Spur of the Moment

I’m off to the Greek to see the Dead’s bass player, Phil Lesh, with his quintet. I really should finish the color insert material first, but I’m running out of time. Probably I’ll end up doing it Saturday between shopping and having E over for dinner. I’m thinking of renaming this blog “My Boring Life”—that should draw traffic. Reminds me of that classic of Victorian porn, My Secret Life, pretty sure by Anonymous.
B has deadlines of her own and may have to work part of the weekend too, so it’s not just me nyeah nyah.

Best Viewed in IE

This is kind of cool.

We're Running Out of Iced Coffee

…overheard at Peet’s today while replenishing our supply of Sumatra (whole beans) and taking my complimentary cup on ice.

Reclaiming the South Bay Saltponds

The newshook is that it’s the second biggest wetlands restoration project in the world (or maybe the country?), second to the Everglades (which apparently Jeb’s older brother plans to buy him as an early xmas present) or “largest on the West Coast.”
I doubt B is on camera but she was at this photo-op press conference yesterday, taking pictures of Davis and Feinstein and other fonctionnaires as they announced this deal to clean up the Cargill salt ponds. (Click on the “play video” TV icon to see the three-minute report on KRON.

Dog Days Come Early

A combination of work de-stress and hot tropical weather has reduced my tendency (temporarily) to post here in this blog. Today we put the screens on the windows and soon I’ll be setting up our two-fan system (one at the bottom of the stairs to bring relatively cool air up from the basement, another near the dead-air spot just past the kitchen to keep the air circulating).
Handed in the part openers on Tuesday and the introduction, acknowledgments, and dedication (collectively known as the frontmatter) yesterday. Today I have some second-round author review to do, usually very minor, and I need to finish the color insert section. I checked out the “real” (aside from the title) cover of the book at Amazon and was pleased to see it’s much cooler than the dummy cover they were using before (and that I thought I was stuck with). This reminds me that I have to set up an affiliate account for the book’s website. I wonder if isbn.nu has affiliates?

Fugue State

I last tracked my peak flow (breathing/lung-capacity) on 5/2, just before my trip to New York. This is mainly because of my workload and stress but it’s not a good thing. When under stress I need to be sure to do the things that help keep me on an even keel, which includes tracking my peak flow, along with yoga, sleeping enough, staying hydrated, getting fresh air, etc.
Now that the excuse of brutal deadlines is (mostly) past, I must pick up the thread of these sanity-sustaining habits one by one. Writing more here might help as well.

TAPOAFOM*

Ten hours sleep, weird feverish dreams (about all-hands meetings in strange nonexistent hybrid entities, about chapters to be revised, about people I worked with ten years ago), and then waking with that remarkable feeling: the worst of the deadlines have passed. There are just incidentals left to handle (intro, acknowledgements, dedication, part openers, color insert, CD content) and the flood of other priorities, obligations, and wishes begins to crowd in. But no matter, today I feel free.
*The awesome power of a fully operational mothership

Did Porn Sites Have the Earliest Blogs?

In the current blogging craze tipping point moment (a computer book author list I’m on right now is discussing MovableType under the thread “Is MT is or is MT ain’t the shiznit?”), I got to wondering if, as usual, porno pioneered yet another micromedium. I mean, the people who market the make-your-own-porn-site kits always include a what’s new type blog and often a diary as well, my sources tell me. =%7o
To support myself as a writer, though, I have to get ahead of something else, or at least a new twist. Not the semantic web… What? I still think the problems of personal information management are very interesting and largely unsolved for those who are not effortlessly smart-technical (people like shacker and john levine and alan i mean philip greenspun, off the top of my head).
For example, my email archive viewed as the database it is, filtering, sorting, searching, and relating content), and relevant to this context and this post, a hyperblog tool that would make it much easier for me to cross-reference any particle of my blog with any other particle or any other part of the web and vice versa. My reference to MT above should at least be related to my other posts about setting up a movabletype test bed using my mac’s apache server, right?

Tim on the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference

Subject: Re: Trip Report: O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference
From: “Tim O’Reilly”
Date: Tue, 21 May 2002 09:35:40 -0700
X-Message-Number: 15
On 5/20/02 10:00 PM, “Curtis D. Frye” wrote:
>
> I was in a position to take Tim O’Reilly up on his generous offer to attend
> his Emerging Technology conference…
For those of you who weren’t, there’s a lot of detailed conference coverage
collected at the address http://www.oreillynet.com/et2002.
I particularly like Jason Kottke’s review, with the paragraph that ends
“Best f***ing conference ever.” 🙂
http://www.kottke.org/notes/0205.html#020517
And don’t miss Rob Flickenger (author of Building Wireless Community
Networks)’s amazing article about watching the ebb and flow of web surfing
during talks with EtherPeg: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/1414
—
Tim O’Reilly @ O’Reilly & Associates, Inc.
1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472
1-707-829-0515 http://www.oreilly.com, http://tim.oreilly.com
kottke.org – may 2002 archives

Load Balancing

Slowly but surely the extreme imbalances of the last few years are subsiding. Things are still uncomfortably overscheduled, but I can feel things about to ease off. Listening to the Pixies today, my mind improvised “On a wave of mild elation.”