Sans captions, sans cropping, sans sense, here's my photo gallery for SXSW 2001.

Well, the heat's on again, and California is cutting people's power again today in rolling blackouts.

The site may go down at any time, as I don't know what blackout block I'm in, (1-16) but I do know that we haven't had one yet, and they've already gone through 1 through 11, so it can't be too long. The site will likely go down for 90 minutes to 2 hours when the blackout does hit.

This is just another reason why I should finish up the move to Dreamhost. Presumably they have their own generator, so when the power gets cut, the site won't fail...

Lone Gunmen Spoiler ahead:

Last night's Lone Gunmen episode really irked me. On the quest for a secret water-powered car, once they actually find it, they decide they can't give it to the world because water-powered cars would result in more cars, more roads, more traffic, and more mayhem. This is the most short-sighted piece of crap I've seen on a show I actually like in a long time.

Great, water-powered cars are bad. sure, right, wahever. But might just the water powered engine be useful? For say, generating power? I'm sitting here along with 26 million other Californians, waiting for our power to go out because we can't buy enough, not to mention third world countries out there that just can't make enough. Now Fox is trying to tell me that the ability to create clean energy in abundance is bad? Thanks.

Oh, and just to clear up any misconceptions about Californians: On average, we use less power per capita than the national average. It's not that we're using so much power that we don't have any left, it's that power companies out there understand that we have to buy from them, so they're charging more than the utility companies can afford to pay. Watch out, your state might be next. Except Texas, of course. they'd never stand for that...

Tapping the last of my Post-SXSW euphoria, I'm doing a little work on a new project I mentioned to a few fellow bloggers. I'll need a few people with regular weblogs to help me test it out, but it should roll out in v1.0 by April First. Make that March 31, to get away from any April Fools speculation.

Suffice to say it'll be a nice value-add for anyone who writes a weblog, and anyone who reads one. Stay tuned for more info.

For the time being, the project code name is Missile Command..

So Mir is set to be de-orbited (how often do you get to use that word?) in just a few more days, and the media machines are starting theyre 'what if' scenarios, detailing what could go wrong if, as has happened two other times NASA and the Russian Space Agency (well, the USSR at the time) tried to de-orbit sizable objects, resulting in the crash of Skylab in the Austrailian outback (and one very, very unfortunate cow), and an uncontrolled crash of a Soviet sattelite in rural Canada 23 years ago.

So what could happen this time? Well, both Japan and New Zealand are keeping a carefuil watch, even though it is more likely that Chile and Argentina would be the victims of a botched re-entry attempt.

My favorite media quote so far?

"It's 2 billion chances to 1 that you're going to get struck by this thing."
Col. Norman Black, U.S. Space Command.

Hmm... Seems to me that there are 6 billion people on the planet. Does Norman expect then that three people will be carrying the unlucky lottery tickets? Did we forget and leave a few people in the station?

I'm not one for reality TV, but I can't wait to see the re-entry video.

Yahoo!, that is.

So I made the decision. Yahoo gave all the right answers, as did CMU, and so I've decided to defer my admission to CMU's HCI program for one year, and go to work for Yahoo in the interim. Yahoo has told me they don't mind my plan to get my masters because a year is a long time, and they believe that after a year at Yahoo, I won't want to leave.

So, as of May 29th, I'll be starting at Yahoo as a User Experience Designer. They're getting ready to move into their brand new corporate palace campus in a few weeks. The commute is going to be a bear, but I have a few creative ideas on how to handle it.

I was told that something like 60% of the people in the UE group at Yahoo comute more than 35 miles to work, so at least I'm in good company.

Stock price fell to 13 9/16 yesterday. I wonder if my options are from the hire date or my first day of work. I wonder which would be better...

Sony announced the new version of the Clie, their Palm-based handheld. Among the improvements is support for the 'magic gate' memory stick format, and one of the stated features is the ability to download up to 160 minutes of video (presumably compressed to 320x320 resolution) onto a memory stick, and play it on the handheld.

A few people around the web have called this utterly useless (what, video business cards? Maybe store one movie?) but I think it's terriffic.

Think about the possible convergences. Imagine that Sony releases a new TiVo model that has a memory stick slot in the front. You can specify not only which shows you want to record, but which you'd like to download to the memorystick. It would do this automatically, and you grab the stick in the morning before you go to work, and you can watch the shows you missed while taking BART, the train, or your passive transportation of choice to work (or to a friends house, school bus, whatever).

Add a little vidcam (like the one built in to the Vaio Picturebook) and the proper software, and you can record videomail that will send the next time you dock. You could even do a little non-linear editing to make everything perfect. Nifty.

Yahoo! requires all new hires to sign an 'assignment of inventions agreement' which, as a part of it, says I need to make a list of all my current inventions to protect them from inclusion under the agreement.

All my inventions? That's gona be a fun list, especially since invention is defined in the agreement as: "designs, trademarks, discoveries, formulae, processes, manufacturing techniques, trade secrets, inventions, improvements, ideas, business plans or strategies, or copyrightable works."

In essence, I'll be writing up the 100 or so ideas on my list of 'utilities to write if I had a year off' as well as a list of my current sites, projects, and writings. You can bet fury.com will be at the top of the list.

So does this mean I've made a decision on my future? Not yet. There are still a few wrinkles to iron out, but Yahoo's chances look good right now.

Check outthe top navigation bar on Hypnotic.com. It really lives up to the name.

While I'm not quite confident in the logic of trusting a plug-in for your site's primary navigation, it's coming a long way. For a slightly less ...liquid example, check out the navigation on the official X-box site.

---

Update: Case in point, when I try to point my browser to the above xbox link, it forwards me to the download page for Macromedia Flash, even though I know I already have it, as not only can I veiw flash content, but I've also seen that page before on this computer. Javascript sniffer code just isn't up to snuff quite yet...

Random thought for the moment: When your news (or other content-driven) site tailors its presentation to your specified or implied interests, is it giving you a skewed view of the world?

There's little question that our individual world-views are largely creations of the media, which decides for us that the Jon Benet Ramsey (or better, OJ) case is more important in the world-view than a serial killer in Uganda, for example. But to what extent do we all rely on having the same fisheye-lens view of current events?

As important as the news that I get is to my own perception of a world view, so it is important to be able to constantly assess the state of the media, and what it means when post-election third-party Floridian recounts get less coverage than the new President's creative vocal stylings of the last day.

To a large extent, content personalization distorts this view further, by imposing a 'personal fisheye' lens to the already distorted 'media fisheye' lens in an odd attempt to correct the problem in the first place.

Why is this a problem? Maybe it's not. Maybe it's a good thing that some of us actually get news that isn't in the public memeset of the day. Maybe it's interesting to actually be able to say "did you hear about..." and not have the other person say that they too saw the story on CNN (ABCnews, Slashdot, MetaFilter, or what have you)

What do you think? Does fisheye media attention help focus us as a common people, or is it just the encapsulazation and palletization of news into nice little daily packets? Might things be different, for example, if papers (or media sites) weren't always the same length, and slow news days meant smaller papers, instead of thinner content?

This is a perfect example of why I should get off my ass and install a comments system on Fury, and I'll be doing it over Spring Break (read: 1.5 weeks away) but 'till then, please feel free to email me and I'll summarize comments and viewpoints on the blog, poetically and ironically applying my own fisheye on the viewpoints expressed. Actually, just to make things fair, I'll also post a raw data feed page of everyone's comments. Is that better?

PS: To the wonderful people I met at SXSW this last week, reading this blog for the first time, please don't run away! I'm not always so dry; only on slow news days...

Well, the folks at SXSW have posted a highlights reel of the web awards ceremony. Check it out in hi or lo bandwidth versions.