wake up!

Posted a thought via mobile that popped into my head driving to work this morning, part of an ongoing imaginary argument:

Mobile post sent by xian using Utterz.  Replies.  mp3

Started off Saturday morning with Kick ‘08.

Namedropping: Talked to George Kelly, Erin Malone, Anil Dash, Jessamyn West (yay!), Simon Willison, Owen Thomas, Hugh Forrest, Micah Alpern (briefly, passing on the escalator), Janna Hicks DeVylder so far….

After I posted about that Louise Nevelson exhibit at the de Young museum and seeing the model for the sculpture near my parents’ apartment at 92nd and Park Ave in New York, my sister scanned and emailed me a photo of the four of us siblings posing in front of the sculpture, circa 1974.

(The image above links to a much larger version, not quite as cropped.)

From left to right, handlewise, that’s xifer, moo, xourmas, and xian. I’m making a muscle and entertaining xourmas. moo is, I believe, pretending to smoke a cigarette and not making a vulgar British gesture. xifer is looking stylish in her coat.

Yes, we really dressed that mod back then.

A week or so ago I posted a semi-whimsical question on Facebook:

Has anybody seen my bliss? I was following it but I think I fell too far behind.

(Hat tip to Joseph Campbell, pictured here, who seems to have coined the phrase “follow your bliss.”)

My friend Aldon Hynes wrote an interesting post, Following Our Bliss, inspired by this, saying, in part:

Christian has a good job. He’s published a book. He’s newly married. I would have expected him, of all people, to be keeping up with his bliss. Perhaps it is endemic of how hard it is to follow your bliss these days. Perhaps some of it is that people aren’t even sure what their bliss looks like anymore.

He then goes on to talk about his own various ups and downs recently and closes by saying

So, I’m not sure where Christian’s bliss has gone. Perhaps it is walking down the street, talking with my bliss, stopping to befriend a homeless man, spending a little time helping a teenager find her voice, and doing a little social networking to help other people find bliss that is more meaningful than talking about fashion, horoscopes and the desire to find Mr. Right in an Internet chat room.

Believe me, I am well aware of my blessings and how fortunate I am in my life, my love, my work, and so on, but I still wrestle - as probably many people do - with wondering whether I am engaged in the best possible uses of my short time here on earth. No doubt there is a grass is greener component of this, and not everyone is sucked into a higher calling. Some of just muddle through, trying to follow our bliss and sometimes losing sight of it around a corner just up ahead, but I think it’s probably that urge to thrive and grow that really matters.

Saturday

• Get salad greens and heirloom tomatoes at the farmer’s market at Splash Pad park
• Work out with B at the gym
• Drop off shirts at the cleaner
• Start laundry
• Make pizza and salad
• Fix problem with misdirected payments to writer client
• See Michael Clayton
• Have a nightcap of Balvenie
• Move remaining to-do’s to Sunday or Not This Weekend

Sunday

• Make coffee, squeeze juice, scramble eggs, toast bagels, serve lox
• Skim the tv listings for TiVo
• Try (and fail) to get a haircut
• Coordinate move of East Bay for Democracy website
• Catch up on food diary
• Finish laundry
• Go into SF, deYoung museum, dinner at D & P’s

I was running a search on a labeled group of messages (from a mailing list) in my mailbox, looking for just the unread ones, but I was also doing something else at the same time (actually two or three other things, drinking coffee, firing up a YouTube video, looking for a file on my desktop) and I ended up typing “is:unclear” instead of “is:unread.”

But maybe a good email search could find the messages in your inbox that are unclear?

So, I’m back from the Dead Symposium at UMass (I’ll post my slides soon), and Thanksgiving has come and gone, and I’m at the office now wrestling with my new MacBook Pro, trying to get everything possible onto it from my old G4 without breaking any of the new stuff. I think I’m almost there (knock wood), but it has put a crimp in my blogging.

There’s a backlog, though, and I’ll be working through it over the next few days. However, I’m also standing on the verge of getting serious about my next book and I’m not sure how that’s going to affect my blogging. The book will get precedence for daily writing, so blogging may turn into a blow-by-blow account of the process. I also plan to post my notes and drafts on a wiki site as a way of doing it in public and soliciting input along the way.

In the meantime, I was just down getting coffee in bldg B here in Sunnyvale and noticed the XM station on the TV overhead playing a David Bowie song they referred to as “quot;Heroes”quot; from the album of the same name. I don’t know if that was a typo in an HTML entity of if XM has its own crazy dialect for special characters but it looks like something got escaped and then didn’t get unescaped, which is a little bit how I’m feeling about that Dead conference I mentioned in Amherst.

In fact I’ve been trying to post to this blog nearly every day for a while now, with an emphasis on weekdays, but this has nothing to do with the month of November. As for the novel-writing thing, I’m punting. This is slightly to do with the nasty cold that has laid me up this weekend and made it fairly impossible to feel creative or have ideas or write anything substantial. But it’s more than that. I just realized that the timing isn’t right.

In terms of fiction I have my last novel still in my head, since it’s between first and second drafts right now.

And in terms of creative writing I still have a half-written memoir to return to that got shelved when I wrote my last nonfiction book.

And in terms of nonfiction I have a new book dying to come out of my head and that’s the real reason. I think I need to put my creative, extracurricular energies toward the new book on presence and devote my fiction-urge to getting the last novel ready for the agent-publisher mill or the dumpster.

So maybe I need to thank this cold for forcing me to rethink my priorities, but screw that. Not when I still feel like an assembly line for dead white-blood cells.

One last unrelated note. My birthday just passed and the ritual asking me of what I want for my birthday from family members is still going on, and I generally point to my Amazon wish list but it’s not exactly an easy link to remember, so I’ve added a button to my blog here and I’ve stuck it in this post as well so it will pop up in a few other places. This is not a gift-solicitation from readers but more of a convenience for me as I do the tiny bit of writing I’m bound to get to today before my next swoon.

I’ve discovered that it’s easy to remember the anniversary of your first blog post* if you’re as clever or random as I was and wrote it on your birthday. This then reminds me to crank out my yearly age-revealing, I’ve-been-blogging-since post.

And this is a special one, too, for what it’s worth. Ten years of blogging! Hard to believe. Well, and it’s sort of not true. It has been ten years since I started writing a daily journal (Peter Merholz hadn’t facetiously invented the word blog yet), but there are two gaps (or hiati as my Latin-loving friend might style them) each of at least a year, back near the beginning. More recently there are gaps of weeks, possibly even months here and there. Sure, when I started Radio Free Blogistan in 2002 I was lightly underemployed and able to post seven eight nine times a day, and over the years I’ve scattered my words onto many different blogs at many different urls, foolishly diluting my “personal brand,” so that perhaps you can say those days of many entries help fill in some of the gaps in those long silences, much the ways mountains are stripmined and leveled and used to fill in valleys.

But who cares? I’m still ten years older than I was the day I started writing Breathing Room at the tender age of 33 (I toyed with the idea of calling it “Outliving Christ”) and so I feel qualified to celebrate.

I’ve actually been enjoying my nearly daily blogging habit lately and I expect to keep enjoying it until the next major arbitrary event intervenes. Sure, for a month I expect to replace blogging with installments of a novel-to-be-named later, but to me this has always been about a daily writing practice and not so much about professional or career or geek or politics or I stubbed my toe and my cat barfed blogging, so if I do manage to do the NaNoWriMo thing, I will count that.

Those entries, by the way, won’t show up here. I have a tendency to write fiction that treads into NSFW territory, so I’ll post the entries at my no-holds-barred fiction blog - one of the few I’m still willing to maintain as a separate site - A Supposedly Staggering Infinite Work of Heartbreaking Illumination I’ll Never Read - which at the moment still sports the final installment of the first draft of my previous novel, For You, The Stars. If you want all your xian blogging or whatever you call it in one place, you can always follow it from monolog, where the novel chunks will show up alongside this more ordinary blogging.

And so, I’m 43 today, a prime number. My blogging is 10. I apparently was willing to letterspace lowercase letters and thus would “steal” sheep, as the saying goes, and breathing room was right-justified, horror of horrors, and it truly was handcoded daily - though I did eventually at least make a template - with an elegant little url structure, and so it still isn’t fully ported over here (and, no doubt, eventually into some future next blog of mine probably in WordPress). And I’m about to be late for my shuttle.

*I refuse to use that most hateful of all blog-derived words, blogaversary - or however you spell it - except in this disclaimer and even now I must take a deep sip of coffee to clear my pallette.)

Posting over low bandwidth. Consider this photo a down payment toward a great deal more imagery and tales to come.

This is one of the many artworks, most with religious themes, decorating the hotel I stayed in my first night in Oaxaca, the Hostal de la Noria.

UPDATE: (or del, I have to doublecheck that) thanks Alex!

Very late Tuesday night - in fact so late that it will really be very early Wednesday morning - I’m heading down to Oakland airport to hop on a Mexicana plane and fly to Guadalajara and then Mexico City and finally to Oaxaca. Yes, it’s the OAK to OAX run. Once there I will spend three or so days at a retreat, an unconference organized by Jerry “Sociate” Michalski. I wanted to go last year but couldn’t swing it, and I’m grateful to have been invited to participate. The best part is I really have no idea what we’re going to end up conferring about.

The other best part is that I’ve never been to Mexico before, and I’m excited and a little nervous (doing anything for the first time makes me feel that way) about it.

The other best part is that I’ll be disconnected from my electronic life. I won’t want to pay roaming minutes for phone or data so I’ll be just calling home once a day to check in with my sweetie, and checking voicemail intermittently. I may not bother looking at my email till I get back, October 28, and I’ll definitely not be blogging.

I always think it’s funny when people apologize for not blogging. “Sorry I haven’t been blogging lately - I’ve had a flare-up of sciatica,” or “Light blogging ahead - we’re planning to levitate the Pentagon,” or what have you. Isn’t even the briefest pause in blogging actually a bit of a gift to your audience, such as it is?

It’s not that I have any shortage of things to blog about. The Big Star show I saw this weekend illustrated with my blurry iPhone photos. That’d be good. Or a long screed about how you don’t design sites from the front to the back or the back to the front but from the middle (that is, the information architecture) both forward and back. Or my long-tortured draft about social web apps that don’t play well with email. How much I’ve been enjoying the Games for Windows the Official Magazine and Chowder Eating Society Radio Podcast show starring Jeff Green and his sycophants I mean friends I mean underlings.

No, but there will be plenty of time for that (except maybe the Alex Chilton post, which won’t be very current after a while).

I guess I did want to mention this brief hiatus though, hypocrite that I am, so everyone knows I did it on purpose, man! I meant to do that. I’m not losing my edge. Oh, no. (Though I did wake up this morning feeling pretty low and then forgot to pack my gym shorts before leaving the house - what do I do now? Ride the stationary bike in my jock? Wrap a towel around my waist like a Roman? Skip the workout? I really don’t want to. But that’s hardly enough material for yet another blog post.

Got to work, checked some email, decided to stop dallying and head to the gym for 50 minutes on the stationary bike. Suddenly realized I’d forgotten to bring a change of gym clothes to work today, like I usually do. Briefly considered skipping the workout. Decided instead to re-wear my sweaty clothes from yesterday. Went to the gym. Took my clothes out of my gym bag. They were still wet from yesterday. Actually, I’d say, at least in part, soaked. And, yes, kind of smelly.

I felt bad for the people around me, but put on the wet clothes, grabbed and towel, fired up the Games for Windows the Official Magazine podcast (no I’m not a gamer, but Jeff Green is a friend and his crew is very funny), and did my five minute warmup, my forty minutes of interval training, and my five minute cooldown. Then I stretched, went back to the lockerroom, and got those stanky clothes the hell off my body. Stuffed em in a plastic bag, hit the shower, and shuddered until the hot water made the willies go away.

There is a cycle I go through in preparing for a public speaking gig. The UED (user experience design) brown bag series at Yahoo! is low key in a way. We do it in a medium-sized room with hookups to remote campuses, such as Santa Monica. It’s “all in the family” and thus not as stressful as a large conference. But it’s also your peers and colleagues, so there is a desire to knock it out of the park and not waste anyone’s time.

I gave a talk earlier today on the current state of the Design Pattern Library, my role as its curator, and how my cow-orkers could get involved. (It was called “The Design Pattern Library Wants YOU!” and I probably won’t publish the slides outside of y! but the YUI Theater guys videotaped it and they are probably going to edit something together for the YUI blog, in which case I’ll surely mention that here.)

I think it went pretty well. About two days before speaking I get quite anxious, no matter how well I am prepared. I’ve been taught be speaking mentors to view that nervous energy as “excitement” and as a natural part and parcel of summoning up the necessary vim to get up in front of people and engage with them.

The talk really only came together in my head several days or so, although of course it gelled from a series of thoughts and ideas that I’m wrestling with all the time. I finally got the outline down on paper two days ago and spent most of yesterday putting together the slides, until the wee hours of the morning.

This meant that I really only got about four hours sleep last night, which is really not a good thing before speaking, but oh well. I ran out the door this morning in the rain and left my badge at home, the one I use to open doors and buy food at the cafeteria. I spent all morning trying to get a seven megabyte powerpoint file compressed, but whenever I put it on my PC and used the image compression features in the Windows version of ppt, it ballooned to 10 megs, so I gave up on that.

The talk itself went well, I believe. The room was full. The questions were good. I hit my marks and people laughed in all the right places. I’ll probable even be able to adapt some of my slides and talking points for a few conference gigs I’m hoping to do over the next year.

In the rest of the afternoon, I was sort of braindead. Fortunately, we had a big quarterly earnings report all-hands pep rally slash Oktoberfest party, so I was able to ride out the end of the day. Never made it to the gym, unfortunately, to pump out the lactic acid left making my muscles ache from my short night’s sleep.

Also, I lost my in-box zero state of grace that I’ve maintained for weeks now, so I’ll spend tomorrow trying to get that back.

Happy Birthday, Peter!
Originally uploaded by xian.

One of the highlights of last week’s trip to New York was when Peter, Sara, and the boys drove down from New Haven on Saturday. Pictured here from left to right are Caleb, Peter, and Sam.

Later, I’ll post more pictures to Flickr. This one was taken on the way back from the playground in Central Park near 96th, where we ourselves used to play when we were little. I’ve got a bunch of shots from later in the day at another, newer playground near, I think, 95th and Lex, where little Finn joins his big brothers on the roundabout before it gets too scary.

So anyway, today is Peter’s birthday and let’s just say he’s still in his thirties… barely. I’m a terrible birthday-present giver. I always leave it till too late, have trouble of thinking of something in time, end up just asking what they want, which puts the burden unfairly on the recipient and ruins the surprise, and then half the time fail to follow through after all. I still owe Peter some sort of oil vessel for cooking he requested like four years ago. I’m better at spontaneous gift-giving for what it’s worth.

So for now, let me just say, Peter, I’m inordinately proud of you, as a father, as a brother, as a husband, as a scholar, and as a man of faith. You were the real one all along.

I’m no fan of the term “fatblogging” but I do see some value in the idea of inviting accountability by applying the blog (in the sense of public log) format to a health and fitness plan, and reporting one’s weight to a globe full of strangers is surely one way to keep yourself honest.

Those who know me in the real world may know that I’ve been working out with a trainer since February, and those who’ve known me for a while are aware how unlike me this is. I’ve never been particularly athletic. I’ve avoided organized sports, especially since injuring my knee at age 15, and have never felt comfortable around gyms and locker rooms. But since reaching the magic age of 40 and seeing my weight riding an upward spiral, I finally realized that the years of benign (and less than benign) neglect had come to an end, bit the bullet, and started an exercise program.

Then a month ago, for complicated and yet uninteresting reasons, I was assigned a new trainer and this guy is really good. He and I have set some more aggressive goals and he has redesigned my workout program. I’ve been extremely diligent about it. I go to the gym five times a week, rain or shine. Most of the time I go to the fitness center on the “campus” at my job, but I also joined a local gym so I can get that fifth day in on Saturdays.

I feel stronger, healthier, more energetic, and also - quite frequently - sore. I’ve shed nearly 20 pounds while at the same time building muscle and discovering some muscles I never knew I had. I have more confidence in my physical self and I’ve even seen some improvements in my sadly degenerating knee joint.

This past week I was in New York for a conference and incidentally to visit family, and I had the best intentions in the world to keep up with my exercise program. The hotel we stayed at did not have a gym on the premises, but it did have a deal with a local gym. We arrived late Tuesday and I was too beat to go work out that day. Wednesday through Friday were packed solid with conference activities, particularly since I was volunteering and had to arrive early and stay late.

Saturday I totally could have gone to that gym, but chose instead to take it easy in the morning before checking out of the hotel. We spent the rest of the weekend at my parents’ apartment on the upper east side, where there are numerous gyms. I even researched a few within blocks of the apartment where for around $20 I could have purchased a one-month membership and worked out on Saturday and Sunday, maybe even on Monday morning before our return flight. But I did not.

I had my excuses. It was hot and muggy. We were busy. I was tired. And so on. It tells me that the routine I’ve established is a key part of my current program. Without it, I revert to old, bad habits. In the future, I’ll have to make a stronger commitment and find a way to hold myself to it. This morning I meet with my trainer again and I suspect it will be tough, both physically because I’ve been absent from the gym for a week, and psychologically, because I’ll have to tell him I’ve been off the wagon.

The good news is: I did a lot of walking, even in the strangely hot and muggy non-October weather we were getting, and I stuck pretty closely to my food targets. So at least there’s that.

I don’t plan to do a lot “health and fitness” blogging, but that’s what’s on my mind this morning and one thing I’ve learned about a daily writing practice (oh, yeah, I wasn’t able to do the daily blogging thing on my vacation either!) is to write about whatever comes up.

So I’m standing outside of the Parsons (I always knew it as the Parsons School of Design but at some point it got rebranded Parsons The New School for Design in line with all the other New School for… subschools), where we were putting on the IDEA 2007 conference this past week (which is why I haven’t been getting much blogging done although I have been taking a lot of pictures which I’ve been slowly posting to Flickr if you’re interested), trying to get some AT&T reception on my jPhone to return a call when two guys in suits with their arms literally around each other’s shoulders, laughing and schmoozing like the bunch of dyed-in-the-wool politicians I realize they are, as my brain sorts out the distinctions between these are people I recognize from my own personal life and these are people I recognize because the television has emblazoned them on my mind’s eye over the years, come bursting out of the front door.

It’s Chuck Schumer, I notice, the not-Hillary senator from New York and Bob Kerrey, the former senator from Nebraska or was it Kanasas, who is - I suddenly recall - president of the New School and someone about whom I’d recently heard rumors that he might be considering making another go of it in the Senate, despite his admissions of war crimes in Vietnam and his hawkishness on Iraq and Iran.

And I also find myself reflecting on how he used to comb his long receding bangs over his bulgy forehead but that somehow his time in New York had updated his fashion sense so that now he wears his gray hair (or toupe, who can tell?) in a modified Caesar cut, very short bangs brushed forward and it honestly looks much better. He is a handsome man after all.

By now it’s too late to snap a photo of the men, as Kerrey has slipped into a limo and Schumer has hightailed it down toward Sixth Ave and I’m talking on the phone anyway, so it would be kind of rude to put the call on hold just to take photos, but it occurs to me that maybe these guys were talking about said rumored Senate bid and if so was this supposed to be a sort of out-of-the-ways meeting, given that while this is the New School being Parsons and all, it probably isn’t the location of the office of the president of the New School but if so then wouldn’t they be more sneaky and less boisterous and buddy-buddy on their way out the front door?

This is a quandary for me. I try to keep my LinkedIn network literally to people I know and have worked with or with whose work I am familiar. From what I can see, you seem like an excellent person to know, I’m flattered that you enjoy my posts on that list, and I appreciate your providing that context since so many invitations I get have robogreetings on them.

I couldn’t bring myself to click the “I don’t know Jack…” button, but since I take LinkedIn literally (I want to be able to recommend people from my own direct experience) I also don’t feel right accepting your invitation.

I hope you understand.

B and I are getting married today at 3 o’clock. Wish us luck!

Seaside Jazz Fest 2007
Originally uploaded by andytnisbet.

B’s brother Andy took this really nice picture of my sweetie and me. We spent Sunday down in Seaside (right next door to Monterey). Good food, great people, fantastic music (with a rotating cast of players), not too many speeches, birthday wishes to B’s sister Peg, anniversary memories of B’s mom, cold weather, no sunburn, fine beverages, did I mention the good food?

UPDATE: Andy’s photo above links to all of his photos from the party at Flickr. You can also see B’s photos from the same event there.

Surprised my dad this weekend by showing up on Friday, courtesy of JetBlue, to help celebrate his 70th birthday. It’s hard to believe he’s really 70 because aside from the white hair he seems just about the same as always. As much as he may complain about age or infirmity or his physical condition he seems to have some fountain of youth in his genes keeping him feisty and kicking.

We went out to dinner at a nice bistro my brother picked out Friday night and then more surprises followed as all the siblings showed up on Saturday and we had a great dinner with a few friends and admirers of my dad along with the whole family at cozy little Table d’Hote, a restaurant owned by a family friend that’s just a block or two away from my parents’ homestead on the upper east side.

The weather was incredibly frigid. The wind would knife through our clothes and freeze us in a way that triggers some sort of deep primal panic. Inside it was always toasty warm so you end up managing your layers constantly and both inside and out the air was incredibly dry so now my lips are chapped and my sinuses are still recovering.

I had a cold when we left town and I’ve still got one now but somehow during the two dinners I would forget I was sick and just enjoy the bonhomie. It was also great seeing my little nephews, who are growing up so fast, the two four year-olds and my 17-month old godson, who tears around the place like an energizer bunny destroying everything in his wake. The older boys are talking up a storm, singing and playing and asking questions. One told me “You’re silly, like my dad.” They still seemed a bit confused that their dad is my younger brother and that we all grew up in the apartment we were crammed into over the weekend.

On Sunday they had me drawing custom pictures, one of a giraffe named Jeanine and the other of a normal boy named Brian. It made me want to learn Flash so I can do some animations for them. I’ve always wanted to illustrate some stories of Fraidy Cat and the Cloth Monkeys (with special guest Hoppy the Bunny).

JetBlue was great on the way out, a perfect smooth uncrowded unhurried ride on Friday (I took a personal day off from my new job) but the return flight on Sunday was another story. We were delayed over an hour on the tarmac waiting for our pilot to arrive from a flight from Orlando. Most of the passengers watched the superbowl but B watched the ice skating finals and I watched an X-Men movie on Fox, except for when they would break in on us with a loud eardrum-shattering electronic popping sound to give us another update on our delay.

We weren’t home in bed in Oakland till about 2:30 am Monday morning and I’m still feeling a little tired at work today, but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

Here’s three ideas for products that will make you millions if you can figure out how to manufacture and sell them:

1. Self-disentangling (or non-tangling) iPod earbud cords
2. Ear grease cleaner for mobile phones
3. A remote that mutes the TV as it turns on its power.

Send me a thank you note when you make your first million.

Rodney Koeneke hears it came from Junglee, a Bollywood film from 1961.

Back in 1994, Richard Frankel and I (along with Briggs Nisbet and Martha Conway), launched a hypertext webzine called Enterzone. At first it ran on a server under Rich’s desk at Berkeley and its address (now obsolete), was enterzone.berkeley.edu. Eventually we got the ezone.org domain and moved it there.

One of the features of that site was a collection of interesting links. At first we just linked to other e-zines, or other e-zines we liked, or other interesting creative sites, but along the way we added another set of links called “unclassifieds.”

Then one day Rich sent me a link to a site at akebono.stanford.edu/~yahoo which already had a big headstart on us in gathering and organizing interesting links. We agreed that the guys doing that site (David Filo and Jerry Yang), had the link-collecting thing under control so we decided to abandon our half-assed attempt to index the Internet by hand.

Yahoo apparently stood for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Organized Oracle”, although it clearly harked back to the “rude, unsophisticated, uncouth” characters in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

That first website of ours launched both Rich and me into new careers. He was a sysadmin at the time studying archaeology and creative writing. I was an author of computer primers, former editor, and part-time painter.

For a while we ran a little consulting firm together, helping small silicon valley firms get on the Internet, setting up their email servers and their first web sites. Rich made the leap first, from that partnership to a startup in the web advertising world called NetGravity. By now, websites like Yahoo were buying and selling ads in huge quantities and companies that provided ad infrastructure and tracking tools were in high demand.

Rich started out doing tech support at NetGravity but quickly rose to a position of responsibility, and then NetGravity was swallowed up by DoubleClick and Rich took on a new position there. Ultimately he moved on to Yahoo itself, where he is a senior director of product marketing now.

I kept writing, became a literary agent for a while, kept making websites, started writing an online journal, helped an e-book startup acquire authors, saw all my art-y friends from the early days of the web explosion take jobs in the field, and then finally joined a web consulting startup with big ideas called Groundswell in 2000.

I rode that baby down through the whole dotcom crash, through seven official waves of layoffs down to an asset sale featured me, ten or so other good folks, some computers, ongoing engagements with Sprint and Visa, and some Aeron chairs. At Groundswell I was a content strategist but at the successor firm, Enterpulse, I was rechristened an information architect.

Times were still tough and I was finally laid off myself in spring of ‘02. That hurt, even though it was a decision I’d have made myself if the roles had been reversed. We just didn’t have enough IA work to keep me around. I was working on the first of a series of Dreamweaver books then, so fortunately I had something to do. I also got heavily into blogging, which online journaling had kind of evolved into, launching the now fairly moribund Radio Free Blogistan and continuing to migrate the personal blog to new platforms and domain, ending up here.

I consulted with some startups, did some freelance IA work, got involved in politics, wrote The Power of Many, and then rejoined the world of the employed in June of ‘05 as a senior information architect at Extractable, a dynamic interactive agency in San Mateo.

About a year ago I became the director of strategy there, ultimately consulting with such interesting firms as FedEx, Kodak, Charles Schwab, Safeway, Sun, SanDisk and HTC, among others. I spoke at SXSW several times and presented a poster at the IA Summit. I joined BayCHI and was elected to the board of directors of the Information Architecture Institute. Extractable has been growing at an exhilarating pace.

Now, nearly thirteen years after Rich sent me that url, I am also drinking the Yahoo kool-aid. I start my new job there today. I’ll be working for Erin Malone, one of the founder of the IA Institute and one of the founders and first editor of Boxes and Arrows. I’ll be joining her Platform Design group in the Platform Products group. Specifically, I’ll be “curating” the pattern library, and contributing to related initiatives.

Wish me luck. More on this as I get my bearings.

I don’t know why they say Seattle is rainy because, like, I was there today and it was sunny and hot - over 90 degrees, so I hear.

Also, the space needle? Totally pointy.

Cecil filled me in on something cool and old friend of ours, Brendan Fletcher, is doing. I remember him hiking the Sierra Nevada (or some similar west-coast trail) years ago. Apparently now he and his partner Emma Nicholas are “attempting to walk the length of the Great Wall of China.” They are blogging the experience at a site hosted by the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney (as part of their Great Wall exhibition) called Walking the Wall.

I haven’t lifted a finger to post here in so long, and so much been’s going on lately. (And just now I tried to post and somehow lost my window.)

Like, for instance, we just got back from a week in New York. (I posted some pictures from the trip at Flickr.) And before that I was at my 20th reunion at Princeton. And before that I was in Memphis on business.

Also, Bill Ectric just posted an interview with myself and my erstwhile partner-in-crime Levi Asher on his site as well as at at a site called SearchWarp. Bill has got hisself a new blog too, and I’ve been posting a few chapters from his novel Tamper over at Telegraph.

Just wanted to get that off my chest.

My sister emailed me the other day to say she hadn’t heard from me for a while. She reads my bloggingses, so that’s a sure sign that I’ve been radio silent for a while.

I’m fine.

I’ve been traveling a lot and working hard and I’ve had some computer troubles with my Mac laptop at home and no time at the office for blogging, not even on the company blog that I write most of.

I was in New Orleans last weekend for JazzFest and have some photos to post (crummy cellphone photos, though - for good ones, see Briggs’ good photos posted at Flickr). I had a great time as usual but, man, has that city taken a beating! It was heart wrenching.

In the latest go-round with the gremlin in my Mac, it appeared that my carefully backed up months worth of personal data since my previous paranoid backup had vanished from the external hard drive I’d backed it all up to. But my friend MichaelZ suggested I run Disk Warrior on the Lacie drive and sure enough the missing folder reappeared! A rare happy ending in the realm of data loss.

I’ve learned my lesson, sort of, from last year’s loss of about six months of personal information. More and more of the stuff I care about is stored “out there” instead of here. It’s still vulnerable, of course, but it’s somewhat more professionally maintained with redundant backups and such.

Still, when your computer is failing intermittantly, as mine’s been doing, you stop trusting it so much and you stop using it so much, and that’s at least a part of why I haven’t been blogging regularly.

Right now I’m paying bills. It doesn’t sound fun, but getting it done will complete my “to do’s” for the weekend (more or less) and that will feel good. It may even still be light out and a little cooler with some time for another swing in the hammock before the next work week comes crashing down on me.

So I’m slogging through Enterzone fixing vandalized pages from the last few rounds of hackery and I come across the abortive stub of what looks like an attempt to start a blog back in 1998 called unvironmental news. I’ve added the entry into this my modren online journal, as its own entry dated April 8, 1998, just as I plan to eventually port over breathing room and the Daily Barbie.

It’s been years since I’ve ridden the N-Judah muni streetcar on a regular basis but for a while there back in the late ’80s and early ’90s I practically lived on it.

I rode it to get downtown, to get to BART, to get to the east bay, to get to Dead shows. It was always late and it was always crowded.

My friend Nick tells me there was a song by some obscure SF band in the ’60s called the N-Judah blues.

I can believe. Now the line has its own blog: The N-Judah Chronicles.

Finally signed up for an account at Boxes and Arrows (the premier journal of information architecture on the web), so this makes yet another place where a rapidly ossifying bio of mine is bound to fall off my radar.

If I ever get my comprehensive personal site organized, I may need a big list of “identity” pages out there, just to remind me to update them from time to time.

Christian and Jesse Garrett
Originally uploaded by jonl.

The party itself was kind of like a bad college mixer, with kegs of Miller Lite and a silly cover band in a large cement warehouse loading dock.

I did have the chance to chat (or shout) with some interesting people there. This picture was taken by Jon Lebkowsky and shows me talking to Jesse James Garrett, one of the fathers of Information Architecture.

tags: sxsw2006, sxsw

I’ve been jotting down a partial list of the people I’ve been meeting (some old friends, some for the first time) in the halls and at the parties here in Austin. I’m sure I’m forgetting various cool somebodies and I’ll update the list when my memory coughs up new names (and when I go through the stack of business cards piling up in my hotel room).

day one

• Liz Lawley
• Mary Hodder
• Nancy White
• George Kelly
• JW Richard
• j.brotherlove
• Jon Lebkowsky
• Marc Canter
• Jesse James Garrett
• Peter Merholz
• Tiffany B. Brown
• David Pescovitz
• Tikva Morowati

day two

• Don Turnbull
• Thomas Vander Wal
• Prentiss Riddle
• Joshua Schachter
• Adina Levin
• John Tolva
• Halley Suitt
• Scot Hacker
• Liza Sabater
• David Isenberg
• Jerome Armstrong
• Markos Moulitsas Zúniga
• Nancy Scola
• Ruby Sinreich
• Glenn Smith
• Henry Copeland
• Cameron Shaw

day three

• Molly Holzschlag
• Dave Seah
• Chris Pirillo
• Robert Scoble
• Mark Glazer
• Renée Blodgett
• Ed Ward
• Laura Fulford
• Eric Meyer
• Nick Lewis
• Mike Krempasky
• Chuck DeFeo
• Chris Nolan
• Liz Lawley
• Andy Baio
• danah boyd
• Derek Powazek
• Rob Pongsajapan
• George Oates
• Mena Trott
• Tom Coates
• Heath Row
• Susan Kaup
• Halcyon Styn
• Dori Smith
• Steve Champeon

day four

• Rex Hammock
• Limor Fried
• Natalie Zee
• Phil Torrone
• Liz E. Burr
• Susie Wyshak
• David Todd
• Tish Grier
• Scott Allen
• Cam Barrett
• Scott Johnson
• Tantek Çelik
• Chris Messina
• Heather Hesketh
• Kevin Smith

Did I meet you and forget to list you? Let me know and I’ll gladly add you, and buy you a beer (or the frosty beverage of your choice) next year.

tags: sxsw2006, sxsw

B landed safely in London and sent me email from her hosts there. I'll call her mom and dad today to let them know she got there ok and has had a chance to rest and relax before her strenuous trip to Sicily. (Pout.)

I've been watching a bunch of movies that I don't think B would want to see. I saw the new Rob Schneider movie, and it was as dumb as you might expect, but it was relatively innocent fun. There seems to be trend toward "dirty" PG and R rated movies that have sexual themes but are actually fairly childish and even harmless. Sort of just an extension of bathroom humor from what I can tell. I suppose it has to do with the infantilization or extended adolescence of American culture.

Last night I saw the 40-year-old Virgin, which surprised me by being really pretty good, despite the same type of over-the-top bawdy (almost wrote body) humor. It felt a bit funny going by myself. I am forty after all. Four women in front of me seemed to find the jokes, even the ones that B would no doubt consider "boy humor" to be very funny. Not sure if mixed company would work the same way. Then again, I think younger people are just more used to "blue" humor in general, as they tend to be more familiar with pr0n and stuff like that.

Meanwhile, I got a Bill Hicks tape (I mean disk) via Netflix. Wasn't sure if B would be interested in him. Not sure I even want to sit through an extended s