Just got back from Seattle last night, where I had my first experience at the Drift On Inn. What a nice little slice of paradise, that was.

Today a colleague here at work directed me to this Register piece on the RIAA's ill-advised consumer lawsuits, and I have to say, they've whacked the mole right on the head with it. I think the industry blew a big opportunity by suing rather than adapting to Napster. As this story says:

When they shut down Napster, the RIAA lost out on a massive opportunity to address a huge, centralized community of music enthusiasts. Instead their lawsuits spawned multiple decentralized networks which are harder to attack. If RIAA succeeds in shutting down these networks by suing individual file sharers, they might ultimately be killing not piracy – as many have predicted – but their own efforts to shut it down.

Anna just directed me to this Seattle Craigslist missed connection, though it doesn't seem to me that the connection was entirely missed here.

Why couldn't you hold your farts on the plane?


United 876, Tokyo to Seattle, Sunday morning. You laid down two big stinkers with several hours to go. Do you like to just let it rip in the middle of a business meeting, or at dinner with friends? No? Then why do you feel okay about cutting the cheese on a long flight, in Business Class of all places? Did you somehow think your farts don't smell? Weren't you concerned about the victims of your olfactory assault? Why couldn't you slip on those grey socks from the little toilet kit they gave each of us and pad to the toilet instead of sharing your ass-gas with me?

This was posted last Friday, and it's about a flight that presumably happened the Sunday before. Thus poor bastard must have been really affected by this experience to wait a week before going public.

I've been covering this SCO-IBM lawsuit like crazy this week, only to discover that it's all just a Dukes of Hazzard metaphor. (note, this link is for nerds only)

I was in the bow position, which I called boat at the time, both because I never listen, and also because it reminded me of the Persian torture technique known as Scaphismus (or "the boats") in which a man is nailed between two boats, force fed milk and honey, and left to rot in his own maggoty excrement.

I was in the bow position, thinking of something my Yoga teacher had just said. "Visualize what you want to be, and make it manifest," she said. "So much of our time, our mind and body are out of synch. Now, in this place, at this time, synchronize them. Visualize what your mind is telling you and use your body to make it manifest." I held that position so long that I thought my spine was going to snap, but by the time I got home that night, I had decided to quit my job and go on a road trip to the Grand Canyon with Anna.

Those vast expanses of secretive and dangerous land have a way of setting your imagination afire, and two weeks later, as we left Santa Fe for the Grand Canyon, Anna and I were so far removed from our lives as we knew them that, even on the highways of New Mexico, we felt like our heroes: some kind of western adventurers, dodging 18 wheelers on highway 25, and humbled as is right and proper by the capricious storm clouds and wrinkled skin of desert all around us.

We took the 40 to a town called Gallup New Mexico, right near the Arizona border where I wanted to turn north up toward the part of the southwest they call the four corners. This is where Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado all meet with a dull, squared off perfection that must dismay true cartographers. It is also the neighborhood of monument valley; the part of the United States that goes all Road Runner-and--Coyote-like.

Anna drove north, the two of us smelling like horses in our 1971 Cutlass convertible. No heat or defog on the passenger side. No windshield wiper fluid. Rear wheel drive. I spilled a root beer on my lap. Not a good sign. And now the snow was coming down as fast as the dark was drawing near. Then we saw the sign on the highway: Route 666, and after about a half second of nervous, eye-to-eye consultation, we turned that Cutlass around and headed for the nearest roadside inn. Within an hour it was snowing so hard, we couldn't even see the road. We tried to head into town to see a movie, and gave up after losing sight of the road itself.

So when I read this story in the New York Times last week, I felt like a little piece of magic had been stolen because of ignorance, stupidity, and that damned and infernal Book of Revelations.

And by the way, we never did make it to the Grand Canyon.

Larry Fishburne's missing 10 years?

What's up with that Laurence Fishburne Tanqueray ad? You've probably seen it by now. It's on the back cover of this week's New Yorker, if you haven't. He's pointing at a bottle of Tanqueray as if to say, "you the man!" The tagline above his head says "Distinctive since 1971." Above the Tanqueray bottle, it says "Distinctive since 1830," which was when Tanqueray was founded. If 1971's supposed to refer to Fishburne's birth date, that would have made him about four while filming Apocolypse Now, which seems unlikely. The IMDB says he was born in 1961, not 71. So what's up with the ad? Was he just undistinctive in the first ten years of his life?

Oh I've got it. 1971 was probably when he had his first Tanqueray.

I just took the OS/Personality test that MacDougall took a couple of days back. I really thought I was going to get Mac OS, but I'm proud to be...


Which OS are You?

I spent three days this week covering JavaOne at San Francisco's Moscone center. Seven years ago, when I first attended JavaOne it was the first conference I really worked as a professional high tech person, and it always reminds me of my early days in the industry.

This year there was a lot of flashing back to previous lives at the show. I found out that the Web magazine I co-founded in 1998 had been sold, or rather licensed away to another publisher. That felt like a passage.

I spent about ten minutes, standing at the end of an escalator as conference attendees filed out of the show, asking myself how much of my life I had spent trying to talk to these strange people -- nerdy male introverts, almost all of them. All wearing khaki pants and button up short sleeved shirts. Pagers and cell phones on their belts, consulting their Palm Pilots to find a nearby Chinese restaurant. Was this a sociological experiment that had gone on, or were these people somehow a part of me? Was I at home?

I took this job, in part, because I didn't want to end up as one of those grizzled technology veterans scarfing the free food, and scheduling pointless briefings with vacuous mid-level marketing managers, all under the pretext of "working the show," while, in reality, hacking out something just slightly better than PR copy in the hopes of tricking advertisers into spending their money on a magazine that will probably never be read by anyone, or if it does, will have about the same literary impact as the buttons on an elevator.

At the show, I ran into some of those people, and after we talked, I felt all dirty.

But then there are other sides to this tech industry thing that really do make me feel at home. Anna and I went to see Ellen Ullman read at City Lights a few weeks ago, and I see that tomorrow's NY Times has a review of her new book, The Bug. I've always loved her essays, but it's interesting that the Times gives this book such a rave. After seeing her read, I'd kind of decided that fiction wasn't exactly her strong suit.

My co-worker Peter just sent me this link. Talk about a double entendre:

Bush visits Nazi death camp, outlining his vision for Europe's future

Eddie Izzard is coming to San Francisco this fall with his new tour, Sexie. Anna just asked me what date we should see it. My pick: September 11.

What do you think? Complete disaster, or interesting evening? Anna said, "If there's one person I want to spend September 11th with, it's Eddie Izzard."

I just wrote something for 20 minutes and then deleted the post. It was about how crazy it is that Martha Stewart is facing jail while all these other more dangerous slimeballs have gotten off.

The censorship was intentional. I mean, the writing was just so bad. I got home around 11:30 last night after a weekend of drinking and working in Portland Maine, then I had a 10 hour workday today. And now... my.... brain... is... granite.

Life is a fire hose these days, and I seem to be moving so fast that all I can feel is this rock solid sense of stunned velocity. Me moving or standing, I'm really not sure which, and I'm dropping the trappings of my other, downy life. Is this an act of liberation or desperate commitment? I don't know. Life is a fire hose.