Sanuk D

I don't know what I'm doing here, I should be someplace else.

Boy howdy, this has been a week, has it not kiddos?  Rosanne Cash tweeted earlier in the week that she believes the moon is in the house of feces.  Yes, Rosanne Cash tweets at @rosannecash, and she is a darn interesting twitterer if you ask me.  It doesn’t hurt that I have heard her music before.  Of course, she is not playing Moogfest.  Well, she hasn’t announced that she is playing Moogfest yet.  The moral of the digression is that you should follow Rosanne Cash.

Because she knows a crazy week when she sees one.  And this is one.  If I may be so bold, I have been kicking ass this week.  Getting lots of stuff done that needed doing, but whether I am delivering or receiving the kicking of the ass, it seems to take a toll these days.  It feels good to have gotten so much done, but it feels even better that I don’t have to do any more for a couple of days.

So what to do but geek out?  I had been shopping netbooks for some time and had decided on a price that would represent “cheap” and a brand that would, well, represent.  That would be ASUS.  So there was an “Asus” for “cheep” on “Woot” last “Sunday” and I “went for it.”  My Sweet Lady took it well.  She even nods her head and smiles when I say that this is a critical piece of what we will need for our trip to Israel.  ”Yeah, right, whatever” she thinks.  But she does not insist that I send it back.  She loves me.

So far I like the netbook.  It has Windows 7 which I could care less about.  I’d go straight to a Linux installation but I want to make sure the touchpad and webcam work.  Perhaps I am being a sissy.  Doesn’t matter because so far everything works pretty well.  The screen is very clear and the keyboard is nicely sized.  I figured out how to make the screen scroll using the touchpad.  That’s all in one night.

Plus I started to edit my conversation with GrimeDog Mallory McDuff.  (Get it? McGruff, the Crime Dog fought crime.  McDuff the Grime Dog fights environmental degredation.  Get it?)  It was a great conversation and a fabulous way to start the weekend. I hope that will come through on the podcast, which should be up tomorrow or maybe Sunday.  We had a lovely run after as well.  Stay tuned.

The Woot is now in Irving.  Irving is not a person, of course, Irving is a town.  Maybe a city even.  All I know about Irving is that it was the location of Texas Stadium where the Dallas Cowboys played.  Texas Stadium was on the opening credits of Dallas, the TV Show.  Dallas came on after the Dukes of Hazzard, and it’s theme song signaled a great time to go cook up a frozen pizza or velveeta sandwich.  Two slices of white bread, velveeta, and two minutes in a microwave give you a velveeta sandwich.  I would not feed that crap to Tallulah if her belly were distended with malnourishment.

Ok, maybe I would if that was all we had but I’d like to think that I could use my Woot to find something more nutritious than a velveeta sandwich.  The Woot has a 10.1 inch screen, 250gb of storage, 802.11 wireless connectivity, a webcam, and a card reader slot.  That’s all I need really.  Just a solid, reliable, portable way to travel down the information super whatever.  Like a Tony Dorsett of the digital age.

So when it says up there at the top “I don’t know what I’m doing here,” it really, really means I don’t know what I am doing.  That is true enough here in the land of the WordPress.  It is especially true as I start to hack away on a new site.  That site is being built, for the moment, in Drupal.  There are some things I would like to do, and Drupal seems much more powerful in helping me get them done.

I also sort of sense that I am trying to transition from props to jets.  That’s nothing against WordPress.  I think it is a very good prop plane.  It even flies like a jet at work.  At least, that is what I have been trying to convince my co-workers of.  They think I am the Wizard of Oz when it comes to the website.  I know I am the Wizard of Oz because the Wizard was, as we all know, a humbug.  He really did not know what he was doing.

And neither do I.  The point is to hack around.  To have a good time and figure stuff out.  I am accomplishing that more or less.  The only issue being that I have imposed an artificial timeline on myself.  That too is ok, because I am not sure how else a thing would get done.  I may have mentioned to you before that I can be lazy for days.  So, instead I hack away.  Hack hack hack.  Someday we will get to the 101st hack, won’t we Elvis?

So it feels a bit like you are being treated to a multi-media cornucopia here at Sanuk D.  Don’t get used to it, kiddos, because work is going to kick my ass soon enough.  Not that this multi-media cornucopia is filled with the rich goodness of, say, the Pilgrim’s horn of plenty, but rotten fruit takes just as much time to grow.  So eat up, friends!

Here is the first part of the conversation I had today with my good friend Zonker, aka BD, the guy whose brush with death inspired all of my blogging, tweeting, podcasting, and so forth.  Blame him.  But listen to his story first.  This part is about how he almost died, and tomato sandwiches.  The next part is about how he has recovered.  Somewhat.

It’s a whole host of Mediterranean food analogies with those guys over at Google.  First they are throwing spaghetti against the wall and then they are doing the Aegean equivalent of shooting the bird at us for not wanting to eat the spaghetti that has been thrown against the wall.  What the hell am I talking about?  Google Wave, you idiots.  Of course it’s Google Wave.

See here is the thing.  We don’t know what to do with Google Wave.  There was that whole invitations thing.  Plus it was never really pushed in a public way.  It takes years to figure out what to do with a new technology once we have acquired it.  Domestication of plants started with the fig like 10 or 12,000 years ago.  What did we get first?  The fig.  It took another 6,000 years or so to get the pecan.  Would you rather have a fig newton or pecan pie? (If you chose fig newton then please stop reading now and go watch some LOLcat videos.)

The point is that if Google is going to invent these things, they need to expect that some will take time to be adopted.  Gmail works on a principle with which we were previously familiar (ie: email).  Google docs, same same.  Google Google worked for so long as a basic search thingy because we didn’t have to figure out how to use it.  Now that we know how to use it, Google has made it more powerful and flexible.  (Ok, they did that because of Bing, but we can handle it because we are used to the technology.)

Google Wave had — and still has — a lot of potential to become the operating platform of the web.  It wasn’t all that long ago that we were executing commands using lines of text.  Graphical user interfaces are only the second generation of operating systems.  An interactive operating system is another level of conceptual thought that users need some time to wrap their heads around.  By pulling the plug now, for reasons of “slow adopting,” it seems like Google is calling us slow in the head.  They’re giving us the fig.