Cat door

We have this cat, and her litter box is in the garage now. All summer we’ve left the door to the garage open, and it’s been fine… but now that it’s getting cold at night, our thoughts have turned to cat doors.

Probably for handy people, installing a cat door is like a one-hour project, something you can knock off while waiting for a coat of varnish on some other project to dry. For us though, there was a considerable period of pondering and reflection: can we train a 12-year old cat to use a cat door? are there doors with cat-doors already embedded in them, or must you install a cat-door separately? are there people in the cat-door installation business? does one procure said cat door at the cat store or the door store? etc. George and Angela provided very helpful advice and encouragement, while Sterling and Jeremy drove me onward with their taunts and smirks.

Finally one day last week I went to Home Depot to purchase a cat door, an electric jigsaw, and safety goggles. I’ve always wanted to wear safety goggles! I was kind of intimidated by the saw though, because I have a morbid fear of cutting off a digit with a power tool. In any event, Tim ended up doing all the hard stuff while I supervised with a cup of coffee in my hand — just like a real construction site! No fingers were inadvertently sawed off or body parts drilled into. And now our cat is locked in the garage until she learns to use the cat door, and handiness is very slightly less mysterious to us. Yay!

Vocabulary conundrum

Is there a word for those bundles of dead pine needles in the street that look like roadkill?

UPDATE 10/31/04: I thought there was an actual word, but if not I’m coining one: porcupineedles.

Web services commons

So far, most of the companies that build on public web services have done so in a notably respectful, community-oriented way — perhaps because when the web services community was small, a company would attract a lot of negative attention if they were perceived to be all take and no give. But as public web services go mainstream, I can’t help wondering about the development of the content commons.

I’d say Flickr is a company that has gotten into open web services in exactly the right way. It costs them a lot of money to host all that bandwidth, but feeds of photos are a cool new feature and a value-add to their users — and ultimately it all loops back to their core business model of getting people to host photos on Flickr. Flickr’s API also gives users some confidence that the company isn’t going to try to screw them by making it hard to get their content back out if they want to take it and go elsewhere. It’s a win-win-win situation for everyone, and another example of Flicker’s leadership by clarity.

On the other side of the spectrum are companies that treat RSS feeds and public web services just as free content, without adding any new transformative value or giving anything back to the community. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this if the license allows it, but it’s not interestingly different from screenscrapers who present your content as theirs — who have long been considered sleazy parasites by most of the legitimate web. The whole idea of opening content via web services is that growth for all can be enhanced by sharing — and in the long run people don’t want to share with those who are openly contemptuous of the whole idea.

Fuck ArtApart

I’ve always been a big fan of ArtApart.com’s custom T-shirt service but I can’t use it any more because they refuse to print the word “fuck”.

This is billed as a “family friendly” policy. Let me note that I loathe this kind of mealy-mouthed euphemism more than the actual restriction. Whose family are they protecting? My husband and mom swear quite a bit, so it can’t be mine. I doubt their insurance company lets their workers’ wives and kids wander around the shop floor either, so the offspring of Portland’s screenprinters are probably safe from direct exposure to my foul language. Maybe at best this is a worker protection policy — but since some worker had to screen my design and send me email telling me that they were rejecting it, at best it’s a partial worker protection policy. ArtApart should probably check with an employment lawyer about the consequences of well-meant but unequal protection, especially if (as I suspect) the worker who read my nefarious order was of a different gender than the one who is being “protected” from having to print the F-bomb. And apparently “f–k” is the only word that they ban — so go right ahead and order a T-shirt that says “shitforbrains cocksucker”, they don’t have a policy on that. And they apparently will print “f*ck” or some other slightly disguised version of the famous fricative — which, unless their workers are mentally challenged or illiterate (in which case they won’t suffer any harm anyway), is hardly less damaging of their tender sensibilities.

Of course they have they right to refuse business for any reason, and I have the right to take my business to another vendor. I’d just like it if they made their policy clear before I wasted time trying to give them money for a service they do not in fact provide.

Halloween parties

So… would it be tacky to mention that I don’t have an office Halloween party to go to this year? And I was kind of hoping wistfully that someone might invite me to their Halloween party? I am thinking of going as Mozilla this year.

Repulsive food gallery

I’m Korean, so of course I regularly eat repulsive foods. I’ve started a photo set on Flickr to document and celebrate said repulsive foods. I enjoy taking photos of food, although as you’ll see I’m not very good at it.

Have I mentioned that I L-U-V-LUV Flickr? This is how lame I am: over a year ago, I started trying to install Gallery… and I never successfully managed to do so. I tried! I tried lots of times. But now that’s all over, because I am in love with Flickr. What a relief!

I also admire Ludicorp a whole bunch. Their product conceptualization and speed of execution are head and shoulders above anyone else in the business right now, and a testament to the vision of Stewart and Caterina as well as the hard work of their amazing team. The cool shit invariably comes out of those small teams that don’t have to spend all their time playing “bureaucratic judo”, or building to some small-minded person’s idea of what the market is ready for. Great product drives the market, and right now Ludicorp is demonstrating that like no other company.

Going to DC

Timboy and I are going to our nation’s capital to celebrate our 12th wedding anniversary. Are there any good restaurants there? And what is fun to do? We were thinking of going to the International Spy Museum and Colonial Williamsburg (which was featured in my dissertation) — but I’d love to hear suggestions from locals. Thanks!

Web 2.0

I’ve been at Web 2.0 most of the week, pretty much just hanging out with friends. I have to confess (sorry Tim and John!) that I snuck in with someone else’s badge… hey, I don’t have a daddy to pay for me to go to these things any more.

I got to interview Mark Cuban, the Broadcast.com and Dallas Mavericks and HDNet guy, in my role as a fake journalist. I asked him whether he’s still a geek, and he gave me some good advice about buying a projector TV, and much to my glee I got to use the line “There’s no D in Dirk”! The thing that impressed me about him is that he doesn’t seem to worry about seeming stupid, and therefore he is able to allow himself to do simple but crucial things — like focus on his own business instead of worrying about what all his competitors are doing. It’s incredibly hard in Silicon Valley to stick to your own knitting instead of being distracted by the next shiny sexy thing.

A lot of the speakers were kind of the same-old same-old — but a couple of good startups came out of stealth during this conference: Jot, Rojo, and InsiderPages. All three teams seem extremely cool, and it was very exciting to see such useful products. I have to admit that I’m very partial to JotSpot, it’s a perfect example of O’Reilly’s truism that great commercial products often supplant just-OK free products — it is to normal wikis as gelato is to normal ice cream. Joe and Graham are also sort of heroes of mine, because it’s rare to see two guys who are able to remain as sweet and genuine and hardworking after having a lot of success around here. When two guys who made their fuck-you money a while ago are staying up all night hacking on one more feature or perfecting the pitch… you know they have love for the game, not just the rewards it can bring.

Best of all, I got to meet Steven Levy and tell him how his book Hackers changed my life. It’s amazingly prescient that he was able to zero in on the themes embodied by Stallman and Gates so early in the game. When everyone in Chicago told me that I’d be wasting my life on computers, that book gave me a lot of hope that I’d find people like myself in Silicon Valley.

Unfortunately, I’ve also discovered the hard way that the wireless in my Linux laptop sucks balls. It’s humiliating to sit next to a guy who’s connecting easily with XP, when iwconfig says I’m connected but I can’t actually seem to move bits. I’m also starting to suspect the built-in Prism card in this box just isn’t any good.

Oh, and I got to ride in a Maserati. Oddly enough, it had really crappy seat belts — like the kind you’d see on a Ford. 400 horsepower is both fun and frightening, especially in San Francisco… my eyes were shut tight every time we accelerated. Yes, I am a wuss, thank you.

iTunes infelicities

Although I had issues with the closedness of iTunes, it’s such an amazing product that I became addicted to it when I had a Mac at my old job. Now I’m back to Linux, but Tim has a Powerbook and I have an iPod (well, I stole his iPod), so I embarked on a big quest to replicate my playlists on the iPod.

First off, it turns out that although you’re allowed to play music you paid for on up to 5 computers, you’re not allowed to download it 5 times. So if your hard disk crashes or you’re making your patented 5-minute getaway from a company that just fired you (for instance), you have absolutely no recourse except to buy the music again. You’re evidently supposed to be making backups by hand, believe it or not. Uh… there is NO TECHNICAL REASON whatsoever that Apple could not offer multiple downloads, even as a fee-based service. It seems to be just part of the whole “we don’t trust the customer” thing that infects everyone in the digital media game.

But whatever, I’m straight with paying for the music twice, since my issue is convenience rather than money. So I get on Tim’s computer and use my iTunes account to buy all the songs again. And they play fine… but they won’t transfer to the iPod. I end up having to get his root password, create a new user account for myself on that computer, copy all the AAC files over to my new user’s home directory, chown them, log out as Tim, log in as me, authorize the computer in iTunes, and delete the XML file that defines what’s in the iTunes library — just to make my songs play on the iPod. And good luck getting help from Apple in figuring all this out.

I’m sure there’s some tremendously clever reason why my iTunes user and my Mac user and the computer-level permissions interact like this… but it’s just a pain in the butt, and ends up actually allowing me to give music to the other users of this computer which I imagine Apple doesn’t want me to do. Usable DRM is a hard problem, and this experience convinces me that even Apple hasn’t solved it yet… but I think they’d be better off just making it easy for me to download my music five times.

New car

I ended up getting a 2005 Acura RSX, silver with black interior. I wanted something that looked humble, but could haul ass on the freeway — not that I ever exceed posted limits.

I wish I could say I did a lot of research, but the truth is my dad suggested the Acura. Korean parents add value again! I did put some time into pondering the manual vs. automatic transmission question… and concluded that for me a stickshift would be a pointless affectation, like shaving with a straight razor. I spend 90% of my driving time on dead-straight, dead-flat, usually dead-slow thoroughfares — and I strictly obey all traffic laws — so 10% extra “performance” would make no discernable difference to me.

I can recommend Yahoo Autos for great one-stop info-shopping; and Los Gatos Acura — the third closest Acura dealer to me, but by far the best — for a smooth and sincere buying experience.