as yes, 'tis the season for traditions, and today kris and i went with a merry band of family members to cut down our family trees. it was a perfectly norman rockwellesque morning. there was the requisite chill in the air that mandated the wearing of the red union suit. on cue, we starting getting a good amount of lake effect snow.

once again, we held out hope that we might find a noble fir like we grew to like in olympia, washington , but like always we settled happily for a white pine. no hot cocoa provided on site this year. hi. ho.

a good time was had by all, including 10 month old ruby, who was a champ in the chilly weather. it's always fun to go out and get a tree and i've never understood why so few people enjoy the sights, sounds and smells of the annual event.

in a move that will surprise almost nobody who knows us, kris and i brought home the latest addition to our family, cadence, our new 7 week-old bernese mountain dog. she's very sweet and already seems like a natural part of the family. more photos than you can shake a stick at - coming soon.

so, let's say you've upgraded to the shiny, new mozilla 1.2 release only to find yourself bitten by the "freezing at splash screen, creating new window" bug . no, there's no need to delete your entire profile and start froms scratch like you did last time [ hooray imap! ]. nope, it's probably because you're running a 'non-standard' theme like orbit . to undo the effect, you need to delete the chrome.rdf file in the chrome folder of your profile and reinstall orbit.

with everything else going on in the world, it might seem silly - but today i'm thankful that i could run a 5k. i might have been slow as molasses running uphill in, well, november, but i finished and after all the trials and tribulations it felt good to get out and run.

as usual, mark pilgrim is talking the smart talk with syndication is not publication . truer words were never spoken:

"It should be obvious to any rational observer that this will go nowhere fast. A syndication format that requires valid semantic XHTML markup? Spare me. 9 out of 10 bloggers can't even spell XHTML."

trust me. i can spell it. and i can tell you, as someone who's maintained a valid xhtml site for years, complete with a homegrown xhtml-to-rss script - it's a pain in the ass that certainly is not possible without a lot of care and feeding and head banging on walls.

somafm is really hitting the spot right now. i'm a sucker for the drone zone . good to see them back in action. jackson.

i remember the hullaballoo awhile back arising from perjorative comments made by richard wallace, of alice fame, regarding how simple we humans really are:

"Wallace had hit upon a theory that makes educated, intelligent people squirm: Maybe conversation simply isn't that complicated. Maybe we just say the same few thousand things to one another, over and over and over again. If Wallace was right, then artificial intelligence didn't need to be particularly intelligent in order to be convincingly lifelike."

perhaps google is rigorously proving this - with data from 86 languages and over 100 countries:

" Despite its geographic and ethnic diversity, the world is spending much of its time thinking about the same things. Country to country, region to region, day to day and even minute to minute, the same topic areas bubble to the top: celebrities, current events, products and computer downloads.

"It's amazing how similar people are all over the world based on what they are searching for," said Greg Rae, one of three members of Google's logs team, which is responsible for building, storing and protecting the data record. "

PHP with Apple's Developer Tools:

"I regularly use Project Builder and CVS to create and maintain complex PHP applications with dozens of source files. In this article, I'll illustrate some of the advantages of Project Builder and show some of the tricks I've learned."

"iStumbler 0.1b is a modified version of MacStumber which intends to adopt the aqua user interface guidelines and create a clean interface to the great scanning capability of MacStumber."

there's not much going on here today because i'm still wading through a meaty discussion on smartmobs :

"The Internet enables people to connect with strangers in other parts of the world, getting together around shared affinities -- the whole virtual community story. Ebay adds a reputation system, and a new market emerges. Peer to peer methodologies enabled 70 million people to share their hard disk space via Napster, and 2 million people to amass 20 trillion floating point operations per second of CPU power to search for messages from outer space.

What will happen when billions of people carry devices that are thousands of times more powerful than today's PCs, linked at speeds thousands of times faster than today's broadband connections, perhaps with distributed reputation systems that enable us to find people with whom we have some common cause -- on the fly, in the real world?"

Knowledge isn't power, says Xerox :

"High-flyers consistently recognise the value of sharing knowledge. In contrast, employees rated as 'low performers' tend to be hoarders who avoid contributing to the knowledge pool, according to research commissioned by Xerox."

[ via cognitivearchitects ]

Dimensions of Communication :

"All the communication technologies we use -- telephones, newspapers, radio, IM, e-mail, mailing lists, TV, books -- are mired in historical cruft that keeps us from seeing clearly what to build next. It is useful to go to first principles, then reexamine whatever communication task you have at hand. So let me suggest the following basic dimensions of communication:"

somewhat relatedly in an obtuse kind of way, is steven johnson's write-up on carrying on two simultaneous group conversations with the same group:

"There's wi-fi in the room, and as people talk and give informal presentations, there's a simultaneous chat going on, restricted solely to the people in the room. The chat is being projected onto a flat screen visible to everyone, so the ten people or so who aren't participating in it can follow the threads as well."

"It was a pretty intoxicating mix -- carrying on two simultaneous group conversations with the same group. You felt like you were pulling down a lot of data: the real-world conversations grounded things, and the chat let the room riff a bit more. But also intoxicating in the dizzying sense. There are a number of cog-sci studies of our ability to follow two verbal conversations at once (we max out above two), but I wonder if the carrying capacity is any different if one conversation is spoken and one is text."

[ Dimensions of Communication via werblog ]

Eye Contact Shown To Affect Conversation Patterns, Group Problem-Solving Ability :

"Dr. Roel Vertegaal, who is presenting a paper on eye gaze at an international conference in New Orleans this week, has found evidence to suggest a strong link between the amount of eye contact people receive and their degree of participation in group communications."

the results would seem to buttress that oldie-but-a-goodie, "Beyond Being There" :

"Hollan and Stornetta effectively argue that the pursuit of face-to-face is a) often inappropriate, and b) destined to fail. The premise behind this assumption is that a media attempting to imitate face-to-face fails when communities only use that media when f-to-f is not available. When this happens, electronic communication is at a disadvantage relative to f-to-f. They argue that "In telecommunications research perhaps we have been building crutches rather than shoes;" we only use the crutch when our fully functional leg is not available. The authors suggest that researchers should instead begin building shoes, which augment our legs, and we use them even when they are fully functional. They astutely argue that there are potential advantages to electronic communication that are not present in f-to-f. "For example, three significant features of the new medium are its ability to support asynchronous communication, anonymous communication, and to automatically archive communication.""

i just went out and saw the wilco documentary which was good, although i'm certainly not a connaisseur of band documentaries. at one point in the film, somebody from rolling stone is talking about how yankee hotel foxtrot requires time to fully appreciate. i agree. in fact, it's the first album i've purchased in a very long time that keeps getting better and better.

i'd almost forgotten that it could happen - a richly textured album that matures and reveals itself with each listen.

wow. it's like the guy who put together his proto geek toys list broke into my childhood toy closet. i was so big into the radio shack electronic sets, lincoln logs and even paper airplanes that it freaks me out a bit to see them all in one neat little list. it's amusing to think i was recently looking for a good paper airplane resource. [ via rael ]

yeah. i can relate. "Burned groin blamed on laptop"! :

"Dr Ostenson said: "The patient recalled that, while sitting two days earlier with his computer on his lap, he occasionally had felt heat and a burning feeling on his lap and thigh."

Unfortunately for the victim, the blisters broke and developed into infected suppurating wounds. "

well, whadya know. there's free wifi in the northwest airlines terminal in the fort lauderdale airport. i don't see any signage, so i'd suspect that it's some kind of trial.

update: hah! i almost missed my flight out because a bell south tech found me and we ended up talking like the superdorks that we are. seems that they just lit up the network and he could see me using it. apparently they're rolling it out in the entire airport and it'll be pay-to-play soon. somewhere between 5 and 10 dollars. i don't know if i'd pay that for a 15 minute e.mail check, but it's invaluable when you're stranded for 2 hours like i was today.

some people might call me a freaky, gemini chameleon with multiple personalities. but really i'm not. really, i'm a "boundary spanning, high self monitor" :

"We can say that "self-monitoring" refers to a person's ability to adjust his or her behavior to external situational factors. Individuals high in self-monitoring show considerable adaptability in their behavior. They are highly sensitive to external cues and can behave differently in different situations. They are capable of presenting striking contradictions between the public persona and the private self."

"High self-monitors are often more effective than low self-monitors in jobs that require boundary spanning (communicating and interacting with different groups of people who, because of contrasting goals, training, or skills "speak different languages")."

sitting in fort lauderdale, i can almost hear my wife laughing in michigan. [ via brad lauster ]

i'm off to southern florida tommorrow and friday. no, i'm not reading for a bit part in csi miami.

posting might be light. be kind while i'm away.

mark pilgrim's back and he's on his ""automated ways to find new and interesting people" kick" and the results are, er, interesting:

"By looking at the sites I currently read in my homegrown news aggregator, looking them up in the blogging ecosystem and seeing which sites they link to, weighing them slightly by popularity (based on the natural log of their incoming links) but also dividing by the number of other sites they link to (because a midlist site that only links to a handful of people is more relevant than a popular site that links to 100), and filtering out sites that don't have RSS feeds (plus a few I already know I don't want to read), I came up with a list of recommended new reading."

david weinberger on on eric norlin on trust :

"Eric Norlin is beginning to think about a taxonomy of trust: 1. You are who you say you are. 2. You do what you say you will do. 3. The combined experience of 1 and 2 builds over time.

As Norlin points out, this applies to one particular type of trust, especially when it comes to transactions and collaboration. But it doesn't fit so well when applied to squishier relationships. Why did I trust that guy named AKMA -- if an AKMA is a guy at all -- after reading his first couple of blog entries? In this case I didn't care much about #1, and #2 doesn't apply. Different type of trust. Not an objection to Eric's taxonomy, just a comment on its scope. And implicitly: what's the relationship of the two types of trust, unless it'st just a trick of language? "

even though it's going to come across horribly underwhelming and understated i'd like pass on a very sincere "get well soon" to brig.

Introducing iPulse! :

" iPulse is an application that graphically displays the inner workings of Mac OS X.

Using its concise and visually pleasing graphical user interface, iPulse displays a multitude of information on the desktop or in the dock. The entire UI is completely configurable so you can turn off gauges you don't want, leaving only what you are interested in for easy viewing."

it's a little wanky, but it could be interesting. unfortunately, it's merely highlighting how many cycles mozilla is chewing up. [ via Forwarding Address: OS X ]

anil has some interesting thoughts that expand on the recent revelations regarding segway's nationwide legislative extravaganza , focusing on the role that weblogs could potentially play:

"Could the geographically distributed nature of various weblog communities be used to spread technology-oriented messages much more effectively? National support for a local candidate for office is damned near useless, since people can't vote in districts where they don't live. But leveraging the strengths of the network by distributing issue information and communications tools for in-person individual lobbying seems a potential that's gone largely untapped."

i'm going to do it. i'm going to linkslut steven johnson's new blog. and no, mrs. smarty pants, it's not because everyone else is doing it. it's because he's nicely summarized his note taking "modes", which ring true with my own behavior:

"But I think there's something very smart in the premise here, which is that note-taking is as distinct an activity as creating a spreadsheet or a presentation, and thus deserves its own application.

Right now, I have about four separate ways that I take notes: reading notes from books I've read as research; quick notes of phone numbers or addresses; story or book ideas; interesting bookmarks of things I've found on the web with commentary. Right now, I use four different applications for those four tasks: I store my research notes in a special format that's searchable online (more about that in another post); I jot down quick notes in my email client, because it's always open and is organized by time; I keep my writing ideas in Word documents; and as of this week, I keep my web findings here in MovableType."

i used to be a prolific "jotter", carrying around 3x5 index cards overflowing with copious amounts of chicken scratch and coded in 3 ink colors. in many ways, the the vast wasteland was an attempt to formalize this behavior in the context of "the networked world." indeed the rhetoric quote i chose for conflux lo those many years ago reflects the thinking to a certain degree:

"...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization."

at the time, i was thinking of ways that i translate the notetaking into something a bit more coherent. an evolving "cabinet of wonders".

the irony? nobody but steven is going to remember that he wrote those words. in hindsight, i should probably attribute them to him instead of linking to a link to the original "feed" story that he wrote entitled, "Portrait Of The Blogger As A Young Man" [incidently, i'd link to the original article but it went into link rot hell long ago. ]

and it's a little humbling to see this site remain much the same over the years. analogous to prehistoric cave paintings caught within the limits of the representation, not even coming close to the complexity that the adept can achieve with a fresh 3x5 card and 3 pens while on the train after a trip to local bookstore - with a head overflowing with too many ideas.

i know several parents who have decided against vaccinating their newborns for a variety of reasons, and i've always looked at the decision with agnostic curiosity.

i understand the merits of both arguments. by their very nature, there is a risk with vaccines. but it's really only because most people give their children vaccines that it's reasonably safe to decide to not vaccinate your child. you reap the benefits of other people's risk taking. classic game-theory scenario.

but that's all theoretical. i don't have kids and i haven't had to make the tough call. i just get to sit back and cogitate on things like "The Not-So-Crackpot Autism Theory" that discusses that there may have been very real risks associated with vaccination:

"The F.D.A. team's conclusions were frightening. Vaccines added under Halsey's watch had tripled the dose of mercury that infants got in their first few months of life. As many as 30 million American children may have been exposed to mercury in excess of Environmental Protection Agency guidelines -- levels of mercury that, in theory, could have killed enough brain cells to scramble thinking or hex behavior.

"My first reaction was simply disbelief, which was the reaction of almost everybody involved in vaccines,'' Halsey says. ''In most vaccine containers, thimerosal is listed as a mercury derivative, a hundredth of a percent. And what I believed, and what everybody else believed, was that it was truly a trace, a biologically insignificant amount. My honest belief is that if the labels had had the mercury content in micrograms, this would have been uncovered years ago. But the fact is, no one did the calculation.""

that's 30 million potentially exposed children. stupifying. think the responsible parties are looking at the business end of a major lawsuit? perhaps not , due to collateral shielding from legislative efforts intended to protect smallpox and antrax vaccine makers:

The provision would require those who wish to sue former makers of thimerosal such as Eli Lilly to instead pursue their claims through a federal vaccine compensation program that caps damages at $250,000, Carl said. Medical research has not established a link between autism and Thimerosal, but many parents believe the ingredient may be to blame and are suing manufacturers.

''Ask a parent of an autistic child if $250,000 is going to take care of that child's needs for the rest of his life and you will probably hear that absolutely not,'' Carl said."

Patterns for Personal Web Sites :

"There are many personal Web sites. The vast majority are mediocre. Some are bad. Fewer are good. An extremely small number are excellent.

These excellent sites -- and I use "excellent" subjectively -- fascinate me. Why is finding a new one such a delight? What distinguishes them from the rest? What unnamable yet instantly recognizable quality do they possess?

This is my attempt to answer some of these questions. My method is to distill the qualities of the best personal Web sites (and my own) into a set of patterns."

[ via laughing meme ]

<note type="self">every day you reach down to press "play" on the answering machine to listen to the messages. without fail, once a week - usually on the weekend - you forget that you need to give your head enough clearance to get past the corner of the cupboard. typically you'll bash your head a mere inches from you temple and exclaim, "FUUUUUDDDDDDGGGGGGEEEEEEEE!!!!!! why do i do that every week?" as humourous as you might find this, it's wearing a little thin. you're better than the fish who keeps forgetting she's a fish. really. you can do it.

i'm hoping you remember this, because i'm not sure the weekly head bash is doing you any favors, if you know what i mean.</note>

i normally try to refrain from linking to things seen on metafilter on the assumption that you've already seen them, but i'm making a rare exception for this hilarious footage of LSD being tested on British troops.

i had no idea dean kamen has been talking about his long-rumoured stirling engine development project:

"According to the Web site for Kamen's Manchester-based company DEKA, the Stirling Engine has always had high potential for thermodynamic efficiency, but has been plagued with problems, such as limitation of materials. But technical advances over the last 150 years have allowed all aspects of the engine to be modernized, turning it into "a high performance, high output, efficient machine of the 21st century.""

[ via john robb ]

why yes - thank you very much. i'm aware that if there were more people like david mccusker life for enterprise blogging evangelists would be a little easier. see, david writes elaborate introductions on his first day of work that detail how he's going to use blogging to make his work-life productive, fun and interesting.

but alas, david's an outlier of freakish proportions [ albeit an outlier that would be fun to work with ].

plaxo. stupid. crazy. or hiding something?

heroic. heroic proportions, i say. very little pain today. who knows. maybe i'll be able to abuse myself by running on a regular basis soon. much to the horror of my general practitioner.

interesting mefi thread on biodiesel made all the more interesting by my recent purchase of a vw jetta turbo diesel wagon.

maybe someday soon you'll know i'm coming down the street when you smell french fries.

as many of you probably figured out, i never did run the chicago marathon, due past injuries coming back to haunt me. but today, several months after being told that i'd never run again, i ran three miles. we'll see tommorrow whether or not this was an accomplishment of heroic or outlandishly stupid proportions. perhaps a bit of both. but for now, i'm feeling pretty good.

rick klau has written up a great piece detailing his exerience with rolling out a klog pilot at work and it's a mixed bag:

"At the end of our first month, it's not a slam dunk. To be successful long-term, we will need to expand the number of people with access to Radio as an authoring tool. We will need to define our objectives - with more specificity than simply identifying how we can improve communications. But this was a helpful start - and a good first step to better understanding how weblogs might make us smarter."

i've had similar experiences in my more limited attempts to evangelize blogging in a work environment. it's a real eye-opener that will level-set any delusions that blogging will revolutionize knowledge sharing in organizations. it takes alot of persistance and i heartily "second" his recommendations. while rick gives his own co-workers the benefit of the doubt, in many ways, the lessons are no different that those learned in more traditional knowledge management arenas. you can lower the barriers to entry to near-zero and find that most people simply don't want to share for all the usual mundane, institutionalized reasons.

as rick says, you "must have a problem to solve", "reward participation", "define what you're looking for" and "ensure senior participation". and that's just for starters. otherwise it's blank stares and business-as-usual.

i'm probably the last person to know this, but until i read this chicago tribune article , i had no idea that there was a cheapo way to mimic the telezapper:

"Here is how to do it: If you call a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service you will hear 3 short tones, "doo...dah...dee", thanks to Ma-Bell. Each time you Refresh this page you should hear, "doo...dah...dee". The actual frequency of these tones are 985.2 Hz, 1370.6 Hz, and 1776.7 Hz. Guess what the telemarketers' software does when it detects these 3 tones at the beginning of your outgoing message? It thinks it has reached a line that is disconnected or is no longer in service. So, it disconnects and does not log your phone number as a working number. BINGO!

NOW record these onto you outgoing message or voice mail announcement, and start exterminating telemarketers. Try this example, but use your own name, "doo...dah...dee, Hello, This is Alan Carlton". It must be at the beginning of your announcement to work."

i don't know. the schwag hasn't exactly been flying off the shelf. maybe a classic thong would do the trick.

scraches chin. The Growth of a Smart Mob into a Wireless Community of Practice :

"Most communities of human beings evolve over time, changing their membership as well as their fundamental purpose and social structure. Smart mobs, enabled by portable communication technology, are a new cultural phenomenon and as such little is known about their evolutionary process. Do smart mobs evolve over time? What stimulates them to change? What do they change into? What are the technological tools necessary for these changes?"

[ via boing boing ]

Incorporating Rendezvous into Your Cocoa Applications, Part 1 :

"Editor's note: In this first part of a short multi-part series, Mike Beam discusses some of the thinking behind Rendezvous (ZeroConf) and the hooks in Cocoa to implement its functionality into your application design. In next week's part two, he shows you how to build a simple chat program that attempts to provide functionality similar to iChat's Rendezvous chat feature."

from the stating-the-obvious department. Study: Prolonged PC use saps energy:

"Researchers in Japan have scientifically documented what dwellers of Dilbertville have known for years: Prolonged daily computer use can make you sore and sap your strength, energy and motivation."

i've always considered voice interfaces for applications to be clunky hacks not worth the learning curve, but john udell highlights some midly interesting scenarios in "speakable web services":

"Consider another Brent Simmons application, the popular RSS newsreader NetNewsWire Lite. It's already more usefully speakable then most OS X apps I've tried. Along with menu navigation, you can speak the crucial commands "Next Unread," "Mark All as Unread," and "Open in Browser." These are more mnemonic than their keyboard equivalents (Command-G, Command-Shift-K, and Command-B), and especially in the case of Command-Shift-K, more accessible, too. An interesting refinement would be to voice-enable random access to feeds, just as MSIE allows spoken random access to items on the Go and Favorites menus. I've got 128 subscriptions, for example. It would be cool to say "Sam Ruby" and jump straight to Sam's blog. Or to say "Jeremy," and jump to a completion list showing "Allaire" and "Zawodny," and speak one of those surnames to finalize the selection."

it's interesting to see the range of responses from voices in the web design community regarding the blogger facelift contest.

it always makes me wince a little to see brute force supply and demand in full effect.

when did blogdex get a spiffy new look? recently, i think. i guess that's what has been occupying cameron's time. i feared perhaps he had succumbed to the evils of carpal tunnel syndrome.

i forgot to mention that chimera 0.6 , with a few new features and a handful of bugfixes . i'd agree that it continues to challenge ie on mac ox , but i'd be alot quicker to switch from mozilla if there were an easy way to export your bookmarks from chimera's xml format to mozilla's format. i suppose i could write some kind of stylesheet, but then i wouldn't have anything to complain about.

Hear&There: An Augmented Reality System of Linked Audio:

"Hear&There allows people to virtually drop sounds at any location in the real world. Once one of these "SoundSpots" has been created, an individual using the Hear&There system will be able to hear it. We envision these sounds being recordings of personal thoughts or anecdotes, and music or other sounds that are associated with a given area. We hope that this system will be used to build a sense of community in a location and to make places feel more alive."

get yer fresh, hot jabber 2.0 alpha release! it's a complete rewrite so watch yourself.

when you think about it, "woman jailed for using sheriff's web address to sell porn" just isn't a headline you see very often. it might even be something you only see once in your life:

"According to the Cincinatti Post she referred to Leis, whose deputies arrested her in 1999 for pandering obscenity, as "Simon (expletive) Leis who thinks he runs the county.""

obsessively observant visitors in the crowd will notice that i've modified the appearance of the "blockquoted" sections of text. i've removed the reddish text color and changed the font to be "in the style" of the "in my experience" blog.

the red blockquote text color always seemed to be just about one color too many and i wanted to make things a little more subtle. i'm not sure how i feel about the change. i'll let it ferment for a few days. comments welcome.

it's a little depressing to see the ten reasons ease of use doesn't happen on engineering projects , what with all its depressing familiarity all compactly articulated in one easy to digest article:

"In reviewing all the email I've received at this website, and the experiences I've had teaching and consulting, I've tried to catalog the different reasons why projects didn't result in easy to use designs. Below I've compiled the top ten reasons into a short list, with some brief suggestions on how to approach fixing the problem."

[ via tomalak ]

101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that IE cannot:

"The following lists 101 things that one can do with the Mozilla browser component that one cannot do with IE. The list only includes things that don't require manually changing the registry or some other obscure thing. I used the Windows version of IE 6.0; the list will vary slightly for the Mac version."

[ via blogzilla ]

speaking of group-forming, buddyspace is an interesting experiment in "Jabber-based presence visualisation, automatic roster & maps, zoom/collapse feature for large-population 'cluster' nodes." it installs on os x, and the scheme for overlaying presence information on maps looks fairly straightforward. hmmmm.

even though i don't really need e.mail from Yet Another List, the group-forming list looks like it has potential to hit on several areas of interest:

"One thing that's exciting about the Internet is that it allows new communities to form at very low expense. This opens up many possibilities that were not previously available. In particular, it allows activists, thinkers, and other creative, change-oriented people to find one another, regroup, share information and learn more easily. This helps those people progress towards their goals more effectively. Successful examples of lively, focused communities include ShouldExist, infoAnarchy, IndyMedia, and MeatBall.

Although we already see social clustering happening in certain areas, it is still difficult to create high-signal, lively groups around issues that are not (yet?) very popular or well known. We need to better understand how the process of clustering happens, in order to figure out how we can make it easier and more efficient."