l.m. orchard is doing some good ol' fashioned brainstorming with Zauri, BlogWalking, Smart Mobs and other oddities :

"A strange little idea I had on the way home today: Movable Type on a Sharp Zaurus equipped with wireless ethernet? Or maybe Bloxsom if/when it has static publishing? Just use rsync to publish whenever the thing finds itself on a network, wireless or otherwise. Maybe that happens while you're out Warwalking - better yet, maybe that wireless network detector you cobbled together autoblogs what it finds while in your pocket.

But, beyond that, I wonder what else having your blog in your pocket might give you? Toss in a GPS unit somehow, maybe some other things like a thermometer device? A compass? Thinking about ways to automatically capture metadata about your present environment."

it would certainly be interesting to see a stew of parts/pieces like wifi, blogging, rss, presence [ in the instant messaging sense ] and maybe something like rdfmap could begin to lay the foundation for the oft theorized, seldom implemented vision of context aware computing :

"Context-aware computing is a mobile computing paradigm in which applications can discover and take advantage of contextual information (such as user location, time of day, nearby people and devices, and user activity). Since it was proposed about a decade ago, many researchers have studied this topic and built several context-aware applications to demonstrate the usefulness of this new technology. Context-aware applications (or the system infrastructure to support them), however, have never been widely available to everyday users. In this survey of research on context-aware systems and applications, we looked in depth at the types of context used and models of context information, at systems that support collecting and disseminating context, and at applications that adapt to the changing context. Through this survey, it is clear that context-aware research is an old but rich area for research."

it's not like there that far away from this type of vision on wifi enabled college campuses these days:

"Take Ben Kasdon, a Dartmouth exchange student with spiky, bleached-blond hair. Kasdon recently applied for a patent on a personal-security device that uses the network's base stations to pinpoint the location of campus emergencies. About the size of a cigarette lighter, the gadget attaches to a key chain and, when its panic button is squeezed, links up with nearby wireless access points to triangulate and transmit its position.

When I meet up with Kasdon, who's working on a double degree at Dartmouth and Skidmore, he's relaxing in the Collis student center, just in from traversing the campus with an open laptop to look for holes in the network's coverage. Asked to name the biggest difference between the two schools, he gives an answer that should stop phone company executives -- and anyone else who's betting on the cellular carriers' version of the future -- in their tracks: "Nobody here knows anyone's phone number.""

thanks to wesley, i now know that the mozilla calendar 0.8 release reads apple ical files.

and, since ical can publish to a webdav enabled server, i'm the luckiest guy in the world as michal at cornerhost has recently fired up webdav capabilities on the server.

i guess i need to stop procrastinating and get a copy of jaguar, so i can publish my calendar to cornerhost to be read by mozCal when i'm on a non-mac machine. hmmm. me wonders if mozCal can connect to a remote server.

and don't miss the fun stuff that morbus is doing with movabletype and ical.

jewels of wisdom. they are everywhere :

"If "normal" refers to the mentality of a year ago today, a great deal of ignorance would be necessary to return there. For the first time in its history, New York City has been forced away from a suspension of disbelief, as if the failsafe on Otis' elevator had never existed. This is obviously the most major turning point in the history of the city, but the new Manhattanism (in the words of Mr. Koolhaas), remains to be seen. What force will propel the city into its next stage of development?"

christ. i wish i could write like that.

it's strange to go back and ready what i wrote on this day last year . it doesn't really seem to capture how i think i remember feeling. trapped in a traffic jam, just miles from chicago's o'hare airport, pummeled by the sheer unbelievability of it all.

and those crazy, crazy nighmares that kris and i had a week before 9/11. at the risk of being branded a wackjob, i can still recall waking in a fit, wondering why i was standing in the cockpit of a plane, flying so close to tall buildings? why were we so close the buildings? thinking over and over. why are we so close? i really don't think we're supposed to be that close.

and why are they all cast with an eerie red glow?

layers and layers of profound inexplicability. impervious to explanation. that's how i remember 9/11.

so, let's just say you're driving 90 miles per hour down a highway that's clearly marked with a 70 mile per hour speed limit and your screemi...er humming along to radiohead's "the tourist", which - i'll remind you - contains the following ominous lyrics:

"It barks at no one else but me
Like it's seen a ghost
I guess it seen the sparks a-flowing
No one else would know

Hey man slow down, slow down
Idiot, slow down, slow down

Sometimes I get overcharged
That's when you see sparks
You ask me where the hell I'm going
At a thousand feet per second

Hey man slow down, slow down
Idiot slow down, slow down

Hey man slow down, slow down
Idiot slow down, slow down"

yes, let's imagine that this is, in fact, the circumstance you find yourself in, right before you get pulled over by a michigan state trooper. are you:

1. incredibly stupid, for ignoring the universe as she loudly shouts in your ear to slow your shit down?
2. incredibly lucky, for getting the nicest state trooper ever, because - for reasons left unexplained - he decided to write you a ticket for 5 miles over.

and, in what is surely one of the signs of the impending apocalypse, snoop has forsaken the chronic, gin and juice.

wow. Geek chic look is clean cut . and it's thoroughly depressing because it means i'm older than i'd like to believe. apparently an emo is getting popular again and influencing the youngins:

"To understand emo (sometimes called "emocore"), the music must come first. Emo is an arty outgrowth of hardcore punk. It's less macho and aggressive; the lyrics often address idealistic experiences and impressions -- frustration with hypocrisy (or bad luck in love), an appreciation for beauty (as well as the absurd). Emotion is OK. In fact, the emo ideal is authentic, deeply felt emotion.

While Rites of Spring is credited as the first emo band, Washington, D.C.'s Fugazi played a bigger role in defining the genre and being recognized in the media for their uncompromisingly anti-commercial attitudes."

so then, of course, it forced me to check out just how long it's been since i shuffled into the record [sic] store and bought something witth a decidedly emo-ish band name like, say, embrace.

yeah, that'd be around 17 years ago. oof.

oooh, look - it's a good ol' fashioned puff piece of "journalism" with conflict as the central theme:

"Netscape won't dislodge Internet Explorer from its hegemony over browser space. But its open-source sibling is aiming at even bigger game: Windows."

i like mozilla as much as the next guy, but c'mon. get real.