one of life's mysteries is why the prep work associated with painting rooms takes ten times longer than you estimated.

well, hoohah! i finally got all the parts and pieces from apple to get the ibook back in proper working order. i'm cautiously optimistic since everything seems to be functioning. it's recharging right now, so i haven't been able to put it through the paces.

the whole experience has sullied my impression of apple's hardware reliability and customer support. i don't know - in the whole scheme of things two weeks for two rounds of repairs is not completely insane. i'll reserve final judgement until the next system failure.

on a whim today, i reactivated the snowdeal.org voice portal, which is powered by the free service from tellme. it was the result of goofing around awhile back with converting rss feeds to voiceml. it's pretty basic and i never really explored the potential dorky applications that could be developed. hopefully by reactivating it i'll get inspired to tinker. i could imagine some cool stuff you could do with jeremy zawodny's opml2html script that could rip your blogroll into voice-accessible news aggregator.

if you want to check it out dial 1.800.555.TELL and say "extensions", then dial 32523 which will take you to the snowdeal menu. you can say "perl" to get the latest uploads to cpan or "quotes" to get a few quotes-of-the-day. it looks like the cnn rss feed might have moved and is now broken. but the best part doesn't have anything to do with rss. say "homer" to hear a quote from homer simpson that is still making me laugh two years later and i'm not quiet sure why.

In-Room Chat as a Social Tool:

"The in-room chat created a two-channel experience -- a live conversation in the room, and an overlapping real-time text conversation. The experiment was a strong net positive for the group. Most social software is designed as a replacement for face-to-face meetings, but the spread of permanet (connectivity like air) provides opportunities for social software to be used by groups who are already gathered in the same location. For us, the chat served as a kind of social whiteboard. In this note, I want to detail what worked and why, what the limitations and downsides of in-room chat were, and point out possible future avenues for exploration."

and in other house cleaning, i updated the ex machina outbound links to better reflect what i'm reading these days. a few links have fallen by the wayside and a few new links have appeared. if time permits, i plan on updating the other sections of snowdeal.org and parallax may soon get yet another lease on life.

i'm embroiled in The Great Basement Cleanup, so things might be a little slow. my mildly asmatic lungs are enjoying the dust kicked-up from sweeping a basement that hasn't been swept since 1947.

i forgot to mention that friends that give art are the best friends to have. getting art is fun. not that the other gifts weren't appreciated, of course. happy holidays!

in case you were wondering, the old addage 'past performace does not necessarily predict future results' applies to chopping firewood.

i don't care how many successful times you've chopped firewood - it's still not a good idea to go outside, in the dark, standing on a ice-slicked surface, attempting to balance wood and swing an axe. it's more than likely that you'll wack an appendage. but it'll be so cold you won't really notice until you feel the warm sensation of blood dripping through all your fingers. in a rare glimpse at the enormity of your stupidity - then and only then will it occur to you that you might have made around five poor decisions in a row. you'll contemplate this standing in the dark on the icy ground with a sharp, heavy axe, while not being able to see, but now feeling more clearly the dripping blood.

so, it's back to the house, wondering if perhaps this will be the eve of christmas eve when you'll be remembered for cleanly slicing your thumb off. in the house, you will quickly determine that the thumb is intact and you've merely suffered the proverbial flesh wound. you'll note this as positive, while observing that there's a sizeable gash across the thumb knuckle, continuing at an angle down the inside of the thumb. if motivated, you could possibly fold back a small, postage-sized triangle of flesh but you'll quickly decide you're not. oddly, despite the blood there will still not be much pain. since there's no pain, you'll make another brilliant decision, which is to wrap the thumb in giant wads of paper towel, apply five minutes of pressure and decide to give the axe swinging another go.

a half-a-dozen swings into a knottiest of knotty knots, which is in a log so dense you'll be sure you see the faint light from the kitchen window bending towards the grain, you'll realize that now you can feel your thumb. it will started to throb at the same rate as your heartbeat and the blood will have soaked completely through the many layers of paper towel.

back in the house, while contemplating the merits of opposable thumbs and pondering the origins of your maniacal desire to produce the perfect eve of christmas eve cozy fire, you'll resort to wrapping your thumb in paper towel and electrical tape, producing an appendage worthy of sissy hankshaw .

i'm not a lawyer and i don't even play one on tv, which is why it's nice that the jabber.org folks have posted a clear, preliminary technical analysis which inidcates that jabber technologies do not infringe on the aol patent :

"A technology must meet each and every limitation of the independent claims defined in a patent in order to be construed as infringing on the patent. Therefore even this brief analysis shows that U.S. Patent 6,499,344 does not in any way threaten existing or future Jabber technologies. (In fact, the patent seems to describe the original ICQ system, which is fundamentally different from Jabber as well as most other modern IM and presence systems.)"

relatedly, it was recently the 29th anniversary of instant messaging , with the introduction of an application known as TERM-talk .

o.k. enough already! i know i've been slacking on the pictures of cadence, our new bernese pup, that i promised a few weeks ago. here she is in all her fluffy, 7-week-old puppy cuteness. she's already mostly potty trained [ except when you miss her subtle cues ] and loves to give mauja our malamute a hard time in the best possible way. more pictures soon. honest. because who couldn't use a few more dog pictures around the holidays?

ha! my little ipod theory appears to be true. it does make christmas shopping tolerable.

i guess i'm out of the loop. i had no idea that zip zaps are this year's "must have" toy . they're only sold at radio shack and the employee laughed when i asked if they had any. they didn't, but he offered to put me on their 150 person waiting list and told me that he was pretty sure their weren't any left in the state. undeterred i came home and found a store with the last two in the entire grand rapids area less than 5 miles away. the employee said i should hurry over, because he didn't think there were any left in the state.

but now i'm left with a quandry. do i give them as presents or do i unload them on ebay where i could make a tidy profit ?

i just caught the end of a piece on "on the media" on the blogger/trent lott story:

"This week, amidst a wave of controversy, Senate majority leader Trent Lott announced his resignation from the leadership role. Lott's inflammatory remarks were intitially ignored and it was only days later that the story came under mainstream scrutiny. But according to New York post Columnist John Podhoretz, the comments were not ignored by bloggers-amateurs and professional pundits with their own websites. Brooke speaks with John Podhoretz."

i'm off to do a little last minute christmas shopping.

typically, i despise shopping. no, i don't think you understand how much i despise shopping. i used to tolerate certain record [sic] shops and bookstores, but it's hard to muster the energy for even that these days. i tried to go to the bookstore the other day and had a parking spot snatched in the rudest manner by what otherwise appeared to be a kindly grandmother. and today, it's even worse because i have to shop for kids. it's not that i'm some sort of grinch and against kids and toys. i'm just against being in toy stores. or even the toy aisle. it brings out the worst in humanity. and soccer moms.

but today, i have a theory. today, my ipod is going to make it all right. with a little help from brian eno, i will survive.

jabfoaf looks like a handy little tool for producing "friend of a friend" or foaf documents:

"JabFoaf currently consists of two pieces: Roster2Foaf and JID2Foaf. Both tools are based on the same idea -- retrieving vCard information about Jabber users and returning FOAF entries."

of course, you may be wondering why you'd want to produce foaf entries. because, my friend, many a glorious splendor awaits the arrival of the foaf-filled world - for example the foaf- enabled alarm clock :

" Imagine you wanted to create an computer-based alarm clock based on FOAF, where instead of an alarm, your computer played sound samples of your friends (and friends' friends) shouting "Wake Up, slacker...". FOAF tools provide most of what you need, ie. tools that harvest information from your friends' Web sites and aggregate it in a local database. Except you need to know one more property associated with people described in FOAF documents. You want to know the URL of an audio clip (eg. MP3 or WAV) of their "wake up" message. All you need to do to deploy your FOAF-based alarm clock is to document the syntax for adding this new piece of information into FOAF documents. Then install a FOAF harvesting tool, write up some motivating documents, and produce some demos or applications that make interesting use of your FOAF extension."