BillSaysThis

Dan Gillmor has launched Bayosphere, the first public effort of the new venture he launched after leaving the Mercury News. To Dan and the Grassroots Media team, I say congratulations on getting yourselves through the birth pangs and into the screaming infant months. Hopefully your effort will rival the impact of Karl’s terrific PhillyFuture and other localized web-based community systems. Even for a beta product, though, perhaps this launch was premature given the lack of information and/or functionality. A few things I’m pretty much in the dark on:

• What I can do after registering, can I have my own blog?
• How are my bookmarks used?
• Can I control visibility of my (theoretical) blog and bookmarks?
• What’s already on the site other than your blog and comments people have left on it?
• Who’s behind Bayosphere other than yourself (neither grassrootsmedia.com nor grassrootsmediainc.com resolve to a ‘company’ site for this organization either)?

I’m looking forward to a quality, exciting Bay Area-centric system and a new platform for reporting and analyzing local issues we face, opportunities we have and relationships we can develop. Thanks for taking on this challenge.

Joe, I sure do feel lucky. We got the phone call about two and a half hours ago that my nephew Jacob Michael Rentz was born at 4:45 this afternoon, a healthy six pounds nine ounces and 20 inches long, and he and my sister Joanne are resting comfortably. Despite the ultra-connectivity we think we’re living in, no photos have yet been emailed to me but I expect to post one ASAP. Larry, do you hear me? LOL.

Coincidence: Tonight the final episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise and Andromeda were broadcast. I think this is more significant for my nephew’s future than the date being Friday the 13th.

Jake, down the line when you ask about today, here’s what I want to say: You are a fortunate child, born to two wonderful parents with four older siblings that will surely help you, tease you, tickle you and love you. Grandparents who’ve been waiting for your arrival as long as I can recall who want nothing more than to spoil you, within reason, as any grandparent should. And your Aunt Vivian and I, we may not be physically close but you’re always going to be in our thoughts and hearts. Welcome to your new home. Live long and prosper.

I’m sure Tim Draper music video is all that and a bag of potato chips but throwing around the claim that it was produced by a member of the Eagles, when in truth it was produced by the guy they hired to play drums while Don Henley preens upstage is not exactly the same thing. Even if you are a hugely successful venture capitalist.

37signals posts an article pushing back on Google Web Accelerator, Hey, not so fast – an alert for web app designers, which was a reaction to the way GWA prefetches even destructive links. Now arguments have been made, pro and con, on how wise it is of Google to do this and for web developers to use GETs instead of POSTs so the functionality is vulnerable to it, I’m not debating which is the best answer. I am sitting here laughing because on the same page as this blog post, 37signals has an add for the book they authored, Defensive Design for the Web. I personally expect people who write books about defensive design to actually design defensively, don’t you?

Driving to the gym this morning, one of the radio station blabbermouths mentioned a recent academic study which found that only two percent of all marital affairs stay secret, meaning that 98% become known to the other spouse. Let’s call BS on this, assuming the radioman reported the study accurately, because if you’d successfully (and purposely) hidden knowledge of the betrayal from everyone would you really be likely to tell a complete stranger? Even if anonymity was guaranteed why would anyone take the chance?

The smallest details turn our lives down wildly different paths
Butterfly wings, hurricane winds, everybody uses the cliche
Then completely forget that cliches are truths indelibly
Written into the collective conscious by centuries of experience
Emotional bursts pushing momentarily on winds no different
Than those the butterflies ride and no more substantial.

A young woman walks through a store door on a Spring afternoon
Expecting to see her boyfriend smile and perhaps offer a hug,
Instead he’s scowling and her arrival startles him
Rather than face some intemperate growl she backs off.

Her young man’s disagreeable demeanor worsens as her legs
Beat a measured retreat, the door’s bell rings on exit
He slams an open palm on the countertop hard, fast,
Enough to make some loose coins jangle and matchbooks jump.

Romantics say that for every person there’s one and only one
Perfectly matched soul and so I ask if you meet this person,
Start down some golden path and then one day scream
Over some trifle, so important in the moment yet so
Utterly meaningless, and blast that golden path apart
What happens to the joy of that possible future?

Perspective matters, massively, more than readily
Comes to mind in the moment when it matters most
When a surge of happiness or sadness or pity
Courses through your veins and sudden action demands,
Heats up a body’s temperature to force a choice
Dragging the future wherever it winds you up.

Life, I’ll say, is a book well-written with characters
Who surprise you at times, featuring no balance at all
Between good and bad, pleasure and pain, faith and fairness;
Simply put, an unending team of runners handing off a baton
From one to the next in a marathon relay where no pistol
Shot signifies that only a single final lap is left.

Thanks for a wonderful, amazing two years, Vivian!

Which SF author are you? I’m Hal Clement (Harry C. Stubbs), a quiet and underrated master of “hard science” fiction who, among other things, foresaw integrated circuits back in the 1940s. Don’t usually go for these quizzes but this one caught me at the right time. [via Anita]

Climate change: Another ominous sign

According to a report on the brand new Huffington Post blogsite, the House of Saud has developed a deadman’s switch that includes radioactive dirty bombs that will decimate their oil fields for decades and is intended for use if the royal family believes its survival and control of Saudi Arabia is threatened. Not the country, mind you, just their position of power. Way to lead your nation, dudes!

Now using Cake to deliver frequent doses of humor: Spamusement! Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines!

So GWB heads over the pond to attend some celebrations of the 60th anniversary of the end of WWII and while there faults the legacy in Eastern Europe, the acquiesence of America and the allies to Soviet annexations and dominations. Never again, Bush says, will we be “appeasing or excusing tyranny, and sacrificing freedom in the vain pursuit of stability.”

The thing I’d like to know, given this assertion, is how he’ll answer questions about our relationship with such bastions of freedom as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia–I wanted to come up with a third example that’s both (a) meaningful and (b) not another Muslim country but these days there are very few non-Islamic countries which are out and out dictatorships or monarchies. Still, I’m sure you see the direct conflict between the President’s words and his actions.

So much for separation of Church and State, though not in the expected direction. Over in North Carolina, a Baptist minister is excommunicating members of his congregation who don’t support George Bush. That’s not only truly wild, it also violates federal law and the IRS should be showing up any day now to revoke the church’s tax-exempt status. A good test case for political independence. [via Doc]

What, I often wonder, drives people to such extreme behavior as:

• torturing and humiliating prisoners,
• lining a group of men, women and children up in front of a large, freshly dug trench and shooting them so their lifeless bodies topple over into it, or
• penning masses up inside fences for years without adequate food, sanitation and opportunity.

What, I often wonder, is necessary to stop such insane and ultimately useless behavior.

Human Rights Watch – Blog for Human Rights [via DanG]

Just finished watching Monday’s The Daily Show with Zell Miller as the guest. As Jon Stewart said in the closing, he and Miller disagree on, well, just about everything. Frankly I expected a bit more of a blow up, a confrontation based on that extreme difference but Stewart decided not to go there. Oh well.

Boy, oh boy, between work and soccer and TV and keeping up my web reading, three days have passed since my last post. What a bummer. I don’t really have much to say tonight but will substitute some linkage instead:

sensor sweep

DV blog still funny

dayjet scheduling software cool stuff

bud gibson contrasts tags on delicious and technorati, comments by Vander Wal argue a different interpretation

peter meerholz argues that tags are an emergent information source of their own different from pure metadata

meerholz again: “footworn paths” over time show where people want to walk, not where they’re told to walk

Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

Don’t panic–your tags are your own and don’t need to compete, compare or connect to what anyone else uses, even for the same page. Serendipity will lead to these connection over time anyway. If you widen your search to the master RawSugar database, you’ll see what tags other people have used for the same pages and what pages other people have given the tags you use.

flicktion

Life is good. Birthday was good, yummy veal parmagiana one last time, Liverpool in the Finals!!!

Liverpool 1-0 Chelsea: I don’t think I’ve been so excited about a sports event since the Earthquakes won the 2003 MLS Cup. A disputed goal in the fourth minute and then 90 minutes of nailbiting and hairpulling but the Reds shut down the Blues for the second game in a row. I’m looking forward to reading some day after quotes from Jose Mourinho, the goal was certainly close, but we outplayed them over the 180 minutes.

24 is still going strong, for my viewing hour, but as Emeril might say they’ve hyped the action up another notch to the point where I begin wondering how many more ‘days’ the producers will be able to come up with and retain even a tenuous link to reality.

The first new Family Guy episode, that was cool. The Griffins still got it goin’ on and so does creator Seth MacFarlane. Lots of good jokes and good to see that Fox is willing to bring the show back from the abyss. Since MacFarlane does several of the main voices, getting the crew back together probably wasn’t an issue. Have American Dad on the Tivo, didn’t watch it yet.

Andromeda is almost done. The producers did come up with a pretty whacky and original concept for the last season, though I’m sure someone will point to another show that did something similar that I’ve just not seen, maybe Farscape. At least they knew well in advance and planned out a real ending.

Star Trek: Enterprise is almost done too but of course Moore and Braga weren’t given enough time to truly wrap it up like the other Trek series. Too bad. The recent two part Mirror Universe episodes showed there’s still plenty of good thinking and writing going on there, but the franchise will be back soon enough and I’ll undoubtedly watch.

Wire in the Blood wrapped tonight with another amazing episode, I do believe this is the end period. Robson Green, man, Dennis Franz only wishes he was Green.

Turning out to be quite a lovely day here. After breakfast TS1 and I went to the farmer’s market for the first time this year to pick up fruit and flowers for gifts and brocolli and English cucumbers for ourselves. Tasted Pomelo for the first time ever, a fruit related to grapefruit but even larger and not as much bite, I liked it. The fruit and some of the flowers are for a gift basket for our neighbors to celebrate the recent arrival of their baby Alan.

The other flowers are to bring to Pam’s wedding in a few hours. I’m so happy for her and Henry because they make each other so happy. I think the sunshine is nature’s blessing on the joining, the forecasts were for clouds and a chance of rain as recently as yesterday morning, and yet we have blue skies and a warm Spring day.

We’re making a diet change soon and Sunday morning visits to the farmers market will be a regular part of it, I’m excited.