this is sippey.com

googlephonics

Steve Martin, in a bit swiped from 1979's Comedy is Not Pretty, on Googlephonics: "I listen to it for a couple days I say 'Hey, this sounds like shit.'"

Googlephonics

Resonates.

getting hatted by project upstream

This may be old news to all of you, but it was new news to me. While enjoying my morning coffee, up popped this instant message.

Hmm, I'd never heard of this person "ExpeditedCoho." And the message didn't seem like your normal AIM bot, looking to start a chat about hot things. A little Googling turned up that this was the work of Project Upstream.

Project Upstream is an organization dedicated to promoting social ideals through the use of exciting new technology. Our most well-known service is our swarm of robotic fish, which connects AIM users to each other.

Which means that when I replied "Hello, ExpeditedCoho" Upstream connected me to another AIM user in their database, and, presumably, cloaked my username as another *Coho. Randomness ensued:

ExpeditedCoho: I IMed you first. If I deny this later, I'm lying.
msippey: Hello, ExpeditedCoho.
ExpeditedCoho: who art thou?
msippey: michael
msippey: but i'm sure my screenname appears to be something that ends in "Coho"
msippey: we've been randomly connected through project upstream
ExpeditedCoho: wait which michael
msippey: http://project-upstream.awardspace.com/
ExpeditedCoho: i dost not understand

There's a great LiveJournal community all about Project Upstream, with a perfect FAQ.

Q: What cool lingo do you use? I'm so confused!
A: "Salmoning/Trouting/Cohoing" is being IMed by a fishbot (see, similarly: "salmoned"/"trouted"/"cohoed"). "Hatting" is being hit by--you guessed it--a hat bot (also see: "hatted"). "Project Upstream" is the name of the group that created the fishbots. The "Hatmaster"/"Salmonmaster"/etc. we use to refer to the creator of that specific kind of bot, and an "operator" is a person operating the bot (not necessarily the creator).

I love the Internets.

from the flickr clock

I like the Flickr Clock, because it randomly helped me find this gem. Wait for the end, it feels like magic.

matt webb's 100 head cattle drive

Matt Webb likes plastic cows. And he wants 100 of them. But, as he says, "there is no way I can justify to myself spending that much money on plastic cows. Really, there is no way."

I could however justify giving that same amount of money, or more, to a worthwhile charity. That would be an easy thing. And while I personally could not justify splashing coins on plastic cattle, I would be perfectly happy encouraging 100 other people to each spend 1% of that (plus postage and packing). This is because of my willingness to take advantage of that happy human psychological miracle called out of sight, out of mind.

A promise: IF I GET 100 × SCHLEICH HOLSTEIN OR FLECKVIEH COWS, I WILL DONATE £500 TO A CHARITY CHOSEN BY MAJORITY VOTE.

[this is good]

recently starred

The moral equivalent of clearing the browser tabs, here are some recently starred items. (And yes, I realize that along the way I could have Shift-S shared these items with you, since most of you are reading this in Reader, or FriendFeed, or some other type of super fabulous lifestreaming and attention parsing aggregator that reduces the elapsed time from content consumption to content production to mere milliseconds, but I digress.)

Protocol Buffers, or "a flexible, efficient, automated mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler." Even if you never use Protocol Buffers (the product marketer in me winces at the name) the overview is worth reading, if only for the speed difference v. parsing XML (that's measured in nanoseconds, mind you).

Also from Google's earth (we just live in it) comes Joe Greggorio's draft spec (tracked at the IETF) for adding multipart support to AtomPub. "The primary objective of multipart/related POSTs is to reduce round-trips for creating Media Resources." Who wouldn't like reducing round trips?

Wil Shipley's post on fixing The Greatest Bug of All is worth the entire read. Don't get discouraged when two-thirds of the way through he starts wandering off through the land of file system memory mapping and the ins and outs of NSData; push on through and stay for the payoff.

Software is written by humans. Humans get tired. Humans become discouraged. They aren't perfect beings. As developers, we want to pretend this isn't so, that our software springs from our head whole and immaculate like the goddess Athena. Customers don't want to hear us admit that we fail.

Via Kottke, Michael Beirut's appreciation of Mad Men. I feel for Jason, who hasn't even seen the show, since when he read through Beirut's wholesale quotation of scenes he didn't have the memory of watching Jonathan Hamm deliver these lines...

This device isn't a spaceship. It's a time machine. It goes backwards. Forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called The Wheel. It's called The Carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels, around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.

OK, that's enough for a Monday. The elapsed time between star and share has already grown too long, and I fear this post may already be fish wrap.

conversations i wish i had heard

While there's something absolutely priceless about being able to get nearly unlimited facetime with the guy who won Battledecks, there have been a few conference talks/conversations that I wish I had caught in person.

• Thurston Moore and Steve Reich at SXSW
• Brian Eno and Clay Shirky at the ICA
• Dave Eggers at TED

Alternative reality Sippey has unlimited time and an unlimited budget to jet around to hear things like this. Actual reality Sippey has blogs that recap! And in some cases, video! So there's that.

click to add title

Anil won Battledecks.

When confronted with a Venn diagram showing the convergence of helpful and Fail!, he let it rip: "There is no overlap," Dash said. "This chart is a fucking lie."

Nice work!

short messages not sent

From the "short messages not sent" department.

• Putting a new watch on your wrist changes how you perceive time.
• I spend way too many cycles messing with sync, even though I think I have a decent system figured out to work around the awkward combination of Microsoft Exchange, Apple iCal, an iPhone, Mail.app and Entourage.
• When I'm not online I can string more than a few hundred words together at once, and have them make sense. This is good.
• That said, midtown hotel lobby + powerstrips + wifi = WIN.
• When you have to pay to use something to its full advantage, it's not really free.
• Season two of The Wire gets really interesting around episode 8. Looking forward to the next four.
• I'm still waiting for a delivery date on the Kindle I ordered. I'm tempted to cancel.

OK, that second one up there wasn't so short.

wrapping up 2007

If there's one "2007 wrap up" post you need to read, it's this one from Matt Webb. It's smart, not easily digestible, and will send your mind reeling for more than a little while. (Kind of like Mr. Webb himself.) Here's a teaser bit for you, on the nature of websites:

Instead of a finite-state machine, think of a website as a flowchart of motivations. For every state the user is in, there are motivations: it's fun; it's the next action; it saves money; it's intriguing; I'm in flow; I need to crop the photo and I remember there's a tool to do it on that other page; it's pretty.

There's more on vending machines, risk as motivation, playfulness, the Magna Carta, flocking cars and phenotropics. Fun!

140story

I really like what Joshua Rothhaas (from kindofdelicious) is doing at twitter.com/140story, where every tweet is a story written in 140 characters or less. He doesn't connect on every one, but he'd have a decent major-league batting average. Here are a few of my favorites:

Avid mountain climber, venture capitalist and daredevil, he had but one fear in this world: love, because "only a real man can be a lover."

Two design students fall madly in love and make terribly bold statements holding each other to be more perfect than the typeface Helvetica.

Nation wide protest lead to state wide crackdowns lead to city wide arrest and to local activism which gave way to powerful personal apathy.

That reminds me...

at supernova on wednesday

I'll be at Supernova 2007 tomorrow, and am preemptively very excited about having a hallway conversation with you.  See you there!

i say it here, it happens there

From this very blog, just one week ago:

I wish this plane had a screen in the seatback in front of me showing one of those neat real time maps.  But instead of showing progress at the state or nation-state level, it would show progress at street or near-street level, so that instead of having that "Wow, this flight is taking forever" feeling, you could have that "Holy shit we're going incredibly fast" feeling.  It almost goes without saying that this Holy Shit Map(tm) should be toggle-able between map, satellite and hybrid modes.

From investor.jetblue.com, JetBlue Airways Announces Partnership With Google Maps to Provide Real-Time Flight Tracking Feature:

JetBlue Airways Corporation (Nasdaq:JBLU) today announces a partnership with Google Maps to provide customers with a real-time flight tracking channel on its signature seatback televisions to map the aircraft's route.

Maybe I should blog more often.

top ten wishes from 35,000 feet

If there's anything more ill-advised than blog posts from airport terminals, it has to be blog posts from actual airplanes.  Nevertheless, here goes -- my top ten wishes from 35,000 feet on a Wednesday afternoon.

1. I wish this plane had wifi.  I've heard there's nothing like pinging friends from 35,000 feet to tell them that you're pinging them from 35,000 feet.

2. I wish this plane had a screen in the seatback in front of me showing one of those neat real time maps.  But instead of showing progress at the state or nation-state level, it would show progress at street or near-street level, so that instead of having that "Wow, this flight is taking forever" feeling, you could have that "Holy shit we're going incredibly fast" feeling.  It almost goes without saying that this Holy Shit Map(tm) should be toggle-able between map, satellite and hybrid modes.

3. I wish that my non-existent seatback screen could also be used as a secondary monitor for my laptop, because then I could drag my non-existent IM conversations to that screen and focus my attention on this blog post, leaving my friends wondering if my network connection had gone dead due to excessive cloud cover.

4. I wish that this seat had more legroom.  Actually, that's a lie.  I wish that this seat had more armroom, so that I could stretch out to type instead of sitting here contributing to my neverending parade of hand, wrist, arm, shoulder and back pains.

5. I wish I had Google right now, because I may have just coined the term "armroom" and I have no way to find out.

6. Speaking of armroom, I wish the guy next to me would realize that that armrest there between us is actually MINE, and that he should get his goddamn arm off of it already because he's cramping my mad blogging-from-35,000-feet skillz.

7. I wish this plane had an armrest-powered community jukebox.  I mean, Channel 9 is cool...if you're into pilots and air traffic controllers.  Instead I want to listen in on what that guy with the big headphones is bopping his head to over there in Seat 12D, or what the mother is using to to drown out her tweener kids back in 32F, or what the guy with $800 shoes in 2B is using to passive-aggressively ignore his so obviously botoxed traveling companion.  Frankly, if it were up to me, to even plug your ears into an iPod you'd need to allow others on the plane to jack into what's shuffling through your 1 or 2 or 30 or 60 gigs. 

8. And then it wouldn't it be nice if your seatback display would let you know that the person over there in 22C likes your musical selections and wishes to become your friend on Facebook or your professional contact on LinkedIn or your neighbor on Vox?  And wouldn't it be nice if you could cancel-or-allow directly from said seatback display?

9. I wish this plane had a better inflight movie than the "Diane Keaton at 60" vehicle they're showing right now on the barely visible string of CRTs hanging above the aisle.  (Not that there's anything wrong with Diane Keaton at 60, mind you.) Of course, if I had that non-existent seatback display, then maybe I could order up something interesting.  Like that documentary about Arial Helvetica.

10. But if I had one wish, it would be for the woman in front of me to bring her seat to the fully upright and locked position, so as not to crush my laptop display.  After all, it's the only display I've got right now.

a dose of ze

I've been missing my daily dose of The Show, so tonight I finally made the time to watch all 19 minutes and 58 seconds of Ze Frank's February 2004 talk at TED.  It's well worth the extended dance remix attention disco.  (I mean, really, watching nearly 20 minutes of online video...in a row?  That has to be a personal best.)

X is Y's grandpa

Is this a phrase the kids are using?

now they know where i go

Today was my first day with the new EZ Rider BART card.  No more paper tickets, no more fumbling with the world's most unusable UI when I have to refill said paper tickets, no more wondering if there's enough value on said paper ticket to make it home.  Instead, an RFID-enabled card linked to an appropriate credit institution which is swiped on entry and exit.  The combination of this and the FasTrak-enabled automobiles means that The Man will know where I am, but it's not as if my route between North Berkeley and Powell is much of a secret...

Insanely jealous BART rider?  The program's currently in pilot; apply today.

wanted: auto-twitter

Really, I'm just Too Damned Busy to update Twitter in real time with status updates about my life.  My "followers" are thankful for this, because if I were to update them with the truth, boredom-induced tears would fall from their face, land on their cellphones and short out the circuitry.  So to save my friends and their cellphones from death by boredom, I hereby beseech the LazyWeb to create the auto-Twitter generator to periodically post messages on my behalf about my "alternate" life.

• "On my way to that conference in Rome; thank god for upgrade certificates, otherwise would have been stuck in business class."
• "Lunch with Don downtown talking about the new book."
• "Leisurely enjoying some well-brewed Blue Bottle coffee while crushing the Sunday crossword puzzle."
• "Wii!"
• Etc.

Extra points for integrating user-submitted Twitters along with a Digg-style voting system.  Let the community build my alernate life!

(Of course, blogging about my lack of Twitter updates qualifies me for some kind of ridiculousness prize, so I'll shut up now and point you to my latest entry.  Because what else is all this multi-billion dollar infrastructure good for if not going oh-so-meta on the latest celebrity scandal?)

because it's the perfect how-to video

From Walt:  "Diet Coke and Mentos is the 'Hello, world' of YouTube."

blank is the new blank

I keep hearing that brown is the new black.  And that  pink is the new blog.  Which led me to the question of just how many pages on the web have the phrase "<blank> is the new <blank>" in their title.  Answer?  About 100,000.  Here are the top twenty "<blank> is the new <blank> results, removing the titles that don't really match the pattern...

1. Blood is the new black.
2. Innovation is the new black.
3. Yellow is the new black.
4. Fat is the new black.
5. Sincerity is the new irony.
6. Caring is the new competitive advantage.
7. Green is the new black.
8. Gamma is the new beta.
9. Secrecy is the new black.
10. Folksonomy is the new black.
11. Disk is the new tape.
12. Blogging is the new black.
13. R&B is the new hip-hop.
14. Bitter is the new black.
15. Gay is the new black.
16. XML is the new black.
17. Transformation is the new black.
18. White is the new black.
19. Random is the new black.
20. Teen is the new noir.

The pattern "<blank> is the new black" accounts for more than half of the top twenty!  And if you're curious, check out the Google Trend line for "is the new" -- it shows a slight trend upward in the past couple of years, and you can check out the top news stories on the term, like the Massachusetts Daily Collegian story titled "Vengeance is the new Justice," which somehow fittingly, 404s. 

stack overflow

I hate rules like these.