yesterday, all day at the beach - today, chores - tomorrow, follow up interview!

have a look: a picture from the previously mentioned hill in the park.

the spell check button seems to have dissapeared from blogger.

i was woken up this morning by my roomate mary... with two big bags of vegtables. she went crazy in the produce isle. we made (are making) stew. there was so much, we had to make two pots. hopefully it will cook down enough to mix into one. in the meantime, the house smells amazing. i can't wait for dinner.

on thursday i got this:

Unfortunately we have filled this position for production assistant [...] I could only hire one person and I was flooded with over 1500 applications. There is just no way for me to reply to each applicant personally, so please excuse this impersonal mass reply.

on friday, i had an interview. i feel pretty fortunate just to have one. on top of that, i think it went really well. i had a good time. i got to talk about ideas i believe in, with people who seemed very receptive and full of the same. i hope to have many more conversations with them in the future.

afterwards, i felt incredibly relived. it was nice to finally make some notable progress in finding a job. the fact that it occurred with a job i really want, was all the better.

the weekend following was wonderful. i think my improved state of mind had a bit to do with that. the rest was a direct result of getting in some quality hanging out time with my two best and oldest friends - aaron and jason. way back in st. louis, we spent much time together. nightly for long stretches. eventually college came for them... and the need to leave st. louis came for me. we always kept in touch, although in spurts. we saw each other now and again... a day or two here and there in st.louis. a visit to princeton. a few weekends in new york city. for the most part, we had our own separate lives. we each set out on very different paths... learning about the world and ourselves. conclusions were come to and directions were settled on. as it turns out, many of those were shared. now we've met up again in SF. for the first time in many years, we're daily parts of each others lives. no longer hindered by the need for special plans, time constraints, and catching up.

starting friday, we played video games till wee hours of the morning... cooked up a big tasty meal... chatted on a sunny hill in mission delores park... had late night pie and fries at the lucky penny dinner... wandered around the city... had hot fresh donuts at midnight... and too many other enjoyable moments of little consequence to list...

it couldn't have been a better three days.

Cheney Calls on Navy to Pay Bill to Light His Home
Shortly after saying this:

"If you want to leave all the lights on in your house, you can," Mr. Cheney said. "There's no law against it. But you will pay for it."

Vice President Cheney wants the navy to pay the electricity bill for his 33 room mansion.

malfunction.org | picture of internet
erik bernhardsson has written a bot that goes out onto the web every half hour, grabs .gif files, and assembles them into a nice collage. (source: metafilter)

today has been a make things better sort of day.

live365 started spawning popup ads from their broadcast windows. while folks were listening to quish, their desktops became cluttered with visa ads. unacceptable. i certainly don't expect to get their service for free. i'm all for the banner ads they had within the broadcast window, and i've got no problem with them inserting audio ads into my playlist (if they would ever get it implemented)... but popups from something that's going to sit, unused for potentially hours, is horribly invasive. people complained to me immediately. ...so i created a little real audio app (side note: quicktime was preferred, but it's not behaving. hopefully in the future) to hook into the live365 stream and used php to filter out the current playlist info. now you get a nice, clean, custom designed broadcast window.... 100 percent advertising free.

additionally, i needed log files for all my various sites. i can't afford to upgrade my current web hosting plan, and don't really need any of the other features. everything worth logging is a php file, so i created a little php include to write out my own custom access.log. then compiled analog and configured it to read the logfile format. wah-lah. i know have nice neat reports, including search term/referral/etc statistics.

all hail the net's inherent flexibility.

The Case Against Micropayments - users don't like them.

update: a couple hours of new music added at quish.

this past weekend, we rented zone of the enders, for ps2. it's one of those games you want to love - but it does everything in it's power to stop you. the graphics are gorgeous. especially the mechs... yet there are only 3 types of enemies (not counting bosses). the control is dead on. fighting those same 3 enemy types never gives it a satisfying workout. the story is ambitious. a fast paced shooter, thats all about the value of life. your rewarded for not destroying things. unfortunately the characters are poorly developed, the pace is way off, and the cinema sections are way overproduced (there's more dramatic cuts in the opening, than there needs to be in the whole game). it could have been an amazing game. as is, it really isn't worth more than a rental.

more than anything, it made me anxious for the next wave of games. metal gear solid 2 should be more, well... solid. still shooting and wars and all the standards though. ico on the other hand, seems to be something completely different. your an average medivalish young boy... except you have horns. the towns people aren't too happy about it, so they bury you alive. somehow you manage to escape. when you get out of the box, you find yourself in a castle, with an entirely different, yet equally odd young girl hanging in a cage. you set out to rescue her. rather than use the ps2's power for big explosions and your typical macho/busty characters, it's used to create atmosphere. it's very deliberate, and sweet, and charming. i've haven't seen such a thing since harvest moon. i can't wait.

bah.
my websites have been up and down the past couple of weeks, while my hosting provider switched everything to new servers and then started working out the bugs. it's usually not for very long... so no big deal. except for one thing. on my resume pages, i was using a link tracking script to see what items in my portfolio interested people the most. somehow a key file didn't make it in the server transfer. all the links were returning php errors. everyone i sent a resume to (including some jobs i really wanted) in the last 2 weeks, saw broken pages.

i'm sure that didn't help my cause any.

your tax rebate is coming. donate it through give for change and they will match it. that means, if you give your $300 to amnesty international, they will get $600. it's an offer you can't refuse.

another one for the 'it's about time' file...
cbs marketwatch is going to stop providing click-through rates to advertisers.

the concept of click-through is absurd. it works on the assumption that advertising is only useful if it results in instant gratification. people don't get up in the middle of their favorite sitcom, to go get a whopper. no matter how good the commercial is. advertisers shouldn't pay by the number of people that leave what their doing, to go see more advertising.

limited edition yahoo! gibson explorer
what sort of person spends close to 5 grand on a yahoo 'branded' guitar?

more web hosting problems.... pages an email were down this afternoon. again. if i had any money, i don't think i'd be a cubesoft customer anymore.

an interesting side note to the rushkoff article - google reports that art and society make up 34% of their current searches, while business and shopping are at 14%. lets do some quick math. google averages 100 million searches per day. so on any given day, there are roughly 34 million cultural searches performed. that's 20 million more than business related. it warms the old heart.

finally, someone puts the state of the internet into a bit more realistic perspective. the people's net, by douglas rushkoff.

in an ideal world (read: much different economy and values and i could write a better cover letter) i would spend my days as an interaction designer with a not-for-profit. it makes perfect sense to me... but people tend to get a bit of a blank look when i mention it. even to geeky folks. It's all about to be a little clearer, thanks to robert reimann over at cooper interactive. Check out his article, so you want to be an interaction designer.

that's what i do.

or would do... or should do... or could do... or... yah.

update: photos added from adam and joe's visit to san francisco.

i feel like making something... but what but how but who?

a disturbing indication of mainstream media attitudes toward coverage of the wto meeting came before the conference, when disney/abc's seattle affiliate announced that it would "not devote coverage to irresponisble or illegal activities of disruptive groups," adding that "komo 4 news is taking a stand on not giving some protest groups the publicity they want ... . so if you see us doing a story on a disruption, but we don't name the group of the cause, you'll know why." in a revealing choice of words, news director joe barnes described civil disobedience as "illegally disrupting the commerce of the city."

taken from:
pratle in seattle - media coverage misrepresented protests, by seth ackerman