I often give my close friend Abram (aka Defective Guru) grief for playing the roll of devil's advocate. Truth is, he's one of my strongest advocates. Everyone should be lucky enough to have a friend like him. Thanks, dude.

I'm the guy who floats lofty, underdeveloped ideas only to have them dismantled before they have a chance to blossom. I hate it. I react poorly to it. The problem isn't that that happens; it is a necessary part of the process, the part where you objectively examine the idea and filter out the bad ones. What frustrates me is when such contemplation tends to bury ideas instead of simply bringing them down to earth.

These posts offer insight on maintaining the spirit of an idea in spite of the devil's advocates, naysayers, and poo-pooers:

Death by Devil's Advocate
The Concept Clarification Effect
Keep the sharp edges!
Because that's the way we have always done it...

"Imaginative ideas are subject to be shattered and annihilated by contact with the practical."
~unknown

Jill sprang a surprise on me — tickets to celebrate my birthday in Boston for an extended weekend with my sister, Katrina. I had a surprise for her too...I asked her to marry me (she said yes), so we made it a dual-purpose celebration weekend.

[photos]

Next weekend is my ten year high school reunion in Arizona. More pix to come!

"Do you have any spare change I can have to use the payphone?"
- Woman in The Loop, standing near this payphone.

http://awarmgun.net/archives/zombiefiction/

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I usually listen to NPR on the way to work in the morning. The last four weeks of coverage have been marked by frequent and excellent reporting on the aftermath of hurricane Katrina and those affected by it.

For whatever reason, this morning I thought of the two-week hiatus I'll take from listening when they perform their annual fund drive. It occurred to me that it would be remarkably magnanimous for the organization one year to casually announce, "Thanks to some generous donations and intelligent budgeting, we'll be forgoing this year's NPR fund drive. We ask instead that you donate what you can to the Red Cross or a charity of your choice." I suspect the gesture of good will would be repaid in the following year's donations.

Of course, it may be impractical or impossible to pull something like that off, but it sure would be remarkable.

By now, you probably know that Local Google is better than the phonebook and Google Maps are way better than MapQuest and MapBlast. But this is really comprehensive.

tip: Zoom all the way in. It's AMAZING.

"The zoo keepers tried every way to divert the chimp's attention from cigarettes: a walk after breakfast, a music session after lunch and gym after dinner."
[source]

Uh, did you try NOT GIVING IT FUCKING CIGARETTES? What's it gonna do, borrow someone's ID and go to the gas station?

I was watching the Microsoft Sparkle video that has been heavily hyped across the blogosphere with my friends August and Michelle with whom I work. (the video is over an hr long, here's a concise synopsis of Sparkle)

August made a good point: the video showed us what the tool looks like, but didn't really go into what it means. This post contemplates some of that.

What it made me think of is that there may be increasing opportunities for "traditional applications" to have rich media interfaces, and thus create branding opportunities. Maybe a rich media tool that has a full animation/3D and a full application framework behind it will be the next step in the command line -> GUI -> ??? evolution. In fact, we're already seeing that sort of thing with Dashboard Widgets on OS X and Konfabulator (the product from which Apple aped the idea for Widgets, now owned by Yahoo). Maybe this will take it to the next level. Maybe it'll just be another tool to use.

Much of what is demonstrated in the video certainly falls into the "flash already does all that" category. It reminds me of the "Director already does that" days when Flash got bought by MM and hit the scene. I guess the "next new thing" might not be better than the existing thing, but it might be what you end up with.