Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

Time Magazine's cover is so ... twentieth century.

This is what it really should look like.

Note: 21st-Century iSight-style camera and modern Safari/WebKit browser running on Mac OS X "Tiger" is needed. If you see black in the picture below or a plugin error, then please move along....

Inspired by Steven Frank and this prank on O'Reilly MacDevCenter by Chris Adamson. (For more thoughts about the notion of embedding iSight video, see this post by Jonathan Wight.) Oh, and see this movie trailer about you, too!

(Thanks to Sven-S. Porst for the CSS help on this!)

(digg this story)

How to discover and get some great new music:

1. Download tons of free MP3s from the SXSW festival over bittorrent (2007, 2006, 2005).
2. Slog through the music and find the songs that you actually like; throw away the junk.
3. Get thee to eMusic and start searching for the artists that you liked. Amazing how many artists you are likely to find!
4. Download albums from these bands. When you run out of music credits, well you gotta wait until next month or boost your subscription.

I have used emusic before, but now that I had the idea of finding bands from the songs I've found at SXSW, I now have dozens and dozens of albums that I'm ready to download.

If you like discovering new music, try this out!

(OK, this is a conceptual mashup, not a web 2.0 implementation ... that would be cool! And it has nothing to do with musical mashups!)

I like to work down at a nearby café one day a week or so, just for a change of pace, and to try to emulate the behavior of famous software companies. :-) Recently I started chatting with another patron there when I noticed that he stopped bringing in a Windows laptop and was now using a Mac. I learned his first name, and over the last couple of months, we've chatted at bit when we run into each other there.

Meanwhile, I've been corresponding with a fellow Alameda resident over the last couple of months; he has started up a local political group that I've been hoping to get involved with — but haven't yet.

Yesterday I discovered that those two people — the guy at the café and the guy I've been exchanging emails with — are the same person!

What a strange thing to happen, to have to now merge two "people" (in my mental model of the world) into one!

OK, it doesn't involve any hard-drive swapping or deal-making with Apple. Here's how I've upgraded to a 40 GB iPod -- I bought a new iPod, and I'm selling my 30GB iPod on eBay.

Actually, what I'm selling is almost completely new -- I had taken in my 30Gigger into the Apple Store because it was having a few problems (e.g. it was narcoleptic, falling asleep while playing music, even while docked). They swapped it for a brand new unit. But since it was so new, I thought this was a good time to "upgrade" to 40 GB, so I could sell the almost-new 30-gigger.

And it still doesn't hold my entire music collection. (I was an eMusic member for a while; it's amazing how much you can accumulate!)

If anybody wants to buy this iPod, which has all the accessories still wrapped up, since I just swapped them with the new stuff that came with the 40-gigger, I'll throw in a license to Watson to the lucky winner!

I had to share this with the world. My mom recently bought this water pitcher with the most bizarre label on it:

Product this peculiar overlengthy groove is it design to surface, can stretch reach flowering shrubs preventing rivers from overflow effective when watering flowers.

Full size scan @ flickr: The Luxurious Flower Shedding

Today I kept reading blog posts and notice iChat status messages of people I know so excited about the Nintendo Wii (pronounced "why" — I don't care for computer gaming) ...

... But this story was certainly a sobering take on the phenomenon.

"Oh, you're buying those Nintendo tapes? You've got those ones that are all war.. I've been there. I've seen it." A few people were perplexed, but still curious about what the guy had to say.

...

"You remember that, when you're playing your little tapes," the man said as he gestured playing around with a controller, "you remember that there are people really doing that. They're shooting and they're getting shot at."

...

Not only was it a moment of intense frustration, but also introspection - I was sitting in line for a f[...] Nintendo while there are people dying for no reason. I'm programmed to buy the latest crap just because it's the latest crap, and play games that mock the reality of the horrifying environment of war. You can try your best to change the status quo sonny, but it's not gonna work - so fire up your Sony NintendoBox 2000 and shut the hell up.

Read the whole story about the early-morning encounter at the mall.

Maybe somebody who reads this will have some suggestions. I'm trying to help a friend set up a blog that allows multiple authors to each have their own sub-blog, that they would post to along the same lines of a wordpress or blogger blog, and could be viewed or subscribed to individually as an individual blog; all the sub-blogs would be aggregated into an overall blog that would merge all of the authors together on a single main blog page, feed that aggregates all the other posts, etc. I don't think bloger or wordpress are up to this. Any suggestions?

A few months ago I came across a website that offered a number of nice banner images that could go across the top of one's website or weblog. They were free to use (sort of like stock photos), and they came in regular (about 800 by 200 pixels) and double size.

This was a very nice resource of images, but I can't for the life of me find this website anymore. Has any reader here come across it and know its URL?

Update:We have a winner! Free Web Page Headers, thanks to John Fox!

I've found in the past that a good way to find somebody to hire for a particular task is to write something on my weblog. Apparently the five readers here are very well-connected, because it has been quite fruitful in the past.

This time, I'm writing because we're looking for somebody who can help with the daunting task of documentation writing, as a contractor. It's not glamourous work, but it's clear that Sandvox is going to need some major documentation. There are so many features that even I forget all of what it can do!

So we are looking for somebody who:

• ...can quickly, fluently write in English
• ...has good writing organizational skills
• ...is a Mac User, Tiger specifically, to be able to run Sandvox
• ...is not afraid to ask questions to dig into the how and why of the program
• ...can work in the WikiMedia environment (e.g. can format text like this)
• ...is willing to explore and document every avenue of Sandvox
• ...is available starting now, full-time or part-time

If this is you, or somebody you know, please reply to me (dwood, at the domain name here or karelia-d0t-com) with rates and samples.

We all know about the five senses of taste, smell, touch, sight, and hearing. There's the term (and movie) "sixth sense" of ESP that people hear about and can't quite prove, though actually there are other lesser-known senses, such as sense of balance or even mild echolocation (close your eyes and hum, then pass an open hand across your face).

I've become gradually aware of a new sensory perception. Well, it's not really a sense, but it's more fun to call it that. It is the sense that there's something on the clipboard.

Having used a Mac for more than half my life, I've gotten used to having a clipboard around, with its contents never seen, but its presence felt. I've noticed that when I am multitasking, and if I get a bit distracted, I might suddenly feel like I have something on the clipboard and I need to paste it somewhere. I've probably forgotten what it was that I copied or cut there, or where I was going to paste it, but I somehow remember that it's there. Often the only way to alleviate this sensation is to open up an empty document (usually TextEdit since it handles text and images) and hit command-V to paste. Then I get to see what it was that needed handling. At that point, I'll recognize what it was, and remember what I was starting to do (e.g. copy a URL out of a webpage and paste into an email message) so I can complete the task.

This sensation seems to outlast short-term memory, so I don't think it's stored the same as, say, a phone number that you are trying to remember as you dash from your TV screen to your phone, or the fact of what is on your clipboard and where you were going to paste it. The hard facts of what you were doing, but the sensation that the clipboard has something useful on it lingers on, perhaps another minute or two past forgetting what you were doing.

I don't know what to call this sensation. "Cliposeption" seems so trite, but then again, a Google search for that reveals absolutely no hits as of this writing; this article will probably be the first! Any better ideas for a term for this? :-)

Last year's SXSW festival (which I still can't figure out — it seems to be so many different events crammed into the same name) had a great online goodie for people who weren't there — a sampling of hundreds of songs from the bands that are playing at the festival. I slogged through lots of music last year and found some real gems, some bands that I've gotten to really enjoy. Some of them, I've even since heard on the radio.

This year they have a bunch more here, available as a torrent. If you like to discover new, interesting music, check it out. (There are also over 100 trailers for films they are showing there, though that's not something that I can really do "in the background" like listening to music!)

Those who have known me for a long time know how big I was into Babylon 5 when it first came out; my virtual fingerprints are all still visible all over the Lurker's Guide.

I was sad to hear that Andreas Katsulas, perhaps its best actor, certainly under-appreciated by the world at large, passed away a couple of days ago at age 59.

Cigarettes were the cause, lung cancer was the result. Score yet another win for the Tobacco Industry, and a big loss for the rest of us.