Objective - Chris Hollander's Blog

I love Facebook.  No, really, I do.  It’s awesome to get back in touch with folks whom I’ve fallen out of touch with, and its a great, convenient way to keep in contact with the folks who I’m close with, even as we all adjust to our rapidly changing lives.  But… there are better ways that I should be spending my time.

In this posting, I’ve listed 25 things that I should be doing instead of spending time on Facebook.  the main reason I’m doing this is because I’m a very visual person, and actually seeing this list makes it more real to me, and (hopefully) helps me focus more on getting this stuff done.  I’m also doing this, though, to share.  To let ya’ll know what I gots goin on.  Maybe some of you have recently done some similar things, and can offer me some advice.  Maybe some of you have your own list of 25 things to get done, and seeing my list might help you get your list in order.  either which way, without any further ado, I present my list of shit that I need to get done:

1. the spray-hose attachment on my kitchen sink is broken, and it needs to be replaced.  Its probably about…. 20 minutes worth of work.  I have to go to home depot, buy a new spray thingee, shut off the water, take off the old hose, throw some plumbers tape on the threads of a new hose, and put it on.  It’s not done yet.  (it’s been broken since we moved in, just about 5 years ago).
1. Completed:  Turned out to be slightly more comlicated- the sink setting wasn’t properly installed, so the new hose that we bought didn’t work, so we ended up replacing the entire sink setting.
2. a few years ago, the washing machine in our kitchen broke. It was a pain in the ass, anyway… it was like a 1970s model that you had to roll out from under the counter and push over to the sink, and then attach a hose, and then wait an hour for the wash to finish and hope that suds didn’t ooze out all over the kitchen, and then throw the clothes into the dryer (which was poorly vented), and push the washing machine back.  I was kinda happy it broke.  Either which way, we need a new washer dryer.  Bringing laundry to the Laundromat isn’t super fun.
3. the old washer/dryer need to be thrown out.
4. We love our 1930s Tudor style house.  We love the hard wood floors. We love the ancient front door, and the brick exterior.  We love it *so much* that we don’t want to mess it up by putting in a properly wired door bell.  So, we’ve gone through three wireless doorbells, all of which stop working after about 3 months or 2 rain storms, whichever comes first.  So, I need a new doorbell.  (until then,  if your coming over, call when you get outside, m’kay?)
5. A couple of times a year, I have to clean the gutters on the roof.  I empty out the spare closet in the office, pull out the ladder, climb up onto the roof, and pull a metric crap-load of leaves and twigs and berries and whatnot out of the gutters. About a year ago, we had a bad storm, and the huge analog TV antennae thingee that the last owners used to tune their TV’s in to Jonny Carson  had been partially knocked over.  It was leering dangerously close to the skylight over our hallway.  I whipped out some wrenches and what not, and de-installed it.  Since then, its been leaning up against the fence in my backyard, doing its best lightning rod imitation.  I need to throw out the large dangerous piece of aluminum in my backyard.
6. Remember when i lost my wallet two days before Christmas this year?  Well, during the process of getting all my replacement cards, I realized that I don’t know where my social security card is.  I don’t know if it was in the wallet or not, but point being, I don’t have it right now.  So, I need to replace my social security card.
7. My garage isn’t a mess.  let me repeat: MY GARAGE ISN’T A MESS. I can get my car into and out of the garage with zero planning or preparation.  I store copious amounts of crap in the garage, but its stored in a (somewhat) organized fashion.  That being said, I really need to give it some spring cleaning love. I can probably throw out 40% of the stuff i have in there.  I should really install some proper shelving.  In short, I need to clean out my garage.
8. somewhere between 12 and 18 months ago, I went to get my car out of the garage, and I realized that a significant portion (2-3 square feet?) of the roof of the garage had fallen in onto the back of my car.  The car only had 2 or 3 minor scratches, which I IMMEDIATELY repaired (this of course, involved ordering special paint over the internet, bringing the car for a thorough hand washing, carefully removing excess wax from the damaged area, hand sanding and repainting the scratches, allowing appropriate drying time, re-washing, re-waxing).  I have not, yet, repaired the gaping hole in the garage ceiling.
9. The couple that lived in our house before we bought it used the 3rd bedroom as a doll room. that third bedroom is now my office.  the walls are still pink.  I need to paint my office. 
10. We have this awesome rolling kitchen kart thingee.  My mom bought it for us as an engagement gift, back in 2001.  A couple of years ago, while cleaning up after a new years party, the front-left wheel fell off. Since then, I’ve stabilized the kart using a cardboard box from a bottle of champagne that a guest brought to the party (Thanks, Jamie!).  The broken wheel assembly is in the drawer of the kart.  I need to fix my kitchen kart.
11. For about a month now, the pressure of our hot water is about half as strong as the pressure of our cold water.  I need to figure out what’s wrong with my hot water pressure.
1. IN PROGRESS: So, it turns out that this is a known issue with hot water heaters installed in the 90s.  Those hot water heater’s often had a device called a “dip tube”, and that device often deteriorates, leading to lower pressure for hot water throughout the house (and also leading to small white detriment accumulating at faucets- another symptom we’ve experienced).  Dip tubes are replaceable, but because of where my hot water heater is located, replacing the whole thing makes a bit more sense.  We’ll be scheduling that job for completion before the end of the summer.
12. Our bedroom has this awesome room length, 2’x14’ closet.  I wanna get some swanky shelving installed in the bedroom closet.
13. 2 or 3 of our windows don’t stay open unless we wedge pieces of wood into them.  I need to re-cord a few windows.
14. The last owners of our house used about 7 different shades of blue in the bathroom.  We remedied this situation by painting and wallpapering whichever surfaces lend themselves to such modification. This included a pretty nice border that we put up on the ceiling.  after a few months, the glue from the border started to come undone.  So, I need to re-glue the border in the bathroom.
15. Our basement bathroom needs to be replaced.  If you’ve ever been to our house, you know what I’m talking about.  If you haven’t, its too much to type out… come on over, you’ll see what I mean.
16. We could use new air conditioners.  The ones we have came with the house, and they’re probably pushing the 10 year mark- I think they were made before “EnergyStar” existed.  When we turn them on, its like starting a 1963 VW bug (in terms of noise and dust).
17. The wall in the boiler room in our basement is basically “unfinished”- as in, its completely bare.  When it rains really hard, it gets kinda moist.  as in, damp.  as in, water from outside is coming inside. I need to fix the wall in the boiler room.
18. While I’m at it, I need to schedule an inspection of the boiler.  In the five years that we’ve lived here, we’ve never had it inspected. I’m not sure how long it was since the last inspection before we moved it.  It generally seems like a good idea.
19. Our basement door doesn’t have a proper door frame, so its super drafty.  I need to install a proper door frame for our basement door.
20. Our house has room to park three cars in our driveway… but, because of the shape of it, its really hard to get all three cars in.  We need to re-pave a portion of the driveway.
21. whenever we invite people over, or order take-out, or have a delivery coming, we often have to wait by the door.  Though #4 is partially to blame for this, there’s also the fact that our address is hard to read on our door.  We need a nice new shiny address placard. 
22. We have a dozen or so picture frames on our stairway.  These pictures brought positive energy into the earth home of our feng shui bagua, and form a natural flow between the heaven, lake, and earth energies.  The pictures in the frames are of past parties, trips, and occasions, and feature many of our closest friends.   We haven’t updated those pictures, though, in about 3 years. There are broken up couples still prominently highlighted. Folks have different color hair now.  some parts of some folks are bigger, and some parts of some folks are smaller.  In general,  the pictures are no longer representative of reality, may, in fact, be poisoning our bagua.  I need to replace the pictures in the frames over our stairway.
23. we have a nice ceiling fan in our kitchen.  we normally don’t have it it turned on, but when we have guests, folks tend to gather in the kitchen, so we put on the fan.  The last few times we’ve had folks over, we noticed that the fan was a bit louder than normal.  A few weeks ago, we realized that one of the screws had fallen out of one of the blades, and that the remaining screw was almost out as well.  Basically, we were moments away from one of the fan blades flying off and impaling one of our guests.  Which would have been bad.  So, I need to replace the screw on our kitchen ceiling fan.
24. Back in November, the dimmer for the lights in our living room broke. I need to replace the dimmer switch in the living room.
25. A very, very long time ago, I bought these neat little stick-up LED-under-cabinet lights that you can easily install (in minutes!) in your kitchen.  Of course, they are now lost. I need to find and install the LED spotlights in my kitchen.

I could probably easily throw another 5 or 6 things on this list, but 25 seems like a nice round number. Lets hope I can get these done in a reasonable amount of time… expect status updates (and, if you don’t see any, poke me until I post them! )

(updated with progress on June 21st)

Samuel Jack's Functional Fun has become one of my favorite resources for functional/LINQ related info.  A recent post describes an Extension method for "Slicing" an existing sequence into same-sized chunks.  This is particularly useful when you have semi-structured data in a one dimensional list- I come across this pretty often when working with legacy systems (or, with new systems designed by legacy developers... but that's a whole other post). 

A few weeks ago, I wrote my own extension method that was functionally equivalent to what Sam had posted, but implemented differently:

   1: public static IEnumerable<IEnumerable<T>> Chunk<T>(this IEnumerable<T> Sequence, int Size)

   2: {

   3:     int Start = 0;

   4:     while (Start < Sequence.Count() - Size)

   5:     {

   6:         yield return Sequence.Skip(Start).Take(Size);

   7:         Start += Size;

   8:     }

   9:     yield return Sequence.Skip(Start);

  10: }

I think that my version is a bit LINQier than Sam's, but much less LINQy than the original version that Eric White posted.  One important difference is that Sam's implementation returns "full materialized" arrays, while (if I understand correctly) this implementation returns expressions that will be lazy-evaluated.

the ease with which that was captured, created, and shared is simply incredible.

photo tour of Edinburgh Castle Courtyard, produced using about 20 pictures taken on my recent vacation and Microsoft Photosynth.  Now, if only the Spaces team would allow me to embed it directly in this post....

li

The Plan

Solve a whole bunch of problems from www.projecteuler.net during my 6 hour plane ride to Seattle.

The Epic Fail

Having to solve these problems without direct access to the project Euler site, so that I can use the provided validator to see if my answers were right, was ridiculously hard.  Basically, I had to go by "feel"... if the code was becoming too convoluted, or if attempts were taking more than a few seconds, then obviously I was doing something terribly wrong. 

My plan when attacking a given Euler problem (or, in fact, just about anything in my life...) is:

1. Come up with a really basic strategy For Euler problems, this might be something like Recursion, Brute Force, Scope Limitation.  At work, it might be adding/improving resources, escalation, cacheing, queueing, etc.  IRL, my basic strategies are limited to "Run", "Hide", "Pimp Slap" (not necessarily in that order, tho).
2. Implement that strategy as quickly as possible.  This should be less than 10% of the total time that i'm going to spend on the problem/issue/challenge/whatever.
3. Test the results of the implementation.
4. If the implementation is within +-10% of target, then I spend the remaining 90% of my time tweaking the implementation to perfection.
5. If the implementation of the initial strategy fails,  back to the drawing board. 
1. repeat steps 1-4 for strategy 2.
6. at this point, if the solution isn't solid, outside assistance is brought in, starting at the center of my social network (my wife) and working my way out towards specialists in the given subject area (aka, the interwebs).

The problem is, on a plane, my approach falls apart at step 2. Having access to the internet is the ultimate crutch.  without having the internet to lean on, I had to fully support the weight of my stupidity on my own two feet... (or ten fingers in this case... whatever).  It wasn't pretty.

The Results

Suffice it to say, I didn't really solve any Euler problems on my trip.  I did, however, dramatically increase my understanding of some key .NET 3.5 features, and of programming in general. It's nice to know that olding dogs can still learn newer tricks.

The concepts that I'm learning the most about are things like LINQ, Lambda expressions, query continuations, and iterators, as well as some really (embarrassingly) fundamental things like recursion, closures, variable scope, and the secret lives of delegates.

I haven't decided wether or not I'm going to love or hate extension methods.  (also, I apologize to every English teacher I've ever had or known for writing that sentence just now).  I absolutely love the capabilities to extend existing classes, but I worry about the impact of this in the enterprise, or in large projects.  A huge portion of the code for my Euler Project solutions lives in extension methods, and this has allowed me to obtain a really high level of code re-use, and a great improvement in code readability- but at what cost?  By doing my own "language design", i've been able to take some great steps towards a more "fluent API" (btw, WTB a great link to an overview of fluent APIs? wikipedia lol'd at my search), but my code has also become more brittle in some ways- a change to something like my Long.IsPrime()  method suddenly impacted a dozen of my euler solutions, some for better, some for much worse. 

The current generation of developers is used to a very linear, vertical understanding of re-use through inheritance and containment; extension methods introduce a much more horizontal impact, especially when fundamental types (date, string, numbers, etc) are extended.  It's not quite as cross-cutting as Aspects, but at the same time, it's less orthogonal than aspects; if you weave in aspects, its easy to turn them off if you notice a problem... whereas if your using extension methods provided by your enterprise, or by your project architect, it will be impossible to "shut off" those extensions if (or, when) you discover a show-stopping problem with them.

I think I'll file extension methods under the "Great Power, Great Responsibility" tag.  What do you think?

SO, its been a few months since my last post here on objective, so I figure why not share some love with the Internets. 

It only took me 2 years, but I think I've finally sorted out my Social network applications media presence on the web. 

• Facebook is my home on the web for the next 3 years. Facebook is how I plan on sharing anything and everything with people who I actually know, IRL.  If you actually know me (i.e., we've shared a meal or a drink or something), then you should add me as a friend on facebook. 
• FriendFeed is where i'll do my blogerati naval gazing.  I'll still do the majority of my reading in my RSS reader, but I'll do most of my commenting on FriendFeed.  If your interested in participating in the same online conversations as I am, then you'll likely find me on FriendFeed.
• Delicious is where i'll keep all of my interesting (lol) links.  Feel free to peruse my hawt linkage.
• this blog, Objective, is going back to its roots.  From this post forward, this blog will be devoted to 100% geekery.  Hardcore geekery. potentially NSFH (not safe for home) geekery.  This will include:
• Code.  Lots of it. 
• Tales from the trenches of a public sector consultant.
• hardware/gadget obsessions.
• Warcraft stuff.  (yah, thats right.) 
• etc.

I've decided to sort all of this out because, after quite a creative draught, I suddenly find myself wanting to write again.  I have a story to tell.  I have an alternative perspective to share.  I want to geek out in a big way, and I needed a venue to support that- My friends don't need to be exposed to the horrible gory depths of my geekery, and you, dear Internet (glares at search engines...), don't need to be exposed to the intimate details of dealings with my friends (facebook is just fine for that).

I need to know that I can post code, and not bore my friends.  I also need to know that I can post videos, and not ruin my friends future presidential campaigns. ;)

And finally... I want to re-establish a weathered connection. 6 years (gasp!!) ago, when I started blogging, I was known (ok, known might be a strong word here..) as one of the first Microsoft bloggers.  Back then, there was a list (blogroll, it was called, way back then..) of about 20 or 30 of us Msft bloggers, and I was proud to be one of them.  Then the blogosphere entered its inflationary phase, and thousands of awesome M'softies sprang up and took the Internet by storm.  Around the same time, I started in a new position at Microsoft, and I didn't feel super comfortable sharing the details of my day job publicly. 

but as of Today, I am the Empire. This Saturday, I fly back to Redmond for a new swig of corporate cool aide. I'm going to spend a week soaking in as much as I can, then I'm going on a 2 week European vacation.  When I come back, I've got about 20 posts lined up... fire up your aggregators. :)

I really, really wanted to love the new iPhone.  See, the original was really wonderful, but still not quite good enough for me... I have an unnatural, unhealthy relationship with my smartphone, and I was hoping that the new Iphone would bring Apple's device at least up to par with what I have, but it fell short. :(

The good:

• Support for Exchange is awesome- I've relied on having access to exchange on my phone for years now, and I couldn't imagine having a phone without it. 
• "MobileMe" is super cool... like they say, apple delivers "exchange for the rest of us".  I've been living in an auto-synchronized world for a while now..  my multiple PCs and smartphone have synchronized email/contacts/calendar, and its all accessible on the web thanks to Outlook Web Access (by far, the coolest (and one of the first) ajax apps I've ever seen.. but that's another topic). It's great to know that my friends who don't work at corporations that use exchange can finally stop worrying about syncing up their address books....
• no suprises with the API announcements.  any platform live and dies by its developer support- now apple is on par with windows mobile development, and positioned as a competitor to android.
• I love the notion of location information as a first class citizen in the platform... I hope to see windows mobile catch up with this, soon. 
• the price... quite nice.

the bad (and the ugly):

• I can't imagine owning a phone that doesn't have expandable storage... Am I being unreasonable here? I just bought an 8 gig micro SD card for my phone for less than 50$, and I can get 32 gig of SD memory for around 100.  If the 8 gig iPhone had the potential for me to throw a card in to upgrade it to 40g, that would certainly sweeten the pot...
• Their "exchange for the rest of us" solution stops a bit short of revolutionary.  revolutionary would be if the entire sync infrastructure were open to 3rd party developers, so that, for example, facebook could write a "fully synched" client.
• I find it outright insulting that in 2008, a company would dare release a phone/media device without advanced bluetooth (A2DP, tethering) compatibility.

my fingers are crossed. Maybe, just maybe, next year, Apple will introduce their next iPhone, and it will have enough substance to pry this smartphone out of my white-knuckled fist.  lets see.

according to Scoble, the web is in danger.  The stage is being set for a grand battle with Microsoft, Yahoo, and Facebook on one side, and Google and the open web on the other.  The preemptive strike is the (completely speculative...) Microsoft acquisition of both Yahoo search and Facebook:

This is a fight for the Web. We all just crawled inside a box that locks Google out.

Lets suspend disbelief for a moment, and imagine that things play out exactly how Scoble predicts.  In his dystopia, Facebook becomes an isolated island in the open sea of the google-accessible web.  Users who are "trapped" on the Facebook island are forced to.... well, they're forced to socialize with their friends, use well documented APIs to create and share applications, and proactively manage their online identities.  Further, they will have access to the (second) best search tools on the planet- but those tools could be specifically tailored to fit the well defined needs of their tiny little island... heck, they might not be the best in the world, but maybe... just maybe... they would be "good enough".

Its a hard life for these poor fools, stranded in Facebook.

Life on the outside is so much better, amirite?  I mean, out in the free web, All Your Data Are Belong To Google, and Google Does No Evil.  Which means that your personal information, browsing habits, attention, gestures, opinions, are definitely not for sale to the highest bidder, right?  Do no evil also means not making tons and tons of money by backing web spam, domain squatting, and malware distribution, right?

ok, that's probably enough sarcasm for now.   See, the thing is, yes, I agree, the Web is in peril.  The Aggressor, though, isn't Microsoft/Yahoo/Facebook- it's spam.  Or more generally, its unwanted, intrusive attention, regardless of vector.  For years, spam has been slowly eroding the value of the open web, and it's not going to stop any time soon. 

What we've wanted, for years, is a network that we can trust.  A network based on real identity.  
A network architecture that puts the user in control of her own information. 
A network that allows users to opt in or out of participation
if Google could provide that, I would be there- but they can't.  I can't trust Google. Most people out there don't trust Microsoft.  But Flickr and Delicious have never betrayed my trust, and neither has Facebook. 

If you need me, you can find me on the island.

 btw, these opinions are mine, and are not endorsed by my employer.

If you've found this post, then you know what I'm talking about.

You came here looking for the Frozen Donkey Wheel.  You've spent hours searching.  You've been pouring over the web, following endless chains of links, chasing rabbits, loosing hours.  You've read a thousand theories, and none of them have satisfied your hunger.  You know that the answer is out there, just out of your reach, just behind the next link.

You've already found it.

You've been in it all along.

The Frozen Donkey Wheel, of course, is the Matrix. 

No, really, stop laughing. Like the Matrix, the Frozen Donkey Wheel is a system.  It's a control.  It's a tool.  Specifically, its a beacon. It's a crib.  It's a tarbaby.  The more you write, the more you read, the more you fight, the more it leads, the deeper you fall, the tighter the trap.  half a million sites across the web tie themselves to the Frozen Donkey Wheel.  And the frozen Donkey Wheel leads back to the original interviews.  Which lead back to websites that are owned by Big Media.  Which sells adds. And makes millions and millions of dollars.  That's all the Frozen Donkey Wheel is.

At TED, JJ Abrams delivers a talk about the mystery box.  The producers have talked, at length, about the importance of the Internet in relation to the show.  They've said that the show simply could not have existed without the Internet.  The Frozen Donkey Wheel is an ad-hoc, dynamic, invisible, real-world mystery box. 

JJ Abrams hasn't opened his mystery box yet.  And he's not going to any time soon.  the secret isn't out there. Your not going to figure it out.  It's not the answer you seek, its the question. 

Your not searching for the Frozen Donkey Wheel because you want to find it.

Your find it because you want to search.

So, here's the thing with the Internet. Thanks to search engines, all sorts of people find this blog- but when they get here, I doubt they find whatever is is that they were looking for.  Hopefully, this post will help redirect the poor, lost surfers* who stumble across my meager little blog in their search for the answer to life's questions.

• I was surprised to see that this post about my mobile phone as the ultimate transition object was ranked pretty high on the major search engines for the term "transition object".  My posting is a somewhat nonsensical ramble about my personal attachment issues with my mobile phone- conversely, this is a real discussion about transition objects from a psychoanalytical perspective, if readers are so inclined.
• I still get a bunch of folks who search the web for the Lost numbers (4 8 15 16 23 42), and somehow find my posts on the subject.  It has been a very, very long time since I've updated these posts, and quite honestly, much more interesting stuff is going on in the Lost-o-Verse- might i suggest checking out these awesome theories about how Lost is a video game, or about how the Lost is based on Time Loops?  Also, people seem to land here after searching for "Somewhere Beyond the Sea" in French. They find a post I wrote a few years ago, back in season 1, when we had absolutely no clue who or when or what was happening on the Island... actually, we still don't really know any of those things, but that's besides the point- the point is, just about every single person involved with that little plot point is dead now.  so... yah.
• I'm quite happy to know that if you search the web for "how to find misplaced items", my post about finding lost things comes up first.  This whole web thing might just work out after all.  

*do we really not have a better metaphor than surfing yet?  Because, like, the web is nothing like a wave... and a browser is nothing like a board...

yes, yes, i understand, my keyboard is a mess.  You're missing the point.  Look closer.  The F4, F5, and F6 keys say "New", "Open", and "Close", respectively. I had no idea what their purpose was.   Until today.

Those keys manage my browser tabs.   Let me say that again: those keys manage my browser tabs.  that means one button access to opening new tabs, closing existing tabs, and entering Urls. 

My whole browsing world has been radically altered.

Its times like these that I realize just how much of a geek I am.

two years ago, I wrote about the then discombobulated state of social networking.  Things have improved a bit since then:

• Del.icio.us is still, well, Delicious.   I still find Delicious to be the easiest way to participate in the read/write web- I've tagged close to 1500 items, used it to share stuff, used it to find stuff, used it to remember stuff... in many ways, its the current focal point of my online experience.
• Sharing pictures online is still a mess.  Flickr is cool, but to put it simply, none of my friends use it.  Instead, my friends upload pictures to myspace, facebook, or older photo sites like kodak.  Low-res pictures get emailed around, and eventually disappear.  For a while, I tried to use Windows Live Messenger Shared Folders (thats alot to type..) to share pictures with my mom, but that didn't quite work out. I am still looking for the perfect way to share pictures, and very soon, videos.  Flickr may win by default...
• 43 Things was a cool idea that fizzled.  not sure why.  That's all I have to say about that.

The new hotness (and by new, I of course mean old to everyone except me...), surprisingly, are a series of services that attack social networking from surprisingly different angles.

• Twitter is anti-blogging. It's often referred to as micro-blogging, but I don't think that sums it up quite right- Twitter boils blogging down to its most pure form (answering the question: "what am I doing right now?"), and throws away everything that is horrible and annoying about blogging: trackbacks, linkbacks, comments, spam, tags, clouds, feeds, etc. Some might call it glorified IRC chat, some might call it a conversation bus, some might call it the future- all of them are right.
• I think Facebook is probably best described as the first true social operating system.  See, in geek terms, an "operating system" is the software that provides developers with a layer of abstraction so that they can write applications without worrying about the details of the computer machinery that those apps will run on.  That's exactly what Facebook does, but for the social Internet.  Developers write applications (like, 25k+ at the time of this posting) that run on facebook, and they don't have to worry about all of the nitty gritty details of how to manage communities- Facebook takes care of all of that, and the apps just hum along.  its pretty damn cool- and, to top it off, the abstraction works both ways.  as a user, I don't have to pay attention to dozens of different web sites, accounts, friends lists, etc- i just do that once, in Facebook, and I get a "portal" experience for all the different apps that I'm interested in.  Cool.
  • the other thing that I find interesting about facebook is that it's essentially a walled garden- there is no notion of "public profiles" that just anyone can see.  It's built on the premise of adding technology infrastructure to existing, established social networks- not on the notion of building web-wide social networks out of the ether.
• FriendFeed, quite possibly, is the coolest of the bunch.  FriendFeed takes on the task of aggregating all of the silly little crumbs that we leave across over 30 different social network properties (including every single one thats ever been mentioned on this blog) and coordinates them into a single, global, threaded discussion.  Here is a list of just about everything that chris hollander has contributed to the interwebs, going back to 2005.  gotta love that. :)

So.... what's the point of this blog post? after spending a few months in "Read Only mode", I'm ready to start contributing to the web again.  This is due, in part, to the culmination of social network stuff outlined above, but also due to the alignment of a bunch of awesome tools: Windows Live Writer, Live Gallery, Witty, Live Mesh, and my smartphone... but that's a whole other post.