An early Christmas

I feel like I'm drowning in fun new stuff.

The headphones showed up today, and they have a very nice crisp sound, though they'll take some getting used to.

And I'm in love with Speakerboxx* (especially "The Way You Move," which I will forever associate with my first night at Toad's...). A guy in line for Toad's Friday (a night on which we were unable to get in...damn them) tried to convince me that The Love Below was the superior album, but I'm always partial to albums that make good running soundtracks.

Speaking of running, I finally went to Marathon Sports, which I should have done a long time ago. The nice man looked at my terribly pronating tendencies and hooked me up with a pair of compensatory Brooks. The difference is amazing.

To round things out, I checked out new books from the library (having finished Kavalier & Clay a while back) and went glasses shopping (I'm being pushed in a rectangular plastic direction) and got most of my hair shaved off.

In any case, I'm off to Columbus...where it is apparently consistently below freezing. I knew I should've gone to Florida.


* Follow this link...it's a pretty cool review aggregator!

Paris Hilton

The buzz aggregator says that, this week, Paris Hilton was the top query at both Yahoo and Lycos. Sadly, Google hasn't updated Zeitgeist in the past 2 weeks, so we can't tell what's going on there. I just thought this was interesting. Plus, if I put "Paris Hilton" in my blog, there's a chance that desperate, porn-thirsty searchers will end up here instead. Poor things.

New headphones

So, I ordered Shure e2c headphones after my third pair of Sony MDR-A35s in as many years had one ear stop working when the cord got yanked. I'm a little wary about owning a $99 pair of headphones, especially for running (we are talking, after all, about the guy who broke 2 minidisc players and an mp3 player in the past 5 years), and the noise blocking seems to verge on dangerous for running on streets (assuming, of course, my knees are ever up to it again). Maybe I'll get another set of Sony's for running, but recommendations on iPod lounge and Joi Ito's blog (which turned into a fascinating impromptu customer relations forum) have me pretty convinced. Score one for decentralized product reviews....where's my review search engine when I need it? I'll report back on how they work once they turn up. (And Shure turns out to be very good at responding to private queries, too: when I asked about the sweat tolerance of the e2cs via email, they wrote back the next morning explaining "the E2C earphone has been tested extensively in environments where the product is exposed to sweat for extended periods of time. Workout
conditions are actually very similar to live performance conditions.")

Speaking of distributed reviews, Seb points to work on a format for marking up reviews in RSS.

The Onion strikes again...

Americans Demand Increased Governmental Protection From Themselves

(also, my worst nightmare: Mom Finds Out About Blog)

Why I woke up before 8 on a Saturday

I woke up early Saturday to attend the attend day 2 of the Multiples of 1 conference, and it was well worth it. What a cool conference, although it's sort of tough to describe what it was about. A recurring theme was the difficulty and power of creating an open platform that allows for unexpected uses while providing sufficient constraints. Perspectives included the way conflicts were resolved in the Linux kernel, how Zipcar maintains order with minimal rules, the relationships between people and their electronic devices, how collaborative tools are often subsconsciously effective, how workplaces are changing physically, how wireless networks can scale indefinitely with a cooperative design, how markets are just one way of exchanging data.

If you thought you were cynical about romance...

...get a load of this article (via danah): "Moreover, dating is often a bloodsport driven by egos and sexual appetites." Of course, watching Average Joe has (surprisingly) convinced me it's true....(and, yes, you read that URL correctly, there is a realitytvworld.com. it's like heaven!)

For my adoring fans...

...who were kept in suspense during my authorial delinquency, I ended up being an iPod for Halloween. I printed out big versions of the controls, display and Apple logo and pasted them on not-too-big pieces of posterboard and hung em over my shoulders. It received rave reviews. And some mockery. One person thought I was a condom, but he might have been drunk. Sadly, there are no pictures, but needless to say, it was not as elaborate as this.