December 2007 Archives

“But Dave,” you might say, “those fonts you listed all cost money and I don’t want to pay for any content.” OK, well there is a way to get some high-quality fonts without paying and without breaking any copyright laws. I pointed you to some of the free font resources a few days back. But here are my top picks from those lists.

Old-style Serif Day Roman Modern Serif Gentium Sans Delicious Humanist Cosmetica

Something very, very strange has apparently caused nearly everyone in the State of Washington to go completely bonkers. Either that or editors are working hard to get their "Best Headlines of 2007" entries in before midnight tonight:

• "Nude Couple Grapple Over Dog Near Shower"
• "Man blames car wreck on prehistoric winged reptile"

The default web fonts are boring. They have been overused, and while they are reasonably well-designed fonts, they just aren't inspiring because they are used everywhere.

For a lot of applications, you'll be forced to use one of these standard fonts, simply because they are universal. But if you are creating a print-out, or a PDF, or even using rich typography on the web, I highly recommend you go beyond the defaults and make your design stand out with a fresh typographic look. Some of my favorites:

Serif Hightower Jenson Mrs. Eaves Caslon Vendetta Sans Serif Agenda Meta Syntax Legacy Myriad

I booked my holiday travel with United Airlines through Hotwire.  During the checkout process there is a pop-up menu that asks what frequent flyer plan you wish to use.  Strangely, United Airlines wasn't among the choices.

One thing I've wondered about movies: why are they all priced the same? It's quite clear that there's a wide range of quality and demand, so I wonder why the studios don't recognize that and charge accordingly. I could see charging $5 for the latest version of the teen cookie cutter movie (From Justin to Kelly anyone?), whereas Star Wars or Lord of the Rings could command $12 for a ticket.

I know movie theaters aren't set up for this yet, but how hard would it be to change? Fast food restaurants have the technology. Sure, they might have to set up improved security on the theater doors to make sure those going into the expensive movies actually paid for them. Maybe some sort of turnstile scanner like they have on subways these days. Or just throw a minimum-wage kid on the door for the expensive films (which they already do on opening weekend for big movies) and don't worry about the rest.

OK, so if variable pricing is too big of a leap, how about coupons? A movie's not doing well, so put a coupon for $1 off in the paper/online. It works for other markets, why not movies (or music for that matter)? If studios want to stop the declining attendance at the movies, they'd better start thinking about making changes like this real soon.

FWIW, Joel Splosky suggests the reason for the price-fixing:

Pricing sends a signal. People have come to believe that “you get what you pay for.” If you lowered the price of a movie, people would immediately infer from the low price that it's a crappy movie and they wouldn't go see it. If you had different prices for movies, the $4 movies would have a lot less customers than they get anyway. The entertainment industry has to maintain a straight face and tell you that Gigli or Battlefield Earth are every bit as valuable as Wedding Crashers or Star Wars or nobody will go see them.

He could be right. But we won't really know the effects of such a change unless we test it out. There might be markets where you don't want to do this. Or times of day. Or certain movies. But ultimately if the movie studios aren't happy with the way things are going, they should start testing out these sorts of things real soon.

A mysterious 30 meter long tank / silo / spacecraft part has washed ashore in Scotland. This sort of thing never seems to happen to me. I was at Ocean Beach in San Francisco twice in the last week, and all I found was some gelatinous blobs and a lot of bubbles. 

The story on the BBC has all of the typically-British details.

Simpson’s memes aside, I love my Scooba floor-scrubbing robot. Nobody likes to scrub the floor, and paying a person to come do it is both expensive and a hassle. These things can be gotten for $275, or half that if you go for the refurbished one like I did.

It takes a long time to charge. I made the mistake of thinking that it would fully charge in a couple of hours, and ended up with half-mopped floors. But if you leave it charging overnight, it's good to go for a run the next day.

It also cleans with plain vinegar and water if you want. We've been trying to eliminate all of the chemical cleaners from our house, so this was a must-have feature.

And while you can get away without sweeping first, I find it works a lot better if you do. Especially if you have a menagerie of pets that are constantly dumping big clumps of hair all over the place. Hmm, so maybe it's time I got Scoobie a friend?

Burn your TV in your yard;
Gather 'round it with your friends.
Warm your hands upon the fire,
And start again...

I have been using Windows XP (I upgraded from Vista) as my primary OS for the past 3 years. One thing I've always missed from my Mac days are keyboard shortcuts for handling windows, like the ubiquitous Cmd+W. OK, so Windows does have Alt+F4, but this was designed by a sadist. There's no way to do this with one hand that won't result in carpal tunnel.

So I got a copy of AutoHotKey and started to fix it. Here are the three essential commands in my script:

#Esc::Send !{F4}
#!Esc::Send !{n}
!Esc::WinMinimize,A

The first rmaps Windows+Escape to Alt+F4. I use this all the time. The second maps Windows+Alt+Esc to Alt+N, which lets me dismiss those “do you want to save?” dialogs. And the final one, Alt+Windows now minimizes the front window.

And this topic reminds me of one of my little-known claims to fame. I was the guy who designed the Cmd+`shortcut for cycling among the windows within an application back when I worked on Mac Outlook Express. The shortcut was picked up by Mac IE and Entourage, and then someone from the Mac OS team saw it and liked it so much, he aded it to the OS. Yay!

My hilarious mom (Angela Haine) obliged me by writing this paean to Seventeen, the Xmas tree.

I took a quick look at the Amazon.com bestseller list for the computers category (as of today). Of the top 25, one is a warantee, so I'll ignore that for a moment. Six items are Macs -- including the top selling MacBook, two are Asus Eee PC's and two others are Nokia Internet Tablets. That's 10 of 24 (or a bit more than 40%) that do not run any flavor of Microsoft Windows. It's not quite half, but I think it's sufficient to officially declare that we are at the end of The Windows Age.

At my new job I'm the sole designer on the team. So despite the fact that I'm primarily an interaction/information designer, I’ve also had to wear the “graphic designer” hat too.

I'm mostly a cut and paste, modify & tweak designer. I take an existing piece of art and modify it for my purposes. That's why I think VectorMagic is so great.

You can upload anystandard bitmapped image and it will turn it into a vector file. The vector file is then more easily tweaked, re-colored, scaled and—most importantly—rendered with a transparent background.

In the example I posted, you can see how I took a typical logo off the web and turned it into a vector file. Try it out yourself; you'll be amazed.

1. Behind the desk, wedged between the tabletop and the wall
2. In the sleeve of the heavy jacket you haven't used for months
3. In a random purple file folder in the filing cabinet.  (The same color as the empty folder labeled "Passport".)
4. On top of the washer and dryer stack, under a thick layer of dust

Another site that has a lot of interesting searchable music is imeem. The problem is that the big labels struck a deal with them whereby they only let you play 30 seconds of songs. But I did figure out a way around it.

Copy the Embed code into your favorite text editor. Find the src value within that code and copy/paste it into the URL field. A media player will load that allows you to hear the entire song. Ignore the aus parameter and the music will start playing immediately.

For example here's a great version of my favorite Christmas song, O Holy Night, performed by Celtic Woman: http://media.imeem.com/m/VEF299EHvL

And while I haven’t tried it, I image you can save the music to your computer using a utility such as UnPlug.

At my new job I'm the sole designer, so I end up doing some basic visual design work too. For commercial fonts, the best overall site hands down is MyFonts. They've got a great search engine, show excellent previews of the fonts, and even have cool tools such as More Like This and What the Font. The latter let's you upload an image with some text in it and they will try to figure out what typeface it is. It works pretty damn well.)

But it turns out there are some pretty good free fonts out there too. The best meta-resource is Smashing Magazine's font articles, from which I found a link to the beautiful font Pigiarniq (shown above. The best repository is DaFont.

Also don't forget that the built-in fonts are often pretty good too. For example Microsoft shipped 6 new, high-quality fonts with Vista and Office 2007. And if you don't have either, you can just install the free PowerPoint Viewer 2007 to get them.

Here are a few other free font resources: Font Garden · Larabie Fonts · Urban Fonts

The Mac is so much better than Windows.  Look at this gorgeous Windows XP blue screen of death.   The deep, rich blue, the graduated drop shadow.  Truly a thing of beauty.  

Sometimes you just really need to hear a song. Something reminds you of an old song you know, a new article references a new artist… Previously I used one of the music stores like iTunes or Amazon's MP3 downloads, but that only gets you 30 second clips.

Seeqpod gives you more. The whole song in fact. It's basically an MP3 search engine that has a really nice, high-quality index of songs and let's you play the files directly in the search results window. You can even create a playlist of songs if you want to use it as a basic media player.

The down side is that there's no easy way to get to the source file. The UI is all done in Flash, so right-click doesn't have the "save to disk" option. But they do show the full URL to the file (albeit in an unreadable, uncopyable state), so all you need to do is practice your typing skills and manually copy the URL.

Other music search engines: BeeMP3, Skreemr, Songza.

The NY Times reports on a new organization (GiveWell) that does seriously in depth analysis of the effectiveness of various charities. This isn't the usual "11% of donations go to administration" kind of evaluation. GiveWell performs an exhaustive look at the effectiveness of the programs themselves, and how efficiently the donated money achieves the charity's stated goals. If their first report -- on saving lives in developing countries is any indication, we can expect great things from them. Their blog makes for interesting reading too.

Recently I've seen a few Smart FourTwo cars around Palo Alto. Coincidentally I'm starting to think about our next family car, and while we can't fit four people into a two-seat car, we certainly don't need two "big" vehicles.

The tiny / economical car market in the US seems mired in an embryonic state. Corbin tried to sell their Sparrow but that seems to have fizzled. There are some signs of life, however. Several companies are promising to have vehicles available "late next year," with two of the most interesting being the VentureOne and the Aptera.

Both are two-seated, three-wheeled high efficiency vehicles, though the VentureOne seems more focused on "fun" and the Aptera on "efficiency". I think both cars look great and either would work well as the second car. I know a tiny bit about product development, engineering, and manufacturing, and I'll be very surprised if these cars get to market on time at the stated price and meet the declared specification. That doesn't mean they might not succeed (even in a limited way), but I'll wait and see.

Well, it's already happened. I was aiming to write a post every day, and I've already missed a couple of days. According to Jerry Seinfeld, the way to do something every day is to visualize it on a large calendar. You X out each day as you accomplish it, and the fact that you get an unbroken chain that stares you in the face all day every day motivates you not to break the chain. I really should try that out. Maybe tomorrow…

Original article

Like it or not, much of my life is online. I have the usual collection of accounts and passwords with banks, credit card companies, email services, phone companies, etc. Since we tend to be a bit on the techie side here at KPAO, I also have about 100 other user name and password combinations for various other services. Sometimes these passwords are for "real" world items like bicycle locks, but usually it's just another website password.

I worked for a while on the other end of the password game -- at a company that offered a service via a website, and asked people to register and remember a password. In other words I was part of the problem. I was recently chatting with a colleague about this system, and he reminded me of this fact of life: people hate passwords, and repeatedly use the same (poor) ones. If you need to guess someone's password, "password" would be a decent first try. "none" would be a very good second guess. If you get a hold of someones password for a low security site (say a photo sharing web site), odds are good that the same password will work for their bank account.

Do you ever reuse a password? If you do, do you trust the people at sillyphotosofmydog.com to securely store your personal information to the same level as bigbankwithlotsofmoney.com? If you use the same password for both accounts (or closely related passwords), then you are implicitly trusting the customer service representative at the puppy photo web site not to steal your bank account. So what to do?

First, you really need use a good password, and you need to change them every few month. It's very, very easy to crack poorly chosen passwords (even ones like "bobby76", which probably resembles one you are using right now). A long time ago, we were taught not to write passwords down. That advice came from the days of one or two passwords, and was probably even wrong then. It's simply unfeasible to remember even a small number high quality passwords that change every few months. So don't try. Here's what I do, based on advice from very reasonable sources:

1. Get a USB thumb drive. Small capacity ones are essentially free these days, and you don't need much space for this recipe -- 512MB is plenty. Pick one based on brand, appearance, etc. Mine has a key chain loop.
   
2. Use KeePass and KeePassX -- two version of essentially the same software. This software securely stores your passwords in an encrypted file. The only password you need to remember is the one to unlock the password safe itself. Install the Mac OS X, Linux, or even Windows version of this software on the USB thumb drive. You can even install all three version, and they can share the same password file.
3. Plug the USB drive into your main computer, and start using the password safe. Be sure to save your changes. KeePass isn't the most intuitive program to use, but it's not that bad. You can figure it out. When you're done, unplug the drive, and put it on your physical key chain. Take it to work and use it there too.
   
4. Just as important as using a password store is using it to generate new passwords. Don't make up passwords -- generate them. Trust me -- your passwords suck. Store the generated ones in the password safe. You probably have a hundred online account too -- don't be overwhelmed by having to change everything at once. Just generate and save a new password the next time you log into a website. You'll hit the most important ones sooner.
5. Set a three month time limit on the passwords (it's an option in the KeePass software). When the time is up, generate a new one.
   
6. Profit!

OK so maybe the last step is not quite right, but you get the idea.

I just read about a cool shape called the Gomboc, which is a shape that has a single stable balance point. Thinking I might want to buy one, I headed over to their online store.

First, it took me 5 clicks to get here from the front page, and 4 after clicking on the top-level menu item “Get Gomboc”.

Next, it turns out they are only selling limited editions numbered 2–2007. And the UI for browsing through the items: type in the serial number, click Next, and see if that particular one is still available. If you want to find a new one, you either need to go back, or click a link to bring back the submit button. Typing in a new number a pressing Enter doesn't work.

And worst of all, the minimum price for these things is €1,000. Wow. Guess I don't want one after all.

I just had linguine with my home-made marinara sauce tonight for dinner, and it's one of my favorite dishes of all time. The recipe is actually from Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, but modified to be vegan, and with a lot of detailed technique on how to put it together, learned from many iterations.

software:

• 3 28 oz. cans of whole peeled plum tomatoes, unsalted (I get mine from Trader Joe’s. If you want to save some time, get diced tomatoes instead.)
• 3 tbsp vegan margarine (I recommend Earth Balance)
• 3 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
• 1 medium onion
• kosher salt
• linguine (or the pasta of your choice)
• optional: nutritional yeast and fresh herbs such as basil and oregano

hardware:

• can opener
• knife
• medium bowl
• large sauce pan
• large sauté pan
• stock pot with cover
• splatter guard for the sauté pan

Place the margarine and olive oil into the sauce pan over low heat. Cut the onion in half along the equator, remove the outer skin, and place both halves in the oil.

Open up all 3 cans of tomatoes near the sink with the bowl. Remove each tomato one by one, open it up with your fingers and scrape the seeds out into the sink. Place the tomato meats into the bowl. When you're done, pour the remaining tomato juice from the cans (and the juice from the bottom of the tomato meats bowl) into the sauté pan. Place over medium-high heat and cover with the splatter guard. Put the tomato meats in the sauce pan, stir to combine with the onions and fat, and turn it up to medium-low.

You now have two pans cooking. The meats are cooking with the fat and onions on a low simmer, and the tomato juice is reducing to a thick sauce on a low boil. Stir both occasionally.

When the juice has reduced to a thick sauce, lower the heat to medium-low and pour the contents of the sauce pan into the sauté pan. Stir to combine, then re-cover with the splatter guard.

Fill the stock pot ¾ full with water, add salt to taste (I use ~1 tsp), cover and place over high heat. When the water boils, add the pasta and cook until al dente.

Meanwhile, continue to stir the tomato sauce as it thickens. It's done when a spoon scraped across the bottom of the pan leaves an exposed  gap that does not immediately fill back in with sauce. It takes about an hour from start to finish. Salt to taste. Remove the onion pieces and throw them away; They are only there to provide flavor.

Garnish with nutritional yeast and minced fresh herbs.

I get about 90% of my news from online sources -- the rest comes from radio and friends. Two of my favorite sites for political news and analysis are the New York Times and the Washington Post. For a long time, both of these sites were free, so long as you registered. They would then slip you a cookie and presumably track what you read, how often you visited, etc. I don't mind the ads (well at least not the obnoxious Flash-based ads), but I don't like leaving a "cookie" trail unless absolutely necessary. My bank can known that I'm paying bills, but I don't want the Washington Post tracking what I read. actually I don't mind them so much as the advertising networks.

We just flipped the switch today on our new solar panel array on the roof of our house. It was installed over a month ago by Solar City, and through several paperwork and communication fiascos, it took this long for the city and PG&E inspectors to approve. But at any rate, we're live now.

It only generates about ½ peak production during the winter, so we're not going to see great results until the sun starts coming back North (only 1 more week until the solstice!). Still, it's pretty cool to see the flow of electricity run backwards for part of the day.

Unfortunately there's no benefit to being a net electricity producer. The best you can do is reach zero with PG&E; that is, the amount of excess electricity you generate from the solar panels during the day offsets the electricity you pull out of the grid when the panels aren't producing. If you push more into the grid, it's basically a gift to PG&E.

The whole process of buying, installing, and activating the system was a lot more involved and stressful than it should have been, so if you're looking to get solar installed, you should check out some of the competing companies like Akeena.

OK, I'm probably just a tool for passing this along, but it's funny and well done, in the same category as the Onion News Network or Daily Show/Colbert Report “investigative journalism”. Be sure to watch Home Sweet Server.

http://www.stayathomeserver.com/

"The total average time a household watched television during the 2005-2006 television year was 8 hours and 14 minutes per day, a 3-minute increase from the 2004-2005 season and a record high. The average amount of television watched by an individual viewer increased 3 minutes per day to 4 hours and 35 minutes..."

I attended the final presentation for the Stanford Facebook apps class last night. It was a great event. There were a ton of really practical learnings that the students found out during the 10 weeks they worked on their apps. And the great thing was that there were enough projects (about 25) that you'd see the recurring themes come up on different teams, further validating.

Here are the top learnings:

1. Simplicity rules
2. Be blunt with what you want the users to do; most will do it
3. Focus on encouraging positive, lightweight communications between users
   
4. Require users to invite their friends to force virality
5. Make default decisions for users (you can allow them to customize but most won't)
6. Keep the feedback loops short. Give the user some value, then ask for some value in return.
7. Use a level-up system with unlocked functionality to encourage engagement.
   

I know a lot of my techie friends swear by Gmail, and I admit there's a lot to like about it. Their spam filter is top notch, it's very fast and responsive, the keyboard shortcuts make it easy to get around, and of course it has great search. But the design is way to antiseptic for my taste. And while the threaded view is great for mailing lists, I perfer the old date descending view for my personal mail.

I always liked the Yahoo! Mail beta. It's a bit slower, but the search is great and one feature I love that Gmail doesn't have – the ability to switch away from a message you're writing to go find a piece of info from another message to include. But the ads always bugged me. I mean really bugged me. Until now.

I switched to Firefox, and one massive advantage is their vibrant plug-in platform. I installed GreaseMonkey and searching on UserScripts, found this add-on that removes the ads from Yahoo! Mail. With this tweak, Yahoo! Mail is now my top choice for web mail.

Agree? Disagree? Let me know in the comments.

I went vegetarian in 1999 and vegan in 2005. Since the topic of vegan diets comes up pretty much every time I eat a meal with someone, I've spent a lot of time explaining the thinking behind my dietary choice. Here's the executive summary.

1. Animal products are really bad for your health. For scientific proof, read The China Study.
2. The livestock industry is really bad for the environment. For scientific proof, read Livestock’s Long Shadow (start with the executive summary).
3. The livestock industry horribly abuses animals. For an entertaining yet accurate overview, watch The Meatrix and its sequels.

Other resources I recommend:

• Food Revolution and Diet for a New America are great books with more details and references on all statistics.
  
• The Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine has great scientific data on the health benefits of a vegan diet.
• GoVeg.com has tons of info on why to go vegetarian, and how to do it.

Comments? Questions? Let me know!

When I was I kid I used to chew through the Radio Shack "50 in 1," "100 in 1," etc. electronics kits. The kits were essentially cardboard boxes with lots of simple electronic parts spread out on them. I followed the instructions that had me connect dozens of wires from one springy terminal to another. In the end, with a little luck and patience I had a working buzzer or flasher or AM radio or FM transmitter or whatever. I have fond memories of working through these kits, and though I'm sure I learned from them, in retrospect I mostly was just blindly following directions and enjoying the beeps and buzzes that resulted.

A friend recently gave me a invitation to GrandCentral.com. It's basically a call forwarding service; they give you a phone number and tools to manage your incoming calls. I'm not 100% signed up for the concept yet, but if I do start using it seriously, I wanted a phone number that had some meaning. So I turned to phonespell.com during the sign-up process to find a number with a good mnemonic.

You can type a phone number mnemonic into soft phones like Yahoo! Messenger or Skype and it will automatically call the right number. I wouldn't be surprised if mobile phones let you do that too, either now or in the near future. So there may come a day when no one needs to know your number—just the mnemonic.

For every number that could potentially spell something (i.e. it does not have a 0 or 1 in it which is only 26.2% of all possible phone numbers), I copied & pasted it into phonespell. There are a lot of garbage numbers out there that don't spell anything. I ended up looking at 100 or so phone number in three different area codes before I finally hit upon 787-4733. It has a simple, neutral, one word menmonic – striped.

So next time you sign up for a phone number, be sure to have the phonespell site handy. It can help you get a phone number that's easy for you and your friends to remember.

Years ago, my friend Ania Moniuszko started a company making reusable shopping bags, to help combat the waste of disposable grocery bags.  She designed them herself and markets them as MyOwnBag, as in: "Paper or plastic?" / "Thanks, I have MyOwnBag."

Ania designed a bag that she would want to use: 

• strong enough to carry a heavy load of groceries
• light and compactable so it could be squished into its own little pouch and kept in a woman's purse whenever she needed it, 
• large capacity so that multiple bags are not needed on a small shopping trip
• versatile, so it could be used not just for groceries but for yoga, gym, beach, clothes shopping, changes of clothes.
• fashionable, to look good while being eco.  They come in many fabrics and do not have huge gaudy phrases trumpeting the owner's environmental sensitivity.
• washable, so the bag can withstand grocery detritus and can be used for a long time without looking dirty and ratty.

Ania created her reusable bags years before they became commonplace and way before progressive municipalities like San Francisco started banning plastic bags.  Now there are dozens of players in the game.  Amazingly, the MyOwnBag product vision has held up well against the flood of competitors:

• Grocery stores sell canvas bags that look like stiff green shopping bags.  Pretty good for reducing waste but you cannot keep it in your purse at the ready.
• Many companies sell $5 nylon bags that fold into nothing.  They are commendable for making something that can be carried around, and cheap enough that anyone could buy them.  But they are typically over-branded and look like garbage bags when freed from their sac.  You wouldn't be seen with it for other trips around town.
• Hermès, Louis Vuitton and others have designer grocery bags for fashionistas willing to pay $500 - $1700.
• Various gym or yoga bags are optimized for their stated purpose but are not meant for groceries. 

Here is what it looks like in a needs table, with the original comparison points, paper and plastic bags (3 is better; 0 is worse):

The needs analysis clarifies the differentiation among these competitors.  For each customer need along the top you can see which solution does a good job of solving it.  You can compare any two solutions and immediately see the important differences between them and which niche each has carved out.

From this chart you can see that MyOwnBag is the only reusable shopping bag that squishes down to a little pouch, and is useful for for things other than grocery shopping, and is chic and may be worn proudly around town, without costing $500.

There is one other need which MyOwnBag solves excellently: your need to find a unique gift for your chic, environmentally-sensitive friend, for about $40 to $60. 

Warning: do not give her a plastic bag.

This is a purely tactical move when buying something online. As I go through the checkout process, when I come across the field for a coupon code, I immediately open up another browser tab and do a search for ›name of web site‹ coupon code (or whatever terms they use to refer to it, like promo, discount…) I just bought a CD from yesasia.com, so I searched for yesasia.com coupon code. The first site in the results has an extensive list of codes including WGASIA5 which saved me $5 on my order.

It doesn’t always work, but it works often enough to make it worth the small effort each time you buy something.

I plunked down my credit card no more than five minutes after seeing David's discussion of the Chumby.

Here is the first product I have seen that embodies the future envisioned at the dawn of the Web era. An unobtrusive, wireless, sub-$200 Internet terminal with no specific purpose.  

That no-specific-purpose part partitions people who hear about the Chumby. Some see it as its greatest weakness, others see it as its greatest strength.  I'm in the latter camp.   I think the potential and relevance of this class of device is enormous. Here are some scenarios:

Alarms of every stripe:  It's time to wake up. It's time to sell Google. It's time to move the car for street cleaning.  My checking balance is getting low; better transfer some funds.  Oh my, something big exploded somewhere.  Oops, we left the garage door open.  Looks like a storm is brewing.  Uh-oh, traffic is bad on 101. Oooh, Tahoe got a huge dump of snow. Oh! Was that an earthquake? How big, and how far?  Hurry!  Wii's are available!  Shh!  Stay low!  There is someone at the front door and he's carrying a clipboard!

Ambient awareness:  What time is it? How many minutes before my next appointment?  Ah, my web traffic is growing nicely, and I even made $0.42 this week with Adsense.  Cool, there's the updated status of a bunch of my Facebook friends.  It's Friday night and three of my friends have no plans; maybe I will call them.  Hmmm, it's only foggy in my neighborhood of San Francisco, not everywhere   How does it look in St. Catherine's Street in Montreal?   Does the baby look ok with the nanny?  We've been using a lot of energy this month.  Philip's birthday is in a few days.

Control:  Time to put the house lights, climate and security in bed-time mode /  away for the evening mode /  away for vacation mode.   Time to put on ambient jazz or groove or drone or classical or acoustic chick rock or energetic rock throughout the house to suit the current mood.  Tell the DVR to record Heroes and Earl.

Tools:  Alarm clock.  Kitchen timer. Game timer.  My favorite Epicurious recipes. The family calendar in the kitchen.

Decoration: Ah there are photos showing what I was doing every year this month for as long as I have been collecting digital pictures.

Communication:  Receive a video voicemail.  Press a couple of buttons and record a voice message to your spouse.

On-demand radio: Listen to the latest NPR news broadcast in the bathroom, when you are shaving.

One could go on.  I could imagine several Chumby's around the house as views and controllers being fed by the same model.  (Our mobile phones would take part, too.)  

One piece apparently missing on the platform is a coherent infrastructure for pulling together alarms, ambient awareness, control, and tools.  From what I can tell, the first batch of applets will be disjointed, inconsistent, mostly useless.  The signal-to-noise ratio of useful vs. demo applets is too low, as happened with Palm apps and desktop widgets and gadgets.

But with the Chumby, the technology and price point have arrived.  The only thing in the way of most of these scenarios is a mere matter of design and code.

A couple of days ago I mentioned that I received a Chumby. It's essentially a general purpose Linux-based computer, running in an shell that's something like the love-child of a bean bag and an alarm clock. The Chumby runs a Flash-based application environment, and anyone is invited to write "applications." I put that in quotes because many applications don't make sense. A spreadsheet on a Chumby is pretty silly.

I'm composing this entry on an iGo Stowaway Ultra-Slim Keyboard that for some reason is now $30 instead of the usual $80 on Amazon. It's connected to a Nokia N800 Internet Tablet. That in itself isn't that remarkable, but that's the point of this post. Nothing remarkable or complex happened to get this going. I just turned on the tablet, fired up the browser, turned on the keyboard and clicked "Write Post."

Now I'm ready to one of "those people" you stare at at Starbucks except I don't go there.

Since we seem to be doing that Hammacher-Schlemmer thing today, and since we're near then end of the calendar year, here is a repeat of my take on the best way to give a charitable donation. If you donate appreciated stock or mutual fund, you get to deduct the full value or the stock on the day you give it away, and you pay zero capital gains tax. No long term, no short term -- nothing. The charity can then sell your stock and also pay no taxes.

I recently started a new job and wanted to start dressing a bit nicer. Not coat-and-tie nice, but button-down-shirt nice. Problem is, most button-down shirts I've found are 100% cotton and require ironing, which I am far too lazy to do. And the synthetic shirts often are plastic-feeling and don't breathe.

Then I discovered Alfani, a Macy's brand. They've got a modal/polyester blend that looks and feels great, and doesn't need ironing. I just bought 6 of these shirts in the past week I like them so much.

There are other patterns in the store that aren't shown on the site. And I've also seen the brand at Ross if you want to find them on super discount.

Kelly's Heroes is the best movie of the 20th century. Woof woof woof. I'm not kidding it really is.

If you use a web browser as much as I do, you'll want to use it as efficiently as possible. I recently made the jump from Avant Browser to Firefox since I found out it supported all of the things I needed, and more. Here are the top things you might not know about, but probably should.

Ctrl + Enter

When you type Ctrl + Enter in the location field, the browser automatically adds www. and .com to the text in the field. So if ou type google and then Ctrl + Enter, you’ll go to www.google.com. In Firefox, Shift+Enter will add .net and Alt+Enter will add .org

Ctrl + click

If you want to open a link in a separate tab, hold down the Ctrl key and click it. This opens it in a background tab leaving your current web page visible. If you want to open it in tab and switch to that tab to view it immediately, press Ctrl + Shift and click. I use this all the time on search results pages to open a bunch of things in tabs, and then it’s really quick and easy to blow through them. It's quicker then clicking, hitting back, clicking another…

Keyword for a bookmark

Right-click on a bookmark in Firefox and choose Properties. Note there’s a keyword field in the dialog box. This allows you to assign an alias/shortcut string to that URL. So for example you can set you Venrock keyword to v. Now when you type v and the Enter in the address bar, Firefox will open the Venrock bookmark.

Creating “search” bookmarks using %s

Take keyword bookmarks to the next level. If you grab a URL that has search terms in it, you can replace those search terms in the bookmark with %s. Then when you add terms after the keyword, Firefox will encode those terms into the search URL. For example I created a bookmark with the URL  http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s and the keyword g. When I type g interaction design + Enter in the address bar, I go to http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=interaction%20design

Site: search parameter

All the major search engines support the site: parameter, and for some sites this is a better way to search than their own search feature. I use it a lot for searching for documentation on Microsoft’s site: http://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=utf-8&p=site%3Amicrosoft.com%20user%20experience%20guidelines

Yahoo! also has a pretty neat search feature called Site Explorer, which is good for browsing the popular pages of a given site, for example:
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/advsearch?p=http%3A%2F%2Fbasicinstructions.net&bwm=p&bwms=p

Firefox plug-ins

If you ever wanted to see the source behind a web page, or even make some tweaks to it, then Firebug is the Firefox plug-in for you. You can right-click on anything on the page an choose Inspect Element. Firebug will show you the HML and CSS source behind that element. You can make changes in Firebug’s UI and see them reflected on the page.

Other plug-ins I use are FoxMarks bookmark synchronization, AdBlock Plus ad blocker, Fission progress bar, and FlashBlock.

Type-ahead find

You probably already know about Ctrl+F for finding text on the page. Try typing / (forward slash) to do a quick type-ahead find for text. Or my favorite, ' (single quote) to type-ahead to a link on the page. It's a lot faster than using the mouse.

I've noticed recently that in colloquial English, people commonly end their sentences with “so…”. I do it to. I think it’s yet another lazy vocal filler such as “like” or “um”.

“So” is a connector used to show causal relation ship: A so B means because A is true, then B must also true. It’s as if the speaker pauses to gather his thoughts for the conclusion (B) but either feels like the listener already understands what B is (perhaps the conversation started with a question, “Why B?”). Or maybe the speaker is unsure of the listener’s agreement with A and is opening up a gap for counterpoint. Or perhaps the speaker didn’t have a particular B in mind and when thinking about it, nothing springs to mind.

If you listen for it, it’s quite amazing how often this occurs. At least for me; maybe it’s a regional or socio-economic pattern that doesn’t show up elsewhere. I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

My Chumby arrived today! I'm not really sure what I'll do with it, but it's cute, runs Linux, and comes with a large set of widgets -- some of which are marginally useful. 

I surely can't be the only one to be simultaneously both confused and amazed by I'm not There -- the bio-pic wrapped in a metaphorical surrounded by in-jokes of Bob Dylan in which six different people play various aspects of his life, personality, and topics.  The best moments for me were all about Cate Blanchett's portrayal of Dylan.  Yes, Galadriel the Elf Queen as Dylan. Example: Dylan hanging out with Allen Ginsburg, and screaming up at a statue of Jesus on the cross "I liked your early work better." Everything -- the dialog, the names, the props, characters, sets and of course music point back to Dylan's life and songs. You'll go crazy trying to figure it all out. My advice: go see the film, and turn off your mind and keep your toes tapping. Then come home and read about Dylan in Wikipedia.