming a huge issue in Scott's expedition to the South Pole.
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| Scam watch |
| meuon: "Supercritical state"?of fuel injection system from
Transonic Combustionoffers 50% milage increase? I smell Steorn droppings. But dang, I am an optimist and hope it's not. Again, time will tell. |
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| | Appropriation Art and Walker Evans |
| Appropriation Art appears to be the topic du jour. Mike Johnston at The Online Photographer devoted two posts to what James Danziger had called “the biggest photographic mystery of the 2008 [US] election”: who took the original photograph that Shepard Fairey used as the source for the Obama HOPE prints? [edited for clarity] Reading the [...] |
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| Cotoneaster Berries |
| Campbelltown, 1984
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| Petals |
| Windsor, 1984
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| Travelling on Foot |
| In my teenage years, desperate to bridge the gap between hope and fear, I would walk long distances. When I “should have been studying”, I would walk for hours. Perhaps, if I had been more willing to participate in team sports, I might have been too sore and weary to be so deeply troubled by [...] |
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| 300 |
| As I sat in the theater a few nights ago with my friends, G and P, desperate for 300 to end, I kept thinking of John Robb’s description of the film as absolutely amazing… So unrelentingly great that it has earned a permanent place in my top 10 movies of all time.
Wherein lay the “greatness”, [...] |
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| Hello world! |
| It’s been two years to the day since my last post.
I’d intended to come back to weblogging before this–especially since Dave Rogers predicted that I would “post something” before the end of 2006. For, even though I wasn’t writing for my own weblog, I never stopped reading weblogs. In fact, weblogs have been my primary [...] |
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| | Oscar Blogging 2010 |
| Multiple Oscar winners: The Hurt Locker: 6 Avatar: 3 Precious: 2 Crazy Heart: 2 Up: 2 For those who are unfamiliar with me doing this, you can find previous year's Oscarblogging at: 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009... |
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| Avatar, two ways |
| Here's my report of two competing 3D systems, using Avatar as the test subject. First, some preliminary reading: This report from the 3D Vision Blog is a rundown of the three 3D systems in widespread use in the US. Right... |
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| Fixing a bizarre iWork and Pages problem (with the SFWordProcessing plug-in) |
| Earlier today, I was using Pages '09, and I attempted to open a document that I'd opened many times before, though perhaps not since upgrading to either iWork '09 or Snow Leopard. Boom. Pages crashed (that's what happens when programs... |
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| Why the iPad doesn't (yet) have a camera |
| Because the iPad is meant to be held in the hand. The main reason for the iSight cameras on Macs or Apple monitors is to do video iChats (yes, I know about Photo Booth, which people use once, go "Huh."... |
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| My (current) opinions on HTML5 |
| There's been a lot of screaming and ranting lately over the current state of HTML5—what is it, what's in it, who controls it, who will implement it, and so on. There's no shortage of good essays, and here are some... |
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| Very limited time discount on my Macworld Expo MacLab |
| I'm doing a two-hour, hands-on session on iWork's Pages application at Macworld Expo on February 9: Building Better Documents with Pages Pages, part of Apples iWork suite, makes it easy to create great-looking documents, whether for print or electronic distribution.... |
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| Home, Ten Years On |
| Today marks a big milestone for us: we've lived in this house for 10 years. We moved in December 23, 1999 (only four months later than the builder's original promise!). Dori reminded me of the original site we did... |
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| Excellent Thanksgiving dinner, good wines |
| Last night, we had Thanksgiving dinner with friends here in Healdsburg. We were tasked to bring the wine, and I'm pretty pleased with the selection of local wines. I'd recommend them all. I'm doing this post as a record of... |
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| Happy Birthday To Us! |
| Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dragontomato/ — cc by-nc-nd 2.0 Somehow, this blog's tenth birthday snuck up on us—and yes, this blog really is ten years old. In Internet years, that makes it what, 70? Which, I guess answers the question as... |
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| Sublime objects of desire |
| Today was Aston Martin day here in Healdsburg. First, I saw a car that I'd seen before in passing, but not close up: a beautifully restored silver DB5 (the Connery Bond car, which was made between 1963-1965). Close up, it... |
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| This weekend: MCE (Be there!) |
| Are you in Northern California? Looking for something to do this Saturday? If so, come and join us at the Mac Computer Expo in Petaluma, put on by NCMUG. It's the best (not-so-)little Mac show since the good ol'days... |
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| Snow Leopard's on its way |
| I know that, oddly enough, there are people who get their tech news from this site. If that's you, here's your heads-up that Mac OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard, will be out on Friday. Want to get a copy... |
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| I miss you, Mom. |
| Today is the twentieth anniversary of my mother's death. I can't help but think of all the things she missed in my life. The end of my first marriage. The second marriage that would have brought her a new daughter-in-law... |
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| The health care reform lies begin; and are debunked |
| As Congress goes into recess, the prospects for health care reform look decent. That has spurred the opponents of reform -- who apparently just love the current system -- to use every means at their disposal to fight it. That... |
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| Women "in Tech" |
| A quick quiz for those of you who attend tech conferences. You're organizing a "Women in Tech"panel, and you have the following panelists: Which of the below do you add as the final member of your panel? An expert... |
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| | New “St. Yesterday” video |
| In Explone news: Thor Radford shot a handsome-looking video for “St. Yesterday.” I’m a little startled by the excellent production quality:
Watch the video (in larger size) at YouTube.
Word is that Thor shot the whole thing on a Nikon D300s. Kids these days with their gadgets! Lead singer Patrick has more to say here.
So yeah, things [...] |
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| Gig report: Explone at the Crocodile |
| I’m off to a mythical land called “France” for a few days. In the meantime, please enjoy these photos from Explone’s gig at the Crocodile Cafe last month.
One of the bummers about taking photos at the gig is they’re almost exclusively done onstage, during soundcheck, to an empty room, and I end up searching Flickr [...] |
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| New Kirby Krackle single out today |
| The new single from Kirby Krackle’s sophomore release E For Everyone is out today. It’s called “On And On” and it’s about — wait for it! — Wolverine.
You know, Wolverine. The X-Men guy. Hugh Jackman. With the claws? What, I have to explain everything?
(NB: I don’t play bass on this tune. I play with the [...] |
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| AIC |
| A digression:
If you follow rock/metal at all, you probably know that Alice In Chains, one of the “big four” rock bands to break out of the Seattle scene as part of the whole “grunge” thing in the 90s, has a new lead singer, William DuVall. They’re currently touring with a new album.
I was reading a [...] |
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| Studio Litho, Days Two and Three, in photos and videos |
| Two new songs, a photo shoot, a video shoot, and a website relaunch. Big week for Explone! Gonna be hard to go back to reality tomorrow.
(Feed reader? You may have to visit the post to see these pics and videos.)
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| Studio Litho, Day One, in videos |
| (Feed reader? You may need to visit the post to see these videos.)
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| Looking ahead |
| I love this photo! MOAR AMPS PLZ.
Explone is at Studio Litho this weekend to cut one final song for the new record and finish any overdubbed parts. Mixing starts in March. Yes, we’re already writing tunes for the next one. So?
My sources tell me we’re also going to record some sort of performance video thingy [...] |
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| New demo: “Note To Self” |
| Here’s a quick demo of “Note To Self” (I posted a video of this song a few weeks back):
[See post to listen and download song]
One guitar, one shaker, a few overdubs, some flurbled chords and the roughest of rough vocals. And a hippie guitar solo I spent all of five minutes composing. Also, my first [...] |
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| Explone at the Crocodile (!!!OMG!!!) |
| Here is news: my band Explone is playing the famously famous Crocodile Cafe tomorrow night (that’s Thursday 1/7) with a stellar lineup of fresh local bands. (I’m especially keen to see all-girl prog rock outfit Eighteen Individual Eyes.) It’s one of KEXP’s Recommended Events this week.
The Croc has long been on my list of A-list [...] |
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| DADGAD |
| Last week I tweeted about rediscovering some song ideas I had written in DADGAD tuning almost ten years ago. I first learned about DADGAD when Megan forwarded me a page of alternate tunings used by Richard Shindell. Since then I’ve tried to work DADGAD into my own songs:
Cut The Wire: DADGAD, capo 5th fret
In Harm’s [...] |
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| Useit.Com: The Power of Defaults. Users rely on defaults in many other areas of user interface design. For example, they rarely utilize fancy customization features, making it important to optimize the default user experience, since that's what most users stick to. |
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| | OPML Editor universal app testing |
| See this announcementon the Frontier News blog. |
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| Installing Snow Leopard on a headless Mac Mini |
 I bought a Canon scannerto use with my MacBook Pro 13-inch laptop, but it just doesn't work. Once in a while it produces a scan, but most of the time, the drivers say they can't find a scanner attached to the computer. I've been advised this may be because the device is powered through USB, and there isn't reliable power coming through USB so the scanner doesn't power up.It first I thought I was out of luck cause I don't have a desktop at the NY apartment, but then I realized I do have a Mac Mini. So I tried installing the drivers on that computer, but was told they require Snow Leopard. Okay but the Snow Leopard disk is back in Calif. So I spent $25 to get another copy of the OS, and tried to install it on the Mac Mini, but...Well first, it's a headless Mac Mini. No monitor, no keyboard, no mouse. So when the computer rebooted it never showed up on the LAN. So I plugged in a keyboard and mouse and the disk starts whirring again, the installation continues, but eventually the disk stopped whirring and the computer still doesn't show up on the LAN.After waiting an hour I recycled the power, but the computer still doesn't show up on the LAN.That's where I am now. Anyone with experience installing Snow Leopard on a headless Mac Mini? Help! If this works I'll put in an order for an iPad today.  |
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| Me and iPad: Not now |
 I was up this morning at 8:30AM Eastern and saw the notes that the iPad was now available for pre-order. So I went through the process, updated my credit card on Apple's website, changed the address and phone number. The total price was a bit of a shocker -- approx $650 including tax. I hesitated. I was typing the order on a $350 Asus Eee PC that I had bought a long time ago. It gets about 8 hours on the battery. It has a 160GB hard drive, three USB ports, Ethernet, webcam builtin. Real keyboard. No DRM. I went to Amazon to see what I could get for $650. Lots of stuff I'm not buying that I'd like to have. A nice Polk Audio soundbaris about $500. I could fly roundtrip to San Francisco for that amount.I thought about which I would bring with me on a trip to San Francisco, an iPad or the Asus. No doubt, I'd bring the Asus. I have no idea what I can do with the iPad, and most important, I have a pretty good idea that I won't be able to run my software on it, or watch a movie I ripped from a DVD. Or listen to a podcast I downloaded with non-Apple software. I decided that no matter how important it is for my work to understand what Apple's product does, it can wait until I find out what the product is.I guess I no longer have the Apple bug up my ass that says I have to get one of everything they make on the day it comes out. So for now at least, the answer to the iPad is "no."Update: People say here and on Twitter that you'll be able to watch movies you rip from DVD or listen to podcasts downloaded with non-Apple software on an iPad. They reason that since you can do it on an iPod you will be able to do it on an iPad. |
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| I like abbreviated RSS feeds |
 Just read an articleby Felix Salmon in response to a decision by Gawker to stop pushing the full text in their RSS feeds.I've heard this argument over years, from many people, but I've never agreed with it. I prefer if publishers include thoughtfully written synopses in their feeds, with links to the full articles.The reason I prefer this is that I am probably one of the few people to use River of Newsapproach to feed reading, which imho is the only rational way to read feeds.I skim. I don't need the full text of each article, in fact I was so annoyed by feeds that publish full text that I made my aggregator truncate the articles at 500 characters. My eyes are very good at scanning. I can quickly tell whether I need to read the full article. This allows me to consider orders of magnitude more stories than I would if I had to wade through feeds with full text. Another point of view that's rarely considered in these debates.BTW, everyone reads a River of News these days. It's called Twitter. Mine is better. (No 140-character limit.) |
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| Still waiting for my HTTP-scanner |
 Many years ago I wrote about an ideafor simplifying hardware devices that scan stuff producing digital images. They shouldn't require any drivers and they should work effortlessly. But the architecture they use for these devices is still rooted in the 1980s, when it should have and easily could have made the transition to HTTP.I'm thinking about it again because I wasted a bunch of time on a Canon 700Fscanner that, because of driver problems, just won't work with my Mac laptop. Now that I've got the problem I see that dozens of other users had it too (the problems didn't show up in the Amazon reviews, but do show up in various support forums).After all these problems I'm reminded how scanners reallyshould work. Thus:1. It has a power cord and an Ethernet jack. 2. You plug the power cord into the wall and the Ethernet jack into your router.3. A new device appears on your LAN called "Scanner."4. Type http://scanner.loc/ into your browser and a simple configuration screen shows up. It lets you change the name of the device, turn security on, give it a username and password. 5. The device has about three buttons on it. The first turns the power off and on. The second creates a JPG image, the third creates a PDF. How to use it: Lift the lid, put a document in. Close the lid. Press a button. Refresh the home page of the scanner and click the Docs link. A list of docs in reverse chronologic order appears. To view a doc, click its link. To download, right-click its name and choose Open or Save or whatever other options your browser allows. No drivers, no fuss, no muss. Nothing to go wrong. It just works.™Please, please -- someone make this device. Thank you. |
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| Location-based content |
I can't figure out how the new location-based Twitterworks. Firefox can't figure out where I am. No surprise, My 13-inch MacBook Pro doesn't have GPS. Is there some place I can click on a map to say This Is Where I Am? Not at all obvious. Other people say they see it. Not on my machine. Anyway, that doesn't mean we can't have fun with location stuff.On Twitter, I posted a linkto a Google Map askingif this was the location of the Fillmore East.  I got back an answer that it was close, but the supermarketnext door is where the Fillmore was. I tweeted back that I had read somewhere that that was where the Ratner's was, next to the Fillmore, and if you go in there you can even see a giant R on the floor. Ratner's was a great Jewish dairy restaurant. Until I read the article (can't remember where it was) I only knew about the now-gone Ratner'son Delancey St. I once took a blonde shiksaVP-Marketing from California to Ratner's on Delancey, and the waiter yelled at me for bringing such a fine woman to such a lousy neighborhood. That was before it all got gentrified and yuppified. Both Ratner's are gone now.Anyway, the same guy dug upa pictureof the old Fillmore just before a Crosby, Stills, Nash &Young concert. My theory was correct. It's the site of the bank. I went to the Fillmore a few times. The most memorable concert was a Grateful Dead show with a surprise toward the end. A bunch of dirty hippies with long hair and beards come out and jam with the Dead. The music sounds weirdly familiar but hard to place. They were being deliberately misleading. Then all of a sudden a rock and roll standard -- Good Vibrations. It was the all-new dope-smoking Beach Boys! Oh man those were the days. I also saw the Incredible String Band there. Ten Years After. We're getting ready to do an East Village blog for the NY Times. Going down memory lane is my way of getting ready.PS: I read about Ratner'son Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, an intriguing blog with lots of great stories about the ever-changing and not-always-for-the-best New York Shitty. |
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| RSS enclosures from 2004 and 2005 |
| I was doing some research for a blog post and came across this folder of RSS enclosures from late 2004 and early-mid 2005.These were the months when podcasting was beginning to take root.I was doing Morning Coffee Notes. Adam Curry was doing Daily Source Code. Together, we were doing the Trade Secrets podcast.Dave Slusher, Steve Gillmor, IT Conversations, Dawn and Drew, Tony Kahn at WGBH, Engadget.It occurred to me that this slice of early podcasting might be worth preserving, so turned it into a torrent and have uploaded ithttp://static.scripting.com/misc/earlyPodcasts.torrentIf you have questions or comments, you can post them here.PS: Another reason I like it is this is a non-infringing use of BitTorrent. We need more of those to protect this excellent distributed technology. |
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| Please fix WordPress for podcast feeds |
Jay and I use WordPress to do the http://rebootnews.com/site.It's a mixed bag. On the pro side, we both know how to use WordPress, and because Jay writes the show notes and I do the tech stuff, it's a good tool to put between us. But WordPress doesn't do podcast feeds well. And that's being generous. Here's how the UI works currently. You edit your post and link to an MP3 or a movie or an AVI or some other media object. The first one that WP encounters as it parses your text, it will supposedly turn into an enclosure. If you happen to link to two MP3s but the second is the enclosure, you're out of luck. And for some reason if you store the MP3on Amazon S3, as we do, it usually doesn't even find the enclosure. But this is variable. Today they've hacked up our link to point to some server on wordpress.com, totally without our permission. What a mess. And even so there's no enclosure in our feedfor this week'sshow (which btw I think is one of our best, oneI hope everyone listens to).For the last three episodes of our podcast, it's failed to add an enclosure element to the feed. As a result none of our listeners get the podcast on time, and it always takes some fussing by the WordPress tech people to get it working, and for all I know a bunch of people neverhear the podcast. I suppose it depends on whether or not the client sees an item as read if the guid doesn't change but all of a sudden the item has an enclosure. Imho a proper podcast client would just watch the guid, and therefore would miss the enclosure. Regardless, it's simply unacceptable that WordPress work this way and that Automattic doesn't do something to fix it.This is how we did it in Radio 8, in 2002, eight years ago.Here's a screen shot.  Click the screen shot for the full effect.See the red arrow pointing to the box called Enclosure? That's where you paste the link to the enclosure. Anyone no matter how technical they are not, could be taught to do that correctly. We never had the problem WordPress is having. Granted a lot fewer people did podcasts then than now. Maybe. I'd argue that the way WordPress works now is killing the art of podcasting because it's so unpredictable and it's virtually got the market cornered. Regardless, I'm a paying customer, and I'd like to continue to use WordPress, but eventually I'm going to have to switch because it's killing our product.Please Matt and company, fix this!PS: I wish Wordpress.com was more hackable, if there was a way for me to patch our feed I could fix this without their help. Alas it's not something I can fix myself and I don't have any interest in running my own installation or fussing around with PHP etc. |
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| A nice boost for rssCloud |
 It's been a while since we could announce new major support for rssCloud, but today is one of those big days we'll remember for a long time. Status.net has now enabled rssCloud support in the RSS 2.0 feeds for all its users. This means that identi.ca, the server operated by status.net, has the feature, as well as all other sites they operate. I assume it will be baked into a subsequent open source release (status.net is GPL software).What does this mean? Well, when I post an update to my account on identi.ca, any cloud-aware aggregator will receive an update notification. River2, the aggregator I've built for Frontier (it runs in the OPML Editor) has support for rssCloud.For a demo here's a screen shotof an updateI posted to identi.ca. Note the time of the update. I immediately refreshed the home page of my River2 server, and there's the update. Elapsed time ==>12 seconds. That's what real time means. This is my feed. A source screen shot showsthe <cloud>element.It's also a holy grail for the idea of a distributed loosely-coupled network of Twitter-like services, linked together in real time using RSS.(What a mouthful!) It's very elegant and lightweight and it works today. |
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| 18 interesting firsts |
 I stumbled across this very interesting listof 18 firsts on the Internet. It's a good way to look at things. You could argue who invented what first, and you often get nowhere that way, because "invention"is such a poorly understood concept. Everyone's work builds on other people's. The guy who invented the car used a lot of other people's work to create something with four wheels and an engine. Did it have to have a steering wheel to be a car? We could argue about that, and that would change who the inventor was.It may be more useful to say who had the first car. Who drove it, and where did they go? And on the Internet, there's no doubt, for example that Tim Berners-Lee had the first website. Unless someone else says they did. (Haven't heard anyone say that, btw.)I was glad to get credit for creating the first podcast. Who wrote the first blog post? They give credit for that to Justin Hall(and mis-spell his name). I wrote in the About pagefor weblogs.com that the first blog was also the first website. TBL's info.cern.ch was a reverse-chronologic list of new websites. That's how central to the web I think blogs are. But if that wasn't the first blog, let's see Hall's first post, and decide if that really was the first one.  Who had the first feed? That's going to be an interesting debate for sure. I can show you mine, it was first published on December 15, 1997. But what makes something a feed? Can you have a feed with no aggregator? Is it the aggregator that makes something a feed? If so, we'll have to figure out who wrote the first aggregator and when, and what feed(s) it read.One of the criteria for being "first"is, imho -- Did your work lead to other people imitating you? That test says whether or not your work commercialized or popularized the concept. The implies "hitting the spot"where being the only one seems, somehow, less significant. That's one argument against Hall as the first blogger, but in favor of TBL. As far as I know there were no bloggers that formed a community in the aftermath of his Links from the Underground. Pretty sure the first blogging community, in the sense that we think of blogging today, was formed around Scripting News. Most blogs today can trace their roots back to Scripting News, if you go back far enough. I suppose some communities are disjoint. Did LiveJournal spawn out of a blog that spawned out of something that came from Scripting? I have no idea. But I do know that most of the early bloggers were readers of this site, and many participated in the discussion group here. There was a website that traced the lineage, called BlogTree, and it verified that the root of the tree was Scripting News. This is something I'm proud of, I think justifiably.One of the reasons I'm proud of it is that blogging was created without the lock-in you see in systems like Twitter, Facebook and though they'll argue for sure, Buzz. Even Posterous, Tumblr and Wordpress.com don't give you easy ways off their servers. Blogging started without the concept of a single server, so there was no place to get off of. The whole point was to be as distributed as the web itself, to give people independence, to let billions of websites bloom. This is such an obvious feature of blogs that people don't usually see it. But it's there, and it's hugely important.There are a lot of very vocal people who work to remove credit rather than give it. I'm sure some of them will comment here. As long as their comments are respectful they will stand. |
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| Promising competition |
Several interesting half-developments in the competitive landscape from non-dominant tech entities. I believe in supportingthe second and third tier companies and startups, when they offer alternatives to the BigCo's. I like the little guys because they have an incentive to listen to and please users, without the strategy taxesalmost always imposed by the big guys.  First, there is Mark Fletcher's SnapGroups. It's basically a threaded discussion group with a modern browser-based UI. It's perhaps a framework that something like FriendFeed can develop from, although it's just a framework. There are no feeds in either direction -- you can't subscribe to feeds from within SnapGroups, and it doesn't generate feeds, so I can't subscribe to stuff from SnapGroups in other RSS-aware environments. But it does look nice, and Mark is the author of Bloglines, so we know he understands feeds. These days, you can't even get into the game without basic feed support. I'd of course also like to see him support rssCloud so the connections in and out can be real-time. Second, I just got an email from Zach Copley at Status.Netsaying their software, which is an open source Twitter workalike, now supports rssCloud. That is very welcome news. I tested it with River2, and while the initial handshake worked, I'm not getting the realtime updates. I expect we'll figure out the glitch quickly and then we'll have another realtime connection. What can we do with it? We'll have to explore that. Meanwhile, it's nice to have a reason to get reacquaintedwith Identi.ca, which is the mother ship of Status.Net. And thanks to Zach for sticking with it.Finally, Marshall Kirkpatrick, who writes for ReadWriteWeb, says the big players in his market, TechCrunch, Mashable, AllThingsDigital, don't pick up stories once RWW has covered them. This gives vendors an incentive to give exclusives to the big pubs, assuming they want coverage from them. Vendors who buy that are making a mistake. The news will find the people who need to know it, more now than ever. Pick a reporter who you think will understand your product and give them enough time. That's one approach, if you think you can get the attention. Otherwise, just write your own blog post, and send the links around to all the reporters, and hope they find it interesting. I know this isn't the standard advice, but the gatekeepersfigure you need them a lot more than they need you, and act accordingly. It's hard to get insightful reporting from them, and I think the readers have figured that out. All pubs should follow this simple rule: write up whatever you find interesting, whenever you discover it, no matter who has already written it. Anyone who plays it differently will eventually pay a penalty. And these days "eventually"is a lot sooner than it used to be. Remember: "People come back to places that send them away." |
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| Great photo of Jobs at Oscars |
Zadi Diazgot this great pictureof Steve Jobs on the red carpet at the Oscars last night.  Click the thumb above for the full effect. |
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| This week's RBTN |
| This week's Rebooting The News podcast, recorded in the studio at NYU, was particularly good. It starts off a little slowly, but picks up speed.http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Mar08.mp3 |
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| Best Picture 2009? |
| Tomorrow night they announce the winners of the Academy Awards, and for the first time in a long time, I don't really think there is a movie up to being called Best Picture. The only one I haven't seen is Precious. So it might be the exception. Of all the nominated picturesI have seen, if I had to choose one, I'd go for Up In The Air. Great acting, interesting plot, well done all around. Second choice: An Education. Each of the others has something to recommend it, but none of them put enough of the pieces together to qualify as a Best Picture. Curious what other people think. |
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| Jeff Jarvis and BloggerCon |
 I just watched the live webcast of two friends, Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis, give talks at TEDxNYED. They both did well. At the end of Jeff's talk he told a story about about a big moment in our friendship. Of course he tells it from his point of view. I'm sure they'll release a video of the talk so you can hear it. This is the story from my point of view.I am an evangelist. I think I see how things are going, then I want to show other people, so we can get there faster. Sometimes if I have to, to get the idea going, I write some software, or create a format. That was my role in blogging, RSS and podcasting. And the unconference format that Jeff wasdescribing in his talk. I wrote that format up herea few days ago, because we're doing it again at NYU, but that piece was just an edit of a document that I wrote before the first BloggerCon. I sent links to all the discussion leaders. I talked with each of them before the conference. I knew the idea would be hard to get, because we all had a lifetime of training that said that conferences were mostly one-way affairs. I wanted to try something different, a conference where there were no speakers, no panels, no audience.I wanted the good stuff, the hallway conversations, to be drawn back into the formal conference. Even though we prepared, and knew the format worked (we were running the Berkman Thursday meetings with it) most of the discussion leaders didn't get it at first. When I walked into the room where Jarvis was preparing to lead a discussionat BloggerCon, I saw that he had put a set of chairs in front of the room, and people were sitting in the chairs. It was an awkward fit, there wasn't enough room in front, but despite all the preparation, there was the old format trying to boot up!So I asked the people sitting in the chairs to rejoin the rest of the people in the classroom. Then I said to Jarvis, "This is your panel..."-- and I opened my arms to embrace the whole room. From this point our stories are in total agreement. God you could almost see the light bulb go on over Jarvis's head. Immediately he started leading the discussion, and to this day he is one of the best practitioners of BloggerCon format, and is evangelizing it too. This blog post is an instance of the philosophy that says that everyone's point of view is valid and should be heard. In the old world, the speaker's version would be the only one to get out there. Or the professor's or the reporter's. But in the new world, each of us have a platform to tell our story. That same principle can be applied to conferences, and if it's done well, and Jarvis does it well, with spectacular results. |
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| Be wary of Google patents |
 Google has been pitching its use of open standards as a way to insure yourself against Google going away. That's much appreciated, no sarcasm. All companies should plan for their users'data surviving them. But my concern is what if Google doesn'tgo away. This is a company that's at least heavily influenced by lawyers, if not run by them. They aggressively patent. Personally, I'd rather not build a new ecosystem out of Google patents. If you have a choice of using an already-existing format or protocol that works just as well as the new one Google is trying to replace it with, the rest of us, who don't patent, are better served if we all use the older one, including Google. That way we know that we won't be forced out of the market at some future date, when the cost of staying in is paying huge legal expenses, and royalties, for "technology"we could have had for free.Unless Google also adds a disclaimer of all patents on all the new stuff, I'd be very careful about which ones we adopt. |
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| Alice in Wonderland |
I am a big huge fan of Tim Burton movies. He's right up there with Quentin Taratino and Martin Scorcese. When one of these directors ships a movie, I'm often the first person in line on opening day.So this morning I took off and went to the 11AM showing of the newly released today Alice in Wonderland, at 850 Broadway. First a caveat. Don't read this if you haven't already seen it. No matter what anyone said about the movie I would have seen it, even though I did read the NY Times review before going. 1. The Times reviewis right. The movie is pointless, lifeless. 2. It's not even remotely a Tim Burton movie.3. It's almost as if as they were nearing completion someone said "Hey wait a minute this doesn't have any Tim Burton stuff in it,"so they quickly added a bit of buffoonery, but it is totally embarassing. 4. Hollywood has a formula that it can't seem to escape. A hero forms a posseof colorful allies with big hearts who are in love with the hero. There's an evil adversary and she has a posse of despicable, frightening and evil allies. The movie is a buildup to the final showdown. The two do battle. The hero wins. The adversary is humilated and most of his posse is killed. There's a closing scene where everyone agrees life is great and the credits roll. It's Star Wars meets Harry Potter, Avatar meets Indiana Jones. Every movie with a budget fits this template, with the exception of parts of recent Pixar movies (they always include the basic elements but it doesn't always completely dominate the plot). Once you realize this is what you're watching, unless you really get off on special effects, you might as well walk out.5. A few people walked out. I stayed to the end, but I started checking email on my Droid during the movie. 6. Zero suspension of disbelief. I was always thinking "I'm in a movie theater watching a dumb movie."The plot never sucked me in. 7. Next time let Tim Burton do a Tim Burton movie. Break new ground. Big Fish was great. At least the parts that sucked represent risks taken. This movie took no chances, it was boring. I want great acting, and stuff to think about and to laugh about. I like dark comedy. Sweeney Todd and Alice in Wonderland were great titles, but neither produced an interesting Tim Burton movie. 8. If you like Tim Burton, go see it anyway. The next movie you see can only be an improvement.9. Probably because it's a Disney movie, the characters lacked the usual Burton depravity, seen in Beetlejuice, Nightmare Before Christmas or Corpse Bride. The ghoulishness in Burtonia can be very friendly, like the zombies in Corpse Bride. Or musical like Oogie Boogiein Nightmare. Or humorous like the cigarette-smoking angelof death in Beetlejuice. Or the poor misunderstood Frankenstein -- Edward Scissorhands, who was only trying to do good, yet was run off by the villagers. Other reviewers say that Burton movies lack plot direction, but I disagree. The plots don't always end happily, but they often end with a song, nonetheless. I doubt if Disney would let the film be anything but colorful, but even children like a little depravity as long as it's not too dark. 10. Wait a minute -- I don't think there were any songs in Alice! WTF. |
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| Real-time search |
 Kara Swisher reportson a studythat shows people are ignoring "real time"search results. This matches with my experience. The reason? It's impossible to convey much information in 140 characters. So when a search hits a tweet you get at most a soundbite, telling you something you probably already knew. When you search you're looking for information you don't have but want. I have a collection of Google Alertsthat report once a day or immediately, via email, telling me about occurrences of my name, products I've made, other topics I'm interested in. These used to be pretty useful until they started including tweets in the body of stuff they search. Now the alerts are mostly useless. So in this case, adding real-time stuff actually subtractsvalue. If Twitter wants to make money by inserting ads into search results, and all indications are that they do, they should seriously consider relaxing the 140-character limit, so tweets can carry information worth searching for.Update: Liz Ganneshas the report too.Josh Young adds: "Yes, real-time results in search suck because the feedis what's important, not the individual tweet." |
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| Renewed Evangelism: BloggerCon Format |
 Ask anyone who was at BloggerCon Iand BloggerCon IIto explain the format that evolved there, and you're likely to see their eyes light up, as they wave their hands, but until you've experienced it, they'll just be words. I hope to renew the evangelism for this format while I'm at NYU, and have access to the meeting facilities of the university. The format is not far from the Socraticclassroom, a discussion leader who pulls the interesting bits from the minds of the people in the room, with no sense of one person being a speaker and another being audience. Everyone is both a source and destination of thought. The format solves the problems of the typical professional conference, the problem of droning self-important speakers who bore the audience and force the good stuff out into the hallway. The first goal of the format is to suck the good stuff back into the room. Everything about the format is designed to eliminate the boring, self-serving droning. But to do it respectfully. We're not running the Gong Show. Fred Wilson wrote a piecethis morning on Panels. He went on to say what he doesn't like about conferences. I am so sure that Fred would lovethe BloggerCon format. It was designed for people like Fred. The format is outlinedon the BloggerCon site. But I'm going to reproduce that outline here, and edit it and bring it up to date. 1. We don't have speakers, slide shows or panels. 2. No Powerpoints.3. Every room has a discussion leader, a reporter who is creating a story with quotes from the people in the room. 4. The discussion leader is also the editor, so if he or she feels that a point has been made they must move on to the next point quickly. No droning, no filibusters, no repeating an idea over and over.5. The discussion leader can also call on people, so stay awake, you might be the next person to speak! 6. Think of the conference as if it were a weblog. At the beginning of each session, the leader talks between five and fifteen minutes to introduce the idea and some of the people in the room. Then she'll point to someone else. She may ask a couple of questions to get them going, then she'll point to someone else, then someone else, then make a comment, ask a question, etc. Each person talks for two to three minutes. Long enough to make a point. 7. The attention is focused on the discussion leader. You can ask questions, you don't necessarily have to wait to be called on, use your judgment. But ask the question of the Discussion Leader, and let him find the answer for you in the room. Experience has shown that when others in the room assume the moderation function, the ground rules break down, and droning happens, and people move into the hallway.8. The leader's job is to keep it moving. Sometimes this means cutting people off. Don't take it personally if it happens to you, any more than you would if a reporter only quoted part of what you said in the article. Life's not perfectly fair. You don't have a right to be heard. Sorry. (But you do have a right to get new ideas, meet new people, have new experiences.)9. Since every person in a session is considered an equal participant, everyone should prepare at least a little. Think about the subject, read the comments on the conference website. Follow weblogs from other people who are paticipating. Think about what you want to get out of the session, and what questions you wish to raise, and what information or points of view you'd like to get from the session.10. This is an unusual conference in that almost everyone participating writes publicly. So we assume that everyone present is a journalist. Every badge is a press badge.11. All conversations, whether to the entire room or one-to-one, unless otherwise stated, clearly and up front, are on the record and for attribution. You do not need to ask permission to quote something you hear at BloggerCon. Of course you may ask for permission to quote, and you may choose not to quote things you hear.12. Where I come from, the technology world, most conferences are centered around the vendors. This is not like those conferences. Here, vendors are welcome, and we hope they will help by sponsoring a party, dinner or brunch, but they participate mainly by listening. 13. Most of the people who are talking are users. In my opinion, these are the revolutionaries. Vendors make a living by creating tools that these people use to change the world. So much attention is focused on technology, too much imho. At this conference we turn it around and focus on what peopleare doingwith the technology. So if you hear someone say it's about the technology, expect me to challenge if I'm present. If not, stand up and say "That's not correct."14. If they say the technology is too complicated for a user to understand, ask them why, and if they could simplify it so we can understand. And if not, why should we use it? Perhaps a new user-centered philosophy will emerge.15. Sometimes conferences bog down in meta-discussions, discussions about what it's okay to discuss. I want to try to head some of that off in advance by stating some assumptions, and asking people who want to discuss these things to either discuss them here on the Web beforehand, or to find another venue to discuss them.16. Weblogs arejournalism. Not all weblogs, and not all the time. People have said weblogs aren't journalism, and that seems foolish, as strange as saying telephones aren't journalism. It's kind of a moot question. Weblogs can be used for journalism, or not. When people say they're not journalism, I think they haven't thought it through well enough.17. "What is a weblog"is an interesting question. I've heard people say it's not a good question. At BloggerCon if you have an idea that requires you to say or ask what a weblog is, please go ahead. It's totally on-topic. I would consider the conference a success if that's the only thing we figured out. (Chances are we won't, btw.)18. No commercials. This is a user's conference, it's non-commercial, you may not promote products. If a discussion naturally turns to products, it's okay to talk about them, but it's probably not okay to talk about your product, unless the discussion leader asks you to. No matter what you must ask for permission, and don't be surprised if the answer is no. There are good reasons for this, if one person talks about his or her product, then their competitors will feel they are entitled to, and pretty soon the user's needs are drowned out by the needs of the vendors. The point of this conference is to focus on users.19. You are welcome to bring your own recording equipment, cameras are allowed, basically the rules allow Grateful Dead/Phish style recording. Bring your microphone or camera and recording device, and record it and broadcast it any way you like. Be innovative, but please don't interfere with the sessions. |
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| Google and RSS |
 The first years of Google's existence and the first years of blogging coincide. Google started in 1998, shortly after I started blogging (depending on what you consider the start, which is always a subject of debate). Then blogging begat RSS, and then OPML and podcasting -- and so on. And blogs became influential in Google's ranking algorithms, and we bloggers loved Google, and we gushedover them here in the one and only year we gave awards on Scripting News. They were a small company, very excited. Great food in the cafeteria, and our meetings were always interesting, high energy affairs. Coming out of those meetings were a list of ideas that I shared with them and the readers of this blog. The most important idea was this -- Google could pay special attention to RSS and OPML files when they encountered them in their indexing of the web. They contained rich data which could be used for two purposes: 1. To make searches more current, what I called just-in-time, what people are calling realtime now. This has always been a big deal for me. I wanted search to be part of news and that means new -- and the faster the indexing happens, the more useful it is as news.2. Use OPML to allow anyone to create Yahoo-like directories. Open that process up, let a billion flowers bloom. I suspected there was a lot that could happen with organizing information on the web. The right place to present it, I felt, was in Google, not in a separate directory structure. And with users actively relating topics on the web, that long-term probably could help search engines make sense of the information. Another, more deliberate, form of linking.Now, in 2010, Google is going to start reading feeds, but if I understand correctly, they're going to ignore the billions of RSS feeds out there, and ask everyone to convert to Atom to get more currency in search. You can imagine that I don't like this. I wouldn't like it even if I didn't play a big role in getting those billions of feeds out there. I wouldn't like because I have thousands of RSS feeds on my servers, and believe me -- they are not changing to Atom anytime in the next few decades. I don't think I'm alone in that.Now a little preaching. Big companies always feel they can push the rest of us around, but I gotta say -- I've never seen it work. Usually the lesson they learn is that they would be better off if they would just Go With The Flow, and let the users guide them. Nothing wrong with reading Atom feeds, but to ignore RSS, well guys that's just plain dumb. Give up the fight Google. You don't have to acknowlege me, but RSS -- that's a force of nature. That's why I did rssCloud -- for you -- to give you the impetus to do what you should have done naturally, support the formats that the users have chosen. It's not too late to get our relationship back on track. I'm not your enemy, I'm just one guy in an apartment in the West Villagewriting on my blog. I'm not Apple, suing you for patent infringement, or whoever else you are worried about. Worrying about me is a waste of energy. |
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| Lay Down please! |
| I'm not sure if you grasp this baby, but pacing around and bouncing off the walls at bedtime when Mommy has a headache is not as endearing as you think it is. Also, you HAD dinner. No I'm not giving you the half-handful of kibble the new dog didn't eat. Quit begging for more, you're not starving. In fact, you've put on weight and just finished a rawhide. Now go find a spot and relax. Even the new dog is sleeping, and she's just walked further than she probably has in ages, been dumped by her former "pack"and been terrified by a dog 6x her size bouncing around her like a puppy. |
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| Wristly Update |
| I take it back, I don't think it's broken.Here's the deal. Monday night I went to a core-pump class that I really enjoyed as it included kicking and punching a bag as well as some of the standard crunches and push-ups and such. With some of the exercises I'd try it and realize it hurt the wrist and ask for an alternate option, but some that put pressure on the injured areas didn't seem to hurt too much, so I did them anyway. Tuesday, It hurt again. Same with Wednesday, so I didn't go back to the class as at least half the exercises were going to put pressure on the wrist again. Today, it aches some, but there is noticeable improvement. This tells me I tried to do too much on Monday and set my healing back a few days. I'll give it another week and, if it's still a problem I'll worry about it. So, for the remaining week, I'll not try to ride a bike, I'll not try to do push-ups etc, and I'll give it a little longer to heal up.Meanwhile, I'll RUN. |
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| I'm on the way back.. |
| Yes, my urge to push myself is coming back. How do I know? By my choices in direction for my running.There's this really steep hill just down the road. I've found myself huffing and puffing just walking up it, but it would provide an excellent direction for a weekly challenge as my run time increases. So, yesterday I reached crest of the hill leading to that road (also a steep grade, but for only a hundred feet or so. At the beginning of the week, running to that crest was enough to leave me gasping desperately. Yesterday, I realized I was gasping, but not desperately, so I turned up instead of taking the slight slope down to Dayton where I'd turn and turn again to take a shallow uphill grade for the end of my short run. I didn't run up for long, but I made a deal with myself that to reach the first telephone pole. I did it, and turned gasping to head back and take Dayton for the final few minutes as reward. Today, I turned upwards again, but this time made a deal with myself and went to the second telephone pole. After that, the grade turns up even more, but I turned and headed back down, this time pushing my pace on the flattened Dayton, determined to not walk any of that road. When I turned back towards my place, I was happy to know that despite my extra push up that hill, I'd hit the same mark for starting to walk that I hit yesterday. A slight bit more distance covered up a challenging hill in the same amount of time. Good. A good way to head into the weekend. I've one more short run and then triple that distance to close out the party, and I expect by rest day that I'll feel well wrung out, but it's a good thing.Now to decide what trail I should run on for my long run tomorrow. I'd join the crowd on Sunday morning, but it looks like I've a volunteer to help me move my washer and dryer Sunday morning. I'd rather do that. I am sick to death of the laundromat. |
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| Wristly Update |
| I think it really is broken.Doc said to give it a couple weeks and if it's still a problem to come back in. It's been 1.5 weeks and I still wake up with my thumb feeling numb and the middle of the wrist throbbing. It's not screaming agony, but it's certainly not comfortable. Through the course of each day I'll think "it's getting better"only to find that the exact same things are still a problem. It still hurts like hell to try to grasp and open or use my left hand to zip something. It still hurts in specific points, right below the thumb knuckle (the first one closest to the hand) and the wrist closest to the pinky. It's an ache that honestly reminds me of my ankle.I'll still give it to the end of the week, but I suspect on Monday I'll be calling the doctor for another appointment. |
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| Cheaha, revisited |
| This past Saturday was the date for yet another 50K I was signed up for but couldn't run. After all, I just got released to start running again a few days ago and thirty-one miles is a bit much to ask after a few months without training. I planned on staying home, but one of my buddies asked me to come and cheer, so I decided I would. Strega and I joined Carl, Dreama, Charlene and Nik at the pet-friendly chalet in Cheaha State Park Friday night and dug into a nice, relaxed mood. Saturday morning, Strega and I walked the others to the bus to see them off. Later we took a nice hike down the trail the runners would be coming up to the last aid station at the bottom of the mountain and back, and after a shower we headed to the finish line. The race had been going on for almost four and and a half hours, and the course record was around 4:30hrs so I figured I'd be there to see the first finisher/race winner cross the line.I was wrong.The course record was blown away with a 4:00:25hr finish, a blistering pace for so tough a course. No one expected him that soon. I did see the second place finisher though, and soon found myself parked at a good vantage to see the runners coming in and hanging with the race announcer. I got out my binoculars and gave him race numbers while they were still a ways away, making it easier for him to get their names. We had fun, he and I, cracking jokes between runners and chatting easily. Strega spent his time being his usual hot self and attracting attention from young and old alike. He had three to four children surround him and pet him, runners passing after their finish came to remark on him and give him cuddles and affection... he soaked it up like a champ. It was a fun, relaxing and rewarding way to spend the day, and I'm glad I went. |
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| Running again! |
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| wrist |
| Ok, so here's the story. Saturday was beautiful. Too beautiful to not get my dog some exercise, so I got out the bike after a nice kayak trip (wood ducks, pileated woodpecker and snapping turtle sightings oh my)and my belt-leash and off we went. Strega was thrilled and behaving well, but he really was ready to stretch into a run, so as we turned right onto McCahill, our speed increased. Now, at this point I had his leash attached to my seat post so he would have enough length to run in the grass along the road. There was only one problem with that plan. The street sign. I didn't have time to even try grabbing it and pulling him to the inside of it, or to slow much, when he ran to the wrong side of it and suddenly my bike stopped, but I didn't. In a truly amazing imitation of Superwoman, I flew through the air. My landing however, lacked grace and style. What it did have was impact on my left hand and wrist. I groaned, rolled onto my back and got up, legs shaking. "Dammit, Strega..."but he was slinking up and looking so upset anyway, so I just told him to sit while I checked the bike. Then I got on and realized my left hand and wrist hurt. I couldn't grip. No use of the left hand for more than a prop. O KWell, I went ahead and took a slower pace to finish the route, got home and went to the emergency room. Last time I did home remedy for a joint... well I'm still paying for that, so I figured I'd just go ahead and get x-rays and be sure. The doctor didn't see a fracture though, so it's a sprain with a stone bruise on the meat of my thumb. That's why I have no grip. The thumb muscles are too bruised to work. Typing hasn't been my strong suit either.Anyway, that's the story. I'm sure at this point that by week's end I'll be able to at least hold things again if not grip with real strength. |
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| Broken |
| Crap, wrote a nice entry about how I sprained my wrist and lost it. I'm typing one handed, so no I am not going to retype it now.Suffice to say its not broken per the emergency room doc. |
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| Ankle issues |
| Will I ever run again?Today was another PT appointment, and that meant getting to discuss the problems I experienced trying to use an elliptical. Ten minutes on it and I spent the rest of the day and into the morning limping with pain on the lateral side... and I don't mean muscle ache. In theory, I should be ok on an elliptical. The PT's reaction goes with my own thoughts. It doesn't bode well. I see the MD on Thursday and have two more PT appointments between now and then, the last one being the test so he has something to tell the MD. The reality is though, that pain on the elliptical suggests that the ligament damage is not healing and will require surgery.Here's the thing. I'm willing to do what it takes to get back out there, but if I do require surgery that will mean time I won't be so much as able to walk. This becomes a major issue when I have a large dog that requires walks three times a day, and I'm not talking little 5 minute potty breaks. On average, I walk him 1.5 hrs a day, sometimes more. If I'm unable to do that, I'll have to find someone to take him during my recovery, and I can't afford a boarding kennel. Nothing is certain yet though. Nothing. |
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| Conventional Wisdom |
| According to conventional wisdom, a man or woman who hasn't been married by my age has something seriously wrong with them that should act as a red flag to anyone considering dating them to back away, quickly.Argue all you like, make all the excuses you want, but that's the conventional wisdom. |
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| Yesterday's mail brought me a Valentine. My daddy loves me enough to make a Valentines card by hand. I have the best Dad in the world. |
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| Valentine |
| The Valentines hype is reaching a crescendo, and I find myself thinking of the one man who sent me a Valentines with an amazing consistency.Hey Grandpa, will you be my sweet ballou? I miss you. |
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| Aches |
| My ankle has started to ache. It starts soon after my first round of PT exercise, and as the day wears on just aches more. The problem isn't in a load bearing part of the joint, so it isn't hard getting up and down, it's just a dull ache. My rehab requires that I do no activities that include pointing the toes down or in. Doing so would stretch the torn ligament and hinder healing. I've added a lot of citrus to my diet to support collagen production, key to healing ligaments and tendons. I wish I could get out and run or ride, but it's rainy and cold anyway. If I'm going to have an injury to heal from, might as well be during down time, right? Did I explain the injury here? Well, here's the deal. I have a fractured distal fibula with torn ligament. The location of the fracture, in other words, is the very bottom of the smaller bone in the lower leg. That bone attaches to the side of the ankle with three ligaments attaching it to the foot and locking the joint in place. My torn ligament means the joint is structurally unstable. I do not lack muscle strength there, it's a structural issue. I am currently a surgical candidate to repair the ligament, but we're going to see if we can avoid surgery first. It may be that I have to wear an ankle brace when running from here out to add stability where I torqued the ligaments so badly, but we'll see. I miss my activities. I feel like I'm in hibernation. |
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| Strega has kindly taken up Ms. Howler's duty of eating my apple cores. Up to recently, he wasn't interested. Suddenly, he's all about eating that apple core when I'm done.I wonder if he's turning into a horse? He's awful small for a horse. |
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| Broken |
| It's official. Up until now, I was able to say I'd never broken a bone, but per the xrays I have a distal fracture in my fibula. Yup, I broke myself running.Mind you, it was probably that really bad ankle twist a while back that did it. I probably should have gotten xrays then to be sure. I'm so used to twisting though that I just figured it was a sprain and went to the PT and did some rest and got back running. Either that or since then I got a stress fracture. The doctor couldn't say one way or the other, just that he wished he'd seen me sooner. Of course, I had to wait a week and a half before seeing him from when I KNEW something was wrong. I didn't really have the money for the co-pay before then. The upshot though, is no running for a while. No brace or boot or anything either though. He said at this point it would be strength and body therapy. It's already healing, just needs the chance to finish the job. In the meantime, he wants me seeing his ankle guy to make sure my mind-body connection heals too. His theory is that after this break, my brain won't get the signals from the ankle in time, won't really know where it is like it would normally, so it'll be easier to re-injure. Well, that may be. I guess that means I'll be doing more "stand on one foot"and "stand on this unstable surface"exercises for a while. |
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| Dog Park blues |
| Yet again... a problem at the dog park. My heart sank when I saw there were about five other dogs in there, but I decided to see if things would go ok. Strega is quite content to ignore other dogs if they don't push it. Sadly, this time there was a dog that decided to push it. Naturally it started with him getting mobbed. I tried to keep him moving, but the other owners were far away and not bothering to help. This caused some trouble with Strega trying to back them off him and me trying to get between him and five other dogs. The owners finally called them back and we were able to move to an under-populated section of the park. There, Strega chased his ball and all went ok, till the white, intact boxer named Max came to try getting Strega's ball instead of his own. Strega growled at Max, then snarled and Max ignored him. So in an escalation as inevitable as the sun rising, Strega twisted around and snapped in Max's face. Rather than backing down, Max pushed it just enough for Strega to nip him and jump at him. I heard Max give one cry out but rather than trying to back away when I got between then, he kept trying to get to Strega around me. I yelled at him, I growled at him, I pushed at him with the ball chucker, I stopped short of trying to hit Max knowing the owner would make matters even worse if I did but... I just kept dancing around to keep between Max and Strega. When Max's owner finally came along, I told him "If you don't get your dog I won't be able to stop the fight."His answer? "We didn't have any trouble here till you showed up."Now, just because everyone else on the playground is willing to be bullied, does that mean the kid isn't a bully? No. It just means the rest of the kids are too wussy to react. If the human equivalent of what Max was up to had been going on with me, no one would question my right to kick the crap out of the idiot. |
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| Ankle issues |
| Since I seem to be having issues with my ankle, I made an appointment to see a doctor and get it checked. That's Thursday. Till then I'm facing week two without running and decided that I might as well try to improve *something*. So, I'm working at a little table and rather than sitting on a chair, I'm sitting on my exercise ball. From time to time I straddle it and try to balance with my feet tucked up like a jockey. It's not easy, and I'm feeling it on my inner thighs and calf muscles. Makes me think I'll have to start wearing sweat pants and doing crunches on it from time to time. I still feel pretty lazy though. |
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| Work has kept me busy, and the inability to run has shut my mouth of joys to talk about. Today it's chilly and overcast, but I am contemplating pulling out my bike gear and riding before I head to the barn for some lesson time. It's been so long since I rode a bike that the chilly air intimidates me a bit.I bet I'd feel better though. I can just go out right from here and do the old Tuesday Night Chattanooga route. It's a tad rolling and there's an optional mountain climb, but perhaps a little challenge is just what my body needs. Endorphins to keep the blues at bay.Guess I'll go see if I can find my gear. |
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| I feel rudderless. Cast adrift, and alone. I keep hoping that eventually, it'll even out but so far, it's just getting worse.Being piss broke doesn't help. |
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| Haiti |
| When I watch the news and see the images from Haiti, I cannot help but recognize how very fortunate I am. There are so many things I take for granted that are blessings. Clean water, access to food, indeed the infrastructure we have of roads, supply lines and everything. There, the people within a mile walk of the airport are dead in the street or dying. Lack of water, food and shelter. No tools to try rescuing those buried alive and no quick way to get the tools there. The horror is astounding. |
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| Crap. I went to set up my printer so I could get some work done and out the door tomorrow only to discover I've lost the printer cable. CRAPTASTIC! If I can't replace it, I'll just have to print everything at Kinko's and expense it.In other news, I think I'll head back to the barn tomorrow for some ride time. Also, I'm now ready to move my washer/dryer and get the mattress. I just need a truck and a helper. Hmmm... |
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| They finally came back. The neighbor's puppy has been barking for quite a while in his desperation. They were gone all day, and he's only 10 months old. I wish I had a way to get to him to let him out for a pee break, I'm pretty sure that's what he needed so desperately. I could hear him whining as they walked in the door. I really feel for that puppy. |
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| Friday already? |
| Somehow, it's already Friday despite feeling like a Monday. It doesn't feel like a Monday from a lack of activity the past few work days, but more because the past few days I didn't really get out much. Except for Wednesday evening. I meant to run with a group on trail, but I got there a bit early and, rather than hang around in the cold, got Strega out of the car and got an early start. I let him off leash as soon as we were on the trail, since it was still light out and he's always been good on our trail runs. Well, this time he must have gotten to digging after something. When he does that, all else disappears from his world, he becomes completely focused on digging out whatever ground dwelling beastie he thinks is there. The result was that about 20 minutes into my run I realized that half of that time I'd not heard nor seen hide nor hair of my dog. This... is unusual to say the least so I called for him. When this did not elicit his appearance, I stopped and turned around. I called again, but no dog. So, I started on my back trail, figuring he was digging still in the last place I'd seen him and that I'd just leash him and be done with it. I ran my better pace back, calling out occasionally, but no dog. I didn't find him where I'd last seen him either. Now I was really starting to worry. I ran a little harder. I saw a couple guys I know heading the other way and asked if they'd seen my dog. They had. He was running back along the trail. I thanked them and ran just as fast as I could reasonably go and still be able to call for him every now and then (which is a fine line before going anaerobic). Gasping a bit, I saw the group I'd planned to run with and asked if they'd seen my dog. Yup, he was back at the car acting a little jumpy. They'd tried to get him to come with them, but he obviously hadn't. I ran on, still calling out from time to time. I found him at a full run at the trail head, he was running to me from the car. He cried in joy, wriggling around, bouncing up to kiss my face and leaning against me before running in a tight circle, only to come back and leap up to me again still half crying. My dog did what any parent would want their child to do if lost. Return to a known point of origin (the car) and remain there till found. Do not go with strangers. In his case, running to meet me at the trail head was acceptable, I'd been calling him anyway. Today, I hung what may be the ugliest curtains I've ever had. They're not really that bad, they're just not what I'd normally get. I may get more, just to spite myself. |
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| Cold Weather Running |
| You may have noticed that my icon has changed to the running tiger. I'm thinking this year, at least till it get's too hot, I'll concentrate even more on running. Actually, I need to start concentrating on not eating like a pig too, but running and eating seem to go hand in hand. I need to slow down on the latter just a tad though, I can tell I've put a few pounds back on and it's making my run less pleasant.Today was a mid-length run that felt like a long run. It's about 17 degrees out, I was layered for bear and still my legs were chilled. Maybe when it's a little less frozen it won't hurt so much. To say the least, till it's a tad warmer I'm not planning on trying to ride a horse either. |
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| Moved In |
| I got my stuff in. It's by no means unpacked, but I have my stuff in at least. Today I'm pretty much just taking it slow and easy. Every once in a while I'll get a little from my car and bring it inside, but it's the dregs. The last few items. Now that I'm in, I'm seeing all the things I'd like to do to make this place a bit more homey. Curtains, some paint on the walls and a few spots to insulate. For now, I'm just ready to stay around for a while and be done with moving. |
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