Aku Aku

a proposed story

So this year at Burning Man I had been planning on proposing to Mie. I had written a simple children's story based on our relationship and commissioned illustrations from a woman in Shanghai whom I met on Flickr. The idea was that this could be a book for our own children to enjoy one day. This was something I'd been planning for well over a year, but I am a world-class procrastinator. Seriously, I'd be a contender if procrastination were an Olympic sport.

Well naturally I managed to miss the deadline because the payment for the illustrations didn't arrive in China as quickly as I hoped so I didn't have all the illustrations by the time we left for Black Rock City. Of course, as you may know, Mie took me by surprise and proposed to me at Burning Man. Since the pressure was off I got to procrastinate even more, but I finally managed to get it all put together and presented it to Mie today.

The story recounts how we met at Burning Man and how I convinced her to leave Japan to live with me. The last page ends with me asking her an unspecified question. The plan was to ask The Question directly when she got to that page. Hopefully now Mie (who is much more creative than I) can help me wrap the story up and we can have the final few illustrations done. I'm still trying to come up with a title too.

The entire thing, story and illustrations, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. You can download it here: A Story For Mie.pdf (warning: 66 megabytes in size).

Storm Trooper

My friend Jeff Ballentine in Atlanta ordered this assemble-at-home Stormtrooper kit. The basic outfit was $450, but Jeff added lots of extras (boots, pauldron, holster, shoulder ammo pack, voice mod) so the final cost will be more like $1000. It took him a few weeks to do all the drilling and piecing together, but the final product looks fantastic!

I asked him if he could hit the broad side of a barn with a laser gun in that outfit. He said it would be hard to do anything accurately while wearing all that get-up. So there's one mystery solved.

If you're interested in ordering a kit yourself contact the people at www.501st.com.

stephen hawking coming to the paramount

Dr. Stephen W. Hawking is doing a short lecture tour (apparently all the way from San Jose to Oakland). Anyone else interested in attending? It ain't cheap ($35-$125), but it seems like a rare opportunity. I'm looking at the November 10 gig in Oakland and considering an $85 seat.

Hawking Rethinks Origin of the Universe I

n two, rare public appearances, at a moment of revolutionary change, world-renowned cosmologist Dr. Stephen Hawking presents a popular lecture entitled "New Perspectives on The Origin of the Universe" at the Center for Performing Arts in San Jose on Monday, November 7th, and at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland, Thursday, November 10th, 2005. Both events begin at 8pm.

Paramount Theatre in Oakland tickets are currently on sale and available through TicketMaster online or at 510-625-TIXS.

Professor Hawking holds the prestigious Lucasian chair at Cambridge University, once held by Sir Isaac Newton. Hawking is one of the early developers of the theory of black holes and author of the international best-selling book A Brief History of Time.

Cosmology is making a paradigm-shift in thinking about the formation of stars, galaxies, black holes and, indeed, about the origin of the universe itself. Seventy percent of the universe is a strange 'dark energy'. The cornerstone theory of gravity itself must be reconsidered.

NASA's Swift satellite, in just the last few months, has revealed startling new details of black hole formation. The Swift observations challenge us to consider a dramatically different view – one that entails multiple explosive outbursts not just a single bang, as previously thought.

Hawking – at the forefront of research on both black holes and the origins of the universe – presents for us his working hypotheses.

bunchball

Yet Another Blank White Server: Bunchball was announced today at Web 2.0 (I heard through the grapevine, I'm more the Web 2.1 type). It appears to be a Flash-based BWS.

wasteland

Hey how about blank white web pages (no relation)? I was catching up on some blog reading today, and found a cool new underground web commenting system that allows you to add comments to any website. The premise reminds me of a dot-bomb company my friend Tim worked for, Crowdburst, but this one is 2^w00t times better since it's in ruby and using it initially required you to edit your /etc/hosts file (otherwise the http://hoodwink.d/ URL is gonna bite ya, l33t!). That's no longer necessary, since there's a way to achieve the same effect with a new ruby proxy app called MouseHole (that's an alternative to Firefox/Greasemonkey), but it's still cool.

Building on top of all that, is Wasteland, a forum site that appears as a blank white web page to the uninitiated, but is full of juicy goodness for the wise.

ning launches

Ning.com, the first commercial Blank White Server, has launched.

Previously known as 24 Hour laundry and founded by Marc Andreessen formely of Netscape, this was one of the companies I was looking into joining a little over a month ago. Marc had contacted me after an 24HL employee and friend of mine pointed out my previous Blank White Server posts to him. It was nice to have my ideas validated by Marc's statement that a Blank White Server was what they were creating, unfortunately I was hesitant to sign an NDA as I did not want to be encumbered by any legal morass when I obviously had my own ideas to explore in this space. For the same reason, I'm hesitant to sign up as a user at Ning now since their legalese in the user agreement requires the user to not "modify, distribute, or create derivative works based on the Ning Playground" and I'll need to ask my lawyer what that means in my case of having conceived of it independently.

You should check it out though! The Ning Playground looks to be an excellent early example of what a Blank White Server can be.

Update: This is interesting. A forward from a friend of mine of a message posted today on a SIMS mailing list:

Oh, wow. Flashback to 1999. This sounds eerily like the dotcom flameout I worked for - Desktop.com. And here's some good marketing hype I just found to summarize. Sound familiar? (And for the fellow OSDDDI folks, Mitch was one of our angel investors, hee hee.) - Jen

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 26, 2000
Desktop.com (www.desktop.com), the first integrated and personalized Internet desktop platform, today introduced Devtop (www.devtop.com), the first open, integrated platform for building, deploying, and distributing Web-based applications. Devtop reduces development time, minimizes cost, enables enriched functionality, and offers broader distribution for Web application providers everywhere.
Devtop provides the infrastructure, content, technology, and other resources needed to build Web-based applications. The service includes an Application Programming Interface (API) and corresponding documentation to access databases and servers, 25MB free storage, and content such as news headlines, sports scores, and stock quotes. Devtop's free hosting, 24x7 monitoring site management, and reporting minimize the time, money and technical expertise required to deploy an application.

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_2000_June_26/ai_62915951

Dungen and Frank Garvey

Mie and I went to the Independent last night for the Dungen show. Wow. They opened up with what were my two favorite songs from their album, the title track Ta Det Lugnt and the first track, Panda. At first that disappointed me as they seemed to be just warming up with them and I was thinking I'd have preferred to hear them later when they were in full groove, but I ended up far far from disappointment. The show was an incredible psychedelic guitar romp. It was like Pink Floyd doing Jethro Tull at some points. And all in Swedish. Don't miss them if they come to your town (hint, it helps to achieve a carefully orchestrated lack of sobriety). After the show was over, the audience called for an encore and after a short bit the band came back out and said "we're sorry, we don't have any more songs, but we just wanted to come out and say 'Thank you'," and then the bassist took photos of the crowd. It was a very warm genuine moment.

Update: My friend Paul found a good streaming video of Dungen's live performance at KCRW.

Photo by jodivestar

Earlier in the evening we met Todd and Heidi out for dinner at a new Thai place called Osha, and then an art exhibit at Varnish. This is the same gallery Six Apart used for their MT 3.0 Launch Party, but that wasn't the only familiar thing about it. It was an art opening for Children's Crusade, Frank Garvey's apocalyptic carnival paintings and robot freaks. This morning I searched my archives and realized I've seen his work before and blogged about it back in 2002.