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Last night we saw Neil Finn at The Fillmore. He has put together a spectacular band, and the show was a lot of fun. They were excited to be there and they did several things that seemed like they weren't planned. At one point Neil needed to tune his guitar so he turned to his band and said, "Does anyone have a song?" Lisa Germano was on keyboards and everyone was quiet while she played her song Wood Floors. Sebastian Steinberg (formerly of Soul Coughing) was playing bass. About halfway through the show, Johnny Marr came out and played with the band the rest of the night. They even did a few Smiths tunes including How Soon is Now and There is a Light that Never Goes Out. In another tuning-inspired moment, Neil sat at the keyboards all by himself and played Last Day of June and Message to My Girl (an old Split Enz song—the whole band did One Step Ahead earlier in the night). And there were plenty of audience-sing-along Crowded House favorites thrown in for good measure.

It was a good time, and a nice way to end my week of vacation. Now, back to work!

Here are a few photos from the Portland Japanese Garden.

By the way, skp and I are engaged!

skp and I just got back from the fireworks display in Portland, Oregon. (They were just for you, skp, Happy Birthday!) Here are a few photos:


A crowd gathering at the waterfront


People with their own fireworks


Fireworks over the water

I'm away—but I'll be back soon. Happy 4th!

skp and I got up around 4 am this morning so we could make it to the 13th annual Sonoma County Hot Air Balloon Classic in Windsor. The weather was perfect. We watched the sun come up, the balloons fill with air, and the sky fill with balloons. It really was a bizarre and beautiful site to see over a dozen hot air balloons suspended in air. I took many, many photos.


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Anyone interested in the future of the Internet should be watching the current situation in the radio industry very carefully. The decentralized nature of the Internet makes it hard to imagine a future where a few dominant companies control most of the content. If alternative business models to advertising aren't found for the Internet, though, I'm afraid centralization and concentration could happen—just as it has in every other advertising-supported medium.

Somewhat related: Salon's subscription plus advertising model doesn't seem to be working.

I changed the way Weblog Bookwatch works a little. If a site has been "voting" for a particular book for more than 30 days, it's no longer counted as a mention. Most likely, this >30 day persistence happens because the weblog has mentioned the book in a sidebar instead of a post (which will scroll off the page at some point). I noticed that the list changed very little, with a few books that have been on people's sidebars for months there. I hope this change will more accurately capture the books people are discussing.

That's odd. Why don't any versions of RSS have an element (or attribute) for the date/time an item was posted? Time is key to weblogs.

Movable Type's new TrackBack feature is fantastic. [via Blogroots] I think it's exactly what weblogs need, and is what I was getting at when I talked about writing a distributed conversation server. This feature turns MT into a conversation server, and I hope the other tools will follow suit. It's going to automate the process of sharing information at the post level; which will allow new, exciting things to happen in the blogosphere. nice work!

If I was meg, I would have started this sentence with if I were. Were I her. As I am, though, if I was.

picnic table at the top of mt. burdell, olompali state park