# 02 Jun 2007, 01:44PM: Oh No They Coopted My Indie Band Part MCMXLVIII: A commercial for "Shrek 3" contains music from OK Go's "Here It Goes Again." I will be disappointed if no one in this film dances on a treadmill.

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# (2) 04 Jun 2007, 12:42PM: MC Masala, and Le Weekend: A May 20th column on coffee rituals (citing Neal Stephenson) and a nice little column from yesterday, on my sister's graduation, dancing, food, and an old album.

It could be that the main reason I play Dungeons & Dragons is so that I can tell people at work, "At D&D yesterday we destroyed an undead dragon skeleton," and make them laugh.

We did indeed destroy an undead skeletal dragon. My fifth-level thief with charisma, constitution, and intelligence below ten was not the deciding force in the battle (rather an understatement). I think I'll create a new character soon, perhaps a fighter or a magic user, since our adventures are rather confrontation-intensive. We do travel a lot...Ranger? I'll also need to find an in-story explanation for how s/he runs into our party. This requires more thought.

Also this weekend: got my column off early (YES!) and finished The Confusion. Now, The System of the World, which starts off promisingly, but I did have to flip ahead many pages to find any glimpse of the character whose dramatic pledge we see in the last paragraph of The Confusion. Wrap it all up with a bow, Stephenson! I have faith.

It was way easier to understand The Confusion than to understand The Quicksilver, partly because the middle book had more action (Quicksilver had to set the foundation (ha ha mercury is a horrible foundation)), and partly because I actually read it straight through with no breaks longer than a few days. I read Anna Karenina in a few hours every afternoon one high school summer -- this is also the best way to read The Baroque Cycle.

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# 05 Jun 2007, 11:01AM: The Annals of Point-Missing: Tonight I'll probably go to the New York Tech Meetup, in hope of interesting demos and good questions. I've been to several of them in the past 16 months, and attendance has stabilized at 300-500. Perhaps at first the participants all knew tech really well, but the audience has expanded past geeks to the suits who want to leverage geekdom.

Meetup.com just started offering mailing lists for Meetup groups. So of course we've had some great reply-all cascades of disgust.

it goes through several phases: the original message, people saying "get me off this list," ... people saying "stop sending messages to the whole list," people saying "stop sending messages saying 'stop sending messages to the whole list' to the whole list," and silly nonsense and evangelizing. Quote from a middle phase of this cycle: "I realize I just sunk to the same level by mass emailing, by the way." Quote from the last phase: "i like hamburger."

Today's silly nonsense:

Hiring: Email attendants
Hello Meetup'rs:

My company is currently seeking two (2) people for hire. Both people need the same skillset which is very basic:

Skills Needed:
-- Ability to properly send and receive emails.

If you are interested, please send your reply to the mailing list letting everyone know of your qualifications for such a position. Should you reply to me directly, I will pass on your application.

The pay is great, the benefits are excellent and to think, you will be in charge of sending replies to the wrong places all day!

Thank you for your time and good replying!

-- Allen Stern
Owner, Proper Email Foundation
www.properemailfoundation.co.us.cc.tv

I read it and chuckled, then read further in the daily digest. Two replies to that message (sent of course to the whole list): "I got a error website message? Is this something someone can do partime from home?" and "I am all email all the time and therefore certainly interested."

Wow. How much can you miss the point? Could it be that they've missed it by such an incredible distance that they've wrapped around the world and come back to it again?

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# (1) 08 Jun 2007, 04:47PM: Confluence of Fun: Saturday, June 16th: A friend of mine is in a play in Washington, DC. An interesting metal band plays a park in Astoria. And Slightly Known People leads several area sketch comedy groups in covering classic skits. I can only do one of these, but wouldn't it be awesome if my friends went to the others and reported back?

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# 15 Jun 2007, 09:00AM: MC Masala on Spam, and Lunch Conversation: This week's column, on the funny spam.

I've added books to my wish list based on interesting sentences that spammers stole and pasted in to fool spam filters. I've received spam that includes passages from L. Frank Baum's "Oz" books, Mark Twain's essay "The Awful German Language" and a thoughtful New York Times essay on mistakes in hospitals. In January, I got about a hundred junk e-mails with two sentences each from "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire." (You can always tell Rowling because of the proper nouns -- Hogwarts, Quidditch, Snape.)...

Spam's just a new form of creepy, inept advertising that tries to inflame desire. And I catch myself, in my writing, using the same techniques to draw readers in, to keep them interested after the headline. Hint at sex. Promise instant pleasure. Ask a question and watch them click in the hope of a novel answer.

Discussed at lunch one day this week:

• Joel's opinions on Apple's and Microsoft's font letterforms & rendering. Bonus musing: Didn't they learn the lesson of Microsoft Word 6? Mac people were used to a Mac-ish interface and so they didn't like the Windows-y feel. Safari for Windows needs to adapt to the Windows interface; if it's inconsistent with what Windows users know, they'll feel uncomfortable.

• Fig Newtons, reasonable serving size and healthfulness of. The package says two Fig Newtons make a serving, which I find ridiculously small and others found acceptable or even large. Another noted that any given snack food that isn't a single-serving bar says it has multiple 100-calorie or 120-calorie servings on the label. My mother would serve me more like six Fig Newtons and a glass of milk as a snack, but now I won't eat them at all since they have substantial high-fructose corn syrup content and I could just eat raisins or almonds instead.

• Asterisk. Specifically, fun things you could do using Asterisk as a switchboard for your apartment. Horrible voicemail loops, specifying separate ringtones and/or outgoing messages triggered by specific callers, setting up a text-to-speech synthesizer that reads you your email over the phone, and -- I just thought of this -- automate a Dial-A-Song service.

• Point systems that make you game them. Like D&D, yes, but also credit card point schemes, frequent flyer programs, performance evaluation metrics at jobs....

Then there was another day this week when people didn't talk that much and we ate in relative silence. That makes two mentions of Quakers this week (the first being in a discussion of burkhas, hijabs, modest dressing as religious imperative, and feminism). I can no longer imagine working in an organization that has no good conversations. And I haven't even started talking about the software management trainees' book club.

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# (1) 19 Jun 2007, 12:57AM: MC Masala, Weekend, And A Mess of Miscellany: Well, this will get a bit crowded. Welcome to the social!

This week's column is about Kannada, "Indian," and other languages. Did you know that my sister's brushing up her Hindi?

Right now she can get along OK, understand Bollywood movies and hold decent conversations. But now she's polishing it up, doing the fit-and-finish work. She's already got an ear for how a Hindi phrase or sentence should fit together, and now she has to apply that attention to her own speech. How do you get the knack of the tongue? How do you sink into the rhythm, the idiom of it?

I've been trying to remember how Kannada sounds. The other day I raced up to some Indians in a subway station, eavesdropping on their conversation and introducing myself. Then I found out they were speaking Telugu, not Kannada. Pretty embarrassing.

This past weekend, I visited John, Martin, and Riana in DC. Martin summarizes the main event of the visit: Riana, Martin and I saw John play Orestes in one of three productions of Electra. Pretty awesome. Riana, thank you for your hospitality! Thanks to Riana, I tried out the cardiovascular equipment in a gym for the first time -- elliptical machine, treadmill, stationary bike, what have you. Not since high school weightlifting class had I tried to crack the code of the gym. I now grok why people would choose a gym over running/weightlifting/calisthenicizing at home or in the world. Hmmm. Maybe there is a lesson here for me.

I took the Greyhound bus down south and the Vamoose bus back north. Greyhound: preferable, because it's cheaper, the bus stop and ticketing and schedules are more convenient and reliable, and they don't play movies. But Vamoose's staff is more friendly.

Did you know that there's an Irish pub called Fado in DC's Chinatown that serves fries with Utah-friendly fry sauce (except it's called Marie Rose Sauce)? Or that there are two restaurants named Cafe Luna near DC's Dupont Circle?

I got to the Jack-in-the-Box in The System of the World. Ha! I'm in the home stretch for the Stephenson. In other media experience news, the films on the Vamoose bus back to NYC: The Italian Job, a perfectly enjoyable US remake of a British heist film, and Happy Feet, a terrible, strange, uncanny-valley-inhabiting children's film that reminded me of what I've read about Ralph Bakshi's animated Lord of the Rings film.

My friend Adi, a math professor at NYU, plays an Onion story subject this week. Also this week, I won a $10 Starbucks gift card for winning a copywriting contest at work. It was actually more energizing when I thought it was a random "you're doing great!" gift from a secret admirer/boss.

Leonard was right. I miss Cody's Books on Telegraph in Berkeley. I tried to see Annie Hall in Bryant Park with new friends tonight but we couldn't see nor hear more than a tenth of what was going on so we left. But I don't mind. It's been such a jam-packed pleasant three days, aside from a bit of work kerfluffle, that it's almost a three-day weekend! Goodness, I love social contact.

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# 19 Jun 2007, 01:05PM: Notes On Attention And Shyness: An inadequate excerpt from Sarah Brown of Cringe, on hopes laid bare in a teenager's diary:

You want someone you like to come into your room and ask you if you've read all those books and which was your favorite and who is this in this photo and when was it taken, blah blah blah, you want that tractor beam of attention, that teenage feeling.

I'm reading "MU Tales", an addictive serialized novel about a shy girl starting college, and "Nothing Better", an addictive webcomic about a shy girl starting college and they're helping me understand what it's like to be pathologically shy.

But I'm also thinking about the other side of that coin: show-offiness. What's the basis for our scorn of attention-seeking? If it's about selfishness, does it inevitably turn into "Harrison Bergeron"? Is it a collective effort to treat conversations as ends in themselves instead of a means to an end? From The Big Kahuna:

It doesn't matter whether you're selling Jesus or Buddha or civil rights or "How to Make Money in Real Estate With No Money Down." That doesn't make you a human being; it makes you a marketing rep. If you want to talk to somebody honestly, as a human being, ask him about his kids. Find out what his dreams are - just to find out, for no other reason. Because as soon as you lay your hands on a conversation to steer it, it's not a conversation anymore; it's a pitch. And you're not a human being; you're a marketing rep.

These quotes, links, and thoughts underly my upcoming column on attention-seeking and modesty; that'll be this coming Sunday.

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# 19 Jun 2007, 11:53PM: Old News Is Bad News Too: Somehow a little too weighty to go into the del.icio.us feed: in 1989, a guy in Montreal shot 28 people, almost all women, saying that he was "fighting feminism." I hadn't heard of this incident until just now, which surprises me. In slightly related depression, the Wikipedia category for murdered activists. I was just telling Adi about Harvey Milk and Jonestown the other day. What were the 1970s like? How did they stand it?

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# (4) 21 Jun 2007, 12:35AM: John Gruber Talk on Mac UI Design: Tonight I watched Ten Things I Hate About You for the first time (TiVo thought I'd like it), and hoo boy did I ever go to high school in the 1990s. You could reduce me to a pile of nostalgia by playing that soundtrack at me in an enclosed area.

But! More interestingly, tonight I saw John Gruber give a talk on conventions, consistency, and uniformity in Macintosh design. I got to meet him, and Khoi Vinh, and I sat next to Jason Kottke wowzers! A summary of interesting points:

• We've overloaded the term "consistency." "Consistency" in user interface design might mean visual uniformity, following conventions within your application/website, following conventions set by your environment, or just "it's in the Apple Human Interface Guidelines!"

• Perhaps we needed strict visual uniformity in the early days of the Mac, because users were learning GUIs for the first time. But user experience has increased, and they're used to the wild and wooly UI diversity of the web. They've punched the monkey and won (phrasing Sumana's).

• So now maybe we can have suites and subsets of UI designs, all with basic Mac-like look-and-feel. Instead of complete visual uniformity across Apple applications, for example, apps like GarageBand or iTunes each have a feel of their own with internal uniformity. As long as Apple and indie developers honor the really important conventions (bound in muscle memory), slavish adherence to the HIG isn't necessary -- or even possible, since Apple isn't conscientiously updating or following it.

• What are the primo conventions, other than Command-S to save? There are some new idioms that you have to simply "suss out" to fit in and keep a Mac sensibility. Example: the "source list," otherwise known as the list of categories or top-level elements in a left-hand navigation bar in a window. It's in the "implicit HIG," which is like the British Constitution (analogy Sumana's) (and it's in the indie HIG), and you should follow that convention. Probably.

• Apple optimizes the whole experience and relationship with the customer, not just individual UI transactions ("how many pixels should she have to go to double-space?") (phrasing Sumana's). And where Microsoft apps make it easy for a medium-skilled user to achieve high efficiency (look at how many shortcuts they crowd onto toolbars), Apple makes usability obvious, so it's easier to switch from Windows to Mac than vice versa.

There were good anecdotes and examples and analogies I won't ruin, so you can see the talk sometime when it's iterated more. I can tell that it will, since Gruber was plainly in rumination mode.

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# 22 Jun 2007, 12:26AM: Up Late Writing Dox: Diagram of machines and their locations, or diagram of machines and their LOLcations?

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# (1) 22 Jun 2007, 02:56PM: Making Us Feel Old: People born in 1991 are now old enough to drive in California.

Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted twenty years ago.

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# 22 Jun 2007, 03:55PM: The Lensman, Focusing Elsewhere: By the way, Leonard "The Lens-man" Richardson, my husband, is at the digerati conference "Foo Camp" this weekend. No, spouses don't get to come along automatically. We are sadly parted, and cannot act as a heckling partnership at dive bars! But I have a column to write and sleep to catch anyway.

Evidently all sorts of smart celebrities are at Foo Camp this year, including Steve Yegge and Teresa Nielsen Hayden. A coed Bohemian Grove?

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# 23 Jun 2007, 10:52AM: Just Look Away: My first lolcat is one for Ron Paul, which logically makes it a RonLOL.

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# 24 Jun 2007, 11:19AM: Off to MoCCA: Today I visit the 2007 MoCCA Art Festival. Comics to get, or get autographed, include:

• Ryan North's stuff
• Raina Telgemeier's stuff
• Alison Bechdel's stuff
• Action Philosophers!
• David Malki!'s stuff
• Nothing Better
• And stuff I haven't heard of yet that will empty my wallet

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# 25 Jun 2007, 07:04PM: Today's Firsts: I played Guitar Hero for the first time (wow, this is much harder to get the hang of than Dance Dance Revolution!) and the second time (wow, this is fun). And I heard, via Guitar Hero, the original Warrant song "Sweet Cherry Pie," which I had only heard before in a Weird Al polka medley.

Leonard comes back soon -- I miss my totoroid husband! I want to watch and analyze movies with him! And get secret Foo Camp gossip! And eat noodles.

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# 26 Jun 2007, 02:02PM: Insider Faceball: If you just can't get enough Sumana, and you're already reading my column and my del.icio.us subfeed (with comments!), check out my entries at the newish Fog Creek non-Joel weblog. I tend to talk about things that come up here and applying principles I read in books.

Competing with Open Source talks about how to honestly, fairly get people to use your proprietary product rather than a FLOSS alternative.

Don't forget that competition intensifies over time. Your competitors will watch your software improve, and copy it, and there will come a time when you can't make money off it anymore. Open source developers are great at cloning. Good software takes ten years but then it's done, and you will have copycats every step of the way -- open source and closed source. In the long term, we hope that customer service, brand reputation, and other stuff outside the actual codebase will give us an advantage others can't duplicate.

There's more stuff in that vein in Why FogBugz Competes Against Corkboards. And in Customer Service: Tools, Techniques, Training -- And Breaks I talk about the training, techniques, tools, and breaks we get at Fog Creek that help us support customers better.

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# 27 Jun 2007, 10:16PM: Disclaimer: Blogging will be light for a few days.

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