I’m thinking that my upcoming surf trip will probably look something like this Or not.

I gave Jess a gmail invite several weeks ago. I asked her today how it was working out. She said “Fine, but nobody sends me anything.” I asked why and she said “Because we don’t use email – none of my friends do, we only use IM.”

Fusionary.com circa 1997. It’s been a while.

Everyone who matters loves Wikipedia. Someone was going on and on about how great the coverage was on the Hurricane Ivan page. So I went there, and here’s what constituted the entire page… That there is an example of what’s wrong with Wikis. But in less than 2 minutes it had been properly restored and it is indeed a great resource – even with the blips.

I know, I’ve been on about Flickr quite a lot lately. So what, it’s the best web app I’ve come across in a long time. Maybe ever. There are dozens of web photo sharing applications out there, so why is Flickr better? I believe it’s because it is being designed by people who actually use it, and smartly. Just when something irritates me, it’s fixed. Must’ve irritated them too and they took care of it.

According to this Apple Insider article, the new iChat will support the Jabber protocol. I’ve been a fan of Jabber for a very long time. I even tried convincing a few coworkers to run a Jabber client, but it was too early. Jabber is a platform, not an IM service. I hope that more support like that from Apple will give it enough good press to make it relevant.

I’m typically neither politically correct nor socially conscientious, but I could be convinced to take action against the self-centered, thoughtless bastards driving too-big-for-anything-but-my-fat-selfish-ass SUVs. Check out the new CXT. “At 258 inches, or 21-1/2 feet long, the CXT is about 4-1/2 feet longer than the new Hummer H2 pickup, and about 2 inches longer than the F-350 Crew Cab.” I hope SUVs become the fur coats of the next decade.

Subtle, meditative and beautiful, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring won’t appeal to everyone. I loved it. You should too.

My own little anthropology experiment, The Refrigerator Project on Flickr only has 22 members at this point. I was worried no one at all would join, but a recent post on the Flickr blog helped a little. Join, post a photo of your fridge, and don’t forget to “copiously annotate” it afterward. That’s the interesting part of the whole thing!

After a little more tinkering, I’ve got a (barely) working prototype of a local image gallery driven by the Flickr API. It ain’t pretty, but it works. It grabs sets of images from my Flickr photos and displays them in a grid. The joy here will be that I control the presentation but leave the dirty work of organizing and uploading to the Flickr site. It’s neat. Take a peek at the work in progress here

I have no idea if it works or not, but seems like a good idea – a Flickr plugin for iPhoto. There’s a thread about it here.

RSS aggregators are everywhere, and I’ve used most of them. Eventually I settled on Feeddemon by the always excellent Nick Bradbury. It’s a great piece of software written by a guy who honestly cares about making great tools. But I stopped using it. Why, because as great as it is, it’s just another something I have to launch. That means I have to remember I want to read my feeds, then launch yet another app on my already cluttered desktop.