Month: July 2003

God help me, I’m a square on Hipster Bingo

my piece of hipster bingo

Spotted on Boing-Boing, the Hipster Bingo game. I definitely fit one of the squares on the excerpt to the right; I’m not sure if I’m hip enough to be a “grampa” (though I fit the other part of the definition).

And what’s up with that digital camera? That’s so 1999. It’s gotta be a cam phone now. But I gotta say, it would have taken me about 20 minutes to get Bingo at the Pernice Brothers show, and only that long because the number of hoodies and ski-vests on hand in Seattle in the summer is pretty small.

Last night’s Meetup

Had a really good time last night at the Meetup. Beth Goza did, indeed, attend, and I was more than a little surprised and chagrined to learn she worked in the same building I do. I really outta check that directory more often.

Had a great talk with Jerry Kindall. We were comparing stats engines, and we noticed that we both saw exactly one hit from the meetup listing today. He said, “We should pool our logs and track people’s hits from one Seattle blog to another.” I pointed out that you’d need comparable data from every log, and it wouldn’t work well if one person had Apache logs and another had SiteMeter. I then suggested that someone ought to implement a tracking pixel beacon and host it on a central location like Seablogs, so we could get fun stats like “how many readers of one Seablog read more than one.” I was mostly joking. Of course you’d have to make sure that the web bug couldn’t be cached. And to make it worthwhile, we would really have to make the stats consumable and publishable by everyone.

The evening wouldn’t be complete without the obligatory “huddle round the gadget.” Beth had brought a Tablet, and at one point we realized that we had three Nokia 3650s at a table of 10 people. But of course it all ends up around the PC:

everyone huddled around jake's laptop

Almost forgot: Jake has the full list of attendees with links.

Lots of blame being hosed around

Now that people have finally decided to take the Presidential lie problem seriously (why this lie, as opposed to the other ones, is anyone’s guess), it’s interesting to watch the articles pop up blaming just about everyone else in the administration: from the administration’s scapegoat, the director of the CIA, to Dick Cheney, to Rumsfeld’s Office of Special Plans (Salon link, day pass required; story also here).

Folks, unless you’re claiming that this President is like Ronald Reagan and can’t expect to be held accountable for the decisions he signed up for, and the things he said, and the actions of the people that worked for him, the blame can only accrue to one person.

Meeting up

Looks like it will be a good turnout tonight for the Seattle blog meetup—and for once I won’t be the only Microsoft blogger there. It’ll be good to meet Beth Goza, who’s legendary for having her blog picked on by people all over the blogosphere. Probably because they made the same mistake that everyone does. Just because you’re a Microsoft blogger—or employee for that matter—doesn’t mean you’re any less an individual.

It will also good to see Anita and crew again, although I’ll have to leave a little early to pick up Lisa at the airport.

Around the blogosphere

Very brief keiretsu update:

Yes, heaven help me

Seen via Hooblogger Half the Sins of Mankind, the “What threat to the Bush Administration are you?” quiz. Apparently, the author has me pegged:

Democrat
Threat rating: High. The Bush administration is
concerned that it may not get a second term.
Therefore, we are going to change the rules so
that each Democrat vote only counts as 0.2
votes because Democrat is a shorter word than
Republican

What threat to the Bush administration are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

When cooking = depression…

Great meal tonight. After the iChat experience, I did some pork chops on the grill. Quick brush with garlic, black pepper, and soy sauce, grilled, and brushed with lemon juice, lemon zest, and chopped sage leaves.

And I thought about how I haven’t been eating so many vegetables lately, and decided to try a new green bean recipe from Marcella Hazan: steam the green beans, then toss them in butter and a quarter cup of grated parmigiano. Mmm, vegetables. —What? I figure that Julie Powell shouldn’t be the only one taking a cholesterol bullet for her readers. I do this for you, my friends.

And I thought about how when I cook elaborate meals and then sit on my ass and read the web and listen to music and drink a beer, and then go to bed feeling vaguely dissatisfied with myself…

…Wait a minute, I thought to myself. It’s like when you’re working when you’re depressed. And when have I had nights that haven’t been like that, when I’m cooking for myself while Lisa’s on the road? Man, I’ve got to find better things to do with myself.

No excuse for not communicating

Lisa and I (Lisa in NJ, I in Seattle) got my mother in law set up with iChat AV and Timbuktu this weekend. Now we can talk in crystal clear CDMA-format audio, and we can watch her screen if she calls with a tech support problem. To which I say: Nifty. (We tried the audio chat built into Timbuktu first, but gave up: static-y, and half duplex—stepping on each other’s words—doesn’t cut it.)

Speaking of half-duplex, it appears that audio chatting with iChat AV degrades to a one-way conversation if one participant is on broadband and one on dialup. Thanks to Greg for trying the experiment.

Aux armes, citoyens!

Won’t you join me and Greg in raising a glass to that home of liberty (and Bordeaux, and Fauré, and the second best cuisine in the world after Italy’s), America’s oldest friend and ally, what Thomas Jefferson called “the most agreeable country on earth”?

No, not Great Britain…

(Incidentally, one of the sweatiest performances I’ve ever given was a summer sing in July at the Washington National Cathedral (no air conditioning!) at which we sang the entirety of the Marseillaise. And then proceeded to swoon with something in between patriotic fervor and heat prostration. Ah, the glories of amateur music.)

Senex sum

That’s “I’m old” in Latin, for those of you playing along at home. Old enough to think that maybe I should have thought twice about going to the Pernice Brothers show last night, since it started at 9 and there were four bands on the bill. Rolling in at 2 am last night, with ringing ears, an aching back, and falling eyelids, my only thought was: totally worth it.

The Tractor is one of those real joys of a music venue: big square empty room with bare brick walls, split in two with the bigger rectangle for the stage and the floor. Intimate, in a “put your drink on the stage next to the set list and dance” kind of way. Even in the intimacy, the first act, Jose Ayerve of the Portland (Maine) band Spouse, looked small up on stage by himself, strumming his electric—until he started singing. Big voice this guy has. Some of the vocal licks on his English songs reminded me of a less arty Bono. Good songs too.

The second band, Sparrow, hailed from Canada by way of (apparently) Belle and Sebastian. With a nebbishy lead vocalist who sang barely audibly hunched over the keyboard, every song played in a mid-tempo 6/8, and a cellist who played five lines a song (you could only tell by watching her bow), I wasn’t too impressed. In fact, the best part of the evening was the bassist’s joke to the sound man: “Can we get a little more guitar in the monitors? And a lot more cello? … And can you give me a bigger penis, please? … And how about some more stage presence over there?” (this last directed at the vocalist). (Hmm: If Jessamyn is right, I’ll now find my site unreadable at libraries, particularly in Toppenish.)

Warren Zanes and his trio, on the other hand, had stage presence to spare. Ex of the Del Fuegos, most recently of a PhD program at Rochester, his trio was tight and rocking, with a bouncy backbeat to kill for, killer guitar, and tight three part vocal harmonies over these insanely catchy pop songs. Definitely worth seeking out the long-delayed album.

And speaking of insanely catchy pop songs… the Pernice Brothers. Where their music, great though it is, can occasionally sound thin and precious on disc (see the downloads at EMusic), in person Joe and the band rocked hard. With three guitars and a bass, the group pulled off beautiful precise sounds that you’d expect to take months of overtracking in the studio—and made it sound easy. And Joe Pernice, despite looking a little like a shorter Philip Greenspun, comes across more like Elvis Costello when he steps up to the mic, at least in terms of sheer intensity. What a killer set—and a great Pretenders cover in the encores, as well as a dusted off Scud Mountain Boys song with an unprintable name.

Now as I sit at our patio table with a cup of tea, hugging the dwindling shade and looking up at the sky-blue sky (yes, the satellites are out tonight), I think, maybe there’s no such thing as too old to stay out until two am at a great rock show. Just, too old to get up before 10 am the next day.

(Postscript: I had forgotten how good Nightwatch Dark Amber is. Worth a full tasting note if I can find some more.)

Sun comes up, it’s Friday morning

Just returned from taking Lisa to the airport for a five-day East Coast visit. I’ll be batching it for a few days while she does some work with her boss in New York and helps her parents get set up with a new G4 iMac (the 15″ model, not the 17″ one). I will hopefully be home in time to test out Timbuktu Pro—we’re really hoping we can use it to provide better remote support than we can offer unaided over the phone. (Too many of our conversations with her parents go, “Okay, now click the Apple menu… yeah, the one in the upper left corner… What did you say you saw?” and then we find out fifteen minutes later that what we thought was the problem was really something else entirely, and that although her mother had given an accurate description of the problem, we had heard something else. How I was ever able to do tech support with my limited skills I’ll never know.)

The rest of the weekend? Well, Pernice Brothers tonight, yardwork and hang out with some friends tomorrow—and maybe get a chance to catch up on a few DVDs that have been sitting around waiting for a quiet weekend. Plus hopefully finish reading Dhalgren, which if anything is underhyped.

Quiet week, kinda

With Esta off to Louisville with my mom for the Presbyterian Women’s Gathering, and with the rest of the blogosphere seemingly paralyzed by the summer heat, it’s a quiet week in my aggregator. At home it’s been a little more frantic; Lisa leaves tomorrow for a pleasure-n-business East Coast trip, I’ve been consumed with my new role at work, and we’re trying to finish getting all the new ground cover planted before it gets really hot.

So go check out Greg’s blog, where it looks like some things are actually happening—like trying to start up both a group blog about Atlanta living, and a group blog devoted to Southern politics. Plus, he’s really been tearing the administration several new ones over the revelation that the President cited bogus “proof” about Iraq’s purchases of uranium from African nations during the State of the Union as justification for the war, and other acts of high stupidity.

An anniversary, with full disclosure

Yesterday was the first anniversary of my full-time employment at Microsoft.

I’ve been hesitant, before today, to put that fact in print, because I wasn’t sure how the company would take my blogging. But internal conversations around how we engage our customers on line and offline have convinced me that it would be dishonest to our customers not to publicly disclose my employment.

What does that mean about my blogging? When I write about RSS, for instance, does that mean I speak for Microsoft? No, and if I think I’m getting close to a core area of the company in a post I’ll add an official disclaimer.

As for what I do at Microsoft, I am not now, nor have I ever been, working on one of the core software products at Microsoft. I work on Microsoft.com, which is to an ex-consultant like myself sometimes more interesting, because we are an internal customer for all of Microsoft’s server software, usually well before it actually hits the street. My title is Lead Product Manager, but what I mostly do is to study online customer behavior. My group reports up to Eric Rudder, another Microsoft blogger.

To anyone who may be caught off guard by this admission: I’m sorry, and if you want to discuss it with me on or off line, please feel free to contact me. I hope that the only change in my posting will be that I will be able to be more open. I plan to continue to write about the same set of topics, and will add Microsoft-specific notes to the mix where appropriate.