I got a 500 Internal Server Error on YouTube yesterday.

It began with the usual Web 2.0 PoMo post-ironic stuff.

Sorry, something went wrong.

A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation.

And then what seemed to be a more serious request, complete with link

In any case, please report this incident to customer service.
Also, please include the following information in your error report:

Hmm. What do information do they want me to include?

M566Wv3PR4EcMR9a9eLGms9NQ5r30bYV6nz4j1rH-tDhYTLe_9h9DFPn-vhd
lNcw6XXxPnluW1Z3FeEjkpsEA8W9ue26uIor-q-6AJUiwkIM9X2Gpab0DatV
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g5r2azifjOkEFkGS0csq1oAPl5g-v6a2yPRbT_y9BQH5bqbX7BJzc0o-mi-U
16KJSKqG-jgwfmGw3RsiMRoXM0Rmy2dz1WZLe_0UEdHtnLTptHYTI73d-9QH
BvpeXk3I5-E9QEawtA8vwR4RqWlRXc2Nl4fcuhN7nCzYn5Y3HbQ3X4ZDw3sM
xVEFjG9VR8xQk8gB4Q2CB1AHoIqaJJdp0gw1aYJTjsTgxgw9aKmfpX3ss9AE
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JOm9LI3IgUb5ZCI_PRNRkg13QALYFB9KEG0VA5WpQ-niXyV7klPZRL43vN10
PSD2kIPV_R8-qiVoZ3pBPQjb7ZyK2_eKSBfAA-2tKZ4BSfsi_MowjTjiA4Xq
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OWx_zjYun946H69BO9s1pYnIqkwLwHyE1OgDFkP8OKIN85pw6w==

Now, are they being smartass or serious? Yeah, cut and paste is cut and paste whether it’s two lines or two paragraphs, but that mass of computer gibberish is something they want me to use to communicate to a human? Strange and off-putting. Let’s put some of that Google money to work on that, folks…

Sure, I’ve been getting spam for/from other continents for a long, long, long time, but still I was amused by spam I got today:

Subject: Wish You Very Happy Diwali

Dear Sir/ Madam,

Best wishes to you and your family for a Very Happy Diwali and a Pleasant,
Healthy and Prosperous New Year. May the festival of lights brighten up
your life in every possible way !!

We sincerely wish to extend our support for any of your corporate needs in
following areas. (products/services).

[snip]

Over the last couple of days Firefox (v.1507) has begun to regularly uncheck the “Allow sites to set cookies” option, effectively logging me out of Amazon, flickr, wordpress, and everything else. I can go into the dialog and change it, and within a few minutes or hours it’ll be unchecked again.

What’s going on here? I can’t find any reference to this bug online. Anyone else seen this?

After both Nicolas Nova and Rudy Rucker recommended Accelerando to me, I bought it and just started today. This passage caught my eye.

Manfred [the protagonist] is at the peak of his profession, which is essentially coming up with whacky but workable ideas and giving them to people who will make fortunes with them…There are drawbacks, however. Being a pronoiac meme-broker is a constant burn of future shock – he has to assimilate more than a megabyte of text and several gigs of AV content every day just to stay current.

Not too far off from the truth for many of us!

Bruce Sterling said something similar in his talk on Design Futurism

Futurist activity of “scanning” – newspapers Internet, television, conferences, other futurists, landmark events, reports, weak signals. Always asking “What are the things out there that might affect clientele (which could be anything!)?”

Note: Nicolas Nova blogged the same quote several days before I did. Copycat or coincidence?

This Talk page from the Muppet Wiki

is more compelling for its detailed banality (and hey, that’s what the Internet is amazing for, isn’t it?) than the Snuffleupagus page they are debating. Excerpt from the much longer entry:

Can Snuffy sometimes still go invisiable? I think I recall sometimes in which characters such as Elmo rode on his back appearing to be just floating through the air. Radar 4:08, 15 July 2006

Snuffy was never invisible. The reason why people didn’t think he existed was because he would always walk away before Big Bird could bring anyone over to look at Snuffy. — Danny (talk) 11:46, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

I know that there was a two-part episode from Season 35 where Snuffy became invisible. Maybe that’s what you are thinking of. And besides, the other characters never thought he was invisible. They thought he was imaginary. I feel like there’s a difference between imaginary and invisible. –Minor muppetz 14:26, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

I agree there is a difference between invisiable and imaginary. My question came because this week I recalled walking into the room while the show was playing and seeing Elmo floating through the air with Snuffy talking. I looked it up online and it was an episode titled Snuffy’s Invisible – Part 2 (#4070)

(thanks Katie

for the photo)
Friday was the Bay Area’s Best awards, where local winners of the BusinessWeek/IDSA IDEA Awards were feted. I presented the awards. Below are my opening remarks.

—

In preparing for tonight I’ve been doing some thinking about design in the Bay Area. I’m sure we’ve all had that same experience where we’re on call to our friends and colleagues in other places to try and offer some detailed overview of the local economy for design, consulting, innovation, or whatever. “What’s going on with business out there?” they’ll ask us.

Ummm, well, let’s see.

I mean, how do you answer that?

If you’re like me, you can really only answer it from your own narrow perspective. If you’re having a busy week, you might tell them “The Valley is back!” or if you’re feeling some economic crunch from your employer or your clients, you might just pause and inhale skeptically….”hisssssssssssssssssss. I dunno….”

Of course, we’re all optimists in Sunny (make that Foggy) California, so there’s probably a tendency to lean a bit harder on the “We’re back, baby” side of the equation.

So while I’m sure there’s someone with bar charts, and pie charts, showing the quarterly delta of the Gross Regional Product, design dollars spent per hard good, the macroeconomic tracking index of supply-and-demand curve adjusted for inflation, that’s not me. I can only tell you what I see and hear.

So if you will allow, let’s consider three different aspects of design: people, ideas, and stuff.

Okay, “people”. First of all, look at all of us. A bunch of people who are here tonight for outa-control alcohol fueled mayhem, to raise the roof with each other, for camaraderie, and celebration. To be out with each other and share the connection as part of the scene. We’re here for ourselves, but we’re here for each other. That’s a community. That’s something we know that people move here be part of. If you’ve got friends in other countries or other parts of the US, they may be jealous of that elusive “activity” that goes on here, at events like this and others. If you look at resumes you know that people definitely want to come HERE to work.

One of the largest employers of designers in the world is here…IDEO. With most of their designers here in the Bay Area. Just by mass alone, IDEO puts us all on the map.

We’ve got design students here, with programs at Academy of Art University, California College of the Arts (where I teach), San Francisco State, San Jose State, Stanford and probably someplace else I missed. Those schools are destination schools, and this area is a destination. And certainly the changes going on at CCA and Stanford are well-publicized in the design press, and even in the business press.

So, what about ideas? With Silicon Valley, we’ve got a tremendous history as a place of ideas, ideas that get turned into technologies and of course stuff that people end up using, in other words, design. If you aren’t getting a chunk of the money, you might not think at first that the $1.65 BILLION that Google paid for YouTube doesn’t really affect you, but don’t be mistaken – that’s a dramatic sign about money, content, media, information, entertainment, you name it. Oh, and of course, design.

But the air is thick with ideas here in the Bay Area. Earlier this week I saw a panel discussion with Larry Cornett and Joy Mountford from Yahoo, Peter Merholz from Adaptive Path, and Tim Brown from IDEO. They were considering the design challenges in creating a new class of product: systems with emergent behavior. In other words, where the way the product or system will be used isn’t known before it is created, and the design must allow for that flexibility to emerge over time. Maybe you’d like to dismiss all this as website stuff, but Tim Brown was very clear that he didn’t distinguish; it was all design to him.

And people from outside this area are hungry to bring their ideas here to teach us, and to get our reactions. Just in the last few weeks, we’ve had MOMA design curator Paola Anontelli at Stanford talking about designing the user experience of design exhibits, author and visionary Bruce Sterling at CCA talking about modernism, futurism, and design, Molly Steenson at Giant Ant talking about an ethnographic study she did with Microsoft in Bangalore, India, looking at how people use mobile phones. Turns out that whereas we see the phones as personal devices, for many in India they are shared devices. The design implications for software and hardware in the global marketplace are significant.

And last but absolutely not least comes the stuff. Consider that the talk about emergent systems I mentioned before was held in an overflowing auditorium at PARC, the famous R&D lab in Palo Alto that brought us word processing, the desktop interface, Ethernet, the laser printer, and helped to productize the mouse. We are residents in the ancestral home of revolutionary products, services, technologies – in other words, stuff – the personal computer, the internet, the iPod, the search engine. Revolutionary in that they change how people live, how they work, they create entire economies and destroy others.

And the stuff is why we’re here tonight, after all. Each of the firms we are honoring tonight have a “thing” that we’ll show, a thing that can be seen and touched. But each of those tangible things should mean so much more than the thing itself. The people in our winning firms have taken big ideas, new ideas, and put them into stuff. People, ideas, and stuff, and that’s how we got here, with our Bay Area’s Best.

—

The event was a lot of fun, although they ran out of beer (I was saving myself until after the awards, and made a dash for the bar only to find they were pushing this malt-beverage-with-caffeine that would have turned me into Portigolio with my shirt over my head) and I had to make do with a churro instead. It was really a party, more than a ceremony, and so lots of people continued to chat, loudly, while we began to speak through the PA. It’s very hard to speak when there’s so much background chatter, and I heard from others afterwards that it was a struggle for some to hear the presentations. I don’t begrudge anyone the desire to continue talking (that’s what’s great about parties) but it would be great if it could be managed so that the speaking-and-listening stuff could also go on as well.

Last weekend we had a baby naming ceremony for my brand-new niece, Talia. As part of the ceremony, there were readings and speeches from family and friends. Here’s what I read, using a tiny bib and hat on one hand to represent the other party in the dialogue. Apologies for some of the in-jokes that won’t read here.

—-

In preparation for today’s event, which is of course all about Talia, I thought it would be great to get the perspective of the person we’re all here to welcome and honor, Talia herself. I got in touch with her earlier in the week and did an informal interview. It ran a little long, so I’ve cut it down and will be reading an edited version.

SP: Talia, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me.

TPT: Poo.

SP: I’m sorry?

TPT: Oh, sorry about that. I just thought I’d start there.

SP: Um, good. Great. Listen, I wanted to ask you —-

TPT: (interrupts) Poo.

SP: Yes, I think we’ve covered that. So to move along, what do you make of things so far?

TPT: Totally freakin’ awesome. I’m pleased as punch to be here. I’ve booked myself a pretty sweet gig, as far as I can tell.

SP: In what way?

TPT: Well, non-stop hamburgers and pizza.

SP: What?

TPT: Yeah, hamburgers and pizza. I love ’em.

SP: I’m pretty surprised. I didn’t think you’d be eating solid food by now.

TPT: Hamburgers are solid?

SP: Yep. And pizza too.

TPT: -..hmmm-.well someone told me those were hamburgers I was eating, and I just figured pizza as well.

SP: I think someone was messing with you-

TPT: I guess so. Huh. Well, when it comes to messing with an infant, let’s just say that two can play at that game.

SP: Before we go back to the whole poo thing again, let’s move along. What’s going on at home right now?

TPT: It’s a lot of fun. I am totally hitting it off with Lenny.

SP: Really? I’m a little surprised to hear that!

TPT: Oh, no, he’s totally cool. He plays guitar, and he has a wicked sense of humor. Loves to sweep and clean.

SP: I don’t think that’s Lenny you’re talking about.

TPT: Really? Who’s Lenny, then?

SP: About your size. Dark fur. Pokey claws.

TPT: Next question.

SP: Sorry.

TPT: Well, who was it I was talking about? Is that Brucey?

SP: He probably wants you to call him “Dad.”

TPT: Dad, eh? Whatever it takes.

SP: I think they’d also accept Daddy or Da-da.

TPT: Get outa here? That’s better than Brucey? Whatever it takes.

SP: What about you? What do you think about Talia?

TPT: What do I think about who?

SP: What do you think about your name, Talia.

TPT: Oh, right. I’m still not used to it. I always think people are talking about Talia Shire.

SP: Talia Shire?

TPT: Yeah, you know “Aaaaa-drian” and all that.

SP: I wouldn’t even mention that if I were you.

TPT: Ah. Word to the wise. Will do.

SP: What else is going on at home?

TPT: Did I mention my Mommy?

SP: No, you didn’t.

TPT: Oh, sorry. I’m still filling out my short-term memory. I mean, it’s pretty much ALL short-term memory at this point, so it’s a little full, if you know what I’m saying.

SP: I think I do.

TPT: Okay, then.

SP: You were saying?

TPT: What?

SP: Your mommy?

TPT: Oh, right, right. Well, the woman is a marvel. Blankets whenever I want them. She and the other one are always cooking. Mostly for their friends, but still, I’m hoping for the odd scrap now and again. And let me tell you, she can SHOP like nobody’s business. I mean, I haven’t seen a lot of shopping so far, but my impressions of her are very solid.

SP: Actually, she helped me pick out the shirt I’m wearing right now.

TPT: Does it have bunnies on it?

SP: No, it doesn’t.

TPT: Trust me, go for the bunnies. You can’t go wrong.

SP: Okay, good advice. So what else is on your mind?

TPT: Have you read this thing in the news about the head of the CBC?

SP: I don’t get a ton of Canadian news where I live, but I did hear a little bit about it.

TPT: Totally cracks me up. He got fired for saying how great it was to poo. I want that job!

SP: It looks like we’re running out of time here, so thanks so much.

TPT: Did I say poo?

SP: I think you did.

Seen on the junction between two buildings on Bryant St. in San Francisco.

Who uses this information? And what does it tell them?

Both of these serve as reminders that I’ve got a big project ahead of me to take photos of the tons of Foreign Grocery Products I’ve acquired in the last few years.

Krazy Kids Items


Post Sugar Coated Corn Flakes box

Originally uploaded by grickily.

Limited Edition Candy


KitKat Extra Creamy

Originally uploaded by johnralston.

The critics seem to have grasped the limited resource of attention that is impacting (and yet driving) the exploding volume of media we are faced with.

From two different reviews of The Nine

The SF Chronicle

What the TV industry has wrought this year, making us choose among “Brothers & Sisters,” “Men in Trees,” “Six Degrees,” “Ugly Betty,” etc. — puts a burden on viewers to make a bevy of decisions quickly.

The New York Times

Not many people have time and energy to commit themselves to yet another series that requires weekly loyalty and close attention.

There’s obviously some problems with the models here; as everything gets more narrowcast, we can’t – and aren’t expected to – consume it all, indeed we’ll need to just ignore most of it. So why are there more products that demand even greater loyalty? Dick Wolf, in an extensive New York Times Magazine profile a year or so ago, pointed out some of the elements designed into Law and Order that made them re-watchable and timeless, making for huge wins in syndication. These other shows – cliffhanging serials – may or may not do as well in syndication, but I imagine they’ll do better on DVD. The barrier to entry is high, the barrier to late entry is impossibly high. This can breed high loyalty, doubtless, for those that do join the exclusive viewer club, but the critics are right to question the wisdom of Lost-followers trying to repeat that trick.