So the building started gently shaking and I went to the doorway, after I was sure it wasn't just me. After it was over, I went to the USGS web site and saw that it was centered in Gilroy (about 60 miles south of Berkeley). Given that, I call my friend Crystal, who didn't feel it, and guessed that it was a 5.2 and, in true 'LA Story' fashion, I was exactly right. At least right on the preliminary calculation. We'll see what they say in the morning.

Scary that a 5.2 can kill hundreds and leave thousands homeless when it hits a third-world country. Here it's more like, "Fuck, there was a brownout. Now I have to wait for my TiVo to reboot. I hope it was just recording commercials."

Of course, just because it's over, doesn't necessarily mean it's over.

So being a good son I called my mom this morning to wish her a happy Mother's Day. The machine picked up and I left her a message to call me.

This wasn't too much a surprise, as I knew she had gone on a cruise in the Carribean last week with my grandmother, and I wasn't sure when they were getting back. A conversation with my sister later this afternoon informed me that they were getting back tonight (and that my mom left her cellphone in her car, which was at my sister's house).

So I wasn't at all surprised to get a call from my mom at around 8:30 tonight, and was only slightly surprised to hear the hustle-and-bustle background noise on the other end. "Guess where I am?" she asked.

"At the airport?" I replied, reasonably secure in my assumption.

"Well, yes, but not Los Angeles. We're still in Miami. We took off for Los Angeles on-time, and about 20 minutes into the flight there was a loud mechanical bang, and we turned around and headed back for Miami. When we landed there were about 30 emergency vehicles on the tarmac with their lights flashing."

Wog. Anyhow, they're still waiting on another (I really hope it's a different) plane to fly them back, but that might not even happen tonight. It was already 11:30 pm eastern time when she called.

...

I lost my first grandmother to Cancer about 14 years ago. I hadn't even thought to be worried about both my Mom and my Grandma Kitty on the same flight (on Mothers Day, no less), but now I know I'll feel a lot better when I talk to Mom tomorrow...

Back in early '98 I was working for a now defunct company called CKS Partners. I was leading development of Levi Strauss's first online store. We'd gone through a few rounds of creative, identified business goals, measures of success, and it was time for the focus group testing.

It's a strange thing being on the dark side of the one-way glass. On one hand, you feel like you're about to watch a hollywood premiere. It's dark, the seats are comfortable, and there's hors d'vours. The screen extends across the whole wall and there's plenty of suspense.

On another level it feels like you're about to watch a police lineup. You have a sheet in front of you with the names, occupations, salaries, ages and more about each of the participants. I scanned through, comparing their salaries, ages, and preferences to mine, and a name caught my eye. Mara K. (yes, I had the whole name, but I won't share it here). I thought that name sounded familiar, really familiar, in a peripheral way. Was she in one of my classes? Was she an ex-girlfriend's roommate? I brushed it off.

The focus-group leader walked the eight women, aged 18 to 25 into the room. One immediately caught my eye. Mara. I knew it was her before she even put her 2nd-grade name-tent down on the table. I took a closer look at my cheat-sheet. Occupation: Webmistress. OOOOooooh...

As anyone except those who get paid to run focus groups will tell you, the problem with focus groups is that the eight participants are really just parroting back the strongly-expressed opinions of the one or two most outspoken. Mara was the Alpha Participant tonight, as I knew she would be. She said anything more than 4 days shipping was a total waste. She threatened to boycott Levi's if they used frames in their store. I could have kissed her right there, but for the glass, my coworkers, my not having any idea who she was and her not knowing I exist.

As the focus group wrapped up, I excused myself to call up Karen, and ask her if Mara was her old roommate. Karen had never heard the name before. Walking back towards the 'dark room,' I pass by the participants filing out of the conference room. Mara's right there in front of me, walking by.

"Hi, I've been watching you from behind the half-silvered mirror for the last two hours, watching how you fold your hands and time your sentences. I know your name, where you work, what you make, and what browser you use. Love me?" I didn't say, seeing a couple of my CKS compatriots in the doorway. Half doctor, half stalker, I didn't really think there were many opening lines in a situation like that, or at least I didn't think of any in the 0.3 seconds before she was past me, walking toward the exit. I was just another guy, probably on my way to participate in a focus group myself.

Sitting through the next two-hour focus group I felt bad then better. Ships had passed in the night, and though I'd never see or talk to Mara again, it would be by my own choice. I could call her, or find any of a dozen ways to 'accidentally' meet her, and I'd choosen not to.

Driving home from South San Francisco to Berkeley late that night, I felt great, exhilirated. Mara showed me that someone could come in out of nowhere and flutter the heart. It didn't matter that it was the wrong time and place. It's the experience, and the awareness that this kind of thing can happen at any moment, that counts.

Salon weighs in with a nice article on the blog as a media aggregator, and Google's best friend.

The more blogging articles I see out there, the more I know that blogging is getting the attention of ordinary people. It's a lot like watching the internet in 1996, feeling a shiver of pride the first time I saw URLs on TV commercials or print advertisements...

I found this thread trying to find an old friend of mine, and was highly amused.

For all you OS X users out there: When you have magnification turned on in the dock and you mouse over the dock items, do you perceive the items as getting closer to you while the others stay father away, or that they get bigger, while the others stay small?

Just curious.

In an effort to increase customer awareness and popularity, five of Macromedia's "community managers" have started their own weblogs, to discuss Macromedia technologies and interact with consumers.

"Giving the community managers a platform on which they can use their own voice, that was our idea," Hale said. "Our format (on Macromedia.com) just wouldn't be as quick as a blog is. We do have a community section in there, but a blog is five sentences and 10 links. And that gets to the heart of why people trust blogs -- they like the format."

Hale added: "Would it have been a true blog if we put it on Macromedia.com? Not really."

Indeed, it was important to Macromedia that its blogs seemed true, that readers perceived them as the thoughts of very helpful community managers instead of corporate shills. If the effort felt disingenuous, like the company was merely jumping on the blogwagon, it could have backfired.

"I'd hate for you to think this is some kind of marketing agenda," Hale said. "If there is an agenda, our agenda is related to getting good information in people's hands."

The problem is that taking it off of Macromedia.com just blurs the line between it being a corporate comunications outlet and a true personal expressive publication. Are these people running the blogs as part of their jobs? Does Macromedia pay for their hosting? Are they anywhere near as likely to get fired for things they might say on their blog?

It's an interesting line to draw, or in this case, to blur. I'd wished for a Yahoo-oriented blog, but the torrents of customer-care type mail I'd get would be overwhelming, and I don't think Yahoo would go for an unofficial blog like that.

Still, I hope for the best for Macromedia and these blogs, and I hope they keep it honest. While Adobe might be pissed at Macromedia for infringing on their patent, I'm pissed at Macromedia for their push for a flash-based web. Here are leaders in the web technology field, pushing a position I can't believe that they truly believe in, because its success would mean profit for the company, at the expense of established online staandards and creating more consistancy usability problems than you can shake a fist at...

I find it ironic that blogging is one of the areas that Flash itself is particularly ill-suited for, and though Macromedia owns ColdFusion, they're using Blogger and Userland for the weblogs. Nevertheless, this might end up being a good thing. Back in the Newton days, the Newton developer community was helped immesurably by Apple's Newton Developer Technical Support staffers spending most of their day on the Newton Development newsgroup. They gave an amazing look behind the scenes, and more importantly, you could tell that the communication was two way. Several ideas that first came to light in the newsgroup's threads resurfaced again in subsequent versions of the OS.

What I'm trying to say is that not everyone can have the organically grown relationship that TiVo does with their customers, and we'll just have to see how mature Macromedia and their blogging cadre are about honesy vs marketing on the weblogs, basically, whether they use their blogs for good or evil.

In a twist of ironic irony (yes, that's right, the failure of the cellphone horoscope's failure makes it double), my cellphone horoscope for Monday, the day I gave notice at Yahoo, was:

YOU FEEL BOTHADVENTUROUS ANDSECURE. YOU CANFINALLY EXPLAINTHE CONNECTION.

I've never seen a more accurate horoscope.

Okay, now that the announcement has been made, both here and at work, I've got to buckle down and finish a lot of things, starting off with my own job description. It might be a little quiet around here for a day or two, or seeing how often y'all comment, it might not! :-)

Oh yes, and the thing I was referring to in the earlier posts about being nervous and all, was about letting my manager know my plans.

Well, the press release is posted, and the cat is out of Schrödinger's box.

That's what all the fretting has been about, leaving a job I love in favor of an opportunity I can't refuse.

So excited! Now, must go to work. I'm not gonna be a lame-duck slacker.