Six Apart just launched their new blogging service, Vox, and it's really nice, so i'm going to try blogging over there for a while. if they get around to creating a tool to export data from MT and suck it into Vox, i just might do that. one less moving part for me to have to worry about.

anyway, here's my Vox url: http://bcm.vox.com/. enjoy.

now with moving visuals: 50 dkp minus

in case you need to use some of the wonderful clips, this site has already sliced and diced them for you.

socnet site of the week: ziki.com (my "ziki").

one very cool feature: builtin feed aggregation that lets you choose the type of content in each feed (post, photo, audio, video, link, event, etc). recent feed items are aggregated by type on your main page so that you can visually differentiate between blog posts, photos, etc. i bet other sites have done this in the past, but i've ignored most of them since friendster, so it's new to me.

i also like that relationships can be created dynamically via tags (show me all the people who have tagged themselves "hiking") as well as by manually adding people to your network or favorites list. i should put a little more effort into tagging myself so that i can get higher fidelity matches. i want all hiking, boozing, metal, comics chicks in san francisco.

world of warcraft and myspace: two great tastes that taste great together

SuicideGirls has an interview with Bill Willingham of the wonderful comic book Fables, which happens to be my favorite title of the last few years. if you've never read a comic before, read this interview and then go pick up the first volume at your local comic shop.

http://snakeburger.ytmnd.com/

according to this quiz, i am a chaotic good human bard. i guess it's cos i love the ladies and the liquor. according to the details, i am also very close to being a chaotic neutral dwarven barbarian, which is perhaps less surprising.

Alignment:
Chaotic Good characters are independent types with a strong belief in the value of goodness. They have little use for governments and other forces of order, and will generally do their own things, without heed to such groups.

Race:
Humans are the 'average' race. They have the shortest life spans, and because of this, they tend to avoid the racial prejudices that other races are known for. They are also very curious and tend to live 'for the moment'.

Primary Class:
Bards are the entertainers. They sing, dance, and play instruments to make other people happy, and, frequently, make money. They also tend to dabble in magic a bit.

Secondary Class:

Detailed Results:

Alignment:
Law and Chaos:
Law ----- XXXXXX (6)
Neutral - XXXXX (5)
Chaos --- XXXXXXX (7)

Good and Evil:
Good ---- XXXXXXX (7)
Neutral - XXXXX (5)
Evil ---- (-1)

Race:
Human ---- XXXXXXXXXXXXX (13)
Half-Elf - XXXXXX (6)
Elf ------ XXXXXX (6)
Gnome ---- XXXXXXXX (8)
Halfling - XXXXXXXXX (9)
Dwarf ---- XXXXXXXXXX (10)
Half-Orc - XXXXXXX (7)

Class:
Fighter -- XXXXXXXXXXX (11)
Barbarian -XXXXXXXXXXX (11)
Ranger --- XXXX (4)
Monk ----- (-2)
Paladin -- XX (2)
Cleric --- X (1)
Mage ----- (-7)
Druid ---- XXX (3)
Thief ---- (0)
Bard ----- XXXXXXXXXXX (11)

pvp freakout!

Your results:
You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 70% Iron Man 65% Hulk 65% The Flash 50% Green Lantern 45% Superman 45% Catwoman 40% Robin 37% Batman 35% Supergirl 30% Wonder Woman 15%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test

thor rolls (from architect nic via matthh)

Metal Council Convenes To Discuss 'Metal Hand Sign' Abuse

VATNAJÖKULL GLACIER, ICELAND—In an emergency session Tuesday, members of the Supreme Metal Council strongly condemned the increasing use of the metal hand sign in lay society, claiming that its meaning has become perverted by overuse.

even better than potterpotterpotter

from LJ's Robyn by way of Warren Ellis

hooray! i released Cosmo 0.2 today!

time to kill some troggs!

as my project (Cosmo, OSAF's open source calendar sharing server) matures, we find ourselves in need of some professional tech writing. there's all sorts of doc to be written:

• web interface copy
• web interface help system
• end user guide
• administrator guide
• project web site
• developer resources web site

OSAF is unfortunately not looking to hire a tech writer at the moment, but Cosmo is an open source project, and we're happy to accept contributions from anybody who wants to help.

if you are interested in calendaring or other aspects of personal information management and sharing, please consider donating some of your time and/or urging your friends to do the same. help us bring standards-based calendaring to the common man.

those interested can contact me at bcm@osafoundation.org.

thanks!

tagalag.com - interesting new service for email address tagging. offers an api for integrating with mail clients and other apps and a greasemonkey script for yahoo mail and gmail. not immediately sure how it could be useful to me until a thunderbird extension shows up, but maybe something will occur to me in the shower. regardless, i'm excited for another open, google maps-integrated information service to become available to the world. if you use tagalag, leave a comment describing how.

Walken in 2008: "More Cowbell For Every One"

update: extreme investigative journalism from The Superficial reveals that the Walken 2008 campaign is a hoax. just when i'd started to hope again...

posting from the leather chair in Pete's apartment in Brooklyn. 3am and all is peaceful and quiet. i am very comfortable.

the Lovemakers are playing in San Francisco this Friday night (July 1st) at Mighty. dunno what time. if you can't make that, perhaps you can catch them one of the subsequent Fridays in July during their residency at Cafe Du Nord. i'll be at every one of those shows. they are also playing a charity event at the Playboy Mansion on July 23. tickets only $550. shit, if i lived in LA i'd be there - only time i'd ever be allowed to set foot on those grounds, i'm sure. i'm looking at you, Mark.

let me just say that i am extremely fucking frustrated with .Mac. since i upgraded my PowerBook and two G5s to Tiger, .Mac calendar sync has not worked. changes to one iCal instance are not reflected in the others after sync. in a fit of rage i deleted all of the calendars in the PowerBook's iCal. now no matter what i do i cannot get any of the calendars that were supposedly synced to .Mac by my home G5 to show up on the PowerBook.

i guess this is just an ass backwards additional bit of motivation for me to get Cosmo's CalDAV support working ASAP, so that Apple will begin to have a reason to add CalDAV to iCal. imagine if we had to sync email between computers rather than using IMAP (and POP before it). the current state of affairs is just ridiculous.

speaking of sync - my Treo 650 showed up in the mail last week. once i was all moved into the new apartment i chucked the old 600 with the dying screen, set up Bluetooth on the 650, and used Missing Sync's iSync conduit to copy the iCal and AddressBook data from my home G5 to the phone. now that is what sync is for - when you have a device that spends most of its life offline and/or has a generally slow and flaky internet connection. luckily with the impressive Missing Sync tool, everything JFW'd and i have all my contacts, events and tasks on my phone.

i also set up VersaMail (which now does IMAP and supports SSL for both IMAP and SMTP - yay!) and VeriChat, which continues to be both simple and extremely cool. it's the one Palm app that seems to be able to stay running even when you switch to other apps. too bad the fucking scrollbars don't seem to work on the 650, and i have to tap any icon 2 or 3 times before there's a response. also there seems to be a problem with pssh on the 650 so that you can't import SSH keys. i really hate typing my passwords on the Treo keyboard. finger cramps!

I'm posting this entry with ecto, a fancy desktop blogging client. not sure if i really need the overhead, but i like being able to edit all of my blogs (i have four) in one place. thanks once again to Ted for turning me on to another handy tool.

heh, Wil Wheaton is editing the SG tech news section. strange how the various bits of the Internet are bound to collide if you wait long enough.

i just want to share how super cool Backpack is. thanks to Ted Leung for turning me on to it.

since just this morning i'm using Backpack to track wishlist items that Amazon doesn't carry, to publicly share small bits of data with my friends without having to make a new page on this site, to keep a list of tweaks to make and plugins to install for this blog, and to collaborate on a writing project (exchanging drafts, leaving comments).

for many years now i've dumped these random bits of info into text files strewn about my computers' desktops and home directories. now that i commonly use any of three different machines (office, home office, laptop), having all that available in a central location in a format that is extremely pleasant to look at is just, well, a breath of fresh air.

also, the site is a great showcase for modern design principles and best practices. when you enter a list item, it is added to the list without a page refresh, and it's highlighted for a few seconds to show that your operation was successful. the page is not cluttered with boxes of content; there's a simple toolbar that lets you hide and show only the functions that you care about. when you roll over a content item, controls for that item (like edit and delete controls for a list item) are exposed but are then hidden when your mouse leaves the item. little things like that truly do add up. very impressive.

i'm perhaps most excited about the sharing features. i can make a page public (viewable by all, but not editable) and/or i can share (read and write) with other Backpack users. this is a great way to allow people to collaborate, and it's easy enough for computer-phobic people to become comfortable with very quickly. and the obvious utility of these features validates the amount of thought the folks at work have put into the sharing features of our products. collaboration tools usable by regular people (not geeks) on platforms other than Windows are so desperately needed, and this tool shows in a very real, non-abstract way just how easy these things can be.

there are even more features, like task reminders and iCal integration, that i haven't tried yet. i'm sure i'll find uses for those things sometime soon. and the best part is that, like the ways i'm already using the service, they will be very natural and fluid extensions of the online-centric way i already manage my personal information (del.icio.us, upcoming.org, Amazon's wishlist and this blog to name a few heavily used services).

what an exciting time we live in, that community-minded people are providing these kinds of services that actually make peoples' lives better and easier, rather than streamlining businesses' supply chains or whatever miserable day jobs most of us have. when i started working at Critical Path in 1997, you would often hear after-work conversations about revolutionizing the way people communicate. well, folks, that's really happening now, at a very visible level. hopefully with Cosmo, Warhorn, and other projects i'm dreaming up, i can do my bit to contribute.

har - Warren Ellis refers to tribe.net as "Craigslist for the polyfucker/playa-crustie Bay Area community". the only person i've heard talk about tribe runs an astrology community there. go figure.

i have been quiet lately, both here and in meatspace, because i've been playing World of Warcraft like it's my second job. 6-8 hrs a night for over a week now. have a good group of friends there, some of whom live out of town and whom i consequently never see. if you are a WoW player, i'm on windrunner (alliance: angormor, ferguson) and hyjal (horde: grazztt) - say hi and we will destroy troggs and vile familiars together.

earlier today Jim Home pointed me to upcoming.org, a public events server. i'd heard of it before but hadn't motivated to look at it. i guess the universe finally decided it was the appropriate time, because just yesterday the site got a bunch of new features that really make it exciting, such as tagging, a REST-style API, and reminders via email and SMS.

i've subscribed iCal to "my upcoming events" at upcoming, refreshing it hourly, and i've subscribed to several of the metros' RSS feeds (San Francisco, SF Bay Area, SF East Bay, Oakland, Berkeley). when a new event is posted, i see it in NetNewsWire. if i want to go to it, i hit the right arrow and it opens upcoming. i mark that i'm going to the event, and within an hour, it's in iCal. very very cool stuff.

Jon Udell had some comments about upcoming a week or so ago. the service does seem to be sparsely populated in certain areas, but i'm lucky that SF itself is booming. and if each of my friends entered one event a month, it would be bursting at the seams. and i'd be able to subscribe to "my friends' events" in iCal or RSS as well, which would give us that big group calendar we've wanted for so long.

i was just saying a couple days ago that i wish SFist would follow Gothamist's lead and publish comprehensive show listings every week (or at least more often than they do now). i bet an integration with upcoming.org using its API would make such a thing much more likely.

dear Internet: little of note has happened since i last checked in with you. tonight i finished a really long book and forgot to go see a rock show. also i had a brownie sundae at Fentons. yum.

the last several weeks have really flown by. i had forgotten how drastically my life changes when i have a fulfilling job. i work very intense 50 hr weeks and am too beat in the evenings to party like i do when i'm unemployed. i barely have the energy even to go out to movies anymore. and with my personal trainer destroying me every Wed and Fri afternoon (chick had me do 80 squat reps in 3 mins yesterday), i am often too sore to do anything other than lay around and read or watch Tivo. i've even lost all motivation to work on Warhorn. i know from experience that sooner or later i will adjust and become productive again, but for right now i'm a big blob just taking up space. i'm pretty ok with that.

oh, one interesting thing: as i mentioned recently, every time i am in a room with Mitch Kapor he is talking about del.icio.us and Flickr. so this week i finally got around to checking them out. Flickr is cute and all, but i don't really do the photo thing, so i only spent a few minutes with it. del.icio.us on the other hand is pretty awesome, and i found a great use for it right off the bat. i regularly read around a hundred RSS feeds on three different computers. with sync features still to come in NetNewsWire, it's hard to switch between those machines and remember which URLs i want to save to read in detail later. each machine usually has a bunch of different links saved on the desktop. but now i use Foxylicious to post them to del.icio.us and tag them with "unread". i always have a tab open to my unread tag page, so i can quickly select something to read while i'm waiting for code to compile. nice! tho since my dual 1.8ghz G5 showed up, code compiles pretty much at the speed of light, so now i have to explicitly set aside time to read, heh.