I wrote this short piece for Merlin Mann's 43Folders.com, because I think Merlin and his site are neat. It's about forgiveness.
I'm not a Christian anymore. Perhaps I got a raw deal when God was passing out churches--mine was shaken apart in my late teens by a pastor who got busted for sneaking a few hundred thousand out of the offering plate to buy Nazi war memorabilia, not to mention banging a few dozen women who came to him for marriage counseling--but I've made my peace with the Prince of it.One particularly Christian principle has apparently stuck with me over the years. It wasn't until recently that I rediscovered it. (Not animal sacrifice, which I never abandoned.) And whether Jesus of Nazareth existed as a real meat person or was the product of a coterie of desert sci-fi novelists, one thing he taught has been helping me a lot lately.
It's awfully nice to forgive.
Read the rest. [43Folders.com]
My kid sister Rachel Fracassa, having just completed a rigorous raw food chef certification after a couple of years of solo training, has just opened her new business, "Lemons in the Kitchen." I'm super proud of her, even if I have every intention to continue eating cooked meat, at least until the day she can finally make raw BBQ pulled pork. (And knowing her, it may be possible. She can make quiche out of psyllium husk. No joke.)
If you're in the Kansas City area and are interested in learning more about gourmet raw food, having Rachel come over and teach you some techniques, or simply having her make you some raw food that tastes like, you know, food, I'm sure she'd love to hear from you.
Rachel Fracassa's Raw in Kansas City [LemonsInTheKitchen.com]
I've had an idea that I've wanted to implement for several years, but can't quite seem to find the ability to make it happen, because it would involve expertise and resources I don't have. I actually put together a business plan for this a few months ago when I was working for Wired, but I never heard anything about whether they thought my idea was solid or not.
In essence, I'd like to build a comprehensive database of consumer electronics information, then make that data publicly accessible via API, to create the ur-site for gadgets. (Then games; then cars; then...)
By collecting all that data about a gadget—and I'm talking every last little detail, from the number of things included in the box, the package dimensions, an items ability to be hacked, links to official drivers, release dates, firmware updates—and making it open to public calls, you could end up creating the mother-base to serve as reference for any consumer electronics owner. You could also index reviews from various sites, such as Amazon, CNET, and Epinions, as well as user-submitted scores, to create a meta score a la Metacritic. (I've reserved the URL "gearrankings.com" for just this idea, but never done anything with it.)
There are some similar projects out there, like Amazon's Product Wiki, but they don't work for the same reason that Wikipedia doesn't supplant the idea of Freebase. (Freebase, incidentally, might be a good backend for this project, but I can't say since they not only have invite-only access, but have shut down all ways to contact anyone working for their company, MetaWeb.) A project like this could serve as a platform for an editorial-based organization like CNET, as well, but only if they gave fair weight to others' reviews as well as their own. I think full-time input by staffers would be good to get a project off the ground, but surely OCD community members would be willing to document the majority product details.
The use cases make it more compelling, I think: Wouldn't it be great to be able to follow the lifecycle of a product from rumor to end-of-life? Wouldn't it be nice to have one reference source for drivers, manuals, and customer service numbers? Wouldn't it be useful to be able to gather data about the number of firmware releases per product by company? Warranty length cross sorted by price? A phone under $100 that is produced by a company with a 3.5 star or greater customer service rating that uses recyclable package? All DVD players that can be hacked to be region-free but are made in North America?
It would be a monumental data collection effort, but I think that people would be willing to step up simply because it would put so much useful consumer information back into the hands of web. And being the moderator of that information might not be a bad way to make a little money.
The Akismet plug-in for MT doesn't work like it does on Wordpress, so I'm still getting slammed with bad comments, and there doesn't seem to be a simple way to put all comments in a queue for approval. Why does Wordpress+Akismet get comments so right but MT seems to screw it all up? Typekey was a nice notion, but it should be scrapped.
That wasn't so bad after all. I got StyleCatcher working, found the most barebones template I could find, and punched in some sidebar modules. I've also opened up commenting again, although I couldn't quite figure out how to make the Akismet plugin automatically queue spam comments. (Or at least I'm not sure that it's working yet.
Anyway, not too bad. Might need to tighten up the padding on the post footers just a hair, though.
