Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

Part 1: Greg writes an article that compares the Howard Dean candidacy and its fundraising prowess (and grab of a plurality, though not a majority, of the MoveOn primary) to a Smart Mob a la Howard Rheingold’s seminal work. The next day, he points to an article (via Doc Searls) that points out that [...]

So last night Lisa and I went to see Lou Reed at the Moore Theatre. Amazing theater, almost 100 years old and (except for some peeling paint, and chairs that remind me of middle school) a perfect performance space.
Lou came out about 7:50 leading his band: Mike Rathke on second guitar, the amazing Fernando Saunders [...]

I won’t be around tonight; I’ll be hanging with Lou Reed. Blog amongst yourselves.
Later… Ooops. I’ll be waiting for the Man another day; forgot the concert was Sunday, not Saturday.

As I promised a few weeks ago, I’ve spent a little more time working on AmazonHandler. The biggest problems people have had with it are that

it requires a supporting script which has to be loaded from a fixed location on your hard disk, and
there wasn’t an example of how to parse the output.
Number one is [...]

As everyone has noticed, the national telemarketing “do not call” registry became open yesterday at donotcall.org. This MSNBC article says that the website stayed up, but the problem is mail. Every single phone number registered requires a confirmation email to be sent. Let’s see, 370,000 customers by noon, so figure about a million customers, each [...]

More reaction to the dialog about Echo yesterday:

Ole Eichhorn says I “weighed in on the side of common sense” yesterday. More importantly, he articulates what I tried to, which was that “web plumbing is a lot less interesting than web content, anyway.” Meaning, for me, two things: the web content area is where I need [...]

Phil (over at Blogcount) has come up with a preliminary estimate of the size of the blogosphere using published counts and estimates of Blogger, LiveJournal, and DiaryLand usage. With a fudge factor, he estimates the size at between 2.4 and 2.9 million.
In this game everything is guesses and approximations, since (a) not everyone is on [...]

I came home tonight and iTunes wouldn’t start, complaining that “the iTunes Music Library cannot be read because it does not appear to be a valid library file.” Here are some good instructions on how to fix it, courtesy Joe Crawford.

I didn’t mean to stir up the shit today, but it looks like that’s what I managed to do. Among other things, I got some very rational observations in my comments on the piece about the Echo project that made me think twice about the whole issue, namely that this could be a way to [...]

Ah, it’s too nice a day to be pissed off. I will note, however, as long as I’m stepping in things, that I think the word “funky” is being misapplied to RSS 2.0 feeds with extra items; but for different reasons than Don Park does.

Fundamentally, funk is about booty, not XML. (Yes, I said booty. [...]

Brent yesterday declared his neutrality in the brewing revolution called the Echo Project which is working to displace RSS and the Meta-Weblog API (among others) as the blogging wire formats of choice. Good call, Brent. As a civilian observer and consumer of these formats, I’m going to have to go a little further. This is [...]

MacTarnahan’s Black Watch Cream Porter won as best porter in the 2001 Great American Beer Festival awards, and it’s easy to see why. Made (according to the website) with oatmeal as well as malted and unmalted grains, the beer is actually pretty light in mouthfeel, but the flavor is incredible. (This may have been enhanced [...]

I still have a few problems with Safari, including the fact that it doesn’t appear to support font-variant: small-caps; as a result my date headers appear in lowercase. But I bit the bullet and redid my CSS so I wouldn’t fall prey to the problem that was hitting me with a div nested inside my [...]

MoveOn’s primary starts today. The organization is sponsoring an online primary to allow its members to choose from the declared Democratic candidates; the organization will then endorse and support the candidate who receives a plurality of the votes. (In the preliminary straw poll, Governor Howard Dean, Senator John Kerry, and Rep. Dennis Kucinich got the [...]

I have to earn a living and so won’t be live blogging Steve’s WWDC keynote this time. But Brian Jepson is filling the void (thanks to Dave for the tip). Looks like with the new AV features in iChat we might be able to do some videoconferencing to our East Coast family members—provided we can [...]