directorcommentary | jasonbentley.org

directorcommentry is done

2007-09-30T01:57:00.000-07:00

This is the last entry in my first blog, and I'll admit - it's harder to write than I expected. It's been hard to write lately, period. I write so much at work, too often my will to write any more is seriously tapped. I began directorcommentary at a time when I had a more time for verbose writing - and a time when I had a different concept of what a blog is. Now, any visitor to jasonbentley.org can see the streams of traffic from all my blogs, and my various other feeds. The need to write long entries with lots of links to cool stuff isn't there, when you can easily see what I bookmark. I've let directorcommentary lapse into dead air, and it deserves a better exit than neglectful dormancy.

But anyway, before you start the suicide watch, I'm only ending this blog so that I can begin anew. I've started a new blog for shorter written entries about what's going on in my life and career, which I'll announce as soon as I get the look and logistics pinned down. I'll archive the entirely of directorcommentary at a new address, and my other blogs (The Jasons Bentley, sundry glossolalia, etc) aren't going anywhere. The best way to keep up is at jasonbentley.org or by subscribing to my jaiku rss feed (http://jasonbentley/jaiku.com/feed/rss). I'll announce the new blog shortly, and thank all directorcommentary's readers for their loyalty and patience. Stay tuned to jasonbentley.org. :-)

722 posts.

...and cut. Print. That's a wrap.

Summer Chill

2007-06-20T00:13:00.000-07:00

I don't know about you, but I can't think of a more chilling, Stephen King-ian, dark-side-of-summer story than the little two-year-old witness to something horrible, found left alone in his ransacked house, who keeps repeating, like a mantra, "Mommy's in the rug...mommy's in the rug."

However, this is real, and events in this story are still unfolding.

It's All About the Music...or, Holy Crap!

2007-06-18T14:36:00.000-07:00

I started uploading all my old OLGA files to Scribd less than 24 hours ago. And...holy crap. First, some figures. These refer to total views of all documents that I've ever uploaded to Scribd:

The charts show it better:

And I'm not even half done! In other words...holy crap!

Step away from the meme

2007-06-11T20:02:00.000-07:00

So, there was a time when everyone I know was showing everyone else the "Shoes" video. I've stepped away from it for a while, but watched it again today with headphones, and nearly spewed soda when, for the first time, I actually heard Kelly's brother's response after she says, "I'm gonna betch slap, you, shetbag." He says, "No, I'm an athlete.

LOL.

Sexually-Transmitted Viral Marketing

2007-06-05T12:23:00.000-07:00

Okay...WTF.

I had a surreal experience today. And I mean surreal. In my life, the surreal is fairly common, and this one tips the charts.

I stayed up in South City last night, and came back down this morning with Jodi, who dropped me off at the Mountain View Caltrain. I decided to do another check at the San Jose Caltrain lost and found to see if anybody had turned in my lost phone, so I bought a ticket to the Diridon station. The train arrived shortly afterward, and I boarded the first car - the one right behind the engine. I sat on the second tier, in the double seat just adjacent to the stairs.

I had just opened my laptop when I noticed a teenage boy - he looked maybe 16, 17 - looking straight at me from the other end of the car on the opposite side. His back was to me, but I could clearly see that his long shirt barely hid the fact that his pants were down. I met his gaze, and looked back to my laptop. That's when he proceeded to continue having sex with his girlfriend. Right there. I realized it was just me and them on the second tier, and he clearly knew I was there. They were quiet, but it was obvious what they were doing. I could see...things.

And in the time it took us to get from Mountain View to Santa Clara, he finished and the both of them walked past me along the opposite side. The girl never looked me in the eye, but the boy sure did.

We're such exhibitionists, aren't we?

But anyway, here's the *really* surreal part. As they leave, the boy is dropping little pink flyers on the train seats. When they get to the middle of the car, he reaches over, hands me one, smiles, and they're out. The flyer is an ad for Hikkup.com, a web site that - get this - lets you set anonymous messages to friends. But its in invite only beta.

Does a locomotive sex show and a pink flyer count as an invite? :-)

Wow.

Grazr Guided Melodies

2007-06-01T22:46:00.000-07:00

RSS and OPML mostly remain a mystery to the masses. Sure, most media people are clued in now, but few get beyond clicking on the little orange box to subscribe to a feed in in their mail reader. I'm not going to go into a long Utopian rant about how RSS, XML, et al will change the world and how we relate to information... even though it is. Syndicated feeds, hyperfeeds really, are very powerful things. But so far, there hasn't been no carrier wave - no iPodesque catalyst to light the fire.

Grazr is a step in the right direction. Grazr is unique among OPML/RSS readers, and Grazr's default "slider" setting jettisons the mind-numbing newsreader format (and the underdefined Live Bookmark concept), in favor of a smooth, backward-and-forward glide through as many layers of feeds as necessary. There's in 'it' quality that Grazr brings to the syndication experience that's hard to define...but I'll try. I think the basic backward and forward slide effect adds a third dimension to the web of feeds and links that makes it more tangible - a bit like a book. Gah - that's the best I can do right now.

The effect isn't as noticable with run-of-the-mill news reading (Google Reader remains my favorite in that arena), as it is with more complex, syndicated data structures, like the Rhapsody online music service. Here's one of the root Rhapsody feeds (http://feeds.rhapsody.com/data.opml), first in Optimal, a PHP-based OPML viewer that's more traditionally hierarchical:

Pretty, but the limitations become clear pretty quickly. Now here's the same content in Grazr:

You can even switch to a more traditional "3-pane" view when its appropriate:

So why am I going on about all this? Well, this whole blog entry was basically the answer to why you want to drag one or more of these bookmarklets to your browser toolbar. I was getting frustrated that there was no Grazr subscription option in Firefox's default RSS style sheet, so I whipped these up to do the trick. If at any point you run into an RSS feel or the cryptic blank OPML page, just click Grazrize and voila, instant readability.

Each bookmarklet does the same thing, I just made different ones for a few of Grazr's style options.

Happy grazing. :-)

Grazrize (Noir)
Grazrize (Blanc)
Grazrize (Bleu)
Grazrize

Inflektion

2007-06-01T16:39:00.000-07:00

Surprise o' the day: I'm now a featured director on the Flektor homepage! :-) I guess this would be a good time to congratulate the Flektor guys on their reported $10-20 million acquisition by Fox/MySpace. Glad I could help. :-) Need a committed technology evangelist and community facilitator? I'm available. :-)

No, seriously. I'm available.

Google Simple Style

2007-05-28T22:16:00.001-07:00

If a Google Simple search bar plug-in wasn't geeky enough, I've also put together a style sheet that makes the results a bit prettier (and removes the page-wide input box that's sorta redundant if you're already using a search box anyway.

http://jasonbentley.org/css/googlesimple.css

Google Simple

2007-05-28T17:32:00.000-07:00

For the "Well, if I wanted it, someone else might file:"

I created a Firefox searchbox plugin called "Google Simple," which uses a Google API interface that displays simplified query results in lists of hyperlinked titles only: no description, cache links, green url, nada. Just the title. It's not a hack or a transformation. Google provides the feature so that results can be integrated into a sidebar (like SeaMonkey), but I find it helpful as a general option when I want a title without wading through descriptions, or when my search necessitates visual pattern matching, or whenever when I want a simple, quick, clean experience.

If you're using Firefox 2 or Internet Explorer 7 (or something newer), you can install the Google Simple search plugin it by visiting my homepage (http://jasonbentley.org). Your search box should automatically detect the plugin.

The search box displays results in list of 100 with SafeSearch turned off.

Kyra Phillips NOW

2007-05-25T17:08:00.000-07:00

So my friends can roll their eyes and tune out now - for this is an unsolicited open letter to the peeps down at CNN. Now, as all y'all know, I watch a goodly amount of the cable news outlet, and I've been a steady watcher since my mom first ordered cable back in - gack! - 1983. Anyway, this all, naturally, nore than qualifies me to weigh in on staffing decisions at the Time Warner subsidiary, so you bitches best put on your mouseears and listen up. :-)

Please, please do something with Paula Zahn and give Kyra Phillips the slot now occupied by the often ludicrous Paula Zahn Now. You an even keep the sensationalist "Out In The Open" motif. But Kyra Phillips, during her week as anchor during Zahn's vacation, was more charismatic and likable than Zahn - with those damn fluttering eyelids - has ever been. Phillips was all business when it was appropriate, moderated the discussions with ease, asked interesting questions, and rightfully couldn't keep a straight face during red-meat segments like "Is There a Secret Indoor Pot Farm In Your Neighborhood?"

And move her to New York. She looked so luminous under the New York studio lights, I couldn't take my eyes off her. And no fluttering eyelids. :-)

For God and Country

2007-05-23T19:46:00.001-07:00

This evening I find myself in the odd situation whereby two of my self-published documents at Scribd are burning up the day's chart, hovering neck-and-neck at 2 and 3, trailing way behind Xenu at #1 but kicking the United States Constitution's ass rather nicely. Which is the ultimate irony, since as an American, the Constitution's precisely what gives me (and Hubbard's minions) the right to write, publish, and speak who we are.

And I think to myself, what a wonderful shotgun shack. :-)

You Don't Miss Your Water

2007-03-31T13:32:00.000-07:00

...of limitless pot-ential

2007-03-31T08:12:00.000-07:00

That's just awesome. No, not the silly pot ad, but the embedded viewer from Scribd (www.scribd.com), a free web service from a couple of YAPOGS* that's positioning itself as a YouTube for documents. I think Scribd has a lot of potential.

In a nutshell, Scribd will host your documents for free, and you can choose whether to make them public or keep them private. You can upload in just about any major format (including cut/paste), and Scribd will automatically OCR the text. Within minutes, Scribed publishes the document available a downloadable PDF, the cool embeddable FlashPaper PDF, a Word doc, plain text, and (get this) an mp3 of the text of your document as read by a satisfyingly futuristic computerized female voice, complete with an authoritative English accent straight out of the Sci-Fi channel.

Listen as she reads what you're reading:

Scribd makes it very easy to bulk-upload many documents at once and attach tags, descriptions, and friendly titles. There's also some very well-implemented maps and tables that detail basic stats, traffic analytics, and document attributes that're available on each document's unique homepage.

Scribd's community aspect is still forming, and, like YouTube's more freewheeling early months, there's a healthy dose of blatant copyright violation. But there's also some compelling content mixed in with the odd personal tidbits, the inevitable furry art, various 9/11 conspiracy 'reports', slapdash amateur 'how-to' guides and the persistent oeuvre of Cory Doctorow. Anyone who's ever taken a passing glance an an e-book Usenet newsgroup will recognize a lot of stuff.

I wonder if Lawrence Lessig's seen this. Moreover, I wonder if Google's seen this.

*YAPOGS (abbr.) Yet Another Pair of Geeks from Stanford

For What It's Worth

2007-03-15T02:23:00.000-07:00

This is a word frequency analysis of all listed Craigslist personals for the North Bay, South Bay, East Bay, Peninsula, and San Francisco at approx midnight on March 14, 2007. I removed the automated city notation, age declaration, and anonymous email address and ran the word on exclusively on the title and body text. —jasonbentley

I'll See You In Halifax

2007-03-14T21:39:00.000-07:00

My Canadian friends will certainly sip their Molsons and roll their eyes politely at my sudden enlightenment to a compelling piece of their history, but I'll admit, in my 32 years I'd never heard of the Halifax Explosion of 6 December 1917. Not once, never. No teacher ever mentioned it - I would have remembered. My brain always latches on vividly to stories of great disasters, and this was one of the most terrible disasters to befall a western city - ever. It was a terrible bookend to the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 - but Halifax was a city destroyed by fire instead of water and wind.

Briefly, here's what happened:

At the height of World War I, Halifax, Nova Scotia is one of the busiest, economically booming ports on the Atlantic Seaboard. Port regulations are few and relegated to an honor system, even though this was five years after the Titanic disaster. The laissez-faire approach to traffic management led to a collision between two ships. One of these ships was a Royal Navy munitions transport vessel, filled to capacity with the most lethal explosives available at the time. To avoid any detection by German ships, the munitions ship gave no outward evidence of its cargo.

The munitions ship caught fire, and hundreds of people from Halifax and the surrounding towns and settlements ringed the harbor to watch the burning ship. Only a handful of people knew what was on the ship, and though many tried to warn the spectators, it was to little avail.

Without warning, the ship exploded with unimaginable force, shattering its steel hull into thousands of pieces and wiping much of Halifax, Dartmouth, and the surrounding communities literally off the map. It is estimated nearly 1,000 people died instantly from the force of the blast - still the largest non-nuclear man-made explosion known in human history. Entire families were wiped out in an instant. The blast itself was 1/2 mile in diameter. The explosion was heard and felt up to 200 miles away.

Much of the damange came from flying glass, blinding those spared in the blast. The force of the explosion was so great that it sent a tsunami wave out across the harbor, inundating much of the blast area in several feet of freezing water. The next day, the entire area was hit with a blizzard. Eventually, nearly 3,000 people died as a result of the Halifax Explosion. And have you ever heard of it?

There's much more to the story, and I'll spare you my recount in favor of far superior ones at the CBC and the Wikipedia. But an interesting side-note - this is why I love the associative nature of the web. I came upon this story like so:

Looking for some advanced RSS readers, I try out Amphetadesk, which is bundled with a huge opml file of feeds. One of these feeds had a link to a website that is assembling a directory of bloggers along with their years of birth, in the hopes of painting a picture of the Internet as an age-diverse place. Looking up their oldest members, I found the blog of 94-year-old Donald Crowdis, one of the world's oldest known bloggers and - the Wikipedia says - one of the few remining survivors of, yep, the Halifax Explosion of 1917.

.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_explosion

http://www.cbc.ca/halifaxexplosion/index.html

As U Like It

2007-03-06T21:16:00.000-08:00

Swivel.com lets you make cool graphs from any data that you upload. Not to let technology stand in the way of personal vanity, here's how my Google Videos are doing :-)

What we got here is...

2007-03-04T18:00:00.000-08:00

Okay, when I start getting error messages like this one, I begin thinking that Yahoo Pipes and I have started to form a relationship that may or may not be too healthy. Jury's still out. One thing's for certain, we know how to push each others' buttons. :-)

Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground

2007-02-19T17:28:00.000-08:00

The BBC has run a lengthy article on the decline of Detroit (my hometown), and for me, it's just so *sad.* I was a little boy when the oil crisis hit, starting the Big 3 on the inexorable path to obscurity, so I'd never known a time when Detroit was the Silicon Valley of its day, just as I've never known what it means to respect a President in the pre-Watergate sense.

The dot-com bubble's burst in 2000-2001 was a shocking blow, but recovery here has been steady and relatively swift. Detroit has been limping and wheezing in a slow torturous death for decades, and one wonders what that does to a population that's already disillusioned, disaffected, without promise or hope.

While I'm not surprised that my family didn't see it coming (hindsight being what it is), but what does amaze me is how vehemently they argued against my leaving the area, and lobbied for me to return in 2003.

This could be Silicon Valley in 40 years or less.

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6346299.stm

Deeply, deeply sick s***

2007-02-11T12:53:00.000-08:00

I'm not easily offended. Annoyed, sure. Pissed off, definately. But offended? Nah. I can contextualize most opinions and points of view that I don't necessarily agree with.

But this... this is offensive. Deeply offensive. Jawdroppingly offensive. Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church, have moved beyond their cartoonish "God Hates Fags" campaign and have begun picketing the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq. And now this: a television ad called "Thank God for IED's."

It's unclear if it's been aired. One thing's for certain: it's revolting. As such, everyone should see it. This is the logical conclusion of religious fundamentalism in America.

Well just be over here. In the Caymans.

2007-02-08T17:58:00.000-08:00

As you already know, Anna Nicole Smith died today. The Trimspa website has been replaced with this block of text:

Whippany, NJ, February 8, 2007 – Today, Anna Nicole Smith’s grief stricken and tumultuous personal life came to an end. Anna came to our Company as a customer, but she departs it as a friend. While life for Anna Nicole was not easy these past few months, she held dear her husband, Howard K. Stern, her daughter, Dannielynn Hope, her most cherished friends, beloved dogs, and finally, her work with TRIMSPA.

Anna knew both the joy of giving life, and the heartache of losing a child. We pray that she is granted the peace that eluded her more recent days on earth, and that she find comfort in the presence of her son, Daniel.

-- Alex Goen, CEO and Founder, TRIMSPA

Onaji's Back

2007-02-08T17:14:00.000-08:00

Fly like Lindburgh, baby!

2007-02-04T12:50:00.000-08:00

Not So Harry After All...

2007-02-01T13:56:00.000-08:00

Daniel Radcliffe (aka Harry Potter) stars in a West End revival of Peter Shaffer's Equus. "Nude" publicity stills of Radcliffe are posted to the play's official website. The world reacts:

Muggles the world over are shocked and wonder why nobody "thinks of the children(TM)".
Wizards yawn and shrug at yet another Hogwart's alumni posing in nude photos with horses.
Closeted teenage gay boys across the world begin several days of wistful pining.
Closeted middle age married men on the downlow begin several days of not making eye contact with their teenaged sons.
Furries seethe with jealousy.

It amazes me that there's still shock over a happy trail. Didn't we deal with this, like, back in the 1970's? It's David Cassidy on Rolling Stone all over again (no word, however, on whether Cassidy, a noted equestrian, also poses nude with horses). I mean, it's not like these are shots of Harry Potter in-character playing naked twister with the Weasley boys. Though that'd be kinda hot. Especially if the twins got in on it. The photographers seem to have gone out of their way to make Radcliffe look as un-Potteresque as possible.

How long d'you think before the world gets its first view of Hermione's boobs?

Oh, how funny, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom just issued an apology for having an affair with his campaign manager's wife. And where are the damn pictures of that?

And there begins another moist day in the Bay Area.

Links:
http://jasonbentley.org/blog/img/cassidy_leibovitz_rs.jpg
http://www.ebar.com/news/article.php?sec=news&article=1538
http://equustheplay.com

Making an Example of Me

2007-01-30T18:01:00.000-08:00

Magnoto is a site that offers visually-rich AJAX web pages with limited functionality...you can't even add RSS feeds or widgets. But you can place rich-text notes (which support linking, etc), audio files, and video files. The cumulative effect is much like an Internet-accessible white board or refrigerator door, which is great for kids, but it's something I've little use for. I set up a page months ago to try it out and then promptly forgot about it.

So you can imagine my surprise when I went to the main Magnoto homepage today and saw a capture of the page I set up (with a link to it) right in the middle of the main page as example of notable sites. Well...sweet...but wouldn't ya know it? The one page I spent, like, zero thought on...is the one that gets the front-page-above-the-fold shoutout. I...oy.

Links:
http://magnoto.com
http://jasonbentley.magnoto.com

Stony Zelda

2007-01-26T21:14:00.000-08:00

Zelda on the blunted chill tip.

Sleek, sessy li'l playa courtesy of boomp3.com.