Rally For Keplers on Tuesday, Sept. 6

ota, ln m and I were at the Save Keplers rally today were, according to the Palo Alto Weekly, there were 450 people. Judging from the statements made by the speakers at the rally, it appears that there is a strong chance that Keplers will be saved. The main component of the rescue plan appears to be a consortium of 'qualified investors,' where 'investor' is something more akin to 'donor.' With the large number of dot-com millionaires in the area one would think that there should be plenty of people who fit that bill.

Other components of the rescue plan appear to be a membership program as well as focusing on the Keplers online presence (one speaker mentioned buying books on the Web site multiple times). At the very least they will need to revise their business model to better deal with Amazon. Part of their concern and planning seems to be that they want to make sure that the efforts of this rescue attempt allow Keplers to be viable for many, many more years.

As parakkum taught me today, 'Hope is not a plan,' but today's rally did provide hope and soon we should find out if these shadowy investors will step in and save a Peninsula cultural institution. The speakers recommended that we monitor www.savekeplers.com for updates.

UPDATED: new calendar here Upcoming event I may or may not be at depending on my schedule and willingness to drive:

Monday, September 19 at 6:30pm: Flickr Fiesta at Yahoo

Wednesday, September 21 at 7:30pm: Terry Pratchett at Cody's for Thud!

Thursday, Sept. 29 at 7pm: Neil Gaiman and Michael Chabon at Book Passage in Corte Madera for Anansi Boys

Friday, September 30 at 7pm: Neil Gaiman at Cody's for Anansi Boys

Monday, Oct. 3 at 1pm: Salman Rushdie at Book Passage in Corte Madera for Shalimar the Clown
Monday, Oct. 3 at 7pm: Zadie Smith at Book Passage in Corte Madera for On Beauty

Apple introduced a whole slew of music stuff: iTunes 5, iPod: Harry Potter Edition and the Motorola ROKR photo (100 songs on your phone, rather paltry for an otherwise uninteresting phone). The one that caught my attention the most was the iPod 'nano', the successsor to the iPod mini. It's tiny. It uses flash instead of a hard drive, making it about the width of a #2 pencil. It's small enough that I worry about whether or not the scroll wheel on it will actually be usable. It also comes with a color screen and new features like a better clock, a lap timer, and stopwatch.

The Apple marketing team must have taken a cue from the iPod flea parody: one of the first accessory items that will be offered are 'nanotubes' -- green, purple, blue and pink slipcases -- presumably a step up from the iPod sock.

I've finally posted some much-belated wedding photos for those of you on my Flickr friends list. Months old pqbon wedding photos have now been posted as a set. I decided to only post one photo from the Strange wedding, which I've called "Do the Tooch". It is a charming montage in which a father tries to impart the lessons of Boogie onto his child, only to discover that his child rocks to a different beat. Perhaps I should have posted the pqbon wedding photos earlier so that Tooch could have stolen his son's moves.

There are some animals at the zoo that just perform. You point your camera, click, you gotta shot that's a keeper. I had a giraffe at the Oakland Zoo that was one of those animals. It was difficult to choose just 11 photos to upload because all of them in some way or another made me laugh, especially the drool shots above. Enjoy.

Giraffe Photoset (11 photos)

We spent a lot of time by the elephants because the art students were busy drawing them for one of their assignments. Trunky the Elephant was the most cooperative of the bunch. He wasn't as entertaining as Spitty the Giraffe, but he's goofy in his own way. Actually, there's two elephants pictured here, but all look same to me.

As you can tell from my previous entries, we went to the Oakland Zoo today. It's not the biggest zoo, nor does it have the most exotic animals, but it's fun, accessible, and easy to get around. I took photos of camels, bears, bats, tigers, meerkats, tamarins, gibbons, siamangs, elephants, giraffes, and more. As always there is a photoset on Flickr, with some highlights are below. The bat photo has a neat shadow of the bat's claw, and a two-headed camel must be a rarity.

Oakland Zoo photoset

I hadn't been the least bit interested in anything Microsoft was doing for quite some time. After seeing some of the laughably bad screenshots for the next version of Microsoft Window, which were mostly bad (and ugly) attempts to copy OS X, I was convinced that they had no clue what they were doing (especially the horribly bad transparencies).

I'm still not sold on the next Windows, but two applications they previewed today seem like they might be interesting. First, there's Microsoft Max, which is a photosharing tool notable for the fact that it has some rather nice looking 3D layouts. I haven't tried it out, though, so it's hard to say whether or not it will be an impressive offering.

What did sell me on some future Microsoft tech is the Office 12 revamp. Office 12 is a major, major overhaul. The focus of this release seems more on improving the usability of features, rather than bogging it down with more useless features. Instead of the cluttered menu bar of the past, they have reorganized everything in tabs that change a toolbar at the top. For example, there is an 'insert' tab that you can click on that fills you top toolbar with things like "table" and "header" and "chart." The coolest bit I think is that when you hover over an option, you get an instant preview of it in the page. If you hover over a font choice, for example, your entire page appears in that font. If you hover over a 3x3 table, you see a 3x3 table in your page. I can see this as being a big timesaver.

The Office 12 UI redesign also demonstrates a better, though not perfect, understanding of Fitt's Law (basically, the smaller something is and the further away it is the harder it is to select with a mouse). The new toolbar has much larger selection buttons and there are new "floaty" menus that appear above selected text in Word. These floaty menus contain the most common commands like bold and underline. An interesting behavior they added is that the menu fades away if you move your mouse away from it.

Screenshots taken from here. Words and still photos don't really convey the differences though, so if you have the time you can check out the Office 12 video (skip past the first 10 minutes or so).

A little over a year ago Kenji put 3 vs. 4 blades to the test, but can he handle the 5-bladed razor?

These photos made my day much better.

This involves Google and blogs, so of course I'm obligated to post: Google Blog Search.

Pros: 1) It's fast. 2) It's really fast. 3) It places a "References" link next to blog entries that are linked to by others. 4) You can get feeds of your search queries (ala IceRocket).

Cons: 1) I can't make heads or tails of their relevance. 2) Their index isn't impressive yet (both in depth and recency). 3) It's pretty easy to get a spam blog or two in the top search results page.

Relevance is a difficult issue. When I search for 'jython' do I want a blog about Jython-related issues, or do I want a recent blog entries mentioning Jython. They try to offer both by having a short list of "related blogs" at the top of each search result listing, but it's far from perfect: I get bp's comment feed instead of his main blog when I search for 'bp.'

You can get off-results even for very prominent blogs. I searched for Scoble, author of "the scobelizer weblog." Presumably, someone who is #30 on Technorati's Top 100 with 6,087 links from 4,003 sites be an easy search result. For related blogs, Google returns "Alex Scoble's IT Notes" (a different Scoble). The top result in the main list of results is "the scobelizer weblog," but the URL listed beneath it is http://www.velveetaland.com, which is a blog that links to Scoble. I get similar problems if I search for "John Gruber" (author of Daring Fireball, #76 on Technorati's list).

Of course, a normal Google result for either Scoble or John Gruber gives the desired result.

Sites like Technorati are all but unusable because of slowness and frequent database outages, so speed is IMHO the competitive advantage here. It's hard to care about feature XYZ when it only works 50% of the time and takes 30 seconds to complete.

BTW: My favorite blog search is still Bloglines. It's slow, and it does have frequent outages, but lets you exclude your subscriptions from the search results and it contains a very broad index. I'm also a fan of IceRocket, which has RSS search subscriptions and tends to catch tons of people who link to my mythbusters entries. It's also pretty zippy, though not Google zippy.

Yahoo has launched Instant Search, it's attempt to one-up Google Suggest. Instead of trying to autocomplete your search terms for you, the top search result appears for you as you type, i.e. you don't hit enter or click 'search.' I can see this approach solving a lot of usability problems for Web search for the average user (where average user is probably not someone reading this blog). According to Nielsen, 40% of the search population is not search literate, which he demonstrated by showing a video of an example user in this 40% attempting to do a search query. The number of different ways other than the correct way the user tried was impressive, though understandable.

The elimination of one the search steps should be beneficial to the 40% crowd. Also, this could be merged with a Google Suggest-like autocomplete -- the autocomplete to speed text entry and reduce spelling errors, and the instant search to eliminate problems with clicking the correct button or typing the correct key.

As currently implemented, though, the Y! Instant Search isn't ready to help that many people. The number of queries for which there is an actually instant search result is very small, so small that you have to adapt their examples searches to figure what works. I see this as a big impediment to my general use because the instant search is just slow enough that it's hard to tell whether the instant search is still being fetched or there is no instant search result. Also, I find the general Yahoo! Search results page (the page you get if you do click 'search') extremely annoying. On my laptop screen the top search result isn't even fully visible without scrolling down due to all the ads at the top. A search engine that places most of its results 'below the fold' is rather worthless.

Looks like Books Inc on Castro Street picked up some of the Keplers speakers (Terry Pratchett, Alan Alda, Salman Rushdie), so I won't have to drive anywhere to go see Rushdie and Pratchett:

Monday, September 19 at 6:30pm: Flickr Fiesta at Yahoo

Tuesday September 20 at 7:30pm: Terry Pratchett at Books Inc in Mountain View for Thud!

Thursday, Sept. 29 at 7pm: Neil Gaiman and Michael Chabon at Book Passage in Corte Madera for Anansi Boys

Friday, September 30 at 7pm: Neil Gaiman at Cody's for Anansi Boys

Monday, Oct. 3 at 7:30pm: Salman Rushdie at Books Inc in Mountain View for Shalimar the Clown

I had pretty much given up hope when the Redskins still had not scored a touchdown going into the 4th quarter. That's seven straight quarters with no TD.

I still had no hope when Brunell threw a long pass that somehow ended up in the hands Santana Moss in the end zone to make it 13-7. The Redskins had lost 14 of the last 15 matchups against the Cowboys and last year's near-victory was lost with 30 seconds left on the clock.

I had no idea what was coming when Brunell put it into the hands of Moss yet again in the final minutes of the game to make it 14-13. The entire Redskins offense was otherwise non-existent -- no running game, no passing game, and frequent false penalties.

Two plays on offense and some hard-hitting defense was all it took. I'm going to have to get used to a lot of low scoring games this year.

Washington Post summary Wilbon column

I got my schwag on at tonight's Flickr Fiesta: food, beer, t-shirts, and magnet toys. I now know what Caterina Fake, Heather Champ, Jason Shellen, Stewart Butterfield, and Simon Willison look like in person, but I couldn't really decide what one talks to such people about while greedily grabbing anything not bolted down and stuffing it into my jacket. There was also the entrancing live-flickrstream display on the wall that seems capable of inducing seizures or hallucinations. I forced myself to look away.

I brought my camera but decided not to partake in the warfare. There was constant cross-fire of SLRs, as evidenced by the growing photostream of 'flickrfiesta'-tagged photos. I seem to have escaped capture in the currently posted photos, though I did spot ota. I'm sure that every it's only a matter of time.

Wandering the Yahoo! cafeteria, it seems to be a less cool Google cafeteria. The Y! cafeteria has some nice things, but you get them for free at Google.

They were out of coffee.

talk at Books Inc in Mountain View

Pratchett opened his talk comparing the security at airports to "evil clowns at the circus." Shoes off, belt on, shoes off, belt off. "Trousers down -- they haven't done that yet -- you know they want to do it." There was a "guy with one leg. They took his shoe away." He found the focus on pocketknives puzzling in a country where we have so many guns.

On heart surgery

Pratchett had heart surgery last year. Afterwords his surgeon said that they had a little "fun and games." Pratchett asked if that was medical speak for "you nearly died." His surgeon responded, "heart surgery is medical speak for you nearly died." Apparently throughout the process Pratchett kept trying to get up saying, "he's got sandwiches." He never managed to get close to the man with sandwiches in his dream, so he chalks it up as a "near sandwich experience." Reflecting on this, he thinks that when you die "it's obviously some distance because they give you something to eat on the way." He doesn't know what type of sandwich it was, but if it was a cheese sandwich with a Branston Pickle he would go with but if it were a cucumber sandwich with the edges cut off he would turn away.

Q: What kind of sandwich would Death and the Death of Rats have?
A: Death would have a curry sandwich and the Death of Rats would have a double gloucester cheese sandwich (see Hard Cheese of Old England)

more notes in the extended

jwz did a scan of the Purrington poster I bought back at APE. Behold it's hilarious glory, then checkout the Fighting Machine Super Variant sketch that Purrington drew for me.

via BoingBoing

The Jap in me finds this amusing. The poster for this conference has "NIPS" in nice big letters.

FYI: The 2005 conference will be held in Vancouver.

If only I had a couple thousand dollars, lived in NY, and had a huge apartment to display it in, I could bid on pieces of the old Daily Show set. No sign of the couch, so I'd still have to hold off hope that I could sweep into the Daily Show studios and revert the crappy new set back to the way it was.

On Sunday, bp, d, joy, ota and I went on a ride from the 4th and King Caltrain station in San Francisco to Sausalito. Along the way we passed by the Folsom Street Fair (heralded by naked man on bike), the new de Young museum building, and the Golden Gate Bridge. We ate lunch in Sausalito, drank wine, got ice cream, and then took the ferry past Alcatraz back to the Market St terminal. The weather was oddly terrific -- it was the weather I had been waiting for all summer.

I highly recommend the ride -- the more adventurous can do an additional leg from Sausalito to Tiburon and catch the ferry there. Make sure you know the bike lanes in SF: I failed to print out a map and we had some additional adventurous path finding as a result.

The photos from the trip were a bit of sadness to go through -- I had my camera set on ISO 800 by accident, so they are all pretty noisy. I can always take similar photos on later trips, but having to wait for such great weather again might take awhile.

Josh Tyler, creator of Helio-Courier and ChameleonReader (nice RSS reader layered on top of Bloglines that I use) has taken another stab at RSS reading with his latest project, Rzoto. Rzoto is a Firefox plugin that examines the sites you read to see whether or not there are feeds associated with them. It builds a page that lists the discovered feeds and does some smart sorting. Rzoto is now in its beta phase and Josh needs some users to get feedback.

For those of you that don't understand RSS/ feeds/Atom/aggregators, or just don't like the process of tracking down a feed and manually subscribing to it, you might want to give it a shot to see if it can save you time checking Web sites for updates.

You should give it a shot even if already have a reader setup -- Rzoto does all the work for you so it doesn't require any extra effort. You'll probably find some feeds that you didn't realize existed before.

I was extolling the virtues of my green tea that mom gets for me from Japan and decided to do a little bit more tea research so that, like wine, I could put on snobby airs while talking over a cup.

All tea comes from the same tea plant, Camellia sinensis. While there are three main varieties of the plant in use, the differences in taste mostly relate to when the tea leaves are harvested, how they are fermented, the size of leaves used, and the environment in which the tea was grown. My preferred tea is shincha, a green tea with a name that translates as 'new tea.' Depending on the region, tea plants can be harvested multiple times per year. Shincha tea is produced from the very first pick of the year, which is considered the best pick because the buds have been absorbing nutrients throughout the winter.

• Black tea: leaves are laid out to dry, macerated (soaked, softened, and rolled), fermented, then fired/dried to halt the fermentation. The rolling process encourages the release of chemicals for the fermentation process.
• Green tea: leaves are laid out to dry, heated/steam for rolling, and dried. They are not allowed to ferment. In China, green teas are sometimes pan-fried and then rolled into various shapes such as twisted, flat, curly or balled. In Japan the leaves are steamed then rolled by hand or machine.
• Oolong tea: leaves are laid out to dry, shaken or rolled to bruise the edges, and shade-dried. The shaking and drying steps are repeated multiple times and the leaves are then allowed to undergo a short fermentation process. The fermentation is less than that of black tea and can vary depending on the type of oolong.
• White tea: leaf buds covered with silvery hairs are used to make white tea. The buds are steamed and dried, which results in buds with white fuzz.

that was fast: preorder your t-shirt today

I got a new SD300 to replace my old dead Elph that had served me well. I was annoyed to have to buy new memory for it, but when I turned it on with its new 1GB SD card and saw "873" photos left I was too happy to care.

I sold out last May and started putting Google Adsense ads on some of the older entries on this site. For the first couple of months I only got $0.29/day. In August it jumped up to about $1.07/day and this month it's $1.29/day (the increases were due to placing ads on more pages).

At $0.29/day having ad revenue is like getting a nice birthday present once a year: it's nice, but you're not really sure it's worth the effort. Once I broke $1/day it became much easier to match the revenue to the costs of running the site: $30/month matches well with Web hosting costs or can easily fund hardware upgrades. There's no profit in it, but it feels more self-sustaining.

I didn't sell out to make a profit, so this for me is a wild success. I still find it mind-boggling that anyone would pay me any money to read my old dreck, but I'm sure I can manage a happy maniacal laugh when I deposit my first check.

"Dearly Beloved..."

Neil Gaiman addressed us from atop the pulpit in the First Congregation Church in Berkeley on National Geek Day, the day that both Mirromask and Serenity were released in theaters. He read from Anansi Boys, a book that has the tagline "God is dead. Meet the kids." As Gaiman noted, you write a "book with strange gods, and they send you to talk in churches."

Gaiman described Anansi Boys as American Gods' second cousiin, once removed. He had the idea for Anansi Boys before American Gods, so one way he thinks of Mr. Nancy and American Gods is that it had a special guest star... for a book that hadn't been written yet.

For Anansi Boys I've decided to do something I've never done before: buy the audiobook. My reason for this was is very simple: there's an mp3 version. I never saw much reason before in buying audiobooks. They're as expensive as the book and there's this giant stack of CDs that you either have to cart around or you have to spend an hour ripping to your computer. With an mp3 CD I can immediately place it on my iPod or PSP -- it's ready to consume.

The battle over DRM rarely gets very far as it is an ideological battle with strongly divided opinions, full of speculation but few actual examples proving either sides' case. It's great to see an author that's #1 on the New York Times Bestseller List take what the industry would consider a risk and move the debate over DRM forward. Gaiman had to fight with Harper Collins to have mp3 CDs made, so he encouraged me to encourage my friends to purchase the mp3 version. I wish more authors were iPod users like Gaiman so that they too would act as intelligently about technology.

WARNING: Notes in the extended. I did a really, really bad job with my notes. Much more here is paraphrased from memory than actual quotes. For whatever reason my note-taking skills were terrible tonight and much that was funny I cannot remember well enough to transcribe.