onfocus

Leaving San Francisco

I'm sitting in an Internet cafe in Skagway, Alaska. The geography is amazing here. I heard someone paraphrasing an early explorer who said, "California has spectacular Yosemite, but Alaska is filled with Yosemites." It's true. The scale of the landscape is like being in Yosemite...everywhere.


On the ocean

My favorite part of the trip has been spending hours just watching the ocean. It's an extreme difference being out on the ocean compared with land; it's a completely flat landscape apparently without life. (Except the occasional bird, whale, or pod of dolphins...they're few and far between.) It's been a rough ride at times, and we've heard the crew mention this is the roughest ride they've had in years. It made sleeping difficult a few nights, and even though I'm on land now I can feel myself rocking. The rocking motion of the waves gets under your skin.


Approaching Juneau

We're about halfway through the trip. We saw land for the first time in two days yesterday at Juneau where we took a trip to the Mendenhall glacier. We're headed for the glaciers of the Tracy Arm tomorrow.


A canoe in front of the Mendenhall Glacier


The Mendenhall Glacier near Juneau

The purity of the moonlight,
Falling out of the immense sky,
Is so great that it freezes
The water touched by its rays.

- Anonymous
from One Hundred Poems from the Japanese, Kenneth Rexroth

Blogroots has a new look and some new features. I'm most excited about the potential of Blogpopuli, a TrackBack-powered post aggregator. Basically it's a way of asking weblog authors who post about weblogs to let Blogroots know when they do. In return, Blogpopuli posts an excerpt and a link directly to that post. TrackBack is built into Movable Type, but if someone isn't using that they can still participate with the ping form. We've also put some systems in place for adding resources and reviewing them. It's pretty bare in there right now, because we need to spend some time describing and reviewing tools. But I think it will be very valuable, especially for people new to the weblog world. I see it as a way for more experienced weblog authors to share some of their knowledge of the tools and resources with others.

I'm leaving on Wednesday for 10 days and I probably won't be able to update or check email. I'll be back with lots of pictures.

"...in these coast landscapes there is such indefinite, on-leading expansiveness, such a multitude of features without apparent redundance, their lines graduating delicately into one another in endless succession, while the whole is so fine, so tender, so ethereal, that all penwork seems hopelessly unavailing. Tracing shining ways through fiord and sound, past forests and waterfalls, islands and mountains and far azure headlands, it seems as if surely we must at length reach the very paradise of the poets, the abode of the blessed."

- John Muir, Travels in Alaska

I'm thinking my trip will be like this.

Yet another Weblog Bookwatch addition: Top 50.

TomPaine.com: Stopping The Privatization Of Public Knowledge:

"Preserving the information commons may not be a topic of kitchen-table conversation just yet. But it is fast becoming a hot issue. With a few more turns of the screw by the content autocrats -- snooping on people's computers, lawsuits against individual file-sharers, intrusive new attempts to control personal behavior -- the fledgling movement to reclaim popular control of the information commons may explode into a mainstream juggernaut."

This article points out how absurd our laws have become as a company sued an avant-garde composer over a few minutes of silence. (To which the composer replied, "My silence is original silence, not a quotation from his silence.") The information commons might not be a kitchen-table topic, but it's definitely a weblog topic. Lawrence Lessig has done an amazing job of popularizing the problems with our copyright and patent systems in this community. Now it's a matter of bringing this subject to the attention of others. [link via sotd]

According to the FBI, there are just 200 hard-core Al-Queda members worldwide. [via Tom Tomorrow] This seems like a big story, but I haven't heard anything about it on CNN or anywhere else. At one time the experts were saying there were more than 5,000 Al-Queda members.

My cousin Matt's band, The Eye, is trying to get some exposure on their local radio station in Omaha. You could give them a hand by going here and voting for the second group that contains I Am Siam by The Eye. (You can also download that song and others from their site.) It's a close race.

Update: The voting has closed and they won! (by a good margin.) If you voted, thanks for pitching in. If you're in Omaha, you'll soon hear The Eye at 89.7 on your FM dial.

Cory is in the middle of a core blog dump after vacation over at boingboing. It's worth going over there now, otherwise you'll never catch up.

The garden is coming along nicely. We had a bumper crop of strawberries this year because we let the runners go wherever they wanted last year. They're winding down now, but the tomatoes are just getting started. We also have this crazy cayenne pepper plant on the deck that has half a dozen good-sized peppers on it. I need to figure out how to dry them when they're ready. And then what to make with them...salsa?

Weblog MediaWatch Top 10

I added a page to the Weblog Bookwatch for non-book items: DVDs, CDs, Software, etc. It's called Weblog Mediawatch Top 10. I also re-worked both watches behind the scenes so they're using Amazon's Web Services instead of the bag of http gets and regex that makes up a SCRAPI. (I think the best part of the burgeoning Web Services movement is the fact that people won't have to write as many regular expressions.)

This cracked me up: Real life if hackers ruled the world. it r0xor5! [via MeFi]