In Star Wars IV through VI, I was Luke Skywalker, fighting for his past and his future at the same time, up against evil and incredible odds and emerging victorious at great expense.

In the Matrix I was Neo, someone who believed there was more to the world than we were aware of, given the chance to see behind the curtain, and discovering that I was the only person who might be able to rip that curtain down.

In Fellowship of the Rings I was Frodo, on an unasked for quest to save the world and all that is good.

In Star Wars: Phantom Menace I was.. who? Princess Amadala? No. Obi Wan, or Qui Jan? Unh unh. Anakin? Certainly not. Jar-jar? Ugh.

Ep One wasn't about a personal struggle or a quest. It was an ensemble action flick with pretty CGI. Who am I supposed to bond with, to put myself behind and see their own troubles as my own? Who am I really supposed to get close to?

Maybe Attack of the Clones will be better. Maybe Anakin is old enough now that I can relate to him. Maybe we see through his eyes enough that we feel it's his story. Maybe there's gonads and strife. Maybe there's valor born of both necessity and despair.

As any Smallville watcher will tell you, we have to love Anakin before we can hate Vader.

Maybe Anakin will do what he does because it's what has to be done.

Somehow I doubt it though. The previews don't paint Anakin as particularly humble, a quality that Frodo, Luke, and Neo all shared. What will Episode II contain to make me proud of Anakin? What will make him worthy of my suspension of not just disbelief, but sense of self, to let me put my being into his?

Dear Attack, Please don't suck.

What if, in the final karmic analysis, only our self-propelled journeys count? What if all the elevator rides up two or five stories don't count, but the stairs walked down do?

How deep in the bowels of hell am I already?

I'm in a Photoshop level II training class today, on lunch break...

So, how 'bout that new security alert system? Green->Blue->Yellow->Orange->Red? Makes less sense than Judo belt colors. I mean, Blue?

So my camcorder came today, and the building manager signed for it, but he wasn't in when I got home, so I dropped by his office on my way to the Starry Plough at 9, and he was there.

Tromping back up to the top floor with my new tech, I wondered if Sony was cool enough to charge the battery for me. they were, but about half of it had bled off since it left Sony's hands, probably over a month ago.

Still, half a charge was better than none, and I wasted no time (well, maybe a little) getting the beastie to the Plough where I was a wallflower, but a wallflower with a third eye.

Coming home at about 11:30, what else was there to do but fire up iMovie and make my first quicktime? Okay, it's a little rough. I did something wrong when I tried to up the brightness and contrast that resulted in some funky color shifts, but all in all I'm pretty impressed considering the low ambient light and fast action.

I even made you a copy (3 minutes, 4.9 megs). W'hoo!

It looks like Yahoo! is taking a page from Steve Jobs's book, promising something that's so big there's never been anything like it on the Internet, or anywhere else. Liftoff is 1 PM Pacific Time on Wednesday which, incidentally, is just after trading closes at NASDAQ.

And no, I actually have no secret info on what it is...

A few people are probably wondering why I'm here (or, rather, in the Bay Area) instead of Austin, where every weblogger ought to be right now. It's South by Southwest time, and at this moment a few thousand online journalists, strategists, pundits, and cyberliterati are sitting on and partaking of panels, telling stories, and partying it up.

I'd be there too if I wasn't a dork.

At last year's SXSW I had a cascade of good fortune, taking me from someone whose award entry didn't make the finalist cut and who was debating whether to attend, to an award winner and emergency panelist. Time of my life.

This year I was invited to emcee the first annual Iron Webmaster competition. I gladly accepted, and things started to go south. The even staff and I never really made the communication channels that we should have. Team selection happened late, and if I had actually lived up to the legend of Kaga Takeshi (or even William Shatner) I would have reigned in a lot more control, marshalled my forces, planned entertainment that would make good use of the 90 minutes allotted, a period to short to make a decent web site, and too long to try and entertain an audience.

I was still up for it though. Brainstorming with Derek gave me some great ideas, and the organizers asked me if I'd mind having a co-host in the form of the illustrious Ben Brown, a person I hadn't known until a month earlier when I became an instant devotee of the short-lived Ben Brown Show.

Part of the problem was that everyone had the strange idea that, like the organizers, and Ben, I lived in Texas. I didn't realize this until about three weeks ago, when they tried to schedule a brainstorming lunch to start shoring things up. Around the same time I came down with the flu, and a 103-degree Kevin had to miss work for a week, putting me behind on an already aggressive schedule at work. All told, things started looking a little dicey for a five-day Southern romp.

So now most of my weblogging friends are in Austin, and the others are complaining that their web traffic has gone down by 40%, since most people who read weblogs have weblogs, and many of them are down at the interactive face-to-face love-in.

Not so bad though, I got to spend time with friends this weekend, seeing a student production of a stage interpretation of Dante's Inferno (heh, more on that later), having dinner at Zachary's (mmm... Zachary's...), and going hiking at Black Diamond Mine natural park, trudging through sticky wet dirt that still clings to my shoes as I'm on the train to work.

The first report, thirdhand, about Iron Webmaster wasn't promising. I really hope it went well, but it sounds like some of my fears were well-founded. Also it seems that there was a debacle with the Fray Cafe 2 storytelling, and people were turned away at the door because it was full. Apparently even several of those scheduled to tell stories were turned away.

I'm sure there will be comments on other weblogs as webloggers drift from their hotel rooms to the cybercafe at the convention center. As for me, I'm still sorry I'm not there, even more so since I recently found out that despite being a major corporate sponsor of the event, Yahoo! doesn't have the travel budget to send all those interaction designers who want to go to the CHI 2002 conference in Minneapolis next month, and I'll be staying home then too.

I should probably refill my calendar module with other events, considering that the only two things I've had in there for the last four months are conferences I end up not going to anyhow.

Hey, in good news, my video camera should be delivered today! It's supposed to arrive at home, which means Jim the Manager might sign for it. Otherwise I'll probably pick it up at the depot tomorrow.

No matter what else, I had a great weekend, looking forward to a good week. Hope the same is true for you!

According to CNN, record companies are doing away with the single, in order to get people to buy full albums instead.

This comes at the same time that they complain so loudly about music piracy. Here's a quiz: Do you think eliminating singles is going to make the listener (A) More Likely or (B) Less Likely to obtain the song they want in a way that gives money to the record label?

Personally, I think this is a long-term ploy to increase piracy and decrease record label revenues so the RIAA can have some teeth when it tries to show Congress that music piracy is killing their industry.

It reminds me of when my sister used to bite her arm and then run to mom, show her the teeth marks and tell her I did it. Funny how that stopped working when I lost my front two baby teeth and she kept trying it...

(i am not a press release... i am not a press release)

Okay, so it may not be as innovative as MapBlast's LineDrive maps, but Yahoo's new mapping software is a big improvement over the MapQuest (*cough*AOL*cough*) system it replaces. For one thing, the maps are antialiased, so they don't look like crap when you print them, and they have street names you can actually read.

I'm starting a new wish-post-list I call 'synergy', or what would happen if two nifty technologies joined forces.

Today's synergy is the combination of UPS Shipment Tracking and FlightTracker.

The idea is simple: Enter your tracking numbers from any of the major carriers (UPS, FedEx, Airborne, TNT, USPS) or have them automatically entered by giving your shippers a 'receiver number' instead of name/address/phone/shoe-size, and they would all appear in realtime on a map of the US (or your country, or relevant space to accomodate both from and to locations). The map would continually update and you could click on any individual blip to learn more about that package, or submit special instructions to the company (leave in the bushes, hold for pickup, etc.).

The information is there. The carrier already knows what truck has your package, and the trucks (and planes) have GPS transceivers on them. I don't know if the delivery trucks do, but the cross-country haulers and planes are a go.

Like my Garmin GPS, I want to see a heading, distance traveled, distance to go, time estimate, the whole works on there. I want to be able to zoom in ala Maps and see the truck make the left onto the turnpike. I want to see how long he rests at the rest stop. I want to watch him change lanes.

I want to be able to know how many blocks away the package is from my door so I'm not downstairs putting the laundry in the drier when he buzzes my door.

I want to understand how I can order something from MacConnection at 11pm and still have it show up at eight the next morning.

We have the technology, now only if we still lived in the tech-happy world where every idea gets funding. Heck, it could still happen. All it takes are the two magic words 'premium service'.

If they will pay for it, it will come.

I've never had very good luck with vehicles. Most vehicles I've owned have been wrecked, stolen, or both. The unifying thread through these mishaps is that, with rare exception, I've never been there when it happened.

Chapter One: The Huffy - 1980

I was seven years old. I learned how to ride. I spent days with my mom and dad, getting over using training wheels. I remember the first time Dad let go of the back and I started going down the cul de sac on my own, losing my balance, and banging into the neighbor's trash can. I remember it specifically because it was the same trash can (or at least a descendent of the same line, from the same neighbor's breeding stock of corrugated aluminum trashcans) that I hit with Dad's car ten years later when he was teaching me to drive stick.

Well, I did learn how to ride the Huffy sans training wheels at long last. I remember the day I got the hang of it and Susie and I went with the Selbys to UCLA to ride around the campus, and to let their dog splash joyously around in the inverted fountain. I wouldn't claim I was a pro at using the bike; for weeks afterward I would jump off the bike when I wanted to stop, afraid of the brake. For some reason I thought the brake (which worked by trying to backpedal) would lock the wheel and I'd go flying over the handlebars. That fear was stronger than any possible injury I might sustain by jumping off the bike to a run and letting it crash where it may. Eventually I got the hang of it (first of bailing, then of breaking)

Ready bike mobility was a big boon to my social life, and now I could ride to The Galleria. (The Sherman Oaks Galleria, the primordial pool of what would come to be known as the 'Valley Girl.' In fact, the movie of the same name was filmed there.)

Of course, for security's sake, my mom got us chain locks for our bikes. This was before there were Kryptonite locks, and the four-tumbler cylindrical lock afforded more security than this seven-year-old had ever had. I could lock things. I could keep things even when they weren't in my room.

That was the theory, anyhow.

A few months later Susie and I took our bikes to The Galleria and we locked up both bikes with my lock. After a hard day of wandering (the pet store, the arcade, the bookstore, the movie theater, the pet store again) we descended to the underground parking structure to grab our bikes and ride home.

Sifting through the crowded bicycle rack, like trying to find a book on the bookshelf, I skipped over my bike. Looking again, it wasn't there. Locked with the same lock, they were right next together, but now my sister's pink bike stood alone, jilted, with nothing but a broken chain draped on the neck of the handlebars like a broken promise of security.

Speaking of broken security, that was our next stop, to have a report written up by the mallcops. (When you're seven, you don't realize there's a difference between a mallcop and an actual police officer.) The guy said he'd call if anything turned up, and Susie and I made our slow way home, me walking, her on her bike, mildly miffed that the thief didn't think her bike was even worth stealing, when the chain was already cut.

...

Three weeks later I took my skateboard to The Galleria and was skating through the empty parking lot ramps on a Sunday morning and I get stopped by a mall cop who's going to write me up for riding on the parking lot's ramps (first time warning, second time the board gets confiscated). He starts writing up the warning and pauses, frowning further:

"Haven't I stopped you before?"
 "No, sir."
"I think I have. This isn't your first time. I'm going to have to take your board."
 "This is the first time I ever took my skateboard here. I used to take my bike until it got stolen a couple weeks ago."
"Here?"
 "Yeah, right over there. Did you find it yet?"
"No. Um, go on along."

It was a while before I got another bike, but I put that skateboard to good use. In junior high I would ride it 6 miles each way to my Saturday bowling league. (There are so many things wrong with that statement...)

But that's another story.