January 2010 Archives

Researcher gave the Chumash a gift: their heritage: "Everyone thought the tall, strange white man was some kind of genius. But to teenage Ernestine De Soto he was a giant pain in the neck, a nosy, "Ichabod Crane-like" character who drew her mother's attention from its rightful place -- on her.

John Peabody Harrington studied De Soto's Chumash family for nearly 50 years, pumping her great-grandmother, her grandmother and her mother for the tiniest details of their lives. Everything fascinated him: the Chumash names of places mostly forgotten, of fish no longer caught -- even, to the family's puzzlement, of private parts never discussed in polite company. A brilliant linguist and anthropologist, Harrington had been just as relentless with countless Indian families throughout the West, but that didn't impress the young Ernestine.

"It's due to his madness that we are who we are today," said De Soto, a 71-year-old nurse who works at a Santa Barbara rest home. "We have a language. We have an identity.""

Stevenf on I need to talk to you about computers: "For as frustrated as I was with the restrictions, those exact same restrictions made the New World device a high-performance, high-reliability, absolute workhorse of a machine that got out of my way and just let me get things accomplished.

Nothing is simply black or white.

Old Worlders are particularly sensitive to certain things that are simply non-issues to New Worlders. We learned about computers from the inside out. Many of us became interested in computers because they were hackable, open, and without restrictions. We worry that these New World devices are stifling the next generation of programmers. But can anyone point to evidence that that's really happening? I don't know about you, but I see more people carrying handheld computers than at any point in history. If even a small percentage of them are interested in "what makes this thing tick?" then we've got quite a few new programmers in the pipeline.

The reason I'm starting to think the Old World is ultimately doomed is because we are bracketed on both sides by the New World, and those people being born today, post-iPhone and post-iPad, will never know (and probably not care) about how things used to work. Just as nobody today cares about floppies, and nobody has to care about manual transmissions if they don't want to."

Blue whales are singing in a lower key: "A retired Navy scientist directed Hildebrand to a trove of tapes stored at Sea World. The delicate old reels were the size of dinner plates. It turned out they contained snippets of blue whale songs from 40 years ago.

The tapes eliminated all doubt: In the Beach Boys' era, blue whales' voices, while nowhere near falsetto, had been distinctly higher pitched.

With more work, the researchers were able show that blue whales worldwide are using deeper voices lately. Some have dropped their calls by only a few tones, but all showed a steady decline. "It was baffling," Hildebrand said.

Blue whales are shrouded in mystery as it is. "

No, not a law or architecture firm, but two links that I enjoyed today plus a good debate from the other day.

John Scalzi on Holden Caulfield:

"I never got Holden Caulfield anyway. This partially due to having my own reading tastes bend towards science fiction as a teen rather than the genre of Alienated Teen Literature, of which Catcher is, of course, the classic. If you were going to give me a teenage hero, give me Heinlein's Starman Jones: He traveled the galaxy and memorized entire books of log tables and became Captain of a starship (for procedural reasons, granted). All Holden did was bitch, bitch, bitch. Put Holden at the controls of a starship and he'd implode from stress. Not my hero, thanks."

Mr. Scalzi and I are the same age and as teenagers appear to have had similar tastes in literature. I loved SciFi and Fantasy novels as a teenager and when I was made to read novels like "Catcher in the Rye" in school, I found them to be repugnant. I remember thinking that someone should tell Holden to get a life and get on with it.

I was made to read that novel when I was miserable at my high school, but rather than whine about it, I went out bought thrift store clothes, dyed my hair, hitched every ride to Hollywood I could, and took lots of photos at concerts. Holden was up there with the non-hero of "The Good Earth" for folks I would ignore rather than hang out with at that stage of my life.

Mr. Scalzi has squarely hit the nail on the head with his assessment that Holden was too passive. I didn't have those words in high school, but I knew that if you didn't like your life, like I didn't like mine, you did something about it. To this day, I have always thought of Holden Caulfield as the hero to young men of a melancholy bent and I have yet to meet a woman who really liked him or the book as a teenager. If you are a woman and identified with Holden or Catcher in the Rye, please feel free to comment below in his defense.

On another note, Mr. Sullivan has parsed out an interesting difference between Brits and Americans in terms of debating and refining an arguement:

"So much of American politics is debate conducted at a distance, through ads or soundbites or various talking points that never actually engage one another in debate. Reared in the British debate tradition - I debated through high-school and college, becoming President of the Oxford Union in 1983 - this has always felt to me like the biggest drawback of the American system.

The point of debate is to clarify things, to find where the real points of disagreement are, and to assess them in that context of actual alternatives. "

I find this a wonderful assessment as some of my favorite people to debate with have been raised and/or educated in the British or Irish systems. Just a few days ago, I found myself in a good give & take with James Burland on Twitter about Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu for the Nokia Booklet. After our tweeted mini-debate died down, I realized that I thoroughly enjoyed debating the merits of Windows 7 with a Brit who was also a fellow creative and Mac owner as he was able to help me parse out what I was really thinking about rather than both of us taking a side and sticking to it.

Thurs 01.28.10 - This weekend is Alex's Bar's 10th Anniversary weekend, in celebration Alex and I (Ms. Jen) did the above video to cover what the article in The District did not and for Alex to extend a big Thank You to all of the folks who have made 10 Years of Alex's Bar possible.

Alex's has a great line up of shows to say 'Thank you, Long Beach, for a great decade of Alex's Bar!':

Fri, Jan 29, 2010 - Alex's Bar 10 Year Anniversary Show - The Adolescents, Riverboat Gamblers, John Doe, Blockage - $15

Sat, Jan 30, 2010 - Alex's Bar 10 Year Anniversary Show - Riverboat Gamblers, Throw Rag, Mike Watt and the Secondmen, Werewolf - $15

See you at Alex's Bar's this weekend!

Dear Steve, "Long time no see! I've been busy, sorry. First off all, I want to congratulate you on the great show today. Wow, that iPad is truly one of those things everyone is going to want to have, like your previous successes with the iPod and iPhone. I take my hat off for that! And wow, what a lead up to the show. Probably the first hype of 2010. And do you guys know how to keep a secret and then give a great show unveiling it. ... When you were showing the web capabilities of the iPad, something was missing in it's browser (see screen-shot above). As your keynote and product presentations are normally flawless (ah, well, maybe not always), I think you might have missed this one.
You touted the iPad's (great product name, btw) web capabilities as being amazing, perfect, you know, the regular Apple thing. But during the presentation I couldn't help but notice that little "missing plugin" logo, we all know from the iPhone. Now, I was thinking that this might have been one of those very exotic plugin's of back in the day, like Director or Realplayer. But, as it turned out, the missing plugin was the Flash Player."

Wed 01.27.10 - #37 the Nokia Booklet and I are not only back on speaking terms, but with great affection. Thanks to Andrew Currie and Steve Rowlands who recommended Wubi as a fast and very painless way to get Ubuntu Linux running on a netbook without harming the original Windows install, as of this morning, I now have a working dual boot of Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10 on the Nokia Booklet.

And when it is time to ship #37 back to WOMWorld/Nokia, all I have to do is log into the Windows side of the install, go to the control panel and uninstall Wubi in the normal Windows fashion and the whole Ubuntu side will be gone. The machine will then return as it came.

The best part for me, is rather than spending the next 11 days of my trial period struggling with Windows and ultimately disliking the Booklet, I get to spend it enjoying the Booklet, use it as a mini-laptop, and being able to evaluate it as the lovely piece of hardware that it is.

Once Andrew got Ubuntu working on his trial Booklet, #38, via Wubi, he announced mid-day that he had uninstalled Wubi and was on to try Jolicloud. It appears that Andrew is going to test every possible way to set the Booklet free of the confines of Windows. Good on him.

Now that #37, my trial Booklet, is free, I am going to go deeper and see what the capacity of the Booklet is now that it has been set free. Many of the reviews of the Nokia Booklet 3G is the surprise or disappointment on the part of the user on how under powered the Booklet supposedly is in terms of RAM (1 GB) or in terms of the Intel Atom processor. Today as the Booklet wizzed along happily a good speeds under Ubuntu, it hit me that the Booklet may be 'underpowered' for an inefficient hog like Windows, but the Booklet was a speedy little fellow(ess) under Ubuntu.

For a mini-laptop, does it need to have bigger laptop sized RAM & processor or does it really need a better, freer, more open Operating System that is more efficient with the hardware it has?

Point in case, the Booklet allegedly has a multitouch touchpad, but for the life of me I could not get the two finger scrolling to work under the Windows OS, but in the Ubuntu side the touchpad is by far more responsive and is really fast at multitouch. Same hardware, different OSes.

Photo taken of the Booklet screen by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97.

Tues 01.26.10 - Today was also a busy work day, thus my only accomplishments in making progress with the Nokia Booklet was to download and install the Oceanis Change Background program that Vaibhav of The Symbian Blog recommended.

Apparently the version of the Attack of the Redmond Drones that Nokia installed on the Booklet, Windows 7 Starter, is a non-starter in that it does very little and really is only there to irritate the Booklet's owner into returning it or paying MicroSquash $80+ to upgrade to Windows 7 Home or Ultimate. Since, I have no intention of giving any $$ to the dreaded Mordor, I mean, Redmond, I instead put a call of help out to Twitter and my mobile Tweeps delivered.

When I installed Oceanis Change Background, it put a very amusing cartoon in places of the Windows logo, of which I have taken a photo of and placed above, the caption that satirically sums up MicroSquash:

"It's a revolutionary approach really... Instead of developing new software adjusted to the user's needs, we've started developing new users, adjusted to the software's needs."

I also let the Booklet phone home to Finland and update itself and add Nokia Ovi Suite and the Nokia Social Hub. Ovi Suite is just the new name for Nokia PC Suite which is the way one is to supposedly manage one's mobile device's relationship with one's PC, but my mobile, currently a Nokia N97, is a Protestant and does not need to a middleman to manage its relationship with its deity, the MacBook Pro in this case. So, I closed Ovi Suite when it wanted the N97 to come to confession and make a connection.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97.

Project52 : Week 4

Mon. 01.25.10 - Late this morning the Nokia 3G Booklet arrived from the folks at WOMWorld/Nokia for a two week trial review period. I am quite excited about this, I do love to tinker about on a new computer, especially one as lovely and beautifully designed as the Nokia 3G Booklet.

It is cute! It is tiny! It is solid! It is light in weight! It is well-made! Did I mention it was beautifully designed and cute?!?

And then....

I turned it on and I was confronted with the... evil blue background with the light waving Windows logo. Gah.

Fifteen minutes into my new love affair with #37, I had to turn her off and put her back into her wrapping and two boxes and then put her box under my bed, because Windows 7 had so elevated my blood pressure that I was ready to call DHL to take #37 back to London and then write a scathing review of how F*cking Evil Windows is and How it is the Worst Possible Decision... blah blah blah... all because I spent 15 mins trying to figure out how to change the damned Windows background into something more eye pleasing. Big, deep breath.

So, I returned to the work project that is on deadline for tomorrow and then surreptitiously searched Google for 'Nokia 3G Booklet Hackintosh', 'Nokia 3G Booklet Ubuntu 9.10 USB live boot', etc. Yes, I spent most of the rest of the afternoon deep in dual work mode and researching my options for a USB live boot of a real OS, an OS that keeps one's blood pressure at normal.

Which computer or mobile operating system one likes is not just a matter of brand preference, or what your friends like, or what you have already spent the time to learn, it is also about a mental metaphor and mind map. And that mental metaphor / mind map may still be uncomfortable even after learning how to use a system. Sometimes, one just has to give up an operating system that does not fit one's mental processes and move on to one that does. After reluctantly using Windows for years, I happily and with abandon switched over to Ubuntu Linux and Mac OS X about 4 - 5 years ago and have never looked back.

I gladly pay the Apple Tax to get lovely, well designed hardware and OS. I am also happy to pay the Nokia Tax to get kick ass mobile cameraphones, even if I continue to be bewildered by Nokia's hard-on for all things Windows and how their Symbian mobile OS is mapped to Windows and its metaphor. One of the reasons that I am so excited about the Nokia N900 is that its OS is Maemo which is a lovely mobile version of Linux.

All of this adds up to, right now I just can't open up #37 the lovely Nokia 3G Booklet again, until I have time to create a USB stick with a live boot of Ubuntu or Moblin for the Booklet.

Photo by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97.

Mon 01.25.10 - Thanks to everyone who has inquired about Scruffy's health. The good news is that he is on the mend. He is still coughing, but it has reduced in quantity and volume. Scruffy is still sleeping a lot and is a bit cranky (Sorry, Gracie!).

Today, he discovered that sleeping on his back made for less wheezing and coughing. And as he was sleeping on his back, I noticed his cough syrup mustache and needed to take a photo.

Sadly, Scruffy is still on quarantine from other dogs and when Magnus came over to visit today, Scruffy couldn't go out and play.

Photos of Scruffy's x-rays taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97 with permission from Dr. Kali.

Fri 01.22.10 - The last 3 days have been very worrisome & exhausting as Scruffy has been very sick with a hacking, honking cough that has kept both of us up. Dr. Kali at North Tustin Veternary Clinic was a gem today, he was very calm with Scruffy, got the X-rays, we talked over the results, without any panic about kennel cough or pneumonia.

While Scruffy may have one or the other or another type of bacterial lung infection, I appreciated Dr. Kali's calmness and professionalism. Scruffy is on a regime of antibiotics and doggy cough syrup, as well as under strict instructions to stay away from all other dogs for 2 weeks. He is still coughing intermittently, but not anywhere as hard or with the same duration and hopefully the cough syrup will keep him sedated enough to get both of us a good night's sleep.

Project52 : Week 3

I hereby coin a new word, Snobmob, of which the definition is:

"Any person is the type of person who feels so superior about themselves and their knowledge and/or use of mobile technology that they call lesser mortals 'Normobs'."

I have previously written about my distaste for the word 'Normob', and tonight I was set off by Ewan's post, Nokia N900 is now a consumer phone, at the Mobile Industry Review who in his post claims that Nokia's choice of advertising the Nokia N900 in the London Tube is a mistake as the device is for super geeks, not for normobs (aka the average 24 year old female).

"It's always good to take a walk through the tube even if you can't stand the delays, grime and the folks playing music. It's good to get a view on what the mobile market is pitching to end consumers. The Nokia N900 Maemo device was arguably never intended for the average 24 year old female on a 35/month contract. Indeed when I originally talked to Nokia back at the start of Q4 2009, they were -- broadly speaking -- unsure if any operators would 'range' the device. And that issue didn't really bother them either. The N900 is almost a reference device for Maemo, for the future of the company's super-high-tech gadget series of devices."

Now I know some kick ass 20-something women/girls/females/humanswithinnybitsmidbody and most all of them have branded smartphones from a carrier, my local area within a 25 meter radius has at least 7 of them, and they have not had troubles with learning how to use their phones. I have heard two of them explain to the their boyfriends how to use the boy's phone. Maybe the females in California are made of sterner technological stuff than the ones that Ewan encounters.

When I get a new phone to trial from WOM World/Nokia, most of the local females see them, hold them and try them out. Of all the phones, that I have trialed in the two years I have lived here, it was the Google Ion/HTC Magic and the Nokia N900 that I had to do little to no explaining before the local female 20-something supposed 'normobs' were off and running and enjoying the devices. Most all of them have LG and Samsung phones that have been branded, nee raped, by the carrier and they are very used to a phone that one has to explore.

The only thing that stops them from getting any of the high-end phones that I have is price point, as they are unsubsidized by the carrier. It is not the intimidation of a technologically superior phone. One of them is currently waiting to see if T-Mobile, her carrier, is going to pick up the N900 before she upgrades to a new phone.

Culture is learned. Tech culture is learned. We should not be building biases into our blog posts/punditry and assuming that folks who aren't like us won't be able to use the device that we think is most high tech or most worthy of high techologica wizardery. That does a disservice to the potential user and to the folks who designed it.

The Nokia N900 is a beautifully designed device, both in hardware & software, if one has used an iPhone or Android or any of the Samsung touchscreen phones, then one can learn via exploration or via transmission through in person or online tutorials.

Thus, for as long as the derisory 'normob' is bandied about, I will use 'snobmob', and even possibly add it to the Urban Dictionary.

But I would rather that all of us mobile tech bloggers drop our assumptions about users that are based in bias and instead get excited about technology that could be revolutionary in the long run for the largest amount of people we would never expect to use it & love it.

Gentlemen, drop the snob, it is unbecoming of you, your intelligence, and humanity.


****
Update, Sat 01.23.10 :
I want to be clear that the above is a commentary on word usage by mobile bloggers, pundits, and others, not a serious attempt to coin a word so that people can further divide and belittle each other.

Please read Ben Smith's comment below, as he is apart of the London mobile bloggers that came up with the original term, normob, of which he defines and defends its usage. Also, please read my response comment.

As for the 3rd comment, where the writer is asking if we can call a specific mobile designer a 'snobmob'; no, let's not.

Instead, I would like to reiterate that as a blogger or writer or online pundit, our word usage does matter, particularly as we have a potential worldwide audience who may not know our (sub-)cultural assumptions nor maybe be native speakers to the language we are writing in or the reader who drops into a page of our blogs from a search engine may not catch humor or earnest intentions on our parts unless we try to pay attention to word usage and clarity. I say this to myself as well.

1.43 inches of rain in less than half a day. Tornado warning. Sirens, emergency announcements. Flooding of Electric Ave. Tornado touches down 1 mile south at PCH and Anderson Street. Storm moves southeast quickly. Big winds, waves, and sun in wake.

I will let the video I took with the Nokia N97 tell the story. The first two were taken around 8am this morning on the berm in the southern most part of the Seal Beach. The second two while the emergency sirens were going off at 12:52 - 1:02pm, Electric Ave was flooding, and the tornado/waterspout was coming ashore. The thrid two were in the 3pm hour after the crazy clouds had moved out.

Mon 01.18.10 - If you are reading this on a feed/RSS/Atom, then you haven't noticed anything unless you click through, but if you are reading this on the website then you can see that I have made some incremental changes.

The changes I have made have mostly been an attempt to improve the speed of the site for you, the reader, as YSlow and Google's Webmaster have let me know that this site was a bit sluggish.

I have noticed the slowdown the last year, of which I believe have been a combination of more and more entries, the shared hosting that I have my sites on, and a few blogging software configuration issues.

Today, I did the following:

1) I reduced the Black Phoebe :: Ms. Jen index page to 6 entries rather than 12, as the home page is image heavy.

2) I combined some scripts and stylesheets, as well as eliminating a few that not currently being used but were legacy code bits.

3) I cleaned up the sidebars on the index and entry pages to reduce the http requests, as well as taking the Flickr Badge off the index page as it was causing a whole second of rendering time.

4) Plus a few other Movable Type template tweaks.

What I still need to do:

5) Combine as much of the javascript for the site, comments, and lightbox as possible into one script with out causing conflicts.

6) Figure out a better Movable Type to blackphoebe.mobi solution. The current one that I threw up in a day in January 2008 is slowing down the whole install.

Let me know if the site is faster for you and if the changes are good or not working. Thanks!

Project52 : Week 2

File Under: I didn't need to see the shit squeezed out of the intestines before they are turned into sausage casings...
OR
Fire Under: How did the drafting of the specs for the new HTML5 and web standards turn into a serious detour in to the spider webs of Mirkwood?

Wow! The Twitter-verse erupted this last week on WTF is going on in HTML5 world:

"is there a good concise blog post anywhere explaining just what happened to HTML5 / WHAT WG last week? Seeing the trees, not the forest." - @mezzoblue

'Thinking of getting this framed: http://icanhaz.com/specdance" - @adactio

"Pleased that http://whatwg.org/html5 is back to being a spec called HTML5 (and more) rather than HTML (including HTML5). Thank you @hixie." - @adactio

" '#HTML5 is a beautiful mess': Sitepoint podcast with moi, @lloydi, @cssquirrel. Transcribed as well, thanks @sentience http://bit.ly/5rJmbS" - @brucel

"#html5 punch-up featuring @marcosc, @hixie, @shelleypowers, @johnfoliot http://bit.ly/4Ojp2v" - @brucel

And there are many more Tweets from Jan 8th to 15th on the subject of HTML5, the WC3, WHATWG, and the spec deliberations.

I am unabashedly a fan of strict XHTML 1.0, as I love the element tag minimalism and the strict code typing. If I code a site in XHTML 1.0, be it transitional or strict, I have few worries on what device will the site work on and I have fewer cross-broswer debugging issues than if I write in HTML 4.01 or the like. I realize that others want more features and the early specs of HTML5 appear to make better semantic sense, but the web standard spec and full browser adoption is supposedly years away.

I don't like to watch the tech sausage being made, I much prefer to let folks duke it out behind some closet doors and then when the browsers adopt the spec, then I will learn it. My passion is in mobile and the web that works for all, not to be the first to use or develop a tecnology. On top of all of that, I am a minimalist. I prefer lean, mean, and elegant over busy, full-featured, and many-optioned.

I first noticed this week's brouhaha when Dave (@mezzoblue) tweeted his call for someone to interpret and explain the forest for the trees (first tweet quote/link above). Tonight was the first time I had the opportunity to go through my feed reader and read some of the blog posts on the HTML5 rupture of the last 9 days.

I started by reading Dori Smith's post, My (current) opinions on HTML5, on Backup Brain which was a good summary of the situation and how it effects the various parts of the web design and development ecosystems. Dori is clear sighted in the matter and I noticed quite a few comments, upon clicking on the comments, I was treated to John Foliot's stident interpretation of Dori's take on HTML5 and Web Standards.

I clicked over to Mr. Foliot's web site to find that he was in full defense / offense mode all at once. ((O.o))

Mr. Foliot referred to Andy Clarke's "Keep calm and carry on (with HTML5)"

Faruk Ateş attempts to find the forest for the close examination of the trees in "The Battlefield of HTML5"

Bruce Lawson, Ian Lloyd, and Kyle Weems weigh in with a SitePoint podcast on "HTML5 is a (Beautiful) Mess"

Mark Pilgrim asserts that nothing has happened other than the HTML5 spec is in the Last Call phase. Mr. Foliot continues his offense/defense bit.

Wow! See what I miss when I am working rather than reading... Wake me up when the spec is ready and the browsers are using it. Then we can slather the HTML5 up in some garlic oil, cook it up on the grill and make some beautiful, accessible web sites and apps.

No Mirkwood spiders, please.

Sun 01.10.10 - I went over to my brother's house today and he showed me the Blackberry Storm 2 that he got this week at his new job. He has had the original Blackberry Storm for the last 12 months and I knew that he had many frustrations with the original Storm, so I asked him if he would do a quick video interview to compare the two Storms.

In this video, Joe talks about the software and OS improvements that Blackberry made to make the Storm 2 the phone that they should have released last year. We also talk about the experience of having a pure touchscreen with no qwerty or alphanumeric T-9 keyboard.

Overall, Joe is much happier with the Storm 2 than with the original, but the other folks at work are still sticking to their qwerty keyboard Blackberrys and Joe is the only one who chose the touchscreen Storm 2.

The video was filmed by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97.

Ashe to ashes, dust to dust. Pixels to electrons, electrons to delete().

As a person who studied art, art history, and graphic design in the first round of my college education, I spent a lot of time reading about and studying artists and designers of the past. We know and study those artists and designers by the physical objects, paintings | journal entries | letters | etc, that were left after their deaths. We know them by their objects.

How will future generations know about our generation when we have spent so much of our time and efforts tossing the physical object to the wind and embracing digital ephemera? For the first 10 plus years of the internet revolution, the giddy joy was in the ephemera, the shifting sands of the bytes blown by the winds of chance and a forgotten domain registration. But the winds have shifted, a few of the early generation of internet pioneers have passed away and now we wonder what will happen to their writings, photos, and their primary sources when the domain expires or the hosting goes past due?

How will future scholars know who were the true pioneers, the giddy bon vi-bloggers from the corporate marketing shills that followed fast on their heels? Do we give the college freshman of 2567 CE/AD an introductory digital studies of Steve Ballmer meets Proctor & Gamble, or do we protect the writings of internet and blog pioneers such as Brad Graham and Lesile Harpold who died too early to write a will or a set up a trust that considered their seminal writings and blogs to be passed on to a university collection?

Now some would say, it is just the internet - here today, gone tomorrow. I would counter that we don't know what others in future eras will want to know and what will be just assumed about our era, and that more the more well preserved primary sources we leave the better for future scholars and pundits to be able to analyze and learn from our time in a way we are too close to see with any clarity.

A discussion started on the "Remembering our friend Brad" Metatalk post between Matthowie, barbelith (Tom Coates), Maximolly (Molly Steenson), myself, holgate, and a few others how to preserve blogs to an archive that can be accessed past the time the domains have expired and the files deleted off the web hosting server.

Tom suggests that:

"We should consider talking to George Oates at the Internet Archive to see if they have any options for this kind of situation. They might be the perfect place to put sites after someone dies like that."

I agree with Tom that the Internet Archive is a great place to start, as I use it to find all of my own 1996-2001 website archives given that I can't find the files on any old disks anymore. But the problem with the Internet archive is that it does not bring any photos or other image files, only the text from the sites that it archives.

After watching in the past few years the work that George Oates did with the Library of Congress while she was still at Flickr, I wondered if we should be considering a long term strategies that would go beyond registering a blog's copyright or even a periodical ISBN with the Library of Congress or other Copyright Libraries (such as Oxford or Trinity) but should we not also be archiving our text, images, and presentation (css) files to the copyright libraries for future study and access?

In the Metatalk thread, I asked:

"Previously if one was a writer or artist or scholar or otherwise historically/culturally significant, one would give one's writings & 'collection' to a university library. What do we do with our websites & blogs past the time we can pay for them?

How can we know now what might be significant for study 100, 200, 500, 1200 years from now? How do we archive bytes?

Some folks are printing out their blogs to custom ordered books, but this is not necessarily the best solution, as what will the children or grandchildren of our friends and families do with those books? Will they end up at flea markets along with 78rpm acetate records? But maybe that is good, the randomness of the find.

By choosing to engage in the frontier online space, we have chosen to some degree to toss the long term to the wind. The suggestion of the Library of Congress, or other institutions that function as a cultural respository, may be a good bet for the long run in terms of keeping an archive of text|image|ephemera, as after 2 recessions, I don't trust the market to keep a reliable archive.

If we can now register our copyright with the Library of Congress or the Copyright Libraries (such as Trinity, Oxford, etc), and we can get an ISBN or periodical number for our blogs, how do we start to archive the actual posts and images to a repository.

Do we lobby our congress|political critters to set aside resources for blogs that are periodicals to be archived OR as Matthowie suggest do we donate to an institution such as the Archive.org foundation and make sure that it can function as a cultural archival NGO?"

Is the Library of Congress or the various other copyright libraries up to the task of the pioneer digital generation donating their archives to the libraries in question or do we donate to the Internet Archive so that they can provide a more robust non-governmental/academic solution to archiving blogs and pioneering digital media?

Ashe to ashes, dust to dust. Pixels to electrons, electrons to save().

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97.

Wed 01.06.09 - Merry Christmas to the folks who celebrate it today as a apart of the Orthodox tradition. Happy Epiphany to others. Happy I am Overwhelmed with Work Day to me.

The Week 1 of the Project52 post coming tomorrow, still doing a bit of research to make sure my info is correct.

The geyers are a' gushin' on the Google Nexus One reveal this morning:

The Atlantic Wire filtering Engadget & TechCrunch's reviews : Nexus One: The Summary Judgement

ars technica : Google's biggest announcement was not a phone, but a URL

Frog : Why Google Had to Take Control of Android with Nexus One

Tuttle LA's own Matt Kapko at The Eye on Mobile: Google is in the trenches while Apple is in our pockets

TechCrunch : Apple And Google Just Tag Teamed The U.S. Carriers

Quote from the last article:

"Think about your cellphone and cellular service five years ago. Both were likely horrible. But you were content in your misery, because you didn't know any better."

Actually, TechCrunch, no, five years ago - Jaunary 2005, I had AT&T's data all to myself and a Nokia N7610 with email, a web browser, a cameraphone, and Lifeblog; I was not miserable and the combo was the opposite of horrible. It didn't get horrible until late 2006 when (Cingular) AT&T in LA started degrading in its service. Then again, I have not owned a phone that was branded by a carrier since 2004. Since 2004, all of my phones have been unlocked and unbranded, praise be to Amazon and Nokia.

My own toddle down memory lane aside, I will be watching what Google does with their own Android mobile. I won't be spending $529 to buy this nexus one, when I do have that amount extra, I will be buying Nokia N900 Maemo mobile as I love that it has python natively on the mobile, Maemo is more open from the dev point of view, it has a qwerty keyboard and the camera kicks bootay.

Even though I am not ready to part with $529 for the Google Nexus One, I am very excited that Android is continuing to mature as a mobile OS and that Google is taking more control of the product. If I were forced to choose between the Nexus One and the iPhone 3GS for my next purchased mobile, I would definitely choose Google over Apple.

Fare thee well, Mr. Graham, you, your laughter, generosity, laughter, humor, and amusing t-shirts, will be sorely missed.

Thank you for your outreach to me along with Jish at SXSW Interactive 2003 when others weren't so friendly. Thank you for all the lives you touched all over the blogosphere in last last decade plus. Thank you for being so willingly to be roped into (ha! leading) all sorts of adventures and misadventures.

Ciao, bello.

.

Photos taken by Ms. Jen on Sat 01.02.10 with a Nokia N97.

Sat 01.02.09 - The thing that is either most wonderful or most baffling about Southern California, 32º to 35º latitude north, is that we don't really have a real winter, but in the time period of December and January when the rest of the northern hemisphere is socked in with snow and cold, we are having a mixed fall | spring.

January in SoCal has some trees are still shedding their yellow and red leaves just as some trees, bushes and flowers are just starting their spring blooming cycle. For years, I found this maddening, as I wanted a real fall with a real winter and then after time a real spring, not all three mashed up layered over each other in a course of 4-6 weeks.

This day after New Years Day trip to the Huntington with Erika and Julie Wanda showed me again, through the lens of the Nikon, how delightful the overlapping of autumn and spring can be when experienced in California's mixed up mediterranean climate.

Photo of Julie Wanda and Erika taken by Ms. Jen with a Nikon D70s.

Sat 01.02.10 - A week and a half ago, Julie Wanda and I go talking about what would be fun to do for New Year's Eve, I suggested that we go to dim sum and then to the Huntington Library to visit the gardens. She reminded me that she had to work on New Year's Eve until 4pm. Julie Wanda and I have a tradition to go to dim sum for lunch on New Year's Day, as we mused our options, Erika pointed out that the Huntington would be closed on New Year's Day.

After a bit of too-ing and fro-ing with the idea, we all decided that today would be the day to go to dim sum lunch at Elite Restaurant in Monterey Park and then proceed to the Huntington for a good toddle about the gardens. I brought the Nikon D70s as well as the ever present Nokia camera phone and took over 300 photos between both cameras.

A truly delightful day in lovely gardens (the camelias are blooming!) with good friends.

The above is my favorite photo of the 300, but I have about 20 more photos that I really like, but I will post them tomorrow.

Photos taken by Ms. Jen at Dog Beach with a Nokia N97.

Fri 01.01.10 - Happy New Year one and all!