photo
me and tarin, bathed in white hot flash.
i smile and wait for wine, she wears rock star clothes.
( Friday, December 31, 1999)

photo
me and tarin, bathed in red light.
( Friday, December 31, 1999)

photo
me and tarin at the fray day party, some time ago. derek linked to it as one of his favorites, which i think is funny.
( Friday, December 31, 1999)

y2k ok (nyt)
the key words are "mostly" and "yet" in the article.

the key thing to note is which countries are mentioned. something tells me that africa may have more y2k-related problems with infrastructure &c than, say, japan will.
( Friday, December 31, 1999)

welcome to the new company town (fortune)
an article about the trend in companies towards providing services that would normally take employees offsite onsite. this dovetails with the trend towards aeron chairs (i bought mine myself when i worked for acer; i may need to buy a second for the new job -- or take mine into the office), as well as the whole vaunted "take your dog to work" culutre.

thankfully, fortune namechecks juliet schor and others who have questioned americans' growing dependence on work to define who we are in coming to some of the same conclusions: that maybe integrating work and life is just another way for corporations to milk their employees for all of the productivity they can.

to which, unsurprisingly, i answer "duh." i have more to say about this, but that will happen at the lounge.
( Tuesday, December 28, 1999)

browse, get paid (fortune)
big bill gurley writes about the trend of companies offering customers micropayments for being affiliates (amazon and every other ecommerce play), supplying the site's content (epinions), or selling one's demographics to advertisers (alladvantage, mypoints).

he neglects to mention that every one of these companies pays so little that one would have to be living rather the monastic life to survive on their money.

then again, he is a venture capitalist.
( Tuesday, December 28, 1999)

curtis gone.
curtis mayfield died this morning. it's sad. "new world order", which was his first new album in ages, was really really good. go out and get it.
( Sunday, December 26, 1999)

an addition to the photographic record
me pointing at tarin at fray day 3, some time ago.
( Sunday, December 26, 1999)

learning to scratch
sadly it looks like i missed this. maybe it will happen again soon.
( Sunday, December 26, 1999)

hello kitty fortune
the best part is the advice given by each character. some of it is almost surreal.

by the way, i hear that keroppi is being discontinued. stock up now. misty already did.
( Sunday, December 26, 1999)

super
is a popular prefix. which is fine. superfine, in fact.
( Sunday, December 26, 1999)

canceled.
a weblog. without the commentary. which means that it's a page of, um, links. yeah.
( Sunday, December 26, 1999)

high income poverty (mojo)
this article brings up a couple of important points:

1. measures of "poverty" need to be adjustible and regional, much as bank interest rates are variable.

   when i was working on housing and transportation policy, "affordable" housing was defined by a percentage of the median cost of housing. the poverty line needs to be a percentage of a region's median income. that would take the high cost of living in areas such as san francisco into account when determining eligibility for social services.

2. the best method of reforming the federal tax system (in my opinion) would be to return it to its original set up: only the top 150,000 earners were taxed. the number would now have to be higher, perhaps a percentage, but even if it were just everyone with higher-than-median incomes being taxed it would be fine.

   and yes, i know i would fall into that group. i could live with that.

we are dancing mechanique
one of the guys at viant (whose offices i am currently working out of) brought his aibo in this week. it's cute. i can see myself getting one, since it's ultra hypoallergenic. and not messy.

maybe after some stock options vest.
( Saturday, December 18, 1999)

etoys.com protest
it's basically an automated server flood script. a way to let etoys know that you don't think corporations should own absolutely everything.

of course, they'll probably try to sue every last person who does this.
( Friday, December 17, 1999)

new toy
i should have one of these waiting for me in the office when i get back from my trip to colorado next week. faster burrito runs are in the offing.
( Friday, December 17, 1999)

urban building (nyt)
There is something inherently quiet about the place and the men who designed it. In explaining their philosophy about living and working in one place, Smith paraphrased a Zen Buddhist saying he once heard in Japan: "The real master in the art of living makes little distinction between his art and his leisure," he said. "He simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both."
( Thursday, December 16, 1999)

skyscraper living (nyt)
High-rise spiders can climb or balloon to the top on strands of silk blossoming from their spinnerets. They are clever enough to hide before the window washers arrive and plucky enough to spin a new web after the crew moves on.

"These critters eat like kings," Dr. Sierwald said. "It's prime real estate for spiders."
( Thursday, December 16, 1999)

y2k survival box
even whole foods can't resist capitalizing on the y2k thing. and that's who i'm working for now. heh.
( Tuesday, December 14, 1999)

ten million isn't enough (nyt)
yet another tale of how the greedy bastards are swooping into the net economy. this industry is already teetering on the edge of pure silliness, and with the new infusion of wall streeters and business school kids it will surely topple over that edge.
( Tuesday, December 14, 1999)

3sixty
speaking of 3sixty, here's a link to their site.

i designed and produced it (with nick).
( Sunday, December 12, 1999)

full line o bags
freitag makes incredibly cool bags. they are well-designed, and made entirely of recycled materials: used truck tarpulins, inner tubes, and seatbelts. each one is unique, and as such is very expensive.

the bags come in boxes that can be made into cardboard television props. which is the coolest thing ever, because i can get a nice looking bag (3sixty has a couple), and silence those who have been giving me grief for not owning a television (ever) in one fell swoop.

yeah!
( Sunday, December 12, 1999)

bagged.
this is one of the coolest looking bags i've ever found. now i just need to find a retail outlet that will ship me one. a reward will go to whomever finds one of these for me. seriously.
( Sunday, December 12, 1999)

juggling
this herman miller webzine has gotten a lot better since i last looked at it a couple of years ago. they've actually started updating it again. which makes me happy, because these life/work balancing resources are what a lot of us need.
( Saturday, December 11, 1999)

must reads (mojo)
this is a weblog that nobody seems to link to. but it's so much more vital than another link to the same old trivial articles.

what happened to that political side of the web? the side that was supposed to get information we needed out there where people can read it and do something?

looks like i may need to start another project.
( Saturday, December 11, 1999)

bubblicious (standard)
"This unpredictability is an especially dramatic issue in the Internet Economy because the stakes are so high. People and companies are placing huge bets on continued strength and expansion in the capital markets. It's more than a little scary when you think about what could happen."
( Friday, December 10, 1999)

telephone exhanges
last year i bought a red rotary phone, which was formerly in use at PLaza 6-2130.

unfortunately, my home number doesn't work out to something indicative of where i am in the city. 64x-xxxx numbers, however, do.
( Sunday, December 5, 1999)

sonoma eating (nyt)
i want to move there.
( Sunday, December 5, 1999)

nodata
this moved from radiohead's site, so i figured i should link to it again. it's really good, text-based art. the web really should be the medium of choice for artists like jenny holzer. (she did something for adaweb, if memory serves.)
( Sunday, December 5, 1999)

nobel prize money (nyt)
"When the long-delayed honor finally came, Nash had been without a job for 35 years, getting by on only a few hundred dollars a month from a trust his mother had established before her death, and avoiding homelessness only because of his former wife's compassion. "
( Saturday, December 4, 1999)

another cool scandanavian site
check out ish no. four, with its acne-esque atari anime graphics. it's really well done, even if each page is more of an independent composition.
( Friday, December 3, 1999)

nonprofits online (standard)
this was part of the reason for doing GiveQuick!, by the way.
( Thursday, December 2, 1999)

suddenly rich (standard)
Money in itself can create odd dynamics, says psychiatrist Ken Woodrow, an assistant professor at Stanford University who sees a lot of wealthy clients in his practice – but usually it just exaggerates preexisting tensions. "If you don't work, even though you do generous things for friends, it can be resented," he says. "But the real issue is not whether some people react to you that way, but whether you have significant relationships. If you've built strong relationships prior to coming into money, those will still be there. Your genuine friends aren't going to change because of your money. But if someone is shallow to begin with, money will augment that, too."
( Thursday, December 2, 1999)

what's your number? (standard)
new york magazine recently had a big article on people's numbers -- the amount of money that is "enough" for them. most of the people in that article (primarily wall street types) had ten million as their number.

ten mil gets you roughly half a mil a year in interest income alone. that's awfully good money.

one mil gets you roughly fifty grand a year, which is still damn livable, even in san francisco.
( Thursday, December 2, 1999)

nice clean design
nick showed me this after i'd started sketching the lounge redesign. this is similar to what i'd originally planned my site to look like. i like this, and i like mine. we both win.
( Thursday, December 2, 1999)

vespa!
the px150 is coming next year. i will buy one.

while i was in college, and for a year afterward, a black honda elite 250 was my mode of transportation. i rode that scooter more than 20,000 miles in four plus years, which is an awful lot. i rode it from berkeley to los angeles and back over the course of a weekend.

i miss my scooter. i sold it a couple of years ago to some high school teachers in tennessee who saw a sale notice on my website.
( Thursday, December 2, 1999)

another superbad site
just fucking beautiful stuff.

no, today there's no recontextualization happening. sorry.
( Thursday, December 2, 1999)

another lounge
i mean, i have to link to other sites with the word lounge in their title as a matter of principle.
( Thursday, December 2, 1999)

worker auction sites (nyt)
The talent market continues to be hyped, but not many people are finding jobs this way. Probably because of that key underpinning to most everything online: the low barrier to entry. If anybody with web access can post their resume, it just makes it harder on companies looking for people to hire.

Which means that the job matching site with the best search methodology will be the one both freelancers and companies turn to.

Guru's is pretty good, if a little bit arbitrary (for both parties).
( Wednesday, December 1, 1999)