Thursday, August 05, 2004

I had a lovely lunch today with Julie and Ted Leung and their three fantastic daughters. Great conversation, food, and weather. Thanks! 

New Bryan Bell theme for Manila users.  

Pictures from Bainbridge Island ferry ride (and one of Scoble). 

John Battelle: Google IPO delayed.  

CBS MarketWatch: Google IPO remains uncertain. 

Today's travel, to Bainbridge Island, will take me through the western terminus of I-90. Just last week I was at the eastern end, in Boston.  

Jessamyn's photo album of the DNC. 

I've heard so many people say that blogging coverage at the DNC sucked, but they usually don't say which blogs they were reading. I wonder if that includes Scripting News, because I think when we hit our stride, the coverage here was excellent. I say "we" because most of the items I pointed to were collaborations or created by others. There was magic in the air at times. For example, here's a brief audio with Rebecca Blood who stopped by the blogger's booth. Now if you know the history, you know that she and I have been at odds at times, not always in a nice way. We had never met face-to-face until Wednesday last week. She's cool, it turns out. We had a great time. She's got a huge heart and a very sweet disposition, made all the nicer because she brought that out in me. Do you doubt there was magic present that night? Listen. It's there. When I play the recording in iTunes, it automatically goes into Red Rubber Ball, which is the perfect song to play at that exact moment. More magic. 

Hanging out with Jeff Sandquist and Robert Scoble in Building 18 at Microsoft yesterday, I dug out my laptop, and recorded this very informal and somewhat kooky discussion. I thought I was using my conference room mike, but I had it plugged into the speaker jack. Serves me right for sitting on an airplane all day cramped into a New Mexico-size seat that was about 1/3 too small for my Texas-size body. 

At the next convention 

Chris Casey of the Democratic News Service asked, on the Convention Bloggers mail list, what we would do differently for 2008. Here's what I say.

In retrospect, it would have been incredible to have a BloggerCon at the DemCon. Off the floor. A room packed with big Democratic icons, the candidates, the operators, the money, the press.

A discussion leader. Let's get to the heart of things. Let's explain to the folks at home how this really works.

We've shown you what the convention looks like to a hayseed in the big city. Now what does it look like from the insider perspective.

And by the way, it's cool that you're all so excited about blogs. Really cool. But what about your friends at the RIAA. They're not our friends. Not because we're pirates, but because we love the First Amendment, like Democrats do. The two positions are not compatible. You can't love blogs and love Hollywood at the same time.

But this iteration was great. Next time let's give the people what only they have. Power. Government of the people, by the people and for the people. Shall not perish from the earth.

Wednesday, August 04, 2004

Betsy Devine: "When I'm sober, I act the way most people act when they're drunk." Heh. Me too. 

Tomorrow night Robert Scoble is hosting an open dinner in my honor, at 6:30PM at the food court of the Crossroads Mall in Bellevue. If you're in the area looking to geek out with some real geeks, this is the place to geek.  

Greetings from Bellevue, WA. It's cloudy. The plane was full. Time for a shower, then my first meeting at 1PM.  

Sean Bonner on lobbycon. 

1995: "But after the six-hour flight, locked in a single position, a very unusual and awkward one, my body wouldn't straighten out. My energy flow was disrupted." This happened again. No room to breathe on the flight out, my pyloric valve slammed shut, and my back is all contorted. No energy flow. Breathe Dave. 

Reuters: Microsoft launches Japanese weblog service. 

Business Week: Don't Quote My Blog on That. 

OPML blogroll for the RNC Convention Bloggers site.  

Wired: "321 Studios, the company that sold DVD-copying software and faced an avalanche of lawsuits from the entertainment industry, shut down Monday." 

Boston Globe: "'We're just looking to change how people connect to the Internet on Nantucket." 

Off to Seattle at 7:30AM Eastern. Checked the forecast in Seattle, San Francisco and Palo Alto. When packing you never imagine the weather is very different from the weather you're leaving. But it is different in Seattle. I only packed one sweater. A mistake? 

Tuesday, August 03, 2004

Announcing a Scripting Noodles dinner, Monday August 9, 7PM at Jing Jing in Palo Alto. The new motto: "It's not just for geeks anymore."  

Before the dinner, at 4PM, we're having a Convention Bloggers meeting at Stanford Law School.  

A humble beginning for rnc.conventionbloggers.com. 

Bryan Bell: "I am so stoked!" 

Electoral Vote Predictor: "[Kerry] is now ahead in the electoral college 328 to 210." 

Sarah Kavanaugh correctly identifies #3 as Laurie McLean, PR person extraordinaire for the early Mac developers.  

Mike Levin is pitching Florida as a place for me to relocate to. I totally appreciate the attention, but if I were going to live in Florida, I'd locate near the ocean.  

Spam has finally reached serious denial-of-service levels. I'm getting almost 1000 messages an hour from one address, informing me that I've won the Swiss lottery. I wonder if anyone else is getting this. (Postscript: I hadn't opened any of the emails, I just did, and saw that he's marching through all four-letter combinations of email addresses at one of the domains I own. I turned off email forwarding, hopefully that should cause all the emails to bounce. Post-postcript: It did.) 

Engadget on hidden iPod features. 

This is Rumor Control is a weblog with anonymous posts by people in the military and intelligence establishment in Washington DC about foreign policy and the Middle East. 

The Washington Post reports that the information that led to Sunday's terrorist alert is very old. If so Howard Dean's conjecture is more than likely. Postscript: The NY Times found sources saying the same thing, as did NPR. 

Don Park: "With Bush is doing much of the work of terrorizing this nation for political gain..." 

Rogers Cadenhead provided tech support as we were preparing to go to Boston last week, curing a bad interaction between Movable Type and the Convention Bloggers site. And advice that the Convention Bloggers name was available came from Steve Rubel. Thanks to both for their help. I just bought another domain yesterday, MigrantVoters.Com. Not sure what to use it for, but I liked the sound. Could be a blog to help people find states that are close and need a few extra votes to help push your guy over the top. Tired of having a meaningless vote? Willing to vote with your feet? A battleground state isn't that far away.