Presenting
Just a thought from 30 November 2003 about .

A shot of me presenting Fray at the International Digital Storytelling Conference, BBC sound stage C1. (Thanks, Tom!)

Alive in Cardiff
Just a thought from 28 November 2003 about .

Car to airplane to underground to bus to train to taxi - six modes of transport and sixteen hours later and I'm here in Cardiff. I'd forgotten what a bitch jetlag is. My brain is still somewhere over the ocean.

I also forgot about looking the opposite way when crossing the street. My trip was almost cut very short.

So far Cardiff is adorable, cold, and friendly. It's upscale, for sure. The city center is quaint and full of lights and outdoor craft booths. It's frigid cold (to my Californian skin, anyway), but people are all smiles. Last night I got a cheese and leek crepe from a street vendor that knocked my socks off.

Posting now from the library across from the hotel. No net cafe's here. No wifi, either. I checked on Fray from a fancy housewares store last night until they shooed me off of the computer. Guess you're only supposed to use it to look at their site. Feh.

I can't wait for the conference to begin.

Confidential to H: Miss you madly.

BRB
Just a thought from 26 November 2003 about .

I'm off to here for this and that. Will post if I can. Ta!

Tell your pet stories
Just a thought from 26 November 2003 about Fray.

There's a new story up in Fray tonight, and it's a doozy. Check out Pet Stories: Eight true stories of the critters we love, including a rather revealing one by me. And, of course, you're encouraged to tell your own.

The wonderful illustrations in this story were done by the elusive Goopymart. I've long enjoyed his visual contributions to ... a site that I'm not supposed to talk about. It's great to work with people you're also a fan of.

In fact, these group stories are always a huge collaboration, so here's a shout out to everyone who submitted a pet story, Goopy for the pics, and especially Heather for doing all the footwork and Maggie for all the last-minute editing. You all rule.

Enemy Mine
Just a thought from 24 November 2003 about Geek, Google, Journalism.

Just for the record, I do not hate Google, nor am I its enemy. Quite the opposite: I'm a fan. I love Google. They've done so much for the web. I use their search and news services daily. And, in most cases, the choices they make are sound.

I criticize them when they make choices I don't like, the same way your family tells you when they don't like your girlfriend. It's out of love and respect, even when it's hard to say.

So it's disappointing to spend 40 minutes on the phone with a journalist, make that love absolutely clear, go to great pains to explain what a great thing the AdSense program is, to even refer him to Matt Haughey for a success story, and, in the end, get a line like this:

AdSense has made Google a lot of friends -- and enemies like Derek Powazek of San Francisco.

No, I am not Google's enemy. I thought I made that clear. I'm disappointed that I was dropped from the AdSense program, sure. That money went to support Fray. But I'm no one's enemy. Not over something so trivial.

That's simply sloppy journalism - going for the dramatic turn of phrase instead of the nuanced truth. And I'm sorry my name got used this way.

Perhaps I should be the Boston Globe's enemy now.

(Looks like Dave is unhappy, too.)

A Year of Art
Just a thought from 22 November 2003 about .

Join the H. Champ Print Club! You'll get a beautiful photo in the mail once a month for all of 2004, plus a one of a kind print on your birthday! Makes a great gift....

Google Creates Comment Spam
Just a thought from 19 November 2003 about Comment Spam, Geek, Google, Internet, Weblogs.

There's one central culprit that's gone unacknowledged in this whole comment spam discussion: Google.

Google is the central motivating force here. Comment spammers are adding their links to thousands of weblogs not because the audiences of those weblogs are particularly valuable, but because the links raise their PageRank with Google.

Now, this is far from the first time some group has tried to game Google's system. Google has evolved over the years to combat it, making it more difficult, perfecting their recipe. The plague of comment spam is just another attempt to game Google's system, and it's up to Google to stop it.

Google's bots could be made smart enough to ignore links that come from comments. Ben and Mena of Movable Type could help facilitate this. How hard would it be? I don't know - I'm not a programmer. But I do know it would fix the problem.

If comment spam stopped raising the spammer's PageRank in Google, how long would they keep doing it? Take away the incentive and we could easily avoid the nightmare scenario Mark is so convinced will happen, not to mention make all the work Jay is doing a nice defense against a nonexistent problem.

I'm not saying it ain't a big deal. I'm not saying it's not complicated. I'm just saying, let's lay the blame at the feet of Google, where it belongs.

POWlist: Strange Times
Just a thought from 18 November 2003 about .

Just a little excerpt from the latest POWlist. Not on the list? Sign up at the bottom of the page.

These are strange times, my friends.

Today I'm listening to R.E.M. sing "Cuyahoga" as it digitally streams into my computer. The whole album, Life's Rich Pageant, is filling my hard drive now, thanks to my sweetie Heather, who bought me an iTunes Gift Certificate. Digital money that buys digital music. None of it really exists. None of it you can hold in your hand.

The last time a woman gave me this album, I was in Junior High, 1986, and a girl who's name I can't even remember was astounded that I'd never heard R.E.M. and insisted I copy her tapes. I wrote the song names on the inserts, taking care not to smudge. I'd never met a girl like her. She was one of Claremont's old guard, who still had hippie parents and lived in the village. She seemed infinitely older and wiser than me. She was in High School.

Two women I've loved, 17 years apart, giving me the gift of music. Swan Swan Hummingbird.

Buy my PowerBook
Just a thought from 15 November 2003 about For Sale.

As part of my ongoing life purge, I'm parting with my dear old PowerBook G3. Interested? Bid away!

Signs of Life
Just a thought from 15 November 2003 about Photos.

In the continuing saga of Fred, there are now three babies peeking out of what was once a stick in a pot. Go Fred!

Matt for Mayor
Just a thought from 13 November 2003 about San Francisco.

Download the window sign (80k pdf).

(For any confused outta towners, I'm just poking a little fun at the Ken doll that'll likely be our next mayor. In case you couldn't tell, I prefer the other guy, in spite of the fact that he needs a haircut. Or maybe because of it. I dunno anymore.)

Apple and Sony: Get a room!
Just a thought from 12 November 2003 about Apple, Geek.

I wish Apple and Sony would quit this mating dance and just get a room already. Both companies are all about the digital lifestyle devices now. Sony wishes it had done the iPod, and Apple wishes it had half of Sony's power.

Today Sony announced the beautiful PCV-P101, an all-in-one computer so beautiful, I thought it was the rumored iMac revision. Even the design of the handles is reminiscent of the Power Mac G5.

Personally, I've always loved Sony's design - especially the sexy silver-purple VAIOs - but would never buy one because they run the wrong OS. Sony's hardware plus Apple's software would be a dream come true.

C'mon guys. Somebody's gotta make the first move here. The sexual tension is killing me.

Cleaning Done
Just a thought from 10 November 2003 about .

Here's what I learned about myself after three days of going through old boxes.

• I am the king of all Pack Rats. Bow before me.
• I only have photos of the exes I don't want to remember. And I have so many. (Photos, not exes.)
• That box I packed when I went off to college in 1991? The one I dragged with me from the dorms, to the three different houses in Santa Cruz, to the five different apartments in San Francisco? There was nothing interesting in it.
• I take way too many photos. If digital cameras hadn't come along, I would have died in an avalanche of photo paper in 2005.
• Please tell me there are no photos of me wearing half the clothes I found in those boxes. Or, at least, tell me there are none within Google's reach.
• I found at least three types of digital media that my present computer is unable to read.
• If you wrote for the Fish Rap in college, and you handed me a floppy disk with your story on it, and I said I'd get it back to you, I lied.
• It feels good to get rid of stuff, to shed your skin and start anew. But I probably should have stopped when that was still metaphorical. People keep staring at my naked chin.

Cleaning Bugged
Just a thought from 8 November 2003 about .

It's now almost 48 hours after the cleaning bug hit and I've sold an old computer and two game consoles on Craig's List, thrown away a dozen bags of garbage, set up a bookcase, bought fifty bucks in storage boxes, and reorganized the last 10 years of my nogstalgic detritus into neat, organized boxes.

Discardia rocks.

Most days, I can remember so vividly what it was like to be 13, 18, 26 ... my past is so ever-present that it feels like no time has actually passed at all. But going through these boxes this weekend, finding the treasures I buried over the years, all the photos, tapes, love notes, and other unmentionables ... it makes me realize just how much ground I've covered in 30 years.

And damn does my office look good. Tomorrow, the desk. Now, beer.

Still Life With Artist
Just a thought from 7 November 2003 about Photos.

In our house lately, it's all about Eve.

Cleaning House
Just a thought from 7 November 2003 about .

What is it about an empty house and rainy weather that brings out the cleaning bug? You should see the house now. Boxes are everywhere, that musty dusty smell in the air. I'm throwing shit out from college. Amazing how long some of it has followed me around.

One of those long-following things is the Mac I bought in college. I saved up for that thing for years, and my parents finally pitched in to help me buy it. The Power Macintosh 7200. It came with 600MB on the hard drive, 2MB of RAM, System 7.5, and a beige case. And I loved it. For years.

This is the machine I started Fray on. The machine I dragged into Cellspace in 1998 for Fray Day 2, dialed into the net via 56k modem, so that people could post. (There it is in the corner!)

And now it's on Craig's List, saying "make me an offer." So valueless, it doesn't even merit a minimum price. If no one emails, I'm gonna look for a charity to give it to. If that doesn't work, it's bound for a street corner, in the hope that serendipity will find it a home.

And it pains me. I know it's silly to be so attached to a beige box full of outdated technology. But it's not the box, it's the memories. This machine has been with me in every house I've lived in since college. It's been with me longer than any girlfriend, and almost any friend. It was there to see me weep from loneliness when the calendar flipped to 1996, there to capture my early journalistic endeavors, there when I had an idea for a site full of stories.

I can't help wanting to add "Free to a good home" to the Craig's List post.

Signage
Just a thought from 6 November 2003 about Photos.

San Franschizo
Just a thought from 5 November 2003 about San Francisco.

San Francisco is schizoid. In the runoff for mayor next month, we'll have Gavin Newsom, who's the closest thing we've got to a republican (and a living Ken doll), and Matt Gonzales, who's a Green and so left he wouldn't have any hope of a political career anywhere else in the country. We voted in Proposition M, which makes it illegal for Girl Scouts to sell cookies on street corners, let alone a bum ask you for change, but we also voted in Proposition L, which raised the minimum wage in the city to $8. 50 from the state's current minimum of $6.75, making us one of the handful of cities in the country to set its own minimum wage.

San Francisco: We like our politicians extreme, our wage slaves well-paid, and our homeless quiet.

Sign Person Five
Just a thought from 3 November 2003 about Photos.

Chieka in the Kitchen
Just a thought from 2 November 2003 about Photos.

Garbage Wisdom
Just a thought from 2 November 2003 about Photos.

New in {fray}: Chicken Tenderfoot
Just a thought from 2 November 2003 about Fray.

If you've ever had the pleasure of being that kid behind the counter, punching the clock and passing the time, in a place that always smells of bleach or grease, where the bathroom mirror yells at you in all caps to wash your hands in three languages, all for minimum wage ... then you might be able to relate to this funny new Fray story. Please welcome Fray's newest author, Skot Kurruk, and his tale of fast food hell: Chicken Tenderfoot.

And remember, this is Fray, so you're invited to tell your story of fast food employment, too!