I just ordered a whole bunch of Shrinky Dink paper off the net! I haven't been this excited about an online purchase since I bought Bulk Pez!

I was browsing through my web logs last night and I found someone who'd been visiting my site off and on for the last couple months from my old company CKS (well, actually marchFIRST now). Anyhow, I tracked him down to the same office I was working in when I was building the Levi's Online Store (sorry, no link. Bastages...).

Anyhow, I didn't know who he was so I whipped up a little true interactive media that came up the next time his particular machine accessed my site.

Turns out he joined up after I left, but I can thank him for the traffic I've been getting recently from littleyellowdifferent, his blog.

Hi Ernie!

Mike Bonnell's Computer Wallpaper site is the best I've seen if you like abstract light-on-dark art (or, to a lesser extent, cool Bryce renderings).

Several of these pictures are astounding on backlit LCD screens, and most of them are offered in resolutions from 640x480 clear up to 1600x1200.

Intensity is one of my favorites.

Everyone's talking about the new Palms announced today, including the m100 but nobody seems to mention that the m100 is exactly the same thickness and weight as the Palm V and Vx.

At $150, it's the toy I'm certain most Palm V owners will want to get their SO, spouse, and kids. A year from now, more people will have these than Nokia 51x0's.

This site epitomizes my corporate experiences. Fucked Company is the dot-com deadpool, where people go to predict which companies will have layoffs, takeovers, or will outright fold, and if you're right you gain points and acclaim!

The scary thing is I'd probably be a winner if I only picked those companies who I've worked for at one time or another, including Petstore.com (completely folded, selling assets to Pets.com), Creditland (on its last legs after laying off 3 VPs and 20 others last month), and marchFIRST who had the relatively minor fuck of laying off 200 employees in the Whitman-Hart -/ USWeb/CKS merger. (Do I use a slash or a hyphen when one company has a hyphen and the other has a slash? I guess if I wanted to be precise I'd call it Whittman- Hart- USWeb- Ikonic- a- hundred- little- webcos- Cleary- Kvamme- Suiter- Partners- almost- called- reinvent- but- someone- was- too- close- but- razorfish- stole- it- anyhow- and- now- we're- one- happy- marchFIRST.)

It's sort of paradoxical. The last time I saw Sting in concert before Saturday was nine years ago, when I was a freshman at Berkeley. Coincidentally, I saw his show at the Shoreline Amphitheatre and had lawn seats, the same as last night. I remember how incredible the experience was (I didn't go to concerts very often at all) and was riding a high until Monday when my Calc TA asked if anyone else went to the show, and then lambasted it on technical merits (Sting was having some voice problems from being too long on tour).

Well, the irony here is it's nine years later, and I went to a show that, being technically great, she probably would have loved, yet left me feeling empty.

Granted, my group didn't show up early enough to get good lawn seats, so we were pretty far to the back, but the energy in the crowd was amazingly low. I probably spent more time thinking about this than I did enjoying the concert.

My first assumption was that the whole crowd just lacked energy, but I started thinking about what it would take to make that happen. The theory of large numbers would say that such a significant shift in an entire population would require a large imputus. Could it have been the hour it took to get from the freeway offramp to a parking space? there was a lot of inexplicable traffic all over the Bay Area all day, could that have put people in a foul mood? The declining NASDAQ market? (This was in Mountain View, after all. Probably half the cars in the lot were paid for with dot-com-dollars.)

Musing on this, during Roxanne, I did notice that there was a lot more arm waving and rocking going on in the sections close to the stage, throught back to the lawn seats, and tapering off about halfway up the lawn, to where people were just a diarama of standing and sitting statues. Maybe the energy just wasn't reaching this far back? The music wasn't particularly loud. In fact, where we were, it wasn't much louder than what I'd consider 'loud' in my living room. It really was like watching it on TV, seperated from the volume, the stage itself, watching the action on projection screens delayed a half-second to account for the time it takes sound to travel from the stage all the way back to our seats.

Mystery solved, until it was audience-participation time. What audience participation? It's pretty much par for the course for the stage presence to cajole the audience with a "I can't hear you!" and "I thought I was in " but it's a sad thing when the person actually means it. So much for the theory that it was just a back-lawn phenomenon. He couldn't have heard us back there anyhow.

So what then? Was it just a bad performance? Like I said before, it was technically great. Sting's voice was at its best, the band was great, stage design was beautiful. the song choice had a lot to be desired. It was an odd mix of his older music (15 years or older) and a few things from the latest album. Aside from Fields of Gold, I didn't pick up on anything from between 2 and 10 years ago. No Soul Cages tracks, nothing from Ten Sumners Tales, and strangely, he seemed to shy away from the political songs (Russians, They Dance Alone, etc) that got him where he is. the second song was a medly of three of his older songs which seemed (to me anyway) to say "retrospective" more than "concert." Not that I mind the old songs, I love them, but not when they're treated like vignettes or "Earlier, on 'Sting'..."

Talking to the audience was nonexistant until halfway through the concert, when he twice yelled out "Hello San Francisco!" or "It's great to be back in San Francisco!" which would have been cliche if he had been in San Francisco, but this was Mountain View, with an audience from all over the Bay Area, most of whom probably don't view themselves as San Franciscans. I wonder what he yelled out the previous night when he played at the Concord Pavilion? If anyone knows, please let me know.

Anyhow, to make a long story a slightly shorter story, I took away two things from the concert:

First, that Sting is inches away from the big five-oh, but he's trying hard to maintain the same 1980's image, well muscled in a tank top and short haircut, pushing the 'retrospecitve' angle, as though he doesn't seem comfortable evolving into a mature musical presence.

Second, back to the audience that was really dead before anything Sting could have done to them, I'm left with a curiosity of the mechanics of chaos theory on social systems. What could have affected such a large group? Or was it the absence of something?

By amazing coincidence, while reading the news this morning, I came across a review of The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. The book seems to be all about strange attractors and chaos theory in social settings. This is definitely getting pushed near the head of my to-read list.

Despite having no other food allergies (aside from a mild reaction to sulfates), I'm the only person I've ever known who has an adverse reaction to both Ginseng and Echinecia. A whole wave of new beverage solutions are lost on me.

Going to the Sting concert tonight at the Shoreline.

If anyone else happens to be there with a talkabout radio, I'll be on channel 7, code 11.

Cameo's doing really well. I've distributed 9 cameras so far in this batch and one of the ('Bob') has already come back! It's being developed at the moment, and I'll be putting the pictures up next week, along with the (long, looong overdue) site refresh!

Also, I heard from the current keepers of camera 'Josh'. It's in good hands, and will reportedly be making a trip down to SoCal before flying to New York for more photographic merriment!

There are almost as many postulates of how time travel would work (from the paradoxical perspective) as there are stories that have time travel in them. The trouble is, I have yet to see a time travel story that rigidly adheres to a single one of them. Invariably they assume time travel works one way in one aspect, then contradicts itself in another way.

What's your favorite time travel story? Do you have one in mind that works well technically?

For the curious, I've been spending a fair amount of time (hah) thinking about tt paradoxes since I've been playtesting a new game, Chrononauts, to be released by Wunderland in November.