What Phoebe Did While Mom was At Her Retreat
Click on the images for full screen fun!
Well. Mommy is at a retreat, so Daddy and I decided to have some fun. We started out with a lot of playing at home. I mean, we had breakfast, and tub, but the fun thing is that Dad lets me run through the sprinklers naked. Then a nap. I don't know why Dad thinks I need a nap, but, well, he does. We had a good lunch, and then, Dad made me put on some clothes and we strolled down to Habitot.
By the time I got there, I was ready for a snack, which Dad made me have in the hall.
He said it wasn't nice to the other kids to eat in front of them.
Then we went in, and they have lots of fun stuff. One of my favorites was playing in the water. 
Bubbles, and buckets, and water, and, cars that you ride around in and ... It was fun!
Dad also pulled me around in a trailer, and I climbed around in something they call the wiggle wall, and, oh, I painted! 
We closed the joint down, then came home.
I got a little tired.
After that was dinner 
and then an early bedtime. I was still tired.
I missed Mommy, but Daddy and I had fun.
No wonder newspapers are having such a hard time
If this article is to be believed, and there's no reason I can see to doubt their math, Printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle.
I think the obvious second point of this is that it's amazing how cheap e-ink is now. I wonder how long it will be until there's a "E-book of the month" club that gives you, upon subscription, an ebook reader.
Free Content on YouTube boosts (really boosts) Monty Python DVD sales
According to Can Free Content Boost Your Sales? Yes, It Can, Monty Python's DVD sales have increased by an astounding 23,000% on Amazon since they made all of their content available via YouTube.
I find the logic correct, but can those numbers be correct? 23,000% Sounds fishy to me.
Use Brief for Easy Feed Reading
I like to read news on a lot of different topics. Politics, gadgets, local news, sports, etc. RSS and Atom feeds are a great way to keep up with things, but I'm always on the hunt for a newsreader that fits into my processes, rather than forcing me to change my habits to work with it.
I've found one - Brief. Brief is a Firefox extension that makes reading feeds as easy as reading usenet posts using a good news reader. If you don't know what usenet is, well, go to Wikipedia
What Brief does is pull together all your feeds in the sidebar, give you quick access to unread items, and allows you to quickly mark them as read or actually go to the page and read it.
I know, it sounds simple, but it's really a great tool for keeping up with a variety of feeds.
While walking down the street, I saw …
I saw this billboard while walking around Berkeley last night. I hate to suggest that vandalism is ever a good thing, but I respect the effort that went into it, and, to some extent, I agree with the sentiment. 
Click on the image to see a larger version. I took this with my iPhone at a little after 10pm, so, the quality is pretty poor, but the broad themes come across okay.
Stranded Wind – Wind Powered Ammonia Plant
I read today about a company called Stranded Wind that is creating wind powered ammonia fuel plants in Iowa. It's a brilliant idea.
You can read more about how they made it happen at Jerome a Paris is almost entirely to blame.
Nice tidbit - they use salesforce, and, to quote them
...later today when new people sign up they'll automatically get routed to our SalesForce.com customer relations management system. We love this tool - rock solid, web accessible, open API so we can integrate our news site to it, and we've filled it up with farmers, cooperative employees, bankers, college instructors, state and federal politicians, and we're using it to make our interaction with them coherent and focused as we march towards our goal(s).
I love working for a company that people love to use, and, I love, in my own small way, helping them make a difference.
GMail – where’s my IMAP?
Let's face it, POP sucks. That's why I'm glad Google finally decided to add IMAP to it's free email service. But I have one question - why, two days after the announcement, don't I have the option to enable it yet?
Doulas in the Oakland Tribune
This last Sunday, the Oakland Tribune (and several other Ang owned newspapers) had an article about Doulas - Mother's helper, Doulas make birth better for some Bay Area moms. My wife was part of the article, and her picture was on the front page of the Oakland Tribune. I'm really proud of her.
Trying to add feeds back to my site, but …
They aren't working yet, give me just a bit to work it out.
New Year’s Eve and 108 Bells
On News Year's Eve, my wife and I went to the Berkeley Zen Center. There's a tradition in Buddhism to ring the bell 108 times running up to midnight. Some say each ring represents a path to enlightentment, others say each one represents a worldly desire, and that desire is driven away by the bell. Whatever the meaning, it's a lovely way to spend New Year's Eve.