Four by four by four by etc

I was tagged by Marquis de Canter, so here we go…

Four Jobs I’ve Had

1. Programmer at a computer time sharing company in NYC.

2. Teaching assistant at University of Wisconsin.

3. CEO of software company.

4. Research fellow at Harvard Law School.

Four movies I can watch over and over

Sorry I only watch movies once or twice, maybe rarely three times.

Four TV Shows I Love to Watch

1. The West Wing.

2. The Sopranos.

3. Lost.

4. The News Hour.

Four Places I’ve Been on Vacation

1. Florida.

2. Jamaica.

3. Germany.

4. Canada.

Four Favorite Dishes

1. Spicy Noodles at Jing Jing.

2. Beignets at Cafe du Monde in New Orleans.

3. Oyster poboys at the Brightstar in New Orleans. (It’s gone now.)

4. Cheesecake at Junior’s on Flatbush Avenue in NYC.

Four Websites I Visit Daily

1. Memeorandum.

2. My aggregator.

Otherwise I don’t “visit” websites. Really. Swear to god.

Four Places I’d Rather Be

I hate to be a stinker but I travel a lot and if there was a place I’d rather be, I’d be there. Now if you asked me about times I’d rather be in, there I have an idea. I’d like to be 22 and head over heels in love with a cute 19-year-old, and spend all our time in bed and talking and maybe going to the movies once in a while and going out to eat.

Four Bloggers I’m Tagging

1. Rebecca Blood.

2. Rebecca MacKinnon.

3. Julie Leung.

4. Lisa Williams.

Berkeley Bloggers Dinner, Jan 26

Let’s have a blogger’s dinner in Berkeley on Thursday, January 26, 7PM.

We got the place, Taste of the Himalayas, 1700 Shattuck Ave.

It’s a big restaurant and probably can accomodate up to 20 to 25 people, we can have a loud conversation or two. I’ve eaten there many times, the food is good and not too expensive. Nepalese food is a lot like Indian. Lots of curries, sauces, some spicy stuff, rice.

Anyone can come, no RSVP required although it would be appreciated. Include a bit about yourself in a comment here.

Maybe we’ll make this a semi-regular thing?

Let’s have fun!

PS: It’s five easy blocks from the Downtown Berkeley BART station.

PPS: When you arrive say you’re with the “Blogger” party.

Thursday night geek dinner in Cambridge

January 5, 7PM, Cambridgeside Galleria food court.

We’ll have to get some kind of flag to wave so people can find us. Maybe we’ll launch a flare every fifteen minutes?

Lots of room, different kinds of food, wifi. Let’s call this a Seattle-style geek dinner, because this is the style they do there.

Please RSVP in a comment below.

See you Thursday!

CES 2006

Doc Searls is looking for a hotel room in Las Vegas for CES, January 5-8.

There are rooms available on Expedia, but the rates are unbelievable.

I was thinking it might be fun, but then I remembered what it’s like. Long lines for cabs. Miles of aisles. Aching feet.

I wonder if there will be any podcasting companies there?

Are you going? What do you expect to see there?

The Night Before Christmas

Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St Nicholas soon would be there.

The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads.
And mamma in her ‘kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap.

When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.

The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below.
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer.

With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St Nick.
More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name!

“Now Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! On, Cupid! on, on Donner and Blitzen!
To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
Now dash away! Dash away! Dash away all!”

As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky.
So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,
With the sleigh full of Toys, and St Nicholas too.

And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
The prancing and pawing of each little hoof.
As I drew in my head, and was turning around,
Down the chimney St Nicholas came with a bound.

He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot.
A bundle of Toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a peddler, just opening his pack.

His eyes-how they twinkled! his dimples how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow.

The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath.
He had a broad face and a little round belly,
That shook when he laughed, like a bowlful of jelly!

He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself!
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head,
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread.

He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And filled all the stockings, then turned with a jerk.
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose!

He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, ‘ere he drove out of sight,
“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!”

2006 predictions

1. Apple will ship two generations of iPods. The first new generation, released in April, will have a satellite receiver built-in. The second will have a low-power FM transmitter built-in.

2. Jason Calacanis will stay at AOL though Easter 2006, and then will resign to spend more time with his family. They are good people, but Jason is an entrepreneur, and AOL is a really big BigCo. After leaving, he’ll continue to blog. Engadget will become a Time-Warner print publication. They’ll briefly use Buzz Bruggeman as a stand-in for Calacanis, and then Chris Pirillo. None of them will have the charisma that Calacanis had. Pirillo will leave AOL to sub for Adam Curry on Sirius, who will take more and more time off from his podcast, and Pirillo’s ratings will eclipse the Podfather’s, who will retire to invent the next media revolution, in obscurity, all by himself.

3. SixApart’s servers will melt down in the first two weeks of the new year, and many times after that in 2006. WordPress.com will implement a one-click import of a TypePad site, just enter your username and password and click Submit. Come back in a few hours and your whole site will be there. Under tremendous pressure from users, SixApart will implement a one-click redirect of your old URL to the new site.

4. Google will make a deal with the Time-Warner movie companies, and start movies.google.com for on-demand distribution over the Internet. Google will learn to live with DRM. Their answer to iTunes will involve loose-coupled relationships with content companies, and a new product called Google Money, basically their version of Paypal with a twist, they will also invent a new currency called The Google, which trades against the dollar, the euro, the yen and the yuan. Many small countries in Africa, Latin America and south Asia adopt the Google as their national currency. The Google money website, money.google.com, will list the current Google stock price expressed in googles, of course. They will stop reporting sales and earnings, instead reporting Gross National Product and trade surpluses and deficits. When all this rolls out, Google’s share price crashes, and takes the real estate market in Santa Clara County with it. All of a sudden Dan Gillmor can afford a mansion in Atherton on his teacher’s salary at UC-Berkeley. He becomes Mike Arrington’s neighbor and starts a new subsidiary of TechCrunch.

5. RSS will continue on the growth vector it has been on for the last six years. There will be new applications for RSS as reading lists become widely supported in aggregators, and directories like Technorati produce content in readling list form. Podcasting will be a factor in the 2006 congressional elections in the US, the Democrats will use this medium more effectively than the Republicans at first, but it will quickly even out. There will be moves in Congress to pass laws viewing the use of podcasts as equivalent to commercials, but it will be impossible to place a monetary value on it. More and more RSS will be seen as an advertising medium in itself, like catalogs, newsletters and fact sheets; and less as an advertising-supported medium. The advertising networks that formed in 2005 will wither in 2006, and completely go away by 2007.

6. As 2006 draws to a close, for a fraction of an instant the attention of the entire web will focus on my Long Bet with Martin Nisenholtz. The attention will quickly dissipate as we realize that the blogging world wins by default because the archive of the New York Times is not accessible on Google.

7. The New York Times, Harvard University and Yahoo form the new World Outline Foundation, to create an upgrade for the Yahoo directory, with a permanent model of the knowledge of the human species, accessible openly in OPML format. Yahoo modifies their search engine to understand OPML as a native format. When the Times publishes an in-depth article on a subject, the reporter’s notes are organized as an outline and linked into the accumulated knowledge. An ambitious project among universities worldwide is launched, with Harvard’s leadership, to organize scholarly information in publicly accessible OPML. I draft a new coalesced specification for OPML and contribute it without compensation to the WOF.

8. Scoble will appear on Oprah. His book on corporate blogging will top all the best seller lists, his royalties will eclipse his Microsoft salary, but he’ll stay there, because it’s in his blood. Guy Kawasaki bleeds in six colors; in his heart Scoble wants to know where you want to go today. Scoble’s next book, for which he will receive a $2 million advance, will be a collaboration with Douglas Coupland entitled Blogserfs, about the blogging community at Microsoft. Shel Israel will collaborate on a book with Vint Cerf about the downfall of Google.

wordPress.root version 0.3

0. How to install.

Launch the OPML Editor.

Choose Update opml.root from the File menu in the OPML Editor app.

Then follow the instructions on the support site to download and install the new wordPress.root, and

Come back here to review the change notes, following.

1. New icons from Steve Kirks. Done.

With help from members of the community.

Thanks Steve, and everyone who helped.

2. Category support. Works.

How it works.

1. Choose Get Categories from the WordPress sub-menu of the Tools menu.

2. Create a post or place the cursor on an existing post in the workspace.

3. Right-click. Choose a category from the menu.

4. Click on Save.

You can skip the Get Categories part if the categories haven’t changed.

You can add or delete categories through the Dashboard interface on your WordPress site. Click on Manage then Categories.

Note, this is a complicated feature, so I’m not marking it Done yet, it works here, but I want to hear from a few users before I declare it Done.

3. View button. Done.

4. Indentation. Done.

When you indent in the outliner, it’s reflected by indentation in the blog post.

Tried several methods before settling (once again) on the table method.

Using blockquote wasn’t satisfactory, WordPress has a nice style sheet defined for that, that doesn’t even indent. They’re doing the right thing of course.

And as usual, the default styling for ordered and unordered HTML lists looks terrible, uneven vertical spacing.

The table method looks great.

5. Now you can create posts by pressing the return key. Done.

If you save a post that was created this way, it automatically adds the attributes to the top-level headline.

6. Run text through the glossary. Done.

This is probably something new to most OPML Editor users.

The idea is that you can teach the editor to substitute strings in “quotes” with arbitrary HTML text. Jump to user.html.glossary for some examples. You can edit that table, add your own stuff, delete our stuff. Matt Neuburg has a nice explanation from his Frontier website tutorial. Below is a picture of Gandhi, which I entered by typing “gandhi”.

7. Before releasing todo

Clean out references to appkey.

Release metaWeblog.getCategories. Done.

Screen shot