Step 1. Go to the Oxygen Bar for dinner.

Step 2: Eat lots of sushi.

Step 3: Drink sake. Cold. Apparently hot sake is the Japanese equivalent of putting an ice cube in your wine.

Step 4: Pay actual money for, well, air.

Step 5: Imagine that looking like a 75-year-old life-long smoker is somehow cool.

Step 6: In order to not look like a fool for doing step 4, pretend that the oxygen made you either energized, calm, enlightened, or high.

Man, am I cool or what?

Since installing OS X 10.4, I’ve been using a very similar system to what Giles Turnbull describes in Folksonomise your files with Automator. You can enter metadata (here, in the form of space-separated tags) into the file’s “Spotlight Comments” field that will be searched in any Spotlight query. This is great, and it (along with Spotlight in general) is changing the way I store and access files. When I download a reference PDF, I just throw it into my “docs” directory, tag it in the Spotlight Comments, and forget about it.

The article leads me to think, though, about how the buzzword-hungry internets seem to be mashing the terms “folksonomy” and “tag” into the same thing. Tags are a terrific way to organize data, as the break out of the more restrictive hierarchical structures (like a directory tree on your hard drive), and allow you to associate multiple pieces of information with a particular item (like a file).

A folksonomy, though, introduces a subtle but important distinction in that it describes an emergent vocabulary that evolves as a group of people apply their own categorizations to a shared item. del.icio.us is an example of folksonomy, and it has radically improved my efficiency when performing certain kinds of web seraches. While organizing files in this way is a tremendous shift in personal organization, it is clearly not a folksonomy.

Sick of reading all that annoying content on the web? Doesn’t it always get in the way of good, relevant ads? Then you need the Google Content Blocker.

What types of ads will I see?

Once the content is removed from a Web site, you will see all of the original ads, unencumbered by annoying content. The ads fall into two categories:

Google AdSense Ads
Google AdSense Ads are the best ads, because we make money every time someone clicks. Learn more about Adsense.

Other Ads
Google Content Blocker does not block other ads. This is consistent with the “we are not evil” spirit that our PR department always talks about*.

An excellent parody site.

They’re taking a cue from Napster and RealNetworks and going with a subscription model. No word on exactly what type of DRM they’ll be using, but it does say that you’ll be able to listen to the music on your MP3 player, but the songs will stop working if you don’t renew your subscription every month. They’re also severely undercutting Napster to the tune of $7 vs. $15 per month.

In such a saturated market, one can only wonder how long it will take Google to jump in and do it better than all of them.

I’ve been hacking together my own PCs from spare parts for years. It started when I was 16 and finally scraped up enough cash to replace my old Commodore 64. It wasn’t much cash, though, and in order to get the most bang for my buck, I wound up piecing parts together from old used computers. There was a lot of pride in that first 286, 12MHz PC. No hard drive, and not much RAM, but plenty of pride.

Every upgrade I’ve done since then has included at least one or two parts from the computer before it. Often it was nothing more than a video card, or a modem, or some memory, and eventually there were no remaining parts from the original PC. But somehow it always felt as if that first computer was always a part of whatever the latest one was at the time. Maybe not any of the same physical parts, but hey, this hard drive was in the last box, and that one’s video card was in the PC before it… My computer had its own lineage, and it, too, was proud.

So you will understand that it is a bittersweet time that finds me announcing the passing of that once illustrious line. But not too bitter, because LOOK AT THIS HOT NEW MAC!

I’ve already mentioned how much I love my new iBook. Ever since I got it, I’ve known that my next desktop would have to be a Mac as well. I’ve been patiently waiting, though, for the proper convergence of events, and with the recent release of Tiger and the (admittedly disappointing) updates to the PowerMacs, the time was ripe.

Unfortunately, everyone else in the bay area thought so too, and I had to call four different Apple stores to find a dual G5 2.0 GHz in stock (man, I love that I live within driving range of four-plus Apple stores!). But I managed to find one in the end, and took home this brand new powerhouse of productivity. You wouldn’t believe how much more efficient I am now at wasting time!

I don’t think many people realize this, but Apple has as much to offer the super-geek computer user as it does the technophobe to whom it seems to target most of its marketing. Darwin means that I can have all of the Unix tools on my desktop that I’ve become so attached to on my servers. That, and the second-to-none UI, bundled software, and professional-level software availabile combine to make this my dream machine.

Sorry if this sounds like an Apple ad, but I’m just excited. I get that way. Right now, I’m busy exploring the world of development for Mac OS X. It’s a slightly different world than Windows, and there’s a lot (Cocoa, for one) that looks very cool. I’m eager to share some of those experiences with you here as they happen.

Early Friday morning, I flipped the switch on Elistic, my idea for a social list manager come to life. The concept was born from a combination of my desire for a good organizer for my Getting Things Done lists and my interest in social networking tools like del.icio.us. The current product is the result of several commutes’ worth of hacking and is still very much in its infancy. I hope to continue developing Elistic in response to the ways in which people want to use it.

Elistic gives you the ability to create lists containing any type of text content, organizing them using a free-form tagging system, and “linking” your entries to other users’ entries as you see fit. Elistic offers RSS feeds for all of its hosted content, and I’m working on an XML API similar to that offered by del.icio.us to encourage creative development of extensions.

It’s a pretty simple system, but I believe that it creates the potential for rich social interaction — one could conceivably use Elistic to host a blog, or a discussion group, or a communal mind map… It would thrill me to see people eventually using it in ways that I had never considered. I hope you’ll check it out and tell me what you think!

There are a couple reasons why I waited until now to start telling people about it. Most interestingly, I wanted to perform an experiment to see how effective del.icio.us would be as the sole promotion tool. Friday morning, I added Elistic as a del.icio.us bookmark and tagged it with a few values that I thought were appropriate.

Within a short while, the bookmark had been picked up by a few more people, and people were starting to sign up at Elistic. By the end of the day, Elistic had about 50 unique visitors, and about 200 more throughout Saturday, all from one link on del.icio.us. Of those 250, ten people created an account and started experimenting with it.

I don’t know that this proves anything other than del.icio.us is a success as a useful social bookmarking tool. Not that I didn’t know that already, but it’s fun to see it in action, anyway.

The other reason that I kept quiet for a couple days was becuase I wanted a chance to start nice and quietly to make sure things were working. I have already found and fixed a couple minor problems thanks to the interest of one particular user. But it seems like things are running more ore less smoothly, so if it sounds interesting, why don’t you check it out? I’d love to hear what you think I can do to make Elistic a more interesting and useful service.

You know that guy on BART with the pony tail who hasn’t shaved in about a month? He sits on the edge of his seat and stares down everybody who gets on the train, occasionally breaking down in silent laughter — you know, him? Well, he was on my train this morning, and I finally realized something about him.

He’s not crazy. He’s a genius. On a crowded commute, nobody once dared sit next to him. And this was one of the good sideways seats, where you don’t have to wait for someone to let you out.

So from now on, I’m working on developing my crazy. Cue bug eyes and random laughter.

Why didn’t they give February 30 days and use the extra two to take a couple of the 31-day months down to 30? That would be much more consistent.

Since moving to the bay area and starting work in San Francisco, I’ve been doing much more city walking than I ever used to. On my way from the BART station to work, I have to cross two streets. As a computer programmer (and as Distracto!), I’ve been thinking about which is the most efficient way to get there. Allow me to demonstrate with this map (xx is a crosswalk):

---------+--+----------------
         |  |    Market St.
---------+--+----------------
         |  |
[BART]   xxxx - A
         |  |
         |  |
         | -+---- New Montgomery St.
         |  |
         |  |
     B - xxxx   D
         |  |  /
-------x-+--+-x--------------
       x |  | x  Mission St.
-------x-+--+-x--------------
      /  |  |
     C   xxxx - E
         |  |
         |  |
         |  |
         |  |  [Work]
         |  |

Now, I could cross at A, and if the walk sign is on, it might seem like a good idea. But the time taken at A might cause me to miss D, forcing me to wait another full cycle. And for my particular case, it’s a much longer wait to cross Mission than New Montgomery.

It’s possible that if I had not crossed at A, I might have caught the tail end of the light at C, and then could immediately cross at E. And if I missed C, I could still cross at B and I’m no worse off than I was before. So now I never cross at A. I’m convinced it saves me a ton of time.

And the software design lesson? Don’t optimize prematurely. Wait until you know what your biggest bottleneck is, and work around that first. Okay, maybe it’s a strech, but these are the things that I think about on my way to work.

A post by lilliebet got me thinking about something I’ve often considered before… Why do so many bloggers feel compelled to post pictures of their cats? It doesn’t really annoy me as much as baffle me. Are all these people graduates of the Wil Wheaton school of blogging?

Anyway, I was curious as to how many of these there actually were, and I smelled another Google query coming on. The last one was pretty well-received, so maybe you’ll like this too:

Google for people who blog pictures of their cats