"Hi, and welcome. Have you dined with us before?" They looked up at me from their menus with smiles, "Okay. Where are you from?" These guests who grew up in the South heard it instantly, what is left of my... | Continue »

I recommend Anil Dash's thoughtful post on the geek response to forthcoming changes in the Twitter service: Geeks are lamenting that they don't dominate and control this network, and expressing it in the only way we know how: Through technological... | Continue »

The github style of software development has, unusually, embraced the "fork" as a way of encouraging software use and reuse. Rather than being tied to a single repository owned by a single maintainer who accepts or rejects patches at their... | Continue »

Here's my talk from Webstock last month (a conference I loved): I will say humbly that it's a good talk on important subjects I've been thinking about for the past several years, but I should explain my sheepish, low-energy delivery.... | Continue »

Yo, girl. Yo, Put down the eyeliner. While you are at it, put down that box of red dye. Angela Chase or Tori Amos you ain't. The good news is in 17 more years you will be so comfortable in... | Continue »

A long time ago on an internet forum I once frequented, a user posted a video he created. Below is that video. You should watch it because it is one of the best things ever on the internet ever: If... | Continue »

One of the nice things about being older is that you get to hear the story about things that used to be top secret in your time. I remember watching the 60 Minutes story about spy satellites in the 1980’s that referenced this particular spy satellite program. It was dubbed “Big Bird” and it was considered the most successful space spy satellite program of the Cold War era. From 1971 to 1986 a total of 20 satellites were launched, each containing 60 miles of film and sophisticated cameras that orbited the earth snapping vast, panoramic photographs of the Soviet Union,... | Continue »

On moving to the Upper West Side: "I live downtown, but when I first got to the show, I didn't know anything about New York. I asked a friend where I should live, and he was like, 'live on the... | Continue »

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Found while updating my profile info. | Continue »

Last year sometime I switched up the tagline on this blog to "Let's make a sandwich." If you were following along with pop culture at the time, you knew the reference. A year later, people keep asking me "What's with... | Continue »

There's been a bunch of stories lately about Ev Williams, co-founder of Blogger and Twitter upon the occasion of him leaving Twitter to do his own thing. Some are outright calling him an asshole. This Business Insider story of Noah... | Continue »

I love this Globe and Mail interview with Michael Chabon about fatherhood (via Ruhlman). In particular, this quote, which is an excerpt from Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs: The daily work you put into rearing your children is a kind of... | Continue »

Last summer I was bored one day and searched the app store for solitaire apps. I admit, this is like telling the universe you give up, you're so bored that you'd like to play the most boring game known to... | Continue »

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I didn't do this last year, and I kind of regret it; it's funny how easy it is to forget what was on your mind in a given year, if you don't write it down (2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004,... | Continue »

As we mentioned last week, the White House recently opened up its first-ever public wiki, for feedback about ExpertNet, a proposed platform for collecting expert feedback from the public. Given that our mission's a close fit for the goals of ExpertNet, we wanted to begin by talking about how the work we've done with the ThinkUp platform at Expert Labs could serve some parts of the request today, and even more in the future. (Obviously, ExpertNet and Expert Labs have similar names, but we're just two different projects with similar goals.) The ExpertNet proposal lays out four main steps for... | Continue »

OH: "It is free because it is nothing." | Continue »

For DJ, originally uploaded by mgtrott. This really is a great photo. | Continue »