i received an email from a reader from a reader regarding my use of the word 'schwag' to refer to the contents of the snowdeal store stating that , much to my surprise, it wasn't a word:

"There is no such word as "schwag".

The proper term is:

swag
n 1: (informal) valuable goods 2: goods or money obtained illegally [syn: loot, booty, pillage, plunder, prize] v 1: droop, sink, or settle from or as if from pressure or loss of tautness [syn: sag, droop, flag] 2: walk as if unable to control one's movements [syn: stagger, reel, keel, lurch, careen] 3: sway heavily or unsteadily

As a longtime fan of the word swag, I hate to see it corrupted. I hope you will share my concern."

now, i'll admit to doing zero research before using the term 'schwag'. when i used the word, i was thinking of the colloquialism that i had heard during my youthful days of indescretion to indicate poor quality marijuana - as in, "dude, that's schwag weed." [ not that i had anything to do with the purchase or consumption of said schwag weed, of course ]. i thought i had heard people say the word 'schwag' in reference to poor quality tchotchkes , like those you may or may not find in the snowdeal store . i thought it was a simple case of reappropriating a euphamism and didn't think twice about it. and now, i find that it might not be a word at all. but after doing a little digging, i'm more confused than ever.

a simple googlefight show that swag beats schwag hands down [ and even more dubiously, i discover that the snowdeal store is in the top five results for 'schwag' ]. and dictionary.com has a reference for swag but not schwag . inquiring minds want to know - could i have wrong all these years?

but things aren't so simple. no less an authority as wired has used the word schwag and the urban dictionary has references to both 'swag' and 'schwag' where a few of the definitions of schwag sounds appropriate:

"any product or thing of poor quality masking itself as a viable product.

Aquanet is the shwag of the hair care world, and Spam is the schwag of the meat world. "

so which is it, 'swag' or 'schwag'?

the holiday season is off to a fine start.

i got my first viewing of a christmas story in a little earlier than usual this year on friday and today we went out with family to cut down a christmas tree. it was in the mid-40s and sunny, so it didn't feel like christmas is a mere weeks away, but it was a lot more pleasant than years past when we wandered around in sub-zero temperatures. we're in a competition with our neighbors this year [ they don't know about it ] so we bought about 30 feet of natural "garland" and a wreath too. we will have the most kick-assedness house on the cul-de-sac, even if i have to get on the roof and string up all manner of lighting.

there's no doubt about it, bad santa has more in common with leaving las vegas than miracle on 34th street. and for what must be some deeply twisted reasons, i'll admit that i laughed out loud through most of the movie, despite the fact that about two-thirds of the way through it starts to get the feel of those saturday night live skits that drags out just a little too long.

you've got to hand it go billy bob thorton - it takes some kind of magic to get a theatre full of patrons to laugh at a degenerate santa drinking himself to death while abusing everyone within earshot.

just this morning i was commenting to kris that george bush really missed an opportunity to do the right thing by visiting troops in iraq on thanksgiving. well, it looks like he didn't miss the opportunity - he just didn't let anyone know ahead of time. the really admirable thing would be to not politicize the trip, but somehow i don't think that's going to happen.

now that iranian vice-president mohammad ali abtahi has has a blog, i wish knew even a little persian. for starters, does the caption to the photo of eduard shevardnadze shed any light on what he might be pondering?

jim moore coined the phrase "pooning in the blogosphere" in reference to andrew orlowski :

"In Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, the ever energized 15-year-old hero and woman/girl Y.T. surfs the highways as a skateboard-riding courier. She propels herself by "pooning" speeding cars. Her poon is a powerful magnet slung at passing autos. When her poon hits the steel sides of a car and sticks, the attached cable pulls taut and off Y.T. goes! Wild ride, with little energy expended by Y.T. Hot transport!

Andrew Orlowski has perfected "pooning in the blogosphere." He picks a speeding target, such as BloggerCon or The Second SuperPower Rears Its Beautiful Head, writes a "poon" in the form of a flame attached to the rising web topic, and off he goes pulled along by another's efforts."

i think john dvorak's latest bit on blogging might just qualify for him for the "poon of the year" award, although i'm sure that orlowski has a few more tricks up his sleeve.

an oddly amusing story about how much can go wrong when you pick the wrong celebrity to pimp your product:

"Chrysler's strategy was to move the brand upscale by attracting younger, more affluent consumers. But during testing, BBDO's focus groups told Chrysler that Ms. Dion appealed to consumers with an average age of 52. "

"Publicly, Bill Morden, BBDO Detroit's vice chairman and chief creative officer, warned that it would take at least a year to improve Chrysler's image in consumers' minds."

[ via marketingwonk ]

first, we discover that jeff tweedy is p diddy vp and now we find that evan williams is michael jackson's number one fan :

"Some fans felt that Jackson is simply misunderstood.

"Is he creepy, no. Is he eccentric, yes. Different? Absolutely. I think that's what draws me to him," said Evan Williams, 28, who cranked a radio that played Jackson tunes. "

in the past, i've tried to get myself into a personal private wiki regime, but i could never seem to get myself to get into the regular habit. sure, i'd give it the ol' college try for awhile, but i'd eventually fall back into my old habits of tossing stuff that should have gone in the wiki into a sticky note . i think the browser inferface never felt quiet right, which is wierd because i don't normally hate browser interfaces. anyway, i had big plans to try something like tinderbox, but it seemed like it might be a bit much for what i needed and never could justify the $145 pricetag.

but i might be finally able to wean myself from my sticky note habit, now that i seemed to have taken a liking to voodoopad. what's amusing is that voodoopad has been sitting on my drive for ages and i just never opened the application. i guess that's as good a testimony as any for how difficult it is to change user behavior. for whatever reason something has clicked and i'm starting to use it more, and i'm am really liking it. i could easily see it becoming "must have" application.

relatedly, i wonder why subethaedit hasn't included the ability to edit in "wiki" mode. maybe they have, i haven't downloaded a new version in awhile. it looks like other people are wondering the same thing.

i was at my local big box bookstore and found myself completely enthralled with "spidering hacks" . it's a page-turner and filled to the brim with all manner of hacks that can be used for good or evil.

congratulations to morbus and tara - you've put together a superfine collection of hacks that's going straight to the top of my christmas list.

that's right. in an unprecedented move, i know what i want for christmas. i've been a good boy and i really, really hope you will bring me a digidesign mbox so i can start laying down tracks with the martin . it's been a long time since i've done any recording and i can't really think of a good reason why.

oh, and if you could get your hands on an 80 gig LaCie drive that'd be super too.

kellan points me to an interesting analysis of the nra suspicous suspects list where i discover that julia child might have been a spy , "...despite being a woman and very tall."

me thinks surely this must be an internet myth, but a quick googling reveals that julia was cooking up more than liver pate :

"Decades before becoming a famous chef, she worked for the Office of Strategic Services. (The OSS was the predecessor to the CIA.) She was assigned to solve a problem for U.S. naval forces during World War II: Sharks would bump into explosives that were placed underwater, setting them off and warning the German U-boats they were intended to sink.

"So... Julia Child and a few of her male compatriots got together and literally cooked up a shark repellent," that was used to coat the explosives, McCarthy says."

it's no secret that parallax has been withering on the vine for quiet some time. originally, i had intended the site for "guest" bloggers. exactly one of you might remember way back in the day when kristine posted on environmental and sustainability issues. but unfortunately she didn't have the stamina for daily blogging and eventually gave up. after collecting dust for a while, matt started posting on design and usability topics, but that didn't last long either.

so, i've finally taken back control of parallax and decided to try and experiment that i've been wanting to do for a long time. the parallax posts are now automatically generated from text harvested from "the vast wasteland" . as of today, the dataset is the entire archives for ex_machina which go back almost 4 years. the initial results are promising and somewhat amusing with almost no tuning of the scripts or massaging of the generated content.

while i've wanted to do something like this for a long time, it was after seeing the markov blogger code that i decided i should start playing around with the idea. i decided to experiment with colin frayn's excellent random sentence generator because, well, i'm lazy and it required less up-front work for me to get running. after doing more tuning, i think the next task will be to figure out how to get it keep links, like the markov blogger. and then i'll fold in support for automated posting to blogger, so i can run it in the background at random times through the day.

why do this? well, i've got a lot of content sitting around and i've been wanting to do something with it that's more fun than the "on this day 3 years ago" type of stuff. and isn't everyone interested in computational linguistics ?

via kellan i discovered "the blue marble" , which has "...the most detailed true-color image of the entire Earth to date".

"that'll make a perfect desktop image", i think to myself. but unfortunately the the hi-res tiff image makes imagemagick for for os x puke when it tries to covert it to a jpeg. it doesn't puke per se, but rather it converts it to a distorted black and white image. other tiffs convert fine. maybe i'm doing something dopey.

olivier fills us in on his decision regarding bug tracking systems . it looks like he decided to go with mantis , which looks nice enough. now he's looking for a ticketing/help desk app. i still say he should go with request tracker . you get a very usable bug tracker - the fact that the perl community uses if for this purposes says something [ no wisecracks from the peanut gallery]. and in addition to a bug db, you get all the features you'd expect in a ticketing system. if you've got to get end users to actually use the tools, it seems like it might be better to have to go the education process once instead of twice.

caveat: i have't actually installed the new version, which i'm going to do tonight or tommorrow, so i can't actually speak to how easy or hard the install is.

War critics astonished as US hawk admits invasion was illegal :

"In a startling break with the official White House and Downing Street lines, Mr Perle told an audience in London: "I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing.""

i'll probably regret this, but i am actually going to link to a fox news article on the michael jackson fiasco, if only because it supports the important principle that there are always two sides to a lawsuit and that you are innocent until proven guilty, no matter how much of a wierdo you are.

in any case, guilty or not, with lots of video tape and a lawyer already working on the case for the better part of a year, you can bet it's going to get ugly and that it will be competing with the upcoming primaries for sound bites every night. something tells me that getting your political message out just got that much harder, which of course favors the candidates with the most money.

update: more people comment on the amount of time being spent on covering the jackson case, at the expense of more weighty news.

the bleat:

"Two big bombs in Istanbul, and what’s the big story of the day? Following around a pervy slab of albino Play-Doh as he turns himself into the police. I was stunned to discover last night that Nightline not only covered the Jackson case in detail, but bumped coverage of the Whitehall speech, which was the most important speech since the Iraq campaign began and arguably the most important speech of the war, period."

George W. Bush Loves Michael Jackson:

"A number of explosions tore through the British consulate in Turkey today, killing scores of people. George W. Bush is in England, surrounded on all sides by enraged British citizens whose massive protests have required nearly every police officer in London to be put on the line of defense."

"It is 3:16 p.m. on Thursday afternoon as I write this. CNN has been covering, with total exclusivity, a parking lot outside a police station for the last hour. "

and behind the scenes, everyone's staring at a spider at neverland.

tuttle svc asks "When will the Salam Pax of the American urban public high school appear?" indeed.

i ran into jim coudal the other day and he let me touch and feel the product of his latest endeavor, jewelboxing; as the website states, it is "..."coolest, most modern, best engineered DVD/CD case, ever."

it's a little hard to convey via a picture, but they really are the the smoothest cases you'll lay your hands on. if you're a little rusty on your design skillz, they've got templates and a bevy of example boxen . to top it off you can get a peak behind the scenes with their jewelboxing blog .

so rather than just handing out snowdeal schwag yet again this holiday season, i think some custom photo cds might make The Perfect Gift.

pathalizer seems like a nifty little tool for visualizing the paths most users take when browsing a website:

"More specifically, Pathalizer takes an apache access.log and from this generates a list of hits, ordered first by source address and then by timestamp. This list is then converted to a list of graphs (where the nodes are web addresses and the edges are transitions ('mouseclicks')), and all these graphs are summarized into one big graph."

[ via morelikethis ]

i'm happy to report that scanning under panther is a painless affair. i just needed to reinstall the drivers for my CanoScan N650U, which i lost when my disk went south a few weeks ago. canon hasn't updated their site and explicitely stated that the drivers work with 10.3.x, but everything seems normal.

now that i'm back in the scanning saddle, i have to commemorate the occasion by digging a few pictures out of the shoebox. of course, that means we have new dog pictures! the pictures of cadence were taken a few weeks before we ran the chicago marathon, which means she was just a few weeks shy of her first birthday.

and proving that i have at least a few non-dog pictures, here's a shot i took of my niece ruby as she sat on the curb waiting to greet us at mile 18 of the chicago marathon. notice her very stylish "flying pig marathon" t-shirt that we made for her when she watched us run the flying pig marathon in the spring. it's a little hard to tell, but she's refueling with a bananna, just like her aunt and uncle.

in the middle of writing about "what being the father of an autistic son taught me about being a red sox fan (and vice versa)" , ned articulates one of the great sublime truths:

"A good day is a good day. Let it be a good day. A good day is not an instrument of torture designed to ratchet up the agony of your ultimate and inevitable anguish. When you start to fear good days, you have gone down a dangerous path. A good day can lead to hope, and hope can later be extinguished, but a good day is a good day, and you have to find a way to weave that into your life."

great. i noticed today that upgrading to panther has screwed up my ability to print to my hp deskjet 895cse .

at first my problems looked pretty similar to those seen by others , but after installing the newest panther update [ which purports to fix printing-related problems amongst others ] and reinstalling the hp drivers , now all i get is pages and pages of symbols and control characters [ actually it looks like it might be trying to print postscript, even thought the printer isn't poscript compatible ].

sigh. apparently a goodly number of people are having a wide range of printing problems

update: 11.14.03 o.k. a call to applecare fixed the problem. it seemed like they had me repeat what i was doing when it was broken, but this time it magically fixed the problem. i think the only difference was i closed all open programs before i reinstalled the drivers, which seems like a decidedly pee cee thing to have to do. .

one of the following stories is in the the onion , and one of them isn't. and yet they are eerily similar, right down the photographs of the offending bloggers.

"mom finds out about blog" :

""I don't have one of those sites that's a big tell-all about one-night stands and wild parties," Widmar said. "I mostly write about the animation I like or little things that happen to me and my friends. But there are definitely things in there that I wouldn't, well, write home to Mom about.""

"Student punished for comments made in online journal" :

""The dean told me that what I'd written wasn't school appropriate," said Juhl, who was Valley's homecoming king this year and also was president of its drama club. "He said it wasn't appropriate for a journal. I just feel like I've been violated, like they've punished me for expressing my personal opinion.""

can you spot the satire?

from the new-to-me-but-not-exactly-new department. localfeeds , which lets you merge rss feeds by geography. it's nice to see someone taking advantage of the geourl data.

i bet it'd be fun throw in a little local calendar foo similar to what's going on at the gothamist event calendar , which is "powered" by upcoming [ and and movable type ].

embedded in ars technica's exhaustive panther review , there's a great bit on something that i've been doing for a very, very long time, something that is so deeply embedded in my way of doing things that i hadn't ever thought about it - spatial window management :

"That's right, Mac users actually manually arranged their windows like so many pieces of paper on a desk. Insanity! The height of inefficiency! Au contraire. I won't bore you with the details yet again, but suffice it to say that there is a vast well of cognitive resources just waiting to be tapped by a bunch of boringly coherent and stable objects on a screen."

cool. i've added the appropriate lines to my css file from "Link Markers: CSS Generated Content" and now i've got an easy way to visually indicate when i'm linking to a pdf file. here's a sample link . if you don't see the little pdf icon, try forcing a reload of the browser to pick up the new css file.

immediately after i wrote "disintermediating technical publishers" , i thought about how i had failed to stress that i was primarily writing about the reference books as epitomized by the camel book , and that the future for oreilly lay in the hacks series and their pogue press offerings, which have attracted my attention and dollars lately. .

kellan comes to a similar conclusion and makes an astute observation about the hacks series :

"The Hacks books are short, relevant, and fun. They build on the what I consider to be the best O'Reilly book ever, the Perl Cookbook, but corrected for the accelerated, networked world we live in."

i upgraded to panther today and my first impressions are generally positive. wierdly the install took a lot longer on my 700 MHz 14" ibook, as compared to kris' 800 MHz 12" ibook. obviously clock speed has something to do with it, but i'd be surprised if it accounted for most of the 30-40 minute difference. it's probably a coincidence, but my power cord died during the upgrade process. it's now making a faint clicking sound and not producing any juice. kris' power cord works fine.

expose' looks like it has the potential to be useful, but i'm not sure how much i'll use it. as noticed by others , expose' exposes a "hidden window in both firebird and thunderbird .

i'll pre-emptively post some links related to perl and mysql that look like they may save me a headache or two over the next few days. here , here and here .

relatedly, after a long blog hiatus ken bereskin is back in action with a panther blog that does a good job of highlighting new features.

i finally got around to taking my ipod apart by following the directions in "complete ipod dissembly" . if i gently shake the drive, i can hear a loose, rattling sound, so i'm assuming that it's foobarred.

unfortunately, but not surprisingly, it looks like the ipods have a magick partitioning scheme , which prevents me from just putting in a plain-vanilla toshiba 10 GB (HDD1262) hard drive , which is what's in there now. harrummph. it looks like the best you can do is try to scavenge a properly formatted drive off ebay . as luck with would have it, there's a 30 gigger for sale at a fairly reasonable price [ at least at this point and relative to getting a new 30 GB ipod ], but i'm not sure if it'll fit in my 10 gig case. the specs between the 10 gig and 30 gig look identical, except for a 3mm difference in the height of the drives [ and yes, all you smarty pants in the peanut gallery, the pin-outs are the same too ].

i'm tempted to just risk the hundred bucks or so for the 30 gig properly formatted drive, but i wish i has something to test the old drive beyond the "shake test" to ensure that it's really the root cause of the dead ipod and not something else. if anyone has successfully upgraded a 2nd generation 10 gig ipod with a 30 gig drive, i'd love to hear about it.

don't mind me, just tossing this php/foaf tutorial into the annotated bookmark bin:

"This article is a guide to using PHP to parse FOAF documents. FOAF stands for Friend-of-a-Friend and is a fun application of RDF that describes people and their relationships to one another. It assumes that the reader is familiar with XML and PHP but that they have little or no knowledge of RDF or FOAF and how to parse them."

[ via laughingmeme mlp ]

Multiple IE's in Windows :

"Essentially this whole thing was stumbled upon out of necessity and a lawsuit that Microsoft lost."

i don't think, according to clayton christensen's own criteria, that mysql technically meets the requirements to be labelled a disruptive innovation . but when the likes of sabre holdings announce that they are have chosen the open source database for travelocity, travel Agencies and airlines , it seems like it might be "good enough" [ in the sense of the phrase that characterizes all truly distruptive innovations ] to warrant the moniker.

"The ATSE platform continuously updates 20 million fare and rule records and 1.5 million schedules with no down time, delivering online schedules, availability, itinerary pricing and low fare searches for Sabre Holdings’ global network of partner and customer companies."

dang. this is too much for me to chew on right now. it looks like alf eaton has introduced a a review (RVW) module for the rss 2.0 which is prompting a lot of , er, reviews . rvw looks to be headed to de-facto standard stardom.

and to think i felt swindled by the matrix reloaded. based on early reviews i will most definately not forcing kris to go see matrix revolutions.

phew. now i can safetly reinstate my "keanu" ban.

i'm off to boca raton for a day or so. unsurprisingly, the weather certainly is better than what i've got going on now. too bad i'll be in planes, trains, automobiles and conference rooms for 99 percent of the trip. hi. ho.

p diddy ran the nyc marathon and he did really well, coming in at just under 4 hours. this is a fantastic time, considering that it includes the occasional interview and being mobbed on the course.

congratulations to maciej as well. you didn't smoke p. diddy like a cheap cigar, but you're still a winner. having just finished the chicago marathon, i applaud anyone who goes through all the training and actually completes a marathon. it's a remarkable achievement, no matter what your time.

multiple data points indicate that the tech book business in general and the xml book business in particular are in dire straights .

looking at my own behavior, i can easily pinpoint the answer. my tech book purchasing has dropped to near nothing over the years and it's due entirely to the fact that, for most tech topics most of the time, a quick one-two punch of google and google groups is "good enough". i love to support great companies like o'reilly , but there is an undeniably diminishing incremental value in many technical books.

it's a sad fact, but it's proven by the decreasing number of times that i've cracked open one of the books collecting dust on my desk and the decreasing sales of tech books that those in the technical publishing industry are reporting.

it's a little rough around the edges and has some of the usual aesthetic quirks which belie its wiki heritage, but openguides looks like it has a lot of potential :

"Next, we get a set of smaller boxes for entering things like more-detailed location information, contact information, and opening hours. These boxes may be completely irrelevant to many, most, or all pages in your Guide. That's OK. They're optional. But if you do fill them in, you get to play with what I feel is one of the most innovative, yet simple, features of OpenGuides -- find me everything within half a kilometre of Piccadilly Circus Tube station. Please. Because my feet hurt and I could murder a glass of wine."

in a way that's quiet a bit different than when the the red hot chilly peppers used to say it - catholic school girls really do rule, quiet literally, at least in certain streets in south philly:

"A 25-year-old man who had repeatedly exposed himself outside St. Maria Goretti School in Philadelphia got his comeuppance when a crowd of angry Catholic girls chased him down, and got their revenge."