The link below doesn't seem to work on my browsers... Any of you night owls have a favorite insta-poll maker? I'll try again in the morning.

So naturally as I start more projects, efforts get spread out too much, and I need to decide what to focus on. Since I value your opinion (and I need to learn to work on one thing at a time), I've made a poll for you all to vote on which project you'd most like to see completed or enhanced.

Please vote and help me get a picture of what's hot and what's not here at Fury.

If your opinion can't be reduced to a single click, feel free to drop me a line.

Some quickie tidbits while I turn qwer into something more interesting and usable (not that it's not nifty, but right now it's 'hey, that was neat' nifty instead of 'Let's see what's new at qwer' nifty).

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A reader (I forgot to ask his permission to name him) sent me this link yesterday. I'm not sure which is more disturbing: that this file photo of Bruce Willis looks a lot like me, or that people I don't know (or at least whose names I can't place) send me pictures demonstrating just ho wwell they know what I look like...

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I made up a joke a few days ago (granted I've been reading a little too many jokes from Yahooligans! recently, but here goes:

What's big, muddy, and uses lots of swear words?

I dunno, what?

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Got my Gameboy Advance yesterday. I also got a 128 meg card for my Elph, so now I can take 220 pictures without downloading. Nifty...

For those in the Berkeley area, and/or into Neil Gaiman, he'll be reading excerpts from his latest book, American Gods, at Cody's Books on Telegraph tomorrow (Wednesday) at 7:30. I'm hoping to make it back from work in time to get a good seat. If you haven't read any of Gaiman's other works, you really should (each for very different reasons), and if you have read Gaiman before, then you'll probably want to be there tomorrow night.

On the train, zipping down the East Bay to work after a fun weekend.

My friend David (Bjalfi) visited from Makon, Georgia this weekend, and is right now on his flight back. David's a friend from my SCA days (1993-ish) and is a frequent reader of the site (Hi!). David's as into games as I am, and we played some old favorites (Fluxx, Cribbage, Scrabble) and some new ones (The Big Cheese, The Big Idea).

Having someone else staying at my apartment made me re-realize some of the oddities of my apartment:

• Don't ever go into the fridge. Really.
• There's plenty of hot water. It will never run out.
• There is rarely cold water. Turn on the cold water and you may have to wait 20 minutes before the water turns from scalding to cold. Even the toilet water. Really.
• A few light switches don't work unless you hit them. Use the floor lamps instead.
• The downstairs buzzer for my apartment is cross-wired with that of my neighbor, so whenever one of us gets buzzed, we both get buzzed.
• Don't mess around with Jim.
• The light switch for the bathroom is outside the bathroom door.

I'm sure there are more, but that's all I can think of at the moment. Anyhow, David had a fun time, we went to a barbecue at Karen & Crystal's (you guys really need to name your place). Karen and Crystal yesterday went to the Novato Craft and Music Fair, the same one that the three of us went to last weekend, or would have gone to, if we had had the dates right. As it was that trip was a lot of fun anyhow. I'll have to see how it compared to the actual fair.

As you can see on the 'Look Ahead' left-hand navigation, the 'family vacation' is starting in just a little over a week. I and twenty of my closest relatives are all off to Barcelona, Spain, the first leg of a Mediterranian cruise. My shipment from Amazon should arrive at work today which, among other things will include a 128meg CompactFlash card and extra battery for my camera, so I'll be able to take all the pictures I want at each of the stops, including France, Italy, Greece, and Turkey. There are also (very) limited uplink facilities on the ship, so you can expect periodic fury-on-the-move updates right here for the duration. It's just like having you all with me!

Well, we're coming up on Fremont station now, which means I should wrap this up so I can write a quick qwer update. Ooh! My cellphone horoscope just came in! I've got to tell you, these horoscopes are the stupidest things I've ever read on a daily basis. They always consist of three short sentences, and seem like they're randomly put together from a huge list of vague catchphrases. Todays: "All your ducks are in a row. Neat answers feed the starving. Clear your conscience." For one glimmering moment this weekend I thought maybe they were haiku, which would suddenly redeem them in my eyes, but alas, they're just stupid fortune cookie-esque koans. Pity, that. I am still working on Federation Horoscopes, weekly respective advice for Human, Klingon, Vulcan, and Borg. I may put up the first week before I leave for Spain.

Okay, gottagobye! Don't forget to wish a happy birthday to Emily if you know her! And if you don't, just pass on your birthday wishes to me and I'll see that she gets them!

One of those words that, if you repeat it often enough, loses all meaning. Except that it didn't have a meaning to begin with.

Okay, so qwer.org has been live for a full 36 hours now, and I'm alreadey convinced that it will be a success, though I'm just as convinced that it badly needs some more functionality to be truly useful. Here are my thoughts so far in bulleted list form:

• Qwer isn't supposed to be secure. Someone mentioned that I could be sitting in my room, pouring over database contents, and that's absolutely true. Don't go putting things in qwer that you don't want people to see. "Security through obscurity isn't."
• I need to implement some measures to prevent the un-fun from going through and deleting everything interesting. To this end I'm toying with a few feature possibilities:
  • Passwords: NO memberships, but when you make/change a qwer page, you can optionally put in a password, which can be used with the features below.
  • Stay of Permenance: For N days (between 1 and 7) after a post is made, it can't be altered except by the password-holder. After that time passes, anyone can make a change, and even apply a new password, resetting the 'stay timer.' This would be a checkbox-able feature that the poster can choose to implement or ignore.
  • Ghost-town timer: After 7 days without anyone looking at a specific qwer page, it can float into the abyss.
• Searchable qwer pages: When you make/edit a page, you can mark it 'private' which would inhibit it from being included in searches. Otherwise, people could perform searches to find words or phrases throughout the qwer world.
• Recent qwer pages: A list of recently changed/created qwer pages that haven't been marked private (maybe 'invisible' is a better term?).
• Visit counters and timers: so you can see the number of visits, and the times since creation, etc.

These are still all in my head, but I think I'll implement them soon, to bring a little order to the anarchy.

Uh-oh. Train's coming up to Great America. I gotta go. Be sure to write if you have any cool ideas/complaints/whatever about qwer. Later!

While the technical production of Qwer is done, there's still a lot of work to be done on the user-experience end of things. Basically I need to make it something that has an obvious purpose to someone who stumbles upon it. I've got plans, and they'll make things a lot clearer.

For the time being, Qwer is an 'internet clipboard' that you can use to easily pass urls or other text-based info from one computer to another.

Say you stumble across a url for a file you need to download on your other computer. Rather than copy the url by hand or email it to yourself (assuming you have email on both your compuers) you can just go to qwer.org/something and paste the url in, then go to qwer.org/something on the other computer to pick it up.

This is also handy when you're on the phone and you want to share a url with someone you're talking to. If it's a deep link (like an amazon page, or anything else with a messy url) you can just put the url into qwer.org/yourname (or anything else) and tell your friend to go there to pick it up. The site is called qwer.org because 'qwer' are the four first keys on the (qwerty) keyboard, and it's one of the easiest and fastest urls that's still out there.

There are other possibilities for uses and features that I'm sure will emerge. One thing is that it's entirely not registration or cookie based: There is no security, other than through obscurity (It's unlikely that you'd stumble across qwer.org/4gnnfn45y5y954 accidentally). I may introduce additional features, like the ability to search qwerbits, but if I do, I'll also make a checkbox so people can exclude their qwerbit.

The most interesting thing I think is to find out what uses people make on their own. One possibility is the communal qwerStory... More ideas? Share with me, or better yet, share with everyone!

Qwer.org is basically done, except for the paint job (and explanation).

The home page is blank, but if you go to any other URL, it seems to be working fine. I'll write tomorrow on exactly what Qwer is, and how you can use it, but just think of it as your own internet clipboard, sans security.

Hope everyone's having a great weekend, and that others didn't get sunburned like I did today!

Driving down to and returning from my second interview at Yahoo!, back in February, I was weighing the merits of employment against those of a Masters education, juxtaposed against the realities of working 50 miles from home and studying 3000 miles from home. Lounging most heavy in my mind were the changes that would manifest transitioning from the 9-4 life of a student living 300 yards from campus and that of a full-time designer working 9 hours bracketed by a combined four-hour commutes

Amidst the downsides, I did see one bright spot that I held to: The Parallax View.

Parallax, the difference between two views of the same scene perceived from slightly seperated points in space, is what gives us stereoscopic vision and a perception of depth. Two simultaneous viewpoints give your brain the information it needs to construct a better picture of the world around it. Similarly, living in Berkeley (northeast SF Bay) and working in Sunnyvale (South Bay) gives me a better perspective on the bay area as a whole.

History: Back in 1994, when Karen and I moved out of our El Cerrito apartment, me to regress back into the dorms (Clark Kerr, building 9 single-in-a-suite) and her to a shared apartment deep in silicon Santa Clara to intern at IBM, the 50 miles between Berkeley and Santa Clara seemed like the voids of the Baja peninsula, ill-defined and forboding. It was a big deal to drive down now and then to see my best friend, or to take BART->bus->lightrail->bus for the same journey. In retrospect it's hard (and a bit depressing) to believe we didn't see each other more often, but from a single-point perspective from a small Berkeley dorm room and a car bearing a moniker of 'deathtrap' and a hood secured with a chain and padlock, the South Bay seemed far, far away.

Later, as more of my friends moved to the South Bay, or at least south of Berkeley, that world started to seem a little closer. For the better part of a year Ammy and I would split the distance for dinner meeting at Hobee's in Fremont. Even then, the measure from Berkeley to Fremont seemed only a bit shorter than the full drive to Santa Clara.

After living with Karen I began a long tradition of getting close to the geographically remote: Liz/Fair Oaks/95 miles/79 minutes, Dana/Davis/63 miles/60 minutes, Crystal/Vallejo/24 miles/30 minutes, Emily/Pleasanton/37 miles/32 minutes. Yet even pushing down the interstate asphalt that lay between the point-source of home and the point-destination of a significant other did little to make the Bay Area seem any closer or more accessable. I'm not sure whether that's because visiting a girlfriend is different than going to a party in The City, or because all of the above lived east of me, and thus represented an exodus from, and not an exploration of, the Bay Area.

Zipping back to the now, driving (or taking the train, as I am at this moment) to and from Sunnyvale on a daily basis has done a lot towards bringing a sense of depth and perspective to my own personal Bay Area geography, consequently bringing the more distant reaches closer to home.

With one foot at each pole of the Bay, suddenly diverting to Mountain View, Santa Clara, San Francisco, Hayward, or Alameda after work isn't nearly the arduous journey that it once was for the Berkeley-laden student.

Of course, all this space comes at the expense of time. As it is when I take the train I leave home at 7 am and get back at around 7:30 pm, so any extra-vehicular activity seriously cuts in to the four personal hours before my own self-mandated bedtime, but as long as I have waystations closer to work where I can bide the night and shortcut the sixthday transit, the Bay has come into my grasp. Like the sojourner gunning down Baja with a second tank of gas in the back to bridge the gap, so I now have both the perspective and the pit-stop to fully explore my decade-home, a palace with too many rooms that I rarely think of and never visit. (Do you get the gist of the post now?)

I'm writing on the train, but I'm not going to worry about posting wirelessly. I'll just hotsync the palm and post once I get home.

So, today's blogfodder falls into the realm of serendipity. I was thinking about a project I wanted to make, a relatively simple one, but with wide application. I'll describe it later (that is, if you're one of those like Karen who reads the blog chronologically, bottom-to-top (and for whom posts longer than one screen must mean a lot of zigzagging up, then down, then up again) but I digress.. If you read from top-to-bottom, then you already know what I'm talking about.)

At any rate, I was looking for a nice, short mnemonic domain for this service which, for lack of a domain I'll call 'clip' (at least initially it will probably live at 'clip.fury.com').

So I was domain-name hunting before work this morning and after a few hundred ideas (nearly all taken in .com, .net. and .org) I settled on either ibidibi.com (pronounced 'ibbi-dibbi' and though a cool palendrome, not quite as cool as idibidi.*, which I'm pretty sure is taken), or voxen.net.

I like voxen.net, as it sounds cool, is short, and even has a little Latin root in there to spark the imagination. It's a little like vox (speech), vixen (sex sells), and voxel (a 3D pixel). In fact, a geek prone to hypercorrection might think that voxen is the plural of voxel.

But I digress...

After deciding on voxen.net, I started thinking about how it lends itself perfectly to my voice-blogging project (that and Dinah noting that vox is voice). Briefly, the voice-blogging project would be a service using VoiceXML and Tellme's developer services to allow registered users call Tellme and record voice blog entries that will automatically post to their site. A lot has to be hammered out, including whether I can do on-the-fly mp3 compression or if I have to use aiff or wav. Then there's hosting. Should I follow Blogger's model and let those who have room and wherewithall to host their own voiceblog entries use the service for free, and either charge those who use Voxel's hosting, or have some sort of advertising model. Anyhow, that's a bit out there, and a lot of things need to be figured out before we get there.

So that, really briefly, is the current vision for voxel.net. You're in your car, stuck in traffic (which frankly is where I get most of my interesting ideas, the forebrain wanders as the backbrain takes the wheel), and you have a thought, you call tellme, login through voice commands, and share your thoughts.

Leia doesn't think she'd use it beyond playing with it a few times, because she wouldn't want to present herself in her voice. I completely understand. I have a lot more control over my tone and content when I'm in front of a keyboard (though you'd never guess it from this rambling post touching on many thoughts but mastering none). I think the idea voice-blogging is like text blogging without a backspace key or the ability to stop for even a moment. Heck, I record my answering machine greeting 10 times before I'm happy done.

Think it's useful? Have an alternate use in mind for the application? I'm all ears.

Actually, as a big 'sike' to everyone, I'm not going to try to explain 'clip' just yet. I'll have it done in a bit (unlike my other projects, when this one's up it'll be fully functional in its glorious simplicity) and you can see it and use it for yourself. Some of the best mainstream tools are born from the inventor personally wanting to salve a problem for themself. Clip falls in that category. I hope you find it useful...