• Crayon Physics Deluxe is a physics puzzle computer game that Petri Purho was showing off. You can see a video of it here. I stood there and played it for a very long time.
• I met Craig Dorety and re-met Guillermo Galindo. I'm going to try to get them on KALX Live this year. Craig builds electronic instruments and Guillermo builds instruments out of pretty much anything.
• Am I just the last one on the bus? How have I never heard of a vintage pinball arcade in alameda where you go, pay 10 bucks and get free play on all the pinball machines while you're there? Definitely looking forward to this place.
• The xtel ubiquitous content platform looks like a pretty cool technology suite of input sensors that wirelessly communicate with each other.
• TechShop had a whole building at the faire with a bunch of their machines out being used. I'm pondering if I should join, it looks pretty amazing.
• Metal Supermarkets are "The Convenience Stores of the Metal Industry". They've got all kinds of metal, they cut it for you, no minimum order needed. I'll be buying stuff from this place soon.
• Fritz Bogott, the creator of Novel-a-Month was at the faire recording video of people reading his most recent story, Boggle and Sneak, in his time machine. I got to read a section for him. He's going to edit down all of the footage and make a youtube video of his book.
• I got to meet and watch Tony Baxter present a talk on "Creating Disney-themed Parks Designs". He shared some color photos he found at a garage sale from the opening day at Disneyland. After the talk I tried to encourage him to scan them and put them online so everyone could see them since they were amazing.

Here are some photos from the faire.

Last night I went to the 2007 Sparkle SF annual champagne and sparkling wine event with my journalist girlfriend. It took place at the St. Regis Hotel in downtown, a shockingly posh place. We went to the press meeting with Kimberley Locke from American Idol and heard her talk about her commitment to charity work. We then went and tasted wines, snacked on fancy hors d'œuvres, watched a charity auction, and listened to Locke sign a few songs. At the auction I got to see a rich girl bid $3500 for a trip to Iceland. After the benefit I met Jack and saw No Country For Old Men, the new Cohen brothers film.

Findings of the evening :

• Rich people food tastes really good.
• I actually like champagne/sparkling wine, which I'd previously though I didn't. Turns out I just don't like the cheap stuff.
• Though I didn't taste all of them, of the ones I did taste the 2006 Goosebumps Sparkling Shiraz by MollyDooker was the best.
• Locke is a good singer, but I still prefer Duncan Sheik for my adult contemporary.
• The new Cohen brothers film is great. It's actually suspenseful. I can't remember the last time I watched a movie and was gripping my legs and truly didn't know what was going to happen. The film breaks many rules that I've come to subconsciously rely on when watching a movie which really make it stand out. It's brutal and violent and dirty and real. If you can stomach it, I highly recommend it.

I invite you to listen to Larry Lessig's brief and focussed talk at TED back in March on How creativity is being strangled by the law. It provides an illuminating perspective on what's happening to our culture today and how it echo's events of the past. It's 19 minutes long and worth every second.

I mention this every so often to people, but it's probably best you read it yourself so that you know the specifics about what happens when you upload your photos to facebook. Here is an excerpt from the Terms of Use.

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

The only silver lining here is that if you delete your photos, Facebook can no longer use them for free and they're yours again

Here's an excerpt from the Flickr's Terms of Service

Yahoo! does not claim ownership of Content you submit or make available for inclusion on the Service. However, with respect to Content you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Service, you grant Yahoo! the following worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive license(s), as applicable: ... With respect to photos, graphics, audio or video you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Service other than Yahoo! Groups, the license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such Content on the Service solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted or made available. This license exists only for as long as you elect to continue to include such Content on the Service and will terminate at the time you remove or Yahoo! removes such Content from the Service.

The important part here, in my opinion is the section that states that this license that you're granting Flickr/Yahoo covers the activites they list as long as they're "solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted or made available". By my understanding this means that the photo you upload to Flickr, can't be used in a television ad for Flickr, whereas the photo you upload to Facebook can. Here's the relevant section of Flickr's Terms of Service before being acquired by Yahoo.

We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Flickr service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. You can remove your profile at any time by deleting your account. This will also remove any private images you have stored in the system. However, by setting your uploaded images as "public", you agree to allow other Flickr users to view and share your images and you therefore agree to allow us to display and store them.

I'm going to visit Allen again next month and I just went to check google, remembering that Kris had said that, to Allen's chagrin, the band had decided to keep the name. Holy shit! I mean I guess this shouldn't surprise me, they're a really great band, and they're still together performing now a year later, but still to see all of this material out there on the web with a name that I came up with. Well I guess this is what actually creative people must feel like all the time (when Jack hears me humming a song he wrote, or when Kris sees someone reading her article in the paper). I'll settle with seeing webpages of Allen's band with their band name.

Here are some videos of the band.

Part I

Part II

Let's collect all of the feature requests or problems with the existing form here at which point Tom can decide what he wants me to implement. Here are the current problems and feature requests that have been passed around on the email thread. Feel free to comment on this thread.

Current Problems

• Problem : Russ Blackmar : This new form makes me fill in the name of the club, address and the other stuff every time.
  • Feature Request : Meredith : Gotta agree with Russ on the annoyance of having to fill in the club info every time. What about a drop down to select your club, and auto populating address info?
  • Potential Solution : Gene Wood : How about this for a solution. I'll make an option that lets you save the Venue information, so you enter it once and save it. From that point on when you go to the form, instead of filling everything in, you select from your saved Venues and it populates the values, at which point you can put in the band and the dates.
• Problem : Russ Blackmar : Clicking back once the PDF is created doesn't retain the field values that have been entered
  • Potential Solution : Gene Wood : I can make the form return to the first form page when the PDF is created, pre-populated with the values. This wouldn't however re-populate the DJ Names and DJ Dates on the second form page.
• Problem : Sherry : Please adjust the form so that I can put in a range of dates and specify any show, as that's how we do the movie giveaways. Or if I can leave it blank that'd be fine as well.
  • Potential Solution : I've changed the form to allow blank fields in the interim. If we want to allow ranges, Tom will need to come up with what he wants that to be represented as in the PDF that's created. Once that's set, I can implement a parser to accept date ranges.

Resolved Problems

• Problem : Russ Blackmar : I like to fill in the names of the dj's to to giveaway the tix when I'm at the station, using the dj schedule by the air studio. This new form means I either have to use the schedule on the website or I have to fill out the whole form while I'm at the station
  • Feature Request : Michael Lubenow : It would be nice to be able to leave the DJ assignment slots blank instead of it filling in ANY automatically
  • Potential Solution : Gene Wood : I can change the interface so the options for putting in DJ Names are "Any", "something you type in", or blank.
  • Solved : I've implemented the solution I described on 10/20/2007.
• Problem : Russ Blackmar : This new form doesn't allow for the date "Now"
  • Potential Solution : Gene Wood : I can remove the date validation check so that it accepts whatever text you want to put in there.
  • Solved : I've implemented the solution I described on 10/20/2007.
• Problem : Sherry : Yesterday it would time out before I could get to the form at all, and today I've tried to do a test three times and it's not working.
  • Potential Solution : Gene Wood : Sherry, I'm not sure what caused this, if you can send me more details I can determine what happened. Has it continued to happen? While this is happening can you reach other websites like google? Has anyone else experienced this problem?
  • Closed : I haven't been able to reproduce this and nobody else has seen this problem occur again.
• Problem : Carol Harris : Computers are not the do-all/say-all as everyone thinks. you should handwrite yours, too!
• Problem : Carol Harris : I'm just putting my two cents in for a third option than the promo forms or this on line one -- and that's a Word template
  • Gene Wood : What functionality would a Word template provide which is not available in the web form?
  • Closed : Sherry clarified that the functionality that she needs are the storage of venue information that Russ requested, and the ability to leave fields blank which I've implemented.
• Problem : Michael O'Connell : My biggest objection is the mono-appearance of the resulting giveaway sheet which is probably unavoidable unless we had font choices and type sizes so that we could emphasize or de-emphasize certain info or get more into certain areas like the description.
  • Gene Wood : This limitation in the variableness of the giveaway sheets was the intent of this project. This is to make all of the giveaway forms look the same so DJs have an easier time parsing them.
  • Closed : Not going to fix

• Lifesavas - Gutterfly
• The Twilight Sad - Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters
• Tracy Thorn - Out of the Woods
• Sybarite - Cut Out Shape
• Ror-Shak - Deep
• Skinny Puppy - Mythmaker
• Music For Animals - Self Titled
• Shawn Lee's Ping Pong Orchestra - Voices and Choices

On July 22nd, we will be going canoing on the Russian River. This is only a Save-the-Date proclamation, more info on carpooling, times, etc., will follow once we actually hit July. But for now, take this date to heart for it is the day we shall set sail on the mighty river and let fate be our rudder! We'll toss off our ballast and steer (from the poop-deck) into the sunset of our lives! Oh!, what a day will we have, on July 22nd, when we take to the oars and brave tide-pools, sea dragons, and sexy, sexy sirens! Ahoy! Avast! A pirate's life for me!

Sincerely,

Russian River Pirate Contingent Fun Committee

I just read the trash periodical that serves as the excuse for a newspaper that we have here in San Francisco, and their piece entitled "Tanker driver in 580 collapse has long criminal record". I'm sorry, but if I'm reading Demian Bulwa's article correctly, he's implying that since the driver of the gasoline tanker truck that crashed and burned down a section of the freeway had been a drug user and most recently convicted of felony possession of heroin 11 years ago, the DMV and TSA somehow failed in there duties to keep this menace off the roads! Give me a fucking break.

Nothing in state law would have prevented Mosqueda -- who had two felony convictions in the 1990s but a clean driving record in recent years -- from receiving the license

Mosqueda also passed a background check, administered by the federal Transportation Security Administration, designed to ensure that those who transport hazardous materials do not pose a threat, Miller said. The crimes of which he had been convicted were not serious or recent enough to disqualify him from driving a truck filled with gasoline, federal officials said.

How shameful. To frame two statements about a person which, in what they say, show that there's no connection between the fact that he used heroin and the fact that he crashed a tanker truck, in a way that conveys the exact opposite is disgraceful.

He also had to receive clearance from the Transportation Security Administration to carry hazardous materials, a requirement under the USA Patriot Act. Not all felony convictions are grounds for disqualification, said agency spokesman Nico Melendez.

Well no shit! What does drug use or burglary or sexual assault or any of the myriad of felonies have to do with your ability to drive a tanker truck? Are people with felony heroin possession charges honestly a statistically greater threat to getting in a car accident than those without? And just so it's clear :

The CHP said there is no evidence Mosqueda was driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

State Assemblyman Pedro Nava, D-Santa Barbara, who chairs the Assembly's Transportation Committee and the joint committee on emergency services and homeland security, said Monday that he would push the state to adopt higher standards for drivers of hazardous materials. "This is a real wake-up call," Nava said. "This is another example of how the federal government really does not have the safety and security of its citizens as its first priority. If this driver were hauling chicken coops, we would not have the kind of problem that we have. But he's driving gasoline."

The whole article is like this. Implying some kind of connection without stating it (in that there's not much to state cause there is no connection). I'm so bored with this human need to blame. I was thinking the other day about the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami and how refreshing and respectful the media coverage was as compared to every other event. There were some attempts to talk about how there should have been some kind of global Tsunami warning system in place to warn all of the countries in the Indian Ocean, but primarily it was just a tragedy. The media reported on how bad it was and what needed to be done to fix everything, but there was a dearth of blame (and rightly so). But here again we have some event that occurs and it's back to deciding where we went wrong.

Let me clarify something that after reading this shabby piece of reporting one may be forgetting. This was accident. This guy was speeding and crashed his tanker truck, which miraculously ruptured (gasoline tankers don't actually do this despite what you see in the movies) and miraculously slid directly under a freeway suspended above it. Was he negligent for speeding in a tanker truck, sure! Was the accident due to the fact that 14 years ago he was caught possessing, drum roll, a syringe? I'm sorry but I just don't buy it. And Bulwa doesn't even have the balls to make this assertion (in that it's asinine). Instead he pussyfoots around trying to shamefully imply what he can't actually report on.

Thank you San Francisco Chronicle for your consistency in embarrassing shabbiness.

Update : July 14, 2007

This just gets better. In Today's chron it turns out the driver wasn't actually even speeding. So now Mr. Bulwa here attacked this guy for what the the CHP has definitively decided was an accident. The head of the CHP enforcement services says :

He was maintaining a speed of 62 miles per hour, which is greater than the speed limit for commercial vehicles there of 55, but it is not excessive speed by any means at that time of the morning with no traffic out on the roadway.

Next time I'm bent out of shape because it takes me more time to commute into work at my shitty newspaper, I'll try to entertain my readership by assassinating someone's character. Seems easy enough.