New locks

Recently, the front door lock had been sticking, so I asked Michele to call the local locksmith to come change the cores on the front and back doors.
The locksmith came this morning and did the work.
As I was heading home, Michele decided to run out with the girls to do a few errands. No big deal, I’ll have a little quiet time in the house until they get home.
The only problem is that Michele didn’t leave me a new key. The doors are securely locked. So now I’m sitting on the back porch with the laptop waiting for her to come home.
Good thing thing I’ve got wifi…

Hubris

I was catching up with the various blogs I read after a bit of a hiatus when I stumbled into the latest Los Angeles Blog Scene Tizzy. Evidently LAist made a little slam on blogging.la about the amount of traffic the two sites get.
This prompted a bunch of posts, trackbacks and recriminations bouncing around the small LA blogosphere echo chamber. I mean there’s probably 20 people out of 9 million that understand what people are pissed about and all the people involved.
I’m friends with Sean and Jason of blogging.la, and I have nothing against the LAist people (except the name… I mean the thing LA people hate is using NY derived names… GothamIST, LAIST, ChicagoIST? WTF?) I digress.
They both have their good and bad points. They both seem to care about the Grove and I couldn’t give a flying fuck. It’s all about movies at the Arclight and dinner at Musso & Franks for me and Scarymommy. The Grove is for TOURISTS.
So I looked at the traffic that the humble Cruftbox gets. OMFG, what would you know. My stupid ass weblog about stupid stuff like hot sauce, Tivos, and video games is kicking their ass in the traffic realm.
Lookie here:


In the words of Ali G, Boo-ya-ka-sha ! My slacktastic weblog is beating the commerical venture. Long live the power of haphazard and meandering weblogs!
Sorry if it seems like I’m rubbing their noses in it…
All you social software types please explain this in terms of the power law or some other corollary about hitting what you don’t aim for.
If you want to see more graphs about the hits & trends ’cause you are an infopron addict, click more.

Continue reading “Hubris”

It just kind of made sense

Six words about Sixapart ain’t bad.
A few weeks ago, I spoke to a reporter from the Wall Street Journal about how we use weblog software at work. We probably spoke for a good half hour about how we were using the software.
Today the story about Sixapart and MovableType ran in the Marketplace section of the WSJ. Amazingly my name and a short quote was in the article. Check it out:


For all my blathering they choose six words I said, “It just kind of made sense.” as my quote. They call my engineers ‘technicians’ and they mention us using cameras, which we don’t have. But hey, what am I complaining about, I’m quoted in the Wall Street Journal.

Took a hit

This morning, we took a power hit in the house. Clocks reset, the lights flickered, the Tivo stayed up, but one computer horked up.
The media server wouldn’t reboot after the power hit. Ruh roh. The media server that I’ve been meaning to back up for months now, but never got around to…
After several computers attempting to boot it, the drive is unresponsive.


I’m afraid it’s dead. On it is our entire CD collection ripped to MP3.
Our entire 500+ album MP3 collection gone. Gone.
Maybe I can teach my daughters to rip CDs…

Distractions

Life’s had me going in several directions at once recently. It’s a good thing. As my father says, “It’s better to wear out than to rust.” He doesn’t say there’s time for blogging…
Last week I was in San Francisco to talk about how we use social software at work. It seems that my talk was well recieved, well at least Jeff Jarvis liked it. The Web 2.0 Conference seemed like quite a big deal. The conference was at the Hotel Nikko, an upscale hotel in the heart of SF.
At these kinds of gatherings, I’m something of a cross between a tourist and an object for show & tell. I’m not in the internet business, I’m in the TV business, so I am not as concerned about the latest Google rumor as most of the Web 2.0 crowd. The discussion is interesting, but it’s not my lifeblood and I’m not in one of the many startups.
The was a definite vibe in the room. Money. The dotboom is over and the money is flowing back in. Like sharks circling the chum in the water, people are working the room like it’s 1999 (cue Prince music…). Discussions of VCs, funding rounds, and customers pervade every corner. The money is getting the greed levels up and people all want a piece.
I meet some cool new people, renewed aquaintences will others and stared at a billionaire. You can see me here, working hard with a bottle of beer in my hand. Click on the Brewster Kahle photo.


Across the street was the Hilton, whose workers were on strike. They were marching, banging drums, and chanting. It’s been 10 years since I lived in San Francisco, but it retains the same eclectic feel. The strikers were chanting in Chinese at some points. Only in the City by the Bay…
In other news, Katamari Damacy has taken hold of the household and all four of us are playing it. We finally beat the game and I was able to build a truly huge katamari.

516 meters is good, but I’m told some people can get it up to over 800 meters.
Michele has been busy as well, deciding that now is the time to clean the house of things. She’s arranged for a large dumpster to appear and I spent most of the day on Saturday filling it up to the brim. And we still haven’t put a dent in the mounds of crap we have.
She also went to Costco and picked up a little Gatorade. I should have known that there is no such thing as a little Gatorade when shopping at Costco.
Here’s the outside fridge.

I stopped counting the bottles when I got to 20 and there were plenty more. So if you’re thirsty, stop by…

Katamari Damacy Rules

Last week I picked up Katamari Damacy. I saw this game at E3 this year. Andy and I agree that it looked like the best game evar.
The game involves rolling a small sticky ball around, picking up objects along the way. As you get bigger, you can pick up bigger and bigger things. You need to get your katamari to a certain size to finish the level.
There is a very Japanese like theme involving the King of the Cosmos (your father, you being the Prince…) and a strange anime family that you see in surreal snippets.
To be honest, I speed through all the translated story line since it makes no sense…


Once you get to the requested size, the King of the Cosmos congratulates you and urges you to get even bigger. The size relationships are accurate, so when you get to be three meters tall, you can pick up people and other large objects. Nothing more satisfying than picking up a pair of large sumo wrestlers.
I love it, the kids love it, even Michele loves the game…

In addition to the single player mode, there is a head to head mode where you can compete. The best is when you can grab your opponent and drag them around.
You should run, not walk, to the game store to pick up this game.