I just successfully upgraded my WordPress installation, which powers this blog, to the latest version (3.0, called Thelonius – see the complete list of major WP releases, all named for jazz musicians). I did this with nary a bump, very few changes in settings, and everything seems to be right.

My first activities with the new version was changing the theme of the site (the look & feel theme, not the content theme) to WP’s default for this version, called Twenty Ten, then changing the header image that appears on each page. While the default image is nice, I wanted 1) to test the waters and modify something and make sure it worked, and 2) to personalize the site imagery. To that end, you’re currently enjoying a (cropped) view of the Brandeis Bardin Institute, home of BCI, the summer camp for Jewish young adults that I attended as a camper (’95) then returned to as an advisor/counselor (’98). This small image hardly does the place justice, but it’s indicative and evocative of the campus’s beauty. I’ll write and talk more about this place another time.

For now, I’m going to call it a night. The plan for tomorrow is to begin documenting my participation with a good friend in The Jonah Project.

Edited on 6/23 to change post title. Because I can.

Seth Godin is a guy whose work I’ve been meaning to read/browse/digest for a while. This was an easily consumable chunk I thought I could handle in the middle of the day, and I wasn’t disappointed. If you are at all interested in social networks (online and off), technology, and people reaching their potential, watch this:

(via)

I just got off the phone with a teller at my banking institution. I had to call in to transfer some money from our joint savings account into our joint checking account, and to my lovely wife’s checking account. I don’t need to tell you why, I just need you to understand that I’m talking about our own money, transferred between our own accounts.

The reason I called in is that I got an error message when I tried to transfer the money online, where we take care of probably 99.9% of our banking needs. The error number is the cryptic one in the title of this post, and the text of the error message was utterly unhelpful, saying only that if the problem persisted I should call my banking institution. It did, so I did. And the teller was kind enough to explain to me why I encountered this problem:

Apparently there is a Federal regulation that prohibits a customer from making more than six (6) electronic transfers per month from any savings account to any other account.

Let me rephrase that, just so we’re all clear on what’s going on here:

The government of these here United States has a rule in place that prohibits ME from moving MY OWN MONEY from MY OWN SAVINGS ACCOUNT to MY OWN CHECKING ACCOUNT more than half a dozen times in a month without walking into a branch of the banking institution that I’ve chosen to hold MY MONEY.

The mind, it doth boggle.

Then again, since money is an artificial construct that has absolutely no intrinsic value to begin with, what am I complaining about? Oh, yeah… my rights, that was it!

Well, I wasn’t using them anyway…

fucking fascists

With Twitter, and with Wil Wheaton.

I got a Twitter account a few weeks ago, and started following some friends and strangers and sending my own updates when I remember (not often enough). After I met Wil at a reading & signing at Mysterious Galaxy last weekend, I started following him, and he’s just as funny in under 140 characters as he is in his longer blog posts and books (I’m listening to Just A Geek in the car, and laughing out loud so much I’m beginning to worry about road safety).

Example: He’s off to Seattle for a con this weekend. Here are two Twitters from this morning:
wilw: Kenny Loggins was at the ticket counter near me. The girl checking me in was early 20s and had no idea why her cow orkers were so excited.
wilw: I was unable to see if his destination was the danger zone, but it was clear that he was alright, so there was no need to worry about him.

That made me laugh again, just copying and pasting it.

I’m such a geek.

edited to add: Wil posted the entire Kenny Loggins Twitter adventure on his blog.

It’s just a fact. When you make something like 800 over 1,000 movies a year, they’re not all going to be classics. And when you make music videos from the songs in some of those movies, some of them are going to be so laughably bad that they’ll provide untold oodles of entertainment (“untold oodles”? Is that even a quantifiable amount?). Thanks to Matthew Rebecca from sporky.net, whose husband, Matthew, provided me with the delightfully random NaBloPoMo badge you see at top of the sidebar now, I just grooved to Ganpat. As Matthew Rebecca put it,

It’s nice to know we’re not the only country embracing stupidity.

Amen.

Matthew Rebecca himherself was turned on this work of art by NPR).

edited to fix the entry based on new information (see Rebecca’s comment below).

Best news about Ann Coulter so far today (hey, the day is young, she could still get run over by a truck, which would eclipse this story):

direct lift from the Subversive Cross Stitch blog:

Seems that some truly subversive and possibly off-balance soul hand-delivered a card to Ms. Coulter’s mailbox in Florida and, according to police reports obtained by The Smoking Gun, the card they chose to express themselves with was our very own “Go Fuck Yourself” card from the set by Chronicle!

I love the NY Magazine piece’s title: But Ann Coulter Always Seemed So Nice! Bwahahahahaha!

edited to add: I looked at the police report at TSG, and was delighted to see the evidence photo showing the “two words unclear” on the inside of the card mentioned by the cop. “They” are easily (to me) discernible as the single word “solipsistic” (adj., one who holds that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing; also : extremely egocentric). It gives me hope and cheer to know that someone with the kind of vocabulary it takes to use “solipsistic” correctly in a sentence took the time to compose this card to Ms. Coulter and hand-deliver it. Thank you, my friend, and Merry Christmas to you!

I don’t remember if I became a fan of Mark Hurst because of his Good Experience Games or This is Broken or some other aspect of his good user experience work, but I am a big fan, as I’ve mentioned before.

Re: This is Broken, I ran into two egregious examples today:

1. this packaging disaster, courtesy of ASAP software, recently bought by Dell:



2. the other item is the WiFi activation switch on the HP Pavilion laptop. first, let me just say that having a physical WiFi activation switch makes no sense to me, but that may just be my higher-than-average comfort with technology talking (I have no problem disabling network adapters via the user interface, for example). That said, putting the switch somewhere where it can be inadvertently toggled is bad design to begin with. This is the case not only with the pavilion, but with another friend’s Toshiba laptop that I dealt with some months ago. Anyway, the brokenness of the HP switch isn’t just in its location (the front panel of the laptop, where it can easily be accidentally flipped on/off). The bigger problem is its design, especially in terms of feedback. I haven’t been able to find a decent picture of it, but here’s a pic of a well-designed wifi switch:
   
   The switch on the HP is also a side-to-side toggle, but the little antenna icon is on one side, and an LED is on the other. That said, which position do you think is “on”? I bet more than 90% of people presented with that question would say the side with the icon. And we would all be wrong. Yes, the OPPOSITE side, the side with no icon or any marking at all, is the position that turns the wifi adapter on. The LED? Oh, that lights up either way. And no, not in the universally recognized red & green for “stop/no signal” and “go/signal”. No. This one is, if memory serves, blue and orange. Unbelievable.

My buddy Avraham has provided a lot of great intellectual (kosher) meat for me to chew on ever since we met in grad school way back around the turn of the 21st century (can you believe it’s been that long, dude?). He challenged me again recently by asking how I keep up with news of emerging technologies and trends (and which technologies I thought were setting the most prominent trends), and in the conversation that ensued, he reminded me of Netvibes, which I’d signed up for when it was first introduced, but hadn’t played with at all. It may have been David Pogue, it might have been one of the editors of BoingBoing, or it could have been someone else entirely who turned me on to netvibes originally, but I just didn’t take the time or have the inclination to mess around and explore too much.

Well, leave it to Avraham to prod me into action by 1) asking my opinion as an expert user (ha!), and 2) appealing to my ego by telling me he wanted to add my blog feed to one of his netvibes tabs. I figured out the latter task and recognized right away the signs of an impending addiction coming on. Thanks, man. Thanks a lot. Please don’t forget to come visit me when I’m in rehab.

I have to go back to my webcomics post from the other day to add links.

I have to let my family and friends know I’m updating the blog regularly and I’d appreciate it if I got some readers and comments.

I have an account with Gootodo, a terrific web-based to-do list application created by Mark Hurst, who I’m proud to know. I have to start using gootodo more, and more efficiently. The week of the wildfires was more disruptive than I previously thought, so this week and next (which is short due to the Thanksgiving holiday) are busier and more packed than usual. I got an account with Jott, too, which I’ve used a couple of times and like, and it might be helpful in conjunction with gootodo: think of something I need to do, and if I’m not in front of a computer, call Jott with a reminder to add the item to gootodo. So far I’ve been using my Treo‘s calendar for personal reminders, but I need a system for work stuff.

I have to stop feeling guilty for watching fluff like Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer when I want to veg out and relax at the end of a long day. I’m going to try to offset the fluff with stuff I should have seen already, like Network (Blockbuster’s one copy was checked out when I went the other day, so it’ll wait) and Say Anything (waiting for me and Jenn to find time together).

Hey, I’m glad we had a chance to have this little talk. It’s been really helpful! Thanks!