5.31.2010

new look new plan, same phro, same old stuff

I've been meaning to take the new blogger theme editor out for a spin but kept playing with it to make something uniquely mine and discovering that under my tender ministrations a unique site theme is also a butt ugly one.  So I decided to leave that to the pro's and use this stock template with some minor layout modifications and methinks it'll do quite nicely.

As for the new plans they are twofold.  One being that I have recently rekindled my love of Crazy Schemes (tm).  Not much to say on that other than I am very much enjoying filling my free time with scheming and tinkering and will have more on that later.


The other thought is that I find myself often thinking something interesting that is too short to be post worthy but too long to express in a tweet.  With that in mind I'm going to be making an effort to put shorter things in this space more frequently, perhaps in a similar format to my last "thinks i think" post.

5.17.2010

thinks i thunk

in no particular order


I heard the phrase "drinking the Tron Water" used to describe using a net connection.  I've decided that sitting in front of my RSS reader is like sitting in front of the Tron Water fire hose.



A good friend and I recently had a conversation about music and documentaries and it occurred to me that I'd much rather hear a song by a band I've never heard of before than learn any single thing about a band I already like.



For a society built on abundance, nearly any vision of the future is accurate.  Abundant variety demands it.



The way this page layout ignores extra screen real estate on a widescreen monitor is criminal!



I heard somewhere that when Warner Bros bought the rights to make the Matrix movies someone said "We know we've got something cool here, but we don't know exactly what it is".  I get the feeling that in the tech world those moments happen most often when cramped rooms with fluorescent lighting are addressed by clever but greasy geeks being filmed poorly.



I treat an incoming call like an audio email inbox.  If I don't recognize it, it's automatically spam.


5.05.2010

"host your own social graph"

Everyone has an opinion about what software to install after refreshing your OS, top x lists abound for the curious.  At some point a while back though I realized that after patches and security updates, the first thing I do now is set up my cloud.  I re-install all my bookmarklets, re-save all my passwords in my browsers, install notifiers for my services, etc.  I recently had the experience of reconnecting my home to the net after we decided to spend some time apart to think about what we really wanted.  It's been a couple weeks of sweet thirst quenching digital Tron water at the homestead and while my software is updated to the bleeding edge, my cloud still needs munging.

Which I've really spent some time thinking about as I soaked up the many and varied reactions to facebook's API announcements, Tim's thoughts on the the net as a platform, and then todays story on ReadWriteWeb about a group of NYU students building "the anti-facebook". "The privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network".  It reminded me of an article I found one day when I googled the title of this post and found this write up from February 2008 about using CMS plugins as endpoints for a distributed social network. This seems far closer to the stack based approach to software development that modern computing is founded on, and certainly closer to the "Don't fight the internet" way of doing things that so many are striving for.



Many of the overloaded web apps of today could be unburdoned by self-hosted, finely controlled, open standards based plugins of tomorrow.  Now I don't mean to say that things like Gowalla, Facebook, and Twitter should roll over and play dead, they will always have their place.  But there is certainly room to fill in the cracks.  After all that's what the internet does best, keeping a myriad of disparate computing environments talking through standardized channels.

I look forward to the day when I hand someone a business card that simply reads 'phrostuff.ca' and they need only punch that into a smartphone to programmatically friend me, phone me, email me, or check out pics, videos, or my opinion of The Dark Knight all based on how much I tell my endpoint to share with them.