wake up!

gee and i’ve only met barlow once
Originally uploaded by xian

was JP Barlow idly doing the comparisons today, or is this more like secret-admirer spam?

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 show, but I keep hearing what a great comedian he was. Maybe I'll see it the Reverend Bill is interested in watching it.

Otherwise, just trying to work through my small to-do list for the weekend (and sleep a lot): Picked up my shirts at the cleaner yesterday, need to get more coffee today. I'm doing laundry right now and doing some scanning for my brother in Greece (long story).

Been playing my uke a bunch and mean to get out my guitar practice book to put in some guitar time for the first time in months. I was going to try to do some overdubs on Xourmas's basic tracks for Salty Dog, but my iBook is back in the shop and my powerbook's fan drowns out everything else. I may try recording on my work PC, but it won't be as easy as just plugging in a mic, firing up GarageBand, and recording some tracks. I keep figuring out melodic lines, like recently I was working out Two of Us on the little uke. One nice thing about the modest level of single-note technique I've picked up is that if a melody is bouncing around my head, I can usually pick it out on one of my instruments, which is infinitely satisfying for some reason.

Let's see. What else? Had coffee this morning. Will probably head down to Lakeshore soon. I'm enjoying taking it easy.

Listening to a Zero show I was at (thanks to MZ) - that's always fun. I can remember where I was on the floor during some songs. The Rigor Mortis (a Meters) tune is bringing up unpleasant thoughts about bodies floating in Lake George. Worried about my friends from New Orleans, of course.

I don't know what's in the air but for the last two days my eyes have been dry and itchy. I'm trying not to be irritable about it and I'm trying not to rub my eyes, because that's just been making it worse. Next I'll scratch my cornea with an eyelash or something. Too melodramatic?

What makes someone park their big-ass 4x4 across two spaces clearly marked "COMPACT" in the parking lot of my office building?

Probably the same thing that would make someone write ASSWIPE on a post-it and put it under their windshield wiper facing in.

Traffic was light today on the way to San Mateo, so my commute took only about 35 minutes instead of the usual 40 to 50. First Sunday of the summer. I snapped this photo from my window with my new phone (just switched from Verizon to Cingular and will save money in the process).

Not that I can take any credit for it, but Extractable has a spanking new web site launching today with a slicker look and some updated content. Congratulations to the crew who did the redesign!

B and I can never cram a full celebration into one single day a year, so we like to celebrate birthday months, with gifts and special events appropriate at any time for a loosely defined month surrounding the birthday in question.

B's birthmonth got off to a good start this past weekend with a wonderful (as always) dinner at BayWolf on Friday night (after my second day on my new job). Then Saturday evening, her actual birthday, we saw Wilco at the Greek Theatre.

The Court and Spark opened. Funny how they seem to be named after a Joni Mitchell album. This SF band is a bunch of young-ish guys playing rootsy, guitar-driven rock. The lead singer is kind of tall and gangly. His mic was set up so he had to crouch a little to sing, and he tends to punctuate his verses with a kind of spasm of bending his knees and almost seeming like he might start duckwalking (but not).

At first this made a poor impression on me, because his microphone wasn't amplified correctly so his voice was faint and wimpy sounding. I liked the lead guitarist a lot more because he seemed to be quietly making all the best sounds. Finally, word got back to the band and the lead singer started singing from the bass players microphone and then everything clicked into place and the second half of the set was very enjoyable. He is in fact a good singer with a strong voice and once the sound was right his mannerisms didn't signify to me at all.

Then Wilco took command of the stage and were just fantastic. B had never seen nor heard the band before and she was still fully entertained, very taken with Jeff Tweedy's charismatic stage presence and singing voice. At one point she said something like "it's all about him, isn't it?" This was only my second time hearing them (the first was at Jazz Fest), but once again I was had a great time.

There are few bands that you can enjoy without knowing their material well. The audience is full of culty lovers of every song who sing along and cheer nearly every song choice, but I found that on the majority of songs that I was unfamiliar with by the end of a verse or chorus I felt entirely drawn in.

Sunday we went down to Palo Alto to celebrate with B's parents. B did a bunch of yard work and I brought my uke and serenaded her with happy birthday and Effervescing Elephant and Salty Dog and The Angels Changed My Name.

Perhaps the best part of the weekend though was the idle time we spent in the back yard. Or, rather, I was idle on the hammock - she was mostly puttering in the garden or trying to prevent the cat from eating birds.

A few weeks ago when I was in New York for the PDF conference, Halley Suitt (rhymes with Sally Root) was offering to give tarot readings at the cocktail party the night before the conference. I've always been a fan of divination and the subconscious so I asked her to read me. Mary Hodder took a picture of us and put it up at Flickr and Jon Lebkowsky asked me to tell the story, so here's the reading as best as I can recall it (the closeup of the cards links to a larger "in situ" picture).

This was not one of your extended Celtic-cross type layouts. Halley had me choose three cards and then a final card for summation.

The first card was the Seven of Staves (or Wands). Note that I'm linking to pages that discuss the tarot and show the same deck, but that the interpretations may not tally precisely with what Halley read for me. The magic, as it were, for me in divination is the human element and what we read in each other consciously and unconsciously, so my memory of her words count much more to me than anyone else's generic interpretation. Halley told me that for a writer this card meant that I had something to say, that I needed to get out, and that if I were to persevere I would be successful in saying my piece.

(I am simplifying our dialogue because I do not remember all the details and nuances, though the gist was clear.)

My second card was The Devil, and Halley read it to mean that to achieve the success (in writing or speech) that I longed for I would need to embrace my inner "bad boy" - that I would have to deal with the dark side of myself and perhaps even indulge a kind of forbidden selfishness without which my own words would fail to make it to the surface. Naturally, this is a very powerful card, even with all of its obvious negative symbolism.

The third card was The Sun and Halley took this as a very good omen indeed, suggesting that if I were able to handle the darkness and get my words, my speech, my writing, my saying out of myself and accept the consequences good or ill, that I would meet with success, radiance, a happy ending.

The final card was the Five of Swords which Halley read to me as a form of victory with negative consequences. She pointed to the illustration and showed that the others have surrendered to the warrior, but that there was jealousy, resentment, negative feelings, and rumors surrounding the victor. Together we interpreted this as connecting to both the first and second cards, in that what probably holds me back from entirely expressing myself is a form of self-censorship driven by fear of selfishness and of how others will receive or perceive me. That is, I may be more afraid of being seen as selfish than of the actual vice of selfishness. Together, Halley read these cards as encouraging me to plow ahead and speak my mind and damn the consequences.

Not a bad reading on the eve of a public speaking event covering the twin power streams of politics and technology in my home city, the Mammon-ridden veritable capital of the planet, eh?

Twice in the past two days I've been mistaken for Craig Newmark. It's kinda flattering in a way. Maybe he and I share a sense of style?

I'm jetbluin' it to JFK later today for PDF 2 on Monday and I'm trying to figure out a few last-minute packing decisions. It looks like it will be mildly warm and rainy while I'm there, so I'll pack my raincoat. I guess I'll bring my leather jacket since it won't be too hot and it's important to wear black leather and look cool when you're in New York.

Then there's how to dress for the conference. There will be a lot of Washington professionals - consultants and journalists - there. So do I wear a suit? But keep the collar open? Or do I go as a west-coast hipster and wear my neighborhoodie and some t-shirt? How do I maximize my apparent billable rate without looking like a poseur or a phony?

Decisions, decisions.

Up out of my sickbed yesterday I ran down to Lake Shore Avenue to pick up some Peet's coffee to send to New York to arrive there before me and to grab a light-baked Arizmendi pizza for dinner. Police cars and an ambulance had the street blocked off, which made crossing easy for once.

The member of the Arizmendi collective working the cash register told me what was causing the fuss. An elderly woman had been jaywalking and crossed behind a truck. The truck, sadly, was backing up and ran her over. From the general hush and the nervous clots of people on the street speaking in low voices, I gathered that she had died.

Returning to my car I heard at least three people pledge to never jaywalk again.

It's also 5/5/5, eh... kewl!

I've still got a nasty headcold, makes me want to sleep a lot.

The Mediajunkie server had a major crash the other day, but thankfully our fantastic sysadmin, Jeff Tiedrich managed to replace the munged drive and preserve everything we care about and transfer it all over. Now I'm in the process of noting the smaller errors that arise from the changed circumstances and fixing them one at a time. The perfect job to be doing on a laptop from a sickbed.

I've really been enjoying reading new stuff from Levi Asher nearly every day now that LitKicks has an subscribable feed. His piece today called Found Poetry reminds me how I always care what the text is everywhere. I don't like web addresses that have "template.php?query=splunge" in them. I like the words to make sense, to look good, to not be informative, or to be imaginative. When x-pollen was my personal blog, the archive was called tubers. Now that my personal blog is at xianlandia, which is named after the discolandia and similarly named Latino stores in New York, the archive is called te-amo, a brand of cigar often advertised in the signage of corner bodegas. (Bodega was an even earlier name of my journal.) Words mean things. I don't like it when they don't:

We sometimes find poetry in the oddest places.... Where have you ever found your own found poetry, if you have found any?

Maybe I deserve to be struck down after a nearly weeklong run of bliss and fine weather in New Orleans but I find myself coughing up something nasty and feeling like napping today.

B and I are headed down to NOLA for our annual Jazz Fest pilgrimage tomorrow, and none too soon, given how stressful life has been for both of us, but especially B, lately.

Last year I ended up not posting any of my notes from the fairgrounds, but the year before I posted a lot of photos and recollections and people seemed to enjoy it. I'm going to play it by ear this time. I'm definitely bringing the camera, so I'll have to offload it every night, so I might as well do some blogging too, right?

We'll see. Vacation means never having to say you're sorry.

I'll be back on the stick a week from today (Wednesday, April 27).

...but perhaps I should have: ABC News: Cardinal Ratzinger of Germany Is New Pope

How old is Pope Benedict XVI anyway?

I am correct that "the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith" is just the old Inquisition re-branded, right?

So I guess he was probably acting as a kind of vice-Pope during JPII's infirm years anyway.

This can't be good.

The world played a few unkind jokes on this April fool: a parking ticket near Piedmont Ave., and the state franchise tax board giving our tax refund to some other (unnamed) state agency, probably also related to outstanding parking tickets.

Then the flooding in the basement - especially weird after no rain. No idea if the shower or the washing machine or the water heater something else is leaking but something is, so we'll need to call a plumber and be paranoid about using water till its fixed.

Did some yoga this morning for the first time in months. What a relief. I nearly cried in downward-facing dog as I felt my calves stretching out of their tight cramp. And in the warrior pose, my shoulders felt like they might crumble and fall off, but something tells me this is just the countervailing effort I need to stabilize those muscles that are aching from all the guitar and ukudelia.

I missed the kickball game this morning (KICK! 2005) ... got to follow George's advice more closely....

Well, the outgoing mail sending problem seems to be located in my client software, Eudora. By process of elimination, I've ruled out the DSL connection, the various mail servers, and so on.

This seems to be the final push I need to abandon Eudora, since it appears to be a bug in the software or its settings. I've reinstalled the latest version and it's still not working. In fact, now instead of offering one of several different errors every time I try to send, it simply goes through the process and completes it without sending and without reporting any problems.

Unacceptable!

I downloaded Thunderbird and I'm learning it now. It sends my mail just fine. It did crash when I tried to import my Eudora mail store, which might have something to do with it being ginormous. So the transition may be rocky for a while. I've got hundreds if not thousands of email messages over in Eudora that I still plan to reply to eventually, and right now I'm manually copying over the replies from yesterday that got stalled out.

At least I am free to communicate again. For a net.junkie like myself, losing smtp access is like losing a limb.

Nothing much substantial has changed but for some reason I'm the optimism tip this week. I have a feeling something's about to break big and I can't quite put my finger on it. Or maybe I'm just getting hyped for south by southwest.

I'm more productive when I'm in this kind of mood, though. I'm working hard on the new Civicspace site for East Bay for Democracy and I've been keeping up around the house with vacuuming and dinner prep and whatnot, helping B set up my thinkpad as an alternative workstation in her office, and even dealing with bills and related money woes.

I haven't had quite as much time to practice the guitar lately, so I'm kind of chomping at the bit to make time for that, but I'll get to it. Also, I think I finally got the Monkey Vortex Radio Theater podcast working, so that's cool. Now I just have to finish my Understand, Rubberband? script for said radio theater and I'll have my writing chops back too.

I need to work on a few articles for Personal Democracy Forum, and I need to download tax software pronto, because I think I'm getting a refund this year.

What else? No word from the documentary TV people I spoke to in New York, so I dropped them a line to say what's up? Also, another feeler for some information architecture work for a huge global services company working for another huge Fortune 500 company based in Missouri. If that works out I'll be doing the commute-by-plane thing for a while, but it would sure help with cash flow.

I keep telling myself to do some blogging every day, even if it's boring- even-to- people-who- know-me journal entries in my persona blog. Why? For selfish reasons. When I'm keeping track of what I've been doing I get more done and I feel better about myself. I also notice patterns and figure out why I'm avoiding other things. I could do this all in private but I like the transparency and it's easy enough to ignore for anyone who isn't interested.

This weekend I saw Life Aquatic again, on Friday night, this time with the Reverend Bill and B, replaced the wound nylon C string on my tenor ukulele and got a big new bag of kitty litter, and then saw The Aviator on Saturday (liked it much better than I expected to). Sunday I went out for some wine and pancetta and for a copy of Pat Conroy's cookbook, which took way too much time, and then enjoyed watching the Oscar's with B and eating the lentil and pancetta soup she made.

Also, I nearly finalized my travel plans for SXSW next month but am tracking down why my listing at the website isn't complete.

Oh, yeah, paid some bills too.

It was bacterial, it wasn't pneumonia, the zithromax killed the little buggers, and the prednisone kept my lungs inflated while my heart was breaking all week.

Off to celebrate a friend's birthday and watch the sun set over Alameda's beach.

Apologies for radio silence. Over the weekend I was celebrating my birthday but I've also been experiencing really bad asthma and some nonspecific aches and pains. It got pretty bad last night so I went to Kaiser today and they told me I've got (if I'm lucky) bronchitis or (if I'm not) pneumonia. Well, at least I know why my energy has been so low lately.

Don't worry about tomorrow. If I have to crawl to my voting location to cast a ballot I'll do it.

Also, along with the rest of the editorial staff, I'll be blogging election day at Personal Democracy Forum tomorrow. We'll be trying to pay special attention to the effects of technology on the race.

So does life really begin at forty?

Given that I've just started playing music this year, maybe so.

This is also the 7th birthday of my online journal in its various incarnations.

I'll be offline most of today.

Up to Point Reyes later.

All I want for my birthday is to see the last of that guy with the mysterious thing on his back.

Yes, I do have a birthday coming up, the big four-oh on October 30. (That will also be the seventh anniversary of this journal - w00t).

People never know what to get for me, but this year it's easy. First of all, the perfect gift for me is to buy a copy of my book. If you already have a copy, buy one as a gift for someone else. If you've already read the book please review it at Amazon or elsewhere.

Speaking of Amazon, I do have a
wish list there. It's kind of random but I do want all the things on it.

Then just in general, since my latest obsession is playing my ukulele and guitar, I would love anything related to that.

A pick. Some sheet music. An instructional LP or video or DVD. Books of music theory or explanations or terminology even. Just about anything to do with music is fair game.

There, so don't say I never told you. Also, I should mention that my general rule is that of course it's great to receive a gift but I don't like anyone to feel obligated and I realize life doesn't always permit that level of involvement. Sending me some good wishes is also appreciated and I'm not strict about day-and-date (which is why B and I tend to celebrate each other's birthday-months - or birthmonths).

If you're trying to call me on my mobile phone I may miss the call for a few days. The thing doesn't ring anymore and its about to come to pieces.

I'm also about to swith carriers but shhhh! don't tell Verizon.

In just a few hours I'll be getting in a cab to head for JFK to fly home to Oakland on JetBlue. I am way ready to be home. I miss my life. It appears that I missed the killer dry-heat wave too, though I caught the killer humid-head wave here. Both waves appear to have broken. It was nice and cool in New York today.

Levi Asher and I went to Sara Schaefer is Obsessed With You downtown Friday night, and saw Jonathan Ames talk, read, and do the Hairy Call; and were treated to a performance of a twelve-minute musical by Paul Ford and Steve Burns called Rat and Squirrel. It was witty, poignant, clever, funny, touching, and musically lively. Plus they've already got an animator lined up apparently.

A nice way to finish off my current visit to New York.

I'm worried that my recent spate of mini-successes is going to have a dark lining. I'm not worried like George Costanza that if I get too happy "God will kill me." It's more that I'm afraid I'm arrogant and conceited enough. I already talk too much. I already think quite highly of myself. As I've started to see some of my longer efforts come to fruition, I have begun to revel in the validity of my own ideas and intentions, and I'm verging on becoming an insufferable prick.

What to do? What to do? Air my dirty mental laundry in public, I gather.

Well, my book shipped a week or so ago and the promotional effort begins now in earnest although the pub date isn't till Sept 1.

I had to unplug for a while and really minimize my online reading and blogging, catch up on sleep and other metabolic necessities, and so on.

Plus, I've now started that new job I alluded to: Chief Strategy Officer for Armstrong Zuniga, a netroots consulting firm. Great bunch of folks - it was an honor to be asked and I look forward to really making a difference in this new role.

There's no ink on the contract yet but odds are looking very good that starting in July I'll be joining a consulting firm as chief mumbledymumbledy officer and work with some clients on projects that combine a lot of my interests today: netroots activism, taking back congress, weblogs and webfeeds and wikis oh my, promoting my book, attending both conventions, continuing to develop PEP, mastering new content management systems and scripting languages, doing visionary strategy work, helping to grow a startup to the sustainability point, and of course doing my own blogging.

Strangest job offer yet. Totally reversed. They came to me. No resume. "We spent a few hours googling you last night." The blog as resume. Blogger gets dream job. Film at 11.

For the first time in 39 days on Friday I wasn't the bottleneck in the editorial and production flow of my book. Today I had a day off on a weekend for the first time in months. I almost wasn't sure it was real: the feeling of being able to do nothing, lie in the hammock reading, take a nap, watch TV, whatever.

It feels like a new year, a good one.

for a very important date. No time to say hello. Goodbye. I'm late, I'm late, I'm late.
.

In the eighth circle of a deadline hell of my own making, for the last time I say to myself for the last time I say this is the last time, this time, this is the last time, this time is the time, this time is the last time, this time is the last time, this is the last time.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall.

Still working on a chapter today. I'm about three or four weeks overdue for a "to done" style posting here. When I get a round tuit it will be a doozy. Got a DFA meetup tonight, then back to finishing up the Chapter 4 rewrite. Then sleep, glorious sleep.

Much to blog about from the last few weeks (pop culture conference in Texas, publishing / technology conference in Berkeley, and now here I am posting from New Orleans), but too much big fun to want to sit in front of a computer posting to the blog, so ideally it will all come pouring out in a week or so.

Rest assured, I am jotting down what I'm eating and hearing at Jazz Fest and I'm taking photos, and the moment the fun stops I will post my reportage.

Till then, laissez les bon temps roulez, or something like that.

It's as easy as falling off a log ( + 25 years).

They start noticing things again. When they feel that something needs doing, they do it. They stop being afraid of making mistakes. They stop hiding from themselves. They wake up to find out they are the eyes of the world.

Be the first on your block to hop on board the xianerrific express! Later, you can tell your friends: "I knew that guy back when he was just a blogger."

Act now!

and I'm late on my way to the Palace Hotel in SF for the coronation anunciation assumption announcement by Howard Dean about his plans for DFA 2.0.

We hope you like our new direction.

There's something to be said for sleeping whenever you're tired and waking up a lot to fiddle around with stuff until you're tired again.

My cell phone rings. It's a guy from my car insurance company's marketing arm. He's reading my survey answers about how I switched from my old insurance company because I saved a couple hundred dollars.

He tells me they're planning an ad campaign on California highways and they want to feature real customers who are residents of the state, representing the diverse population. Am I interested in being on a billboard?

Sure, why not? I tell him. He tells me to email a mugshot to suchandsuch address.com. I tell him it's no problem if they've already got enough chubby white balding guys with glasses and don't need me.

Immediately, I'm thinking, Is this a mistake?

I don't mind telling the truth. My friend Andy says it will freak me out if I see myself on a billboard. I'd have to take a picture. Will they send me a poster-sized version of the ad? I'll only tell the truth, but what's the harm.

I instinctively no B would say no, but I'm such a ham. What a trip, being 20 feet tall. Maybe they're looking for the next "it nerd" in Hollywood and some talent agency will give me a call. Stranger things have happened.

I tell B about it. Don't tell me anymore, she says. She is appalled.

I go out back to snap a few picture. I need a shave and a haircut. My neck is fat. I end up taking a bunch of pictures of the cat first. I accidentally switch to the video format and shoot a bunch of nonsense interstitials. What the hell.

It's as good a time as any to do another week in review:

Monday I finally closed out my February files, deposited some checks, and then met my editor, Pete Gaughan, for a lunch on the sidewalk outside Arizmendi (pizza in the sun, yea! it almost made me feel like I had kicked this cold) and to discuss the progress on my book and the all important subtitle. That night I went to the monthly Alameda County Organizing Committee meeting for the once and future East Bay for Dean organization.

Tuesday I got the groceries and made dinner (petrale soul baked with sauce bercy) but that was about it. Hey, I'm still sick.

Wednesday I managed to submit the book's glossary (nee appendix) after making dinner (grilled grass-fed cross-rib steak, baked potatoes, salad).

Thursday once again I was wiped out and slept almost all day. I did get the garbage and the yard waste (green bin) put out for the next morning's pickup.

Friday I did my laundry, sent out a message to my book's participants via Orkut inviting informal peer reviews of a few chapters, sent a note to one of the authors of Extreme Democracy to invite them to participate in a panel on politics and technology at the Waterside conference in Berkeley in April, and put in a call to a publisher in Connecticut on behalf of one of my clients. He was on another line and will call me back Monday. Oh, also tried to help move along the production process for another book.

Today I got a birthday present for a friend, picked up some sour cream for the icing on the cake, refilled a prescription at Kaiser, took nine shirts to the cleaner, had a pair of trousers (Christmas gift from B) altered, got my glasses readjusted and priced a replacement for the magnetic clip-on sunglass part of my other glasses ($90, holy shit! decided to put off that purchase for a while), and did a preliminary sort of agenda items for a Northern California summit meeting of grassroots Dean organizations taking place next month.

Things I didn't get done this week but meant to include reviewing and resubmitting Chapter 4 (I'll try to finish that tomorrow), updating all teh contact info for participants in my book, initiating the next set of interviews for my book, paying my bills, booking a flight on Southwest to San Antonio for the American Popular Culture conference in March, booking a flight on JetBlue to Boston for the Democratic convention in July, coming up with other ideas for the Waterside conference.

And a propos of nothing, I see that the warm weather has restarted the Ladies (and Gents) who Lunch series in Oakland, next scheduled for March 18. See you there?

On Monday my throat felt scratchy and I had a sinus drip. By Tuesday it was a full-blown cold. It's almost as if my body scheduled its next breakdown for the precise end of the California primary season. I voted for my candidate but, as he had already withdrawn from the race, he of course lost. Wednesday I had another chapter due so even though my cold kept getting worse, I sucked it up and finished it. Then Thursday I lay around sleeping most of the day. Often I get sick when I'm exhausted and sometimes I think it's my body's way of telling me to take a rest. Mission accomplished. Today my voice is hoarse and I've got a dry cough. I think I'll have shaken this thing by the weekend. Not too bad as colds go. Definitely not a flu or a bronchial infection. Thank goodness for small favors.

Between writing my book and being sick, that hasn't left much time for browsing the web lately, let alone blogging. I have continued to keep track of my major activities each day. After I posted my Last Week entry last week, a few people commented to me (mostly in email) that I seem very "busy and productive." I guess that's true. I'm always busy although I don't always keep good track of what I'm doing. I'm not always productive. Sometimes my busy-ness (business?) is taken up by activities and behaviors that don't produce anything. Writing this book has focused me, though, and sharpened my priorities. Also, I think if anyone logs all their activities and sums them up at the end of a week, they would seem productive. Here's another:

• Monday I made sure one of my client's publishers had all the information she needed to do the crucial word-density calculation required to do the castoff, make a page estimate, and come up with a working size for the book's typeface. I also started reviewing the pre-developmental edit of Chapter 3 of my book.
• Tuesday I was mostly sick but I did help resolve a problem with the same publisher and client involving getting a file transfered via FTP (being an agent means being a jack-of-all-trades sometimes: IT support, psychotherapist, diplomat, bad cop, general troubleshooting).
• Wednesday I completed Chapter 8 of my book and submitted it (although actually, being sick, I went to sleep early, got up again at 5:30 am the next morning and wrapped the chapter up and submitted it around 7:30). I have only one chapter, three appendices, and some frontmatter left to write, although I still have about 25 interviews to do and a lot of rewriting before this thing is in the can. Around the same time, B made our reservations for JazzFest. We'll be going for the first weekend again this year. We both really need - and have earned - the break. In fact, April is going to be a travel month for me, with a pop culture conference in San Antonio April 7 to 10, then back to the Bay Area for the Waterside conference in Berkeley April 15th-ish, and then to New Orleans for Fest around April 21 or 22 (I forget).
• Thursday I was reminded that I was running up against the extended deadline to interview some local high school students for the Princeton alumni schools committee. This had been nagging at the back of my mind and I was worried about blowing it, despite the fact that the alumni interviews don't carry much weight with the admissions committee. I managed to set up interviews with two of my three students. The third had an unlisted number. I got her home number from her high school's guidance counselor (thank you, Internet), and left her a message. Most of the day, though, I slept, coping with my cold.
• Friday (today), I completed my review of Chapter 3 and sent it back to my editor and to my peer reviewer. I also completed the two student interviews and filled out their forms. I was never able to get a call back from the third student. Oh well. I'm tired. I hope there's a new Joan of Arcadia on tonight.

Things I wanted to do this week but never got to: grocery shopping (I'll do it tomorrow), interviewing Craig Newmark, Seth Godin, and Christopher Filkins for my book (next week), reviewing the pre-development comments on Chapter 4 (this weekend), updating the massive content database I'm compiling for my book's participants (never?), resubmitting Chapter 4 (probably Monday), checking in with the author's of O'Reilly's Extreme Democracy book to see if any of them are available to join a panel on politics and technology at the Waterside conference (as soon as I get around to it), paying my bills (this weekend).

Next week I've also got to connect with various contacts made through the Dean campaign, namely the local grassroots group which is meeting Monday night, the national technology task force, and the local Kerry campaign people.

This morning I made the coffee as usual and was about to get the oatmeal started when I thought I heard whispering from inside the refrigerator. I put down the pot and it stopped. Then it started again. I could distinctly hear a voice speaking in French. How strange! I went to the fridge and opened the door. Of course, it was the cultured buttermilk.

Not since dotcomania have I worked as long hours without minding it. Lately, between writing a book and volunteering with Oakland for Dean, I've been working 70-100 hours a week, days evenings and weekends, and having a great time at it. Still the tension and stress and anxiety of trying to be "on" seven days a week eighteen hours a day does take its toll. My neck is stiff, I am bursting with pent up physical energy. Desperately need to exercise outside (but now it's raining) and do some yoga, and rest and relax more, but that's hard to do without weekends.

Friday evening I was at Kinko's copying talking-points walking-pieces and stocking up on Manila folders, Friday night I was squinting at Yahoo maps and printing out precinct-walking routes without realizing that custom maps sent to me attached to email was at the time caught in the limbo of my bulk-mail folder spamfilter also provided by Yahoo in this case to my Enronesque service-provider, SBC (in the former Mexican parts of the US, the Texas utilities keep making California utilities their bitch).

Saturday morning I hosted a precinct walk out of my house, and walked part of a precinct myself, in the area I (and only I) call South Lake. I've really come to enjoy precinct walks. That same afternoon we had the first serious Oakland get out the vote (GOTV meeting) and came up with a precinct-captain structure and identified some potential leaders to step up. With just a little more structure, enough to delegate reporting and enable people to take responsibility for manageable tasks, the volunteer campaign should run much more effectively. It looks like we have some office space too, not an official campaign office but a place to store material and stage walks and use for meetings. I agreed to spearhead the Oakland GOTV effort in concert with a small strategic group, currently consisting of four people but with a number of others identified whom we'd like to involve at the strategic planning level, some of whom may bring their own established bases of support to the effort.

Sunday morning, I got up and made scrambled eggs a la Jacques Pepin with toasted bagel half for B and then headed into Berkeley for an interview for the book. I expected to talk for about an hour but we sat in the coffee shop for nearly three hours, with my scribbling furiously in my notebook whenever she was talking. She added another layer of understanding to my grasp of my topic and agreed to peer-review some or all of the manuscript, so that was great.

After a quick dinner of the squash soup that B had made Sunday afternoon, I ran back out to attend an outreach meeting trying to connect East Bay for Dean with the African American community in East Bay. We discussed the group itself late in the meeting, when only half the people were left, and there was general agreement among the black folks that the group shouldn't restrict participation in the group to African Americans but continue being an open group dedicated to the outreach effort and not necessarily an affinity group or lobby. Still the white folk (or "European Americans" as one of the group's founders is fond of saying) don't feel comfortable taking leadership roles. I know I want to participate and contribute my energy and support, but I want to take direction in this area, not give it.

That meeting broke up just before 9 so I dashed over to Piedmont Ave for my weekly writing evening with Cecil Vortex where I was pleased to see the Reverend Bill, who was working his way through a stack of Steve Martin and Woody Allen paperbacks, but admitted that something about the tea shop (the lighting? the acoustics?) wasn't conducive to work for him. One problem might be that Cecil and I are so heavy into politics right now that we sort of grok-lock and start speed rapping and that can make it hard to concentrate all by itself.

I got a little work done on my book that night, mostly framing the fourth chapter and noting some interview that still need scheduling or followup. That was a long day, that Sunday.

Yesterday, Monday, I was exhausted and not that productive. I made some calls and took some calls, did some blogging, and tinkered with the chapter. I was also obsessed with trying to figure out what flavor second-place finish will keep Dean afloat long enough so that New York and California can play a decisive role for once.

Today, Tuesday, I am on tenterhooks and needles. The New Hampshire primary is today, my publisher's marketing meeting for my book is today, and my next chapter is due (and I forfeit a piece of the advance if I miss any deadlines). I shouldn't even be blogging right now, except I promised I'd go back to logging at least the important stuff more regularly here in my online journal.

Careful what you ask the oracle. You might not like the answer. I asked the Rune Caster today "Will it lift?" referring to a pall of gloom that's beset me lately. The cast runes were encouraging:

Past Isa - Cessation of energy, freezing an issue where it stands, cooling relationships, separation, division.

Present Algiz - Protection, fortunate influences, fate on your side, victory and success, good luck and personal strength.

Future Tir - Victory, leadership, success over other competitors, increase in finances, virility and passion (especially for men).

Hey, it beats the newspaper horoscopes.

Oh wait, the check is a loan. Isn't HFC, like, household finance or something? Now they just send you something that looks like a check and starts generating interest the moment you don't put it through the shredder? Why don't they just send me crack and get on with it?

Wow, I don't seem 39. When did I get so old?

This also marks the sixth anniversary of my first blog post (except we didn't call them blogs back them, you young whippersnappers - it was more like an online diary). I can't really claim six straight years of blogging, though, because there were two hiatuses (hiati?) in there of around a year each, circa 1999 and 2001.

I was smart to start on my birthday, though, because it means I don't have to keep track of a separate "blogiversary."

We had a party last weekend when the insane heatwave was still on. The last big birthday party I had was ten years ago. I now have a tradition of saluting the '9 year of each decade. Big difference in ten years. The party was a lot less rowdy, a lot more about quiet conversation and a lot less about loud music. One similarity is that each time I forgot to or was unable to get around to taking any pictures.

Now the weather has cooled off, thank goodness. There were even clouds in the sky again yesterday. What a relief. I don't do well with the hot, dry east winds.

We were in a kitchen, me and the two cops, one white and one black. The black one was Colin Powell. We sat down at the table and continued arguing about some system that would allow them to run background checks on people from their squad cars. The cops were against it, saying it would allow them to beat people up. Isn't that better than the current system? I asked Powell, in which you get beaten up automatically when I'm the one who's missing my IRS audit?

The clock showed it was nearly nine. My audit is at 8:15 this morning. I woke up in a panic. Wish me luck.

Why didn't I ... when I had the chance? or, I wish I had kept at that ... because I'd be really good at it by now. I should have bought that house that seemed too expensive 15 years ago.

Answer: Do it now. Start again. It's never too late. Now is that time that in the future you will wish you had done this. Today is 15 years ago.

Man, I really feel for Red Sox fans. Martinez is obviously an incredible talent but why was he allowed to stay in to preside over that unraveling?

I know the Yanks haven't won it yet, but it looks like now they might. The cameras focused on a sign reading "Mystique don't fail me now" and another that just reads "DestiNY."

I've been laying low since everyone hates the damn Yankees, but I can't help it. I've been a fan since the days of Munson and Murcer.

Bringing nothing to read forced me to write.

1. Some guy I hate, goading me on.
2. A looming deadline.
3. A tempting escapade.
4. Anxiety, guilt, shame.
5. Sex.
6. Bodily functions.
7. Unsatisfactory conclusion.
8. Go to (1).

My sister, J, writes:

Looks like DC is going to get smacked by the hurricane sometime after midnight on Thursday night. They say it would be better if it goes straight over us because there is usually less damage than there is to places that are on the outer edges of the storm (some analogy to an octopus whipping around is the concept). Since I'm on the second floor and my windows are set back from the street and sheltered by two wings of the building, I figure that it'll be noisy but fine. In the city, they've placed sandbags around all of the grates above the metro to protect it from flooding and been trying to unblock any drains that are clogged. I've also seen a lot of trimming of trees today, they usually cause the most damage by falling on power lines. Anyway, that's the scoop from here. I'll be in touch and let everyone know whether or not M and I end up on a raft!

I lost five productive years of potential 410(k) accumulation at the beginning of my working life because I expected the international monetary system to collapse within the decade.

You should always have bought a house 15 years ago, no matter how outrageous the price seemed then.

One of my favorite books of philosophy is Money and the Meaning of Life by Jacob Needleman. If I had absorbed more oft he wisdom from it and from the various buddhish teaching I've gleaned I'd have taken the time to make the above citation an Amazon link.

Money is a measurement of time.

Pay attention to the rate of change of your money (the slope, the tangent of the curve) at least as much as the amount you happen to have (or owe) at this moment. Then take the second derivative.

I knew a literary agent so good that my editor-in-chief at the time, R.S. Langer, Ph.D. (RIP), told me to keep one hand on my wallet the whole time I had him on the phone.

Attribute this: A fool and his money are soon partying.

Like the U.S., my long-term economic plan is to outgrow my expenses and my debts. Unlike the U.S., I am mortal.

I like to have all the bills in my wallet facing the same way.

Without money you're hungry on the street.

I tend to hold my breath while writing checks.

You never need more than four pennies.

$20 is the new $1.

I was really not at my best yesterday. Everything felt like a struggle. I forgot simple things when shopping, brought home fruit with gouges or visible patches of mold on them, knocked over two beers next to the refrigerator so hard that I loosened their caps and they started foaming up all over the linoleum.

Getting ready to grill some nice little salmon steaks and asparagus out back, as I often do on shopping days this time of year, I put on a different shirt, one that could handle a few splatters, but I ignored the thought in the back of mind that barbecuing in bare feet is a dumb idea.

Inevitably, one of the mesquite pieces was too big and when I poured out the coals I decided to split it with one of the banged-up old garden-or-kitchen implements I use to manipulate the grill. Mesquite pops, though. It's full of water, I guess. It often throws off a steady stream of sparks punctuated by the occasional popping of pockets in the wood. When I broke up the large piece of mesquite, though, it popped in a much bigger way. Basically, it exploded. Pieces went flying everywhere. I could see them singeing the wooden surface (just the topmost of a stack of old wooden palettes) and I could hear them sizzling, probably roasting one of the little green weedy plants like nasturtiums or even summer squash the push up through the cracks in our unused driveway.

Sparks and hot coals were everywhere, and as I danced around trying to scoop up visible pieces and set them back in the weber, I stepped on a tiny supernova and - like a dinosaur slowly perceiving an even at the end of my body furthest from my brain - I began howling and cursing, hopping around on my right foot, brushing at the instep arch of my left foot, trying to dislodge the tiny bit off hellfire searing itself into a makeshift callus.

I never did get it out. The little cindernugget is still embedded in the white blister closely packed around it. I kept ice or a coldpack on it most of the evening and whenever I gave it a rest from the cold it would start to hurt again like hell. That wimper-making pain - Mommy make it stop - kind of persistent torture. By bedtime, though it felt manageable and this morning I forgot about it for a while.

You should have seen me, though, finishing the fish and doing the asparagus, hobbling around with three ice cubes stuffed down my sock, afraid to tell B what an idiot I had been.

I'm continuing to assemble scraps of past weblog/journals into this one. I just retrieved all the entries to the Diaryland journal I called Still Breathing.

It was my first attempt at taking the experiment of Breathing Room from an entirely hand-coded flat-file system to an automated one. It was still in the diary/journal form that was more popular at the time. Generally one entry on the current page, ideally today's entry. One entry per archive page as well. Even then, though, I found I was sneaking several entries into a single day, usually divided by an x.

It wasn't till I got my LiveJournal that I really started blogging, in the sense of posting a separate entry for each thought, frequently several times a day. The ideal of posting every day was still there, but it became less important to me. Still important, but not the key.

With this, that really only leaves Breathing Room, which I'll have to scrape and post manually into MT, I think.

There are some other stray weblog-like things. I'd like to migrate the old artsflow archives into the present artsflow blog.

I'll probably leave the Daily Barbie crisis journal of late 1997 as is, although in a way it inspired the idea of Breathing Room. It was my first inkling of the power of daily posting to the Web, and it covered a specific beat, my legal problems with Mattel at the time. It was definitely a weblog by most modern standards, even without permanent links and a syndicated feed.

Naturally, I end up re-reading the old journal as I convert it over. Funny what's changed and what hasn't. There's another New Orleans sequence in there, briefer than my most recent one, and without photos. There's talk of a "neighbor cat" that turned out to be a stray that we eventually adopted, even then named Fraidy by us. (Oh now, I'm cat blogging!

I'm glad I made categories in this weblog for each of my old journals, because while I believe that there is a continuity in all of them, each definitely have their own flavor, and there's a progression as I acclimate myself to this style.

I ran across one of my favorite paragraphs in Still Breathing on a page that will very rarely if ever be repeated in a "on this day in 2000" sidebar box, since it was posted February 29 that year:

[E]ach day you live out the entire story of your life. you are born in the morning and before you slam down that coffee you are still as innocent and vulnerable as a newborn. forcing yourself into adolescence before your time, you head out into the world, probably driving too fast, to meet your destiny, your job. at the end of the day you are more tired and weary than you expect. your faculties fade with that second glass of wine. you've eaten too much. before long you are missing part of the conversation and finally you give in to blessed sleep.

I love that fractal idea of a microcosmic life each day, an entire creation every time [insert appropriate Hindu god here] blinks his eyes. I had a vision like that once at a Meters show, but that's another story.

For anyone interested in reliving part of that year with me, the new entries start with Don't Interrupt Me! (currently the earliest entry in X-POLLEN) through mang! in May, with the entries overlapping some of the earliest entries from the Shallows journal written with Blogger.

At one point, Still Breathing was going to contain longer writings and Shallows (or Shallow Breathing) would have briefer more constant blursts for me personal home page. But I never stopped tinkering with that home page and now everything's a blog, so go figure.

When I was in New York I got to spend one evening with my mom, brother, sister-in-law, and nephews, who have since turned one year old.

As is often the case, most of the pictures I took came out blurry, but some seemed worth preserving, even with motion lines.

I tried using the flash, but it made things so high-contrast. Finally, I shot a couple-twenty seconds of video, just to capture the whole flow.

They got her title wrong and gave her credit for some things that should have gone to her coworker, but the Sunday Chronicle's article on the Bay Trail, BAY TRAIL ADVENTURE / Tramping East Bay to the Bay Bridge, featured some extensive quotations from B:

Out in the grass, Briggs Nisbet and her crew bent to their work.

Nisbet's job is restoration campaigns manager for Save the Bay. Sheworks to reclaim wetlands and restore them in detail, down to the tiniest plants. Her workforce is almost entirely volunteer, and on this baseball afternoon, she led a group of young people from the national service group AmeriCorps in a saltwater gardening session on the banks of the slough.

The young people carried flats of arrowgrass and marsh gum plant propagated in the nursery that Save the Bay operates with the East Bay Regional Park District at the district's Martin Luther King Regional Shoreline headquarters nearby.

Playing their part in a regional campaign to nurture native aquatic plants, the young gardeners plugged in the new shoots on the banks of the slough. The effort seemed like a prayer, considering the size of the area that needs reclaiming. But there was a method to it, one that involves thousands of other people.

Nisbet said the restoration effort, which also includes tearing such unwanted flora as ice plants, is attracting enough volunteers to make a difference.

"This is a totally new thing," she said. "We get 150 volunteers to show up and pull out non-native weeds. That was unheard of five years ago."

Nisbet has a theory on why people are getting involved.

"I think (this is) a desire for people to do something about the environment that for years they've been hearing is a mess," she said. "It's the natural human instinct to garden."

Sun, sea, salt and sand cured what ailed me today, out at Rodeo beach near the Marin Headlands. The weather cooperated. I even got my feet in the water. Good food, good companionship, good wine. Hours dozing with a hat shading my eyes. Birds overhead waiting to pick up after our picnic. It's good to be free.

(Apologies to Kibo for the title.)

Men are encouraged to dominate conversation without even thinking about it, says Dan Spalding, who has another suggestion: shut up already.

Elizabeth Lane Lawley makes a similar point, and asks women with strong voices, "What do you think women should be doing to start getting their voices heard?"

... experience guilt over dental checkup, no coverage for proposed $454 mouthguard for grinding - would valium be cheaper? ... sort out remaining sections of chapter 5 to write ... talk to b about friday plans, about ladies who happy hour, about seeing grey pawn trio at cato's later tonight ... blog kat's monkey cat sexy post ... go back to travel.state.gov to find photo shops in oakland near city clerks ... telnet to xroad to start the backing up process ... get distracted reading rss news feed for 15 minutes, consider and then decide not to respond to cross-post or decry several entries ... (why so tired of weblog minutiae? is it the seybold seminar in september?) ... realize for the fifth time that his was no the year to skip going to BEA, but deadlines are deadlines ... fix x-ism page from latest hack - they replaced the index page on my out-of-date textpattern beta too ... get birth certificate (forgot last time but just as well considering how badly those pictures came out .... open new thinkpad battery that will enable summer backdoor bloggin', powering up now ... catch up with flame.ind on the well ... work some more on long reply to delshad's last message (check mail) ... tar up home/xian folder ... gzip it ... become root to remove nasty hacker index.php file, stop being root ... re-reupload correct index.php to restart ol' textpattern ... post a new item to x-ism to jostle things loose ... check off 'fix x-ism' on the to do list ... find out why tar process keeps dying ... go out to get new passport photos taken....

When I realize that I'll probably miss my 25th grade school reunion in June and I miss my mother on mother's day and I wish I had been at my brother's birthday sendoff before his next trip to Greece, I sometimes think about moving back to New York.

Other times I don't:

Sure, you passed Nathan Lane once. So what! Does that make up for seeing some guy defecating on a staircase? I think not. And what people call the "energy and buzz" of the city is actually called "fire engines and honking" by the rest of the world.

P.S.: Heard Paul Ford's voice for the first time today when I caught the end of his story-commentary on NPR. Hey, Paul, ask them to mention your URL next time. "Paul Ford is a writer who lives in Brooklyn" is so cool it's brittle.

If life were supposed to be fair I suppose I could complain the arbiter or ombudsmand that it's completely unfair for me to have contracted yet another nasty flu within one month's time. Then again, the answer might come back that I was just too happy in New Orleans and this is my punishment now. Problem is, I have a lot of work piled up because of my little escapade and it's hard to do it when you're flat on your back, sweating the nile, or coughing so convulsively that you end up straining the muscles in your upper chest and slamming the inside of your throat so hard that it hurts to swallow or talk.

Yesterday I spent a lot of time leaning over with my weight on my arms just to allow my upper body to relax a little. This morning I feel a little less sick but my neck is still a wreck. And tomorrow I have to jump feet first into an information architecture project while still keeping up with my book deadlines. Oh joy.

Everyone says it's rained pretty hard the whole time we were out of town, but it was only partly cloudy (thick, fat clouds, though, with gray areas) last night and today I'm seeing the same windswept crystal blue sky we had in New Orleans, decorated by the local variety of cloudfluff, so maybe the same unusually weather we got down there came back with us on the plane?

Down here on earth, back in the maelstrom it is.

"Are you going to do any blogging when you're here?" my friend S asked me. I told him probably not. Maybe I'll upload some digital pix from around town or from the crowds (or stage shots) at Fest.

But I did have to get online to send a file I had been unable to send last night, and sure enough I had to check out BoingBoing, which led me to read about the TypePad news at the Guardian and then Mena's discussion of milestones at the Six Log.

Next I wanted to see how the right-wing blogosphere was spinning the news from southern Iraq (ignoring it as far as I can tell), and the next thing you know I'm over at BuzzMachine catching up on the news about Sina Motallebi. And so on.

But the air feels different here in New Orleans, and I slept over ten hours last night, and works seems far away, and I keep letting out these deep sighs. I'm on vacation and my body knows it. I feel it deep down. I may blog, I may not, especially once Fest gets going, but I don't have to do anything I don't want to do.

Just checked the weather report for New Orleans today, sunny and dry. B and I have been to Jazz Fest something like eight times in the last decade, and I think we've made it there for the last five or six in a row (it gets hard to keep track after a while). We've been lucky with the weather for at least the last three or four years, tending to come on the rainless weekend on occasions when there's rain. New Orleans weather in late April/early May is changeable, usually hot and humid, and rain is always a possibility.

So I pack shorts, aloha shirts, a straw hat, t-shirts, tevas, but also a rain slicker, a nonporous hat, sneakers, and a lot of changes of socks. If it rains you make the best of it, put on one of the ponchos advertising a local radio station or a brand of sunblock usually given out for free near the entrance, and hunker down in a tent when possible. I prefer the Jazz tent on such days, but sometimes you just have to go where the seats are. The newest tent is the Blues tent, introduced last year, and its a big one.

Not all the stages are under tents. Some are in large fields and others have smaller audience spaces, with risers set back or to one side. Not all the music is jazz. I think the name of the festival can be misleading. When people hear that B and I return to Fest again year after year, they sometimes surmise that we are jazz fanatics. We like jazz, a lot. We go to Yoshi's here in Oakland and we always pick out some vocalists or instrumentalists as must-hears at Fest every year. But it's a Jazz & Heritage festival, and besides the crafts and the all-important food booths, this also means that the music extends well beyond the boundaries of trad Dixieland and more contemporary jazz.

Pretty much anything jazz- or blues-influenced is fair game. You get gospel, zydeco and cajun (of course), reggae, r & b, rock, pop, jamband, and of course da funk. Lately there's even been some rappers in the house (and I don't just mean Buckshot Le Fonque). If there's a kind of American music you like, you can find it somewhere.

Lately we've relied more on serendipity. We may not be there the same weekend as Ornette Coleman or Los Lobos, but frankly the bigger names and more famous acts are available to us at other times of year, in dedicated venues. And even some of the venerable must-see acts we've stuck to in the past, such as the Hackberry Ramblers and the various Nevilles, Marsalises, and Batiste family bands, no longer have the power to dominate our scheduling plans or drag us away from a serendipitous find.

Yes, it's fun to look at the day ahead and scope out some picks, but the real gold of Fest is some singer you've never heard of, that local band causing a buzz, or some ancient player long overdue for recognition. I always come home with some CDs with no antecedents in my collection, and sometimes - as when I was introduced to James Booker - I come home with a whole new obsession.

So I had my federal and state taxes all worked out this weekend and was just doublechecking the figures and adding a few bits of trivia (my EIN, for example) and getting ready to file electronically tonight. Turns out my copy of TurboTax did not have one current form (8880 - related to 401k tax deferral in my case) and requires an electronic update before permitting me to file.

Problem is, the update keeps fizzling out before it's done. The alternative at first seemed to be filing by mail, something I bought the software partly to avoid doing. Fortunately, I poked around the website and saw that there is a way to download the update manually, which is what I'm doing now.

Knocking on wood, fingers crossed, I should be able to file both before the midnight deadline tonight.

Well, the stress of gearing up for the conference and then running through the whole thing on not enough sleep and too much drinking has left me with a nasty little cold. Like so many it started out with a sore throat but now this one has gotten kind of especially unpleasant. For some reason my soft palette and the back of my mouth feel kind of tender and swollen. Swallowing hurt and my speaking voice sounds incredibly adenoidal. Woe is me. B is out of town for four days and this is how I get to enjoy my temporary bachelorhood?

Most years we hold the annual Waterside publishing conference in San Diego's Mission Bay, but this year we are holding it near East Shore State Park in Berkeley. Author, consultant, entrepreneur (and author of 'elm') Dave Taylor, attending the conference, took a walk along the waterfront this morning and posted some observations about this "lovely spit of land":

There's something delightfully relaxing about a harbor in early morning, and Berkeley's harbor was peaceful, with a light mist over the glass-like still water, and a few early morning fishermen on the pier, trying their luck. I chatted with one of them and found that the prime catch is halibut, if they're swimming in the harbor, or striped bass.

Spotted this IM status message from the environs of Chaif consulting today:

YANKEES MAGIC NUMBER - 156

Screwed up taping the first half of Daniel Deronda Sunday night. These VHS tapes hold so little at the high-quality speeds. Juggling the incoming TV stream is becoming unmanageable. So far I've managed to avoid cable except when I was rooting for Jerry Brown on the road to the whitehouse in '91 and '92. Now, we'd need cable or a DirectTV-type satellite to make TiVo work, right? and it needs a phonejack to download the schedule? I have to study the pricepoints, think about this.

Over at Hyperbole, Jim Haefele reminisces about what he refers to as his decade. Well, we can't choose the time and date of our own birth and one's own memories always end up entangled with the cultural detritus of the period, plus he's in Tunisia and I know when you are away from home, it doesn't take much to stir up some warm associationsbut I can't think of a way to let the guy down easy. The '80 sucked rocks. I was moved to write a little screed in his comments:

I hate to tell you this, man, but the '80s were the worst decade of the last handful, the utter bottom of the worst aspects of the '70s, the beginning of the worst parts of the '90s, plus shoulder pads and a Flock of Seagulls.

You know Reagan was president the entire time I was in college! What a nightmare.

There's a reason SNL had that mutant goat boy hosting their spoof MTV '80s nostalgia show. I know the '70s is played out and the corpse of the '90s is still smelly, but I don't think I will ever feel nostalgia for cousin Balki or Hands Across America.

As my to-do list grows (book project, consulting projects, conference coming up, taxes to do soon, clients deals to do, and more) I've had one of those two or three day periods of just trying to do the same things over and over. First there was a recalcitrant zip file that was showing up corrupted on my client's FTP site. I tried re-sending it. I uploaded the uncrunched files individually. Still no luck. Finally, I downloaded the file again and e-mailed it last night and got the confirmation this morning that it came through OK.

This shouldn't be a big deal but this one file transfer was holding up a huge project and making me later and later. It was very frustrating. That zip file was also the last significant bit of data from my old Phoenix desktop machine that ran my downtown office from about 1998 to about 2000. At this point I've liferafted everything off that machine and am ready to wipe it and then donate it to the Oakland schools. It's only a Pentium "pro" but it should make somebody a good Linux server. I'd keep it for that purpose myself but it's just too friggin' big. One of them old towers. It's got two ethernet cards in it (one was for the Internet connection - first ISDN and later DSL - and the other was for my old office network, before I had a hub.

The other problems involved some beta software I'm testing. It's running on a new/used/refurbished thinkpad I bought on eBay the other week (my first eBay purchase ever). I was having a setup/configuration problem and literally spent days reinstalling and retrying the same configuration steps and variations. Hour after hour while all my other priorities slipped by unattended to. Finally asked some authors on a mailing list for help last night out of desperation. This morning the advice came flooding in and something simple I somehow hadn't tried worked like a charm.

I feel like I've come unstuck from molasses, ready now to go back to knocking off to-do items (after I go grocery shopping this morning, that is). It got so bad there that for the last few night I've been dreaming about zip files and server hierarchies.

Then this morning another call out of the blue about a small consulting project (white paper) I had discussed with former colleages literally months ago. They're ready to run with it now. When it rains, it pours.

Oliver Willis objectively supports rounding up Bon Jovi fans.

Or, as my friend Non likes to call him, Lung Scott-Egret (or the variant B and I like: Lung Pict-Egret). From the UC Berkeley J-School's intellectual property weblog comes Revolution is not an AOL keyword.

This was in my inbox this morning:

I'm back to Erbil city since half an hour ago to check out on the house, we are now in a small village in the mountains that is one hour and half far from Erbil.. its a big crowd in a house that belongs to my brother-in-law's sister ... few family are stuffed in few rooms, so inconvenient but it is fine.. at least safe! the city is pretty much empty and you can feel how vacant it is! it makes me sad to see that! but yet there are policemen in the city that makes you feel things are under control yet! thanks God!!

We are listening to the news all time, if there are power then through TV otherwise a radio can do! anxiety and worry is the atmosphere all day time !! Seems the war pace is too slow than expected.... people all are disappointed about that.. we wished the war to be faster than that to get back to usual life... to see an end to war fear... to get in touch with rest of family and beloved people and see how are they! as longer this war will take time as worse people's situation will get to! people are making jokes saying that seems Saddam will finish up US and Bush this time!! We all know it must be hard to make this war fast ending.. there must be lot difficulties and so on... but people here got fed up and wish it to get to an end.. a good ending that a day we will wake up and Saddam is no more there and we can start a new life!

Baghdad is not in a good shape! we already knew that in war time no one is allowed to leave home unless very high emergency cases and that will be managed by special units assigned to every neighborhood by the government... streets in Bagdad are empty and people are terrified of teh big blasting sounds.. I wonder how are my little nieces in Baghad!! they must be terrified! :(

Well.. thats it's for now, I'll try to write once again when I visit Erbil to check on houses.. I hope this Internet to be working then as it does now!

Keep safe and say hi to B for me.

Then this came yesterday (late last year I had been encouraging Delshad to start a blog, but he has been on the move most of the time since then):

Dear Xian,

I'm now Erbil and most possibly move to some village or town far from here... I really don't like to do that nor my family or the whole people in Kurdistan but we have fears from chemical weapon use against us or even bombed by Saddam if the American troops are inside cities.. there are lot risks to fear and we can't jeopardize... I'll see if we can stay here, I don't like leaving home and going to somewhere else !!

I was reading the blogs, it's really interesting and I would love to have one, but I don't think I can update it at all in the recent period, I don't think I'll have access to Internet at all till things will settle down here. I think you don't know that I am back to work but in a different city's office and I am back to Erbil now to join family as we are living an emergency case and most staff left home for that case.. I was supposed to be one of the key staff to stay till last moment but thanks Allah they realized I can't be away of my family in such hard days and let me go!!

Maybe when I'm back to work when first light ray shows up after the war I will start up a blog to let the people out there know how is it down here!

I'll keep in contact soon when I can... thanks for
your good wishes.. thanks.

Delshad

Here's the message I got from Delshad on Tuesday, sent to all his online friends:

Dear friends,

This is just a very short note to tell you that I'm now leaving back to Erbil where then I will go with the family to some village - seems the war is already starting and the family needs me to be there with! I think I will not have access to Internet for sometime till this risky situation is over and things get settled somehow!

I'll write back to you all again once I get access to internet. Thanks for your support all the way .. thank you all.

Lot hugs to you all.

Delshad

Long story short, I have a friend in Iraq named Delshad. He is a Kurd and he lives in northern Iraq, in the northern no-fly zone. Last fall he was trying to get out of the country, but only got as far as Syria and then returned.

With the war on, I thought I'd post some excerpts from some of his messages to me, just to add his voice to the cacophony online as well as to give people a glimpse of life on the ground in Iraq.

Here's part of what he sent me in January when he had to give up on his attempt to get out of the country:

Hello Dear Xian,

Here I am writing again from Iraq and sorry it is late! Yes I got back to Iraq after waiting more than 3 months in Damascus-Syria and eventually the leave plan I made with people in Iraq failed to work and I decided to return back to take the money back and think of another way to make a new life and future - it was a real hard time of worry and anxiety that I live in Syria but in another way it was very useful that it opened my eyes and brain to a life that exists out of iraq - something that I never knew how does it look like, just yesterday I sat with the planners of the failed plan to claim my money and gladly I could manage to get most of the money back without fights or troubles that was greatly expected to happen fiercely!! They will give the money but missing 25% which lot money but I have to be thankful that they didn't deny the money issue or took more than that!

I am sorry I kept you worried for sometime but the internet in Damascus was not cheap neither quick so I wasn?t able to send pretty much emails! I was there going to Internet café and it wasn't much convenient - in Damascus I was in a fine flat in a fine neighborhood and that was fine but still we had hard time in its late period there as all things where collapsing around me! It was great that I had one great Syrian friend I met through the Internet few months before moving to Syria and there I made few good friends as well? their existence in my life there was keeping me sane. I was there everyday doing nothing since the early morning till late night than just waiting for the news about leaving as we were always promised to leave next week and such promises extended our residence in Syria for more than 3 months and nothing happened at all.

I have now made a primary decision to go back to Syria by myself in March and start to apply to leave to anywhere - I just hope that no war to happen
till then or even after that cause the expected war will be catastrophic and will ruin the life here for long time!! I'm terrified to think about the future of this country and hear the American administration's arrogant language of speech!

Mailed a birthday card, bought some champagne, returned a video, snapped some pictures. The plum trees have turned a lurid crimson maroon. The recent rain has polished the lens of the sky to its east-bay finest. You wouldn't believe how many pictures of clouds I've taken over the years.

I realize I'm falling for a deliberate imitative "fallacy" when Nick Denton contrasts the Iraq/antisemitism storyline with one about drunken Irishmen. It reminds me of an EU chart in a late '80s copy of the Economist I was reading for free on one of my first flights from New York to San Francisco. There were cute little ethnic stereotype cartoons labeling each of the lines on the graph. The one for Ireland was a moon-faced little leprechaun-looking guy hoisting a foamy pint.

If you trace back through my New York Republican roots you quickly hit Philadelphia Irish machine Democrats (and a bishop from Erie regarded as something of a matiné idol in his day) and I'm not unfamiliar with drink or unguarded antisemitism. There's a strange mix of envy and spite as Irish-Catholic Americans privately compare the progress of two national projects: Ireland and Israel. The complaints about the disproportionate influence of the pro-Israel lobby mask (not very well) a sense of competitive disadvantage, an inferiority complex, not unlike the way antisemites here and in the middle east stereotypically seek out Jewish doctors or scientists when push comes to shove.

So I winced when I read about Moran, recognizing the surname as Irish (actually, of course, Anglicized Irish, as all familiar Irish names tend to be). And then I winced again when Denton made his crack about drunken Irishmen, designed I'm sure to get a rise out of people like me exactly, with my vague, somewhat imaginary sense of Irish nationality (mixed in with the German, Scottish, Welsh, English, Italian, Alsatian, and so on).

Well, it turns out immersion in coffee is not good for digital camera. Our local camera shop (down on Lake Shore, and it's cool we have one – the old typewriter repair shop on College in Elmwood closed recently), sent it back to Canon for a $20 estimate. Turns out they can fix it or replace the ruined parts at least for $327+. This isn't much cheaper than the newer models in their Powershot line, so today we ordered me an S230. It should come by Friday.

It's been tough. I'd gotten used to real-world real-time screen grabs on the spur of the moment. I've realized that the digital camera is an essential, if underutilized, component in my ongoing tightrope walk of self-expression, teetering always between art and ego diddling.

Say, is there some sort of cradle that would enable me to use the camera as a webcam when it's not otherwise engaged?

Noticed a bunch of visitors (to RFB) coming from an unfamiliar referrer. It turns out to be a message board for players of some online game. Apparently one of the participants is a French-speaking 15-year-old from Canada who goes by the online handle 'xian'. The mother of one of the other teen participants in the game Google for xian. The old link to RFB is the top result for xian at Google these days, so she looked at my blogchalk info and decided that there an adult male was posing as a teenage girl, perhaps to gather personal information from the other teens in the game.

In the course of the discussion it became clear that there is more than one xian in the world and that the game player was legitimately who she said she was. I'm not sure where the idea that "xian is a killer" got into the conversation but I hope it's lingo from the game and not a real-life aspersion.

It's strange to see myself refracted in this way, but I guess it comes with the Googleshare territory.

There was a time when I had my in box(es) totally under control. Stuff got filtered. I either deleted messages, replied to them, or saved them if they really needed saving. Then blogging helped, because it provides a way to directly deal with any information that comes into my box and deserves immediate public comment or should be passed along as is to some specific audience (that's what x-pollination is all about, to me).

But as I blog more it seems that I attend to my e-mail less. Between blogged items, to-do list items, and e-mail messages related to some action I intend to take, e-mail always seems to fall to the bottom of the pile. Then there's the problem of the in-box getting too full and "urgent" messages scrolling off the screen.

Today I sorted all my "highest priority" messages and found 201 that at least at one point I felt needed immediate attention or were important enough that I thought I'd need to find them easily at a later point (usually conveying some key piece of information or instructions for some complicated technical process I wanted to do without fully understanding).

Some of them have clearly expired and I can take off the priority label and even delete them. Others still require my attention. I dealt with the oldest one just now. It was dated January 17, 2002, which is right around the time I started my bodega blog, coincidentally.

Sometimes the only thing more entertaining than Craigslist personals is the CL job listings. Take this one, PCBootyCall.com Model Recruiter Wanted.

Apparently, "PCBootyCall.com is a new promotional service for adult models in the USA." They're seeking "professional and responsible" female escorts, dancers, and "adult companions" (high quality only) to advertise presumably on their site. Apparently PCBootyCall.com will be unique, especially when compared to Eros-Guide, Lovings, Spectator Magazine and no doubt countless other massage and escort listings nationwide.

The CL ad is for recruiters to "get the word out in the adult community." Interestingly, the unique thing seems to be that "models" in fact don't have to pay for space at PCBootycall. "We provide models with their own web page, advertising, online appointment setting, fantasy auctions and more at no cost to them."

So what's the business plan? So, is this some kind of multilevel marketing for procurers? A pimper's pyramid scheme? Not quite. Recruiters get a base fee (based on what revenue?) plus a "commission on her first three appointments."

So, it sounds like the site gets a referral fee for each appointment, the first three of which it splits with the recruiter. I wonder if this involved more legal exposure than the sites I mentioned abov, which function more like the ad pages in the back of your local "alternative" weekly tabloid.

If you've got contacts in the adult community, here's your chance to get in on the ground floor:

PCBootyCall.com is growing rapidly thanks to our Fantasy Auctions, Internet Reservations process, and of course our lovely models!

At some point Fred Rogers' death from stomach cancer is going to hit me, but so far mostly I think it's kind of passed by me in a glaze. Somehow I'm associating Mr. Rogers with my maternal grandfather, an equally calming presence. An op-ed in the Times today nearly brought a tear to my eye, and reminded me of the X the Owl puppet character. I vividly remember them enhancing the Z pattern of supports on the inside of his Owl-hole door with pieces to turn it into an X.

B hadn't known that the king's full name was King Friday the Thirteenth (or, I suppose, Friday XIII).

Few people knew that Mr. Rogers was an ordained Presbyterian minister, and I gather that the story I once heard that he was a convicted felon is an urban legend, since none of the obituaries have mnetioned.

I had at least one Mr. Rogers record as a kid (it went national in 1968 when I was 4), the one with the closeup of the little trolley train on it. I always loved the way the opening sequence of the show enhanced the whole make-believe theme.

My mother liked that he spoke kindly and gently. My father hated the record almost as much as our I Love Lucy record and fretted that Mr. Rogers was going to turn me gay. Later on a National Lampoon Radio Hour LP that made the rounds in my dorm featured a sketch based on the same insinuation, with an angry father complaining to Rogers, "What kind of a gift is lederhosen for a six year-old boy?" To which the faux Rogers replied, "I lined them with silk so they wouldn't chafe him."

I'm somewhat relieved to hear the McFeely was Rogers' middle name, because the Mr. McFeely character always weirded me out a little. I think those weakly acted visits broke the illusion a bit for me, even when I was little. Contrast that with the way Pee-Wee's friends on his Playhouse show made the camp overt.

In college one of my roommates remembered the show fondly. It sure beat Captain Kangaroo for entertainment. After that came Sesame Street and The Electric Company, which I felt I was too old for, but watched anyway, and later Zoom.

I wanted to end this with a quote from the song he sang at the end of each show, but I can't remember it.

x: got some quotes of deductible vs. premium tradeoff at progressive.

x: also getting a quote from gecko.

b: i tried to call you earlier...D and I were discussing his coming over for dinner tonight & Buffy watching...

b: then he got a call from S saying she and S had just picked up 100 small Johnson's oysters and invited us over to eat them...

x: wow, nice. so we tape buffy or jag?

b: so, we can eat oysters at S & S's ( would drive us over at usual time) or we can stay home and do Buffy with D (and he said he'd eat oysters with them tomorrow)

x: your call...

x: you like oysters...

b: tough call. maybe since D tapes Buffy we could tape JAG

b: oysters are hard to turn down.

b: but weeknight carousing can be hard on me--and tomorrow I have a meeting and a lunch with Big C...

x: uh... then let's defer to the weeknight and pass on the oysters? (boo hoo)

x: probably the smart thing. i was thinking it would be nice to see dick.

b: oh, i don't want to spoil the fun  ?

b: we had discussed his dropping by Bowl and getting a rotisserie chicken or something--any other ideas?

x: no, i can't handle fun right now. i'm a work frenzy.

x: you hate the spices in thos erotisserie chickens and they've stopped offering the barceue or jerked sauce.

x: better rotisserie and weird south african greek lucca

b: ok then. I'm going to tell D we have to pass on the oysters but would still like to have dinner with him?

b: what's greek lucca?

x: i mean better rotisserie at weird south african greek rustica in montclair across the street from notlucca

b: you mean better roast chicken than pizza?

x: {rimatsfn-} was left out... notlucca = a.g.ferrari a.k.a. a.e.ferrar

b: you are losing me

x: yes, saying that if roast chicken then rustica better than bowl

x: she's breaking up! she's breaking up!

b: actually--do you have time to call D--i'm struggling with an action alert

x: also, new puzzler: where's my cellphone?

x: yes, i will call dick

b: i have no idea!

x: i will call him deke, of chez deke.

x: it was a rhetorical question

x: but a puzzler nonetheless

b: you had your phone yesterday on the way to Al's

b: and you called me from the car after Al's

x: I know. I had in Eve on the way home. I think Eve is starting to leak objects into a nearby nano-blackhole.

x: "At what age did Briggs obtain a U.S. state-issued driver's license?"

b: 15.5

x: oops, i said 18. that could skew the quote at gecko i guess

b: have you talked with D?

b: should I call him?

b: i just left a message for D--turning down oysters and asking if he still wants to get together with us for dinner tonight

b: we still have to figure out the menu

b: and were you saying Rustica chicken was a better/easier idea than Bowl rotisserie? if yes, do you mind getting it?

x: yes, i talked to him, sorry

x: i didn't hear you buzz

x: i did call d and left him a message

x: he just called me back.

x: we didn't discuss the chicken, but he is in charge of meat

x: weird it says they'll mail the quote now

x: i guess with accidents they don't do it online?