I figure I'd change the opening page (which would only show up on the main site, not the mirrors), with a quick "hey, throw me some bucks if you've had a good time" message, and have my paypal there (and maybe an address to send cash). I go back and forth on this, but it might be helpful. I just spent $600 to upgrade the machine textfiles.com runs on and of course the bills are notable (but not crushingly so).

My prediction is this would yield me seventy-nine dollars.

I figure I'd run it for the month of June, then focus on the more positive festivities for October.

Hard to say, really. It's one of those ideas you have to really sit around and mull, considering the positive and negative aspects. When my local public radio station goes all street-corner whore on me, it always feels icky, like one of your teachers is asking for a fiver at the end of class.

I'd be all up for interviews and discussions with people about the site and what it means, although I'll bet a half-awake person browsing this weblog would have learned it all already. But who knows, it might be fun.

This is one of those embryonic ideas I'm not sure what to do about. We'll see.

Because he is incredible, and he truly IS incredible, Jim Leonard has taken the hours of raw footage of the competitions and awards of Blockparty and rendered them out into a coherent collection of events and browse-worthy movies.

Here's the central page for all of this. You can even watch songs being played, while the ambient sound of the audience reactions wash over them. The main point of watching the demo and music movies is audience reaction, after all, and you can hear the oos and ahs and the fun as people make up soundtracks, shout out, or otherwise make their opinions known, right now, at the screen.

I suggest seeing the "wild" competitions, lots of fun in their own right, with the audience particularly reacting the one often one-off performances of technology and skill.

What an awesome show that was!

Here is what the new face of my sleeping hours will be.

My second sleep lab was a fitting; they had me take an Ambien, and had me wear a nose mask, then they tried different pressures on me throughout the evening. (This time, thanks to Mr. Ambien, I slept the full night.) Did you know that one of the side effects of Ambien is compulsive gambling? Wanna bet?

I detected no night-and-day with the night spent with the mask because it's a weird place to sleep in a hospital and with all the wires connected. But I definitely had something being done to me overnight, so we'll see what happens. As it stands, I have the mask but I don't have the machine (CPAP) that connects to it; all this has to be observed and approved by my doctor. I expect the machine to arrive soon, and then we'll see.

It would be interesting to see how much more happy and productive (and possibly weight-losing) I'll be with this new tool. Combined with my new drug regimen for my gout/kidney stones and blood pressure, I may be the healthiest in years.

If it doesn't work, of course, I intend to use it to scare children.

They fail in great numbers, and are then not re-attempted for weeks. As a result, many changes go on for months with no backup. The databases sometimes scroll off, meaning you lose the older ones while not having new ones. It is a big goddamn mess.

Maybe you didn't know about these database dumps. I've been downloading them pretty seriously for a few years now. Even the insane twiddling of a thousand little emperors can't divest things like the great talk pages, the surviving-for-a-while articles later deleted, and the link lists. It's worth it to have these things. It's something else to keep around.

The administrators like to say they're working on it, but the fact is, they're not able to keep up. They're breaking. Millions coming in and they can't make this work. It's very sad.

I save a lot of things. It never hurts and disk space is cheap. I've been downloading every wikipedia image uploaded. I've been downloading every flash sent to 4chan. I've been grabbing many webpages and offered items, and many times in the past few years this has been rewarded, as things are lost forever... until I put them up again.

Here's hoping someone there gets their act together. I'm waiting....

Here it is, along with some background history from the author, which I'll reprint below:

"A collection of payphones in Santa Barbara that I compiled in 1982 when I was 14 years old. I still have the address book so I called all of them to verify which were still in use. I knew if I got a voice mail or a business or even more obviously a disconnect message then the payphone was no longer there. Out of an original list of 300 there are only 73 left which comes out to 24% which is still higher than I expected. I uploaded it as a textfile to my best friend's BBS (the predecessor to the internet) in 1986 and he said it was his number one most downloaded file. So apparently there were other teenagers out there with a fascination with crank calling payphones. It's somewhat normal for teenage boys to crank call but I didn't want to disturb people in their homes so I was a considerate crank caller."

I'm also including the map itself, although this might not work for everyone.

Some people might not be aware of this, but it's the sunset of the payphone. AT&T is pulling them out of places by the truckload, giving up that maintenance and accounting nightmare in lieu of the cellphone and the internet connection. Phone phreaks are sad, and of course I have my own memories, but keeping vending machines around for sentimental reasons would be silly.

I'm assuming the list he refers to is this one, which is in a nice directory of similar compilations. These were handcrafted things, made by driving or walking around and noting what was where and what the numbers were and generally being a bird watcher type, selecting the world's interesting points for later recounting.

In case anyone missed it, many payphones stopped accepting incoming calls years and years ago, because they were being used by drug dealers as points of contact and business. That action turned them from places of communication and community to the aforementioned vending machines, in my opinion; you could pay and call out but never get someone calling back, or able to find you there, or anything else. With that, the phone numbers themselves became less important, because nobody could call them.

We'd have killed for something as cool as the Google Maps interface to payphone lists like we have above. It puts it all in perspective, with locations shown, descriptions of the places, and easy directions. This was, in a rare exception, when you could have excursions related to telephone hackery, finding all the places payphones could be shoved and keeping track of what the numbers were.

The miraculous is becoming mundane, perhaps.

So I fixed the thing, but kept it sending me copies of attempts. Somehow, I got a kick out of watching a script try and force this now-repaired web page to send out spam. I got to see what was big in the spam world at that point, and what kind of targets were being attacked, and so on.

It got old. It still works, but I kind of ignore them.

Similarly, some set of people like to post spam comments on this weblog. To do this, they have to type in a password. They appear to target a couple entries that must have the most link-backs or something, because it's only those two that get the love. The others get by just fine without this personalized (a person is doing it) spamming. Again, I must make clear: rat fuckers.

There's no solution. There's just none at all. I think this will be like this forever, generation after generation of rat fucker trying to use weblogs as spam. Twitter as spam. And they all think they're doing something good and they're all perfectly above board and in fact they're rat fuckers.

I've encountered, through third parties, the kinds of justifications that try to say that what they do isn't THAT bad. You are shocked, I bet! People think that unsolicited advertising blasted at maximum radius is somehow a kind or humanitarian effort. I've also met people who think smoking is good for you. I meet a lot of people.

But until this type of person is wiped off the face of the earth, and I don't believe they ever will be, I get to watch it day after day. Knock knock knock.

It gets very, very old.

The three boxes contained five hundred more boxes.

Why did I order three boxes containing five hundred boxes?

Because so many people have ordered my documentary that I ran out of boxes to ship them in.

Roughly three thousand of you have ordered copies of my little movie.

Thank you.

The talk I gave at ROFLcon, "Before the LOL", was captured by several entities. There were some internal videographers streaming me to the net at large via the Ustream service, and there was also Rocketboom, a weekday video weblog that puts up little hacked up films about people, places, things.

Here is the remix of my talk on Rocketboom.

Bear in mind you're seeing probably two to three minutes of a 50 minute presentation. For some, this may be all of me you want to take, so it'll work out just fine. Others might enjoy the talk more seeing the full version that I've been told is coming out later. I intentionally set up the speech to not need fixing up, so hopefully it'll look and sound good. WARNING: Amish Hat.

As a nice bonus, you see me kiss Steve Garfield on the forehead, and call him the Gift of Boston. I interviewed Steve six years ago for the BBS Documentary, and since then he's gone on to become one of the bigger "Video Bloggers". He never tires, never gives up making his funny and smart content, and so I was really happy to see him there.

I'll post a more elaborate overview of my talk when it's downloadable. Needless to say, I go in some crazy directions in that speech, which people liked. Unfortunately, I was scheduled up against a "LOLcats" panel, in which some of the biggest stars of the event were assembled to give their thoughts. People chose one panel or another to attend, and a lot of people who wanted to see me ended up going to the other one. So soon everyone will enjoy it.

By the way, the photo of me above came from Scott Beale of LaughingSquid, who I met at ROFLcon for the first time and is this really amazing photographer on top of everything else. You browse his photos of me and I actually look pretty damned human! Considering the lighting condition, the angles and final appearance of my presentation looks incredible. You could do worse for an afternoon than browsing his photos of the event.

This is only the second time I ever had something like presentation software showing images during my presentations. The first time was at Google, and I figured it'd be worth it. This time was because I walked the stage and thought this massive screen was too beautiful to resist. I was right. I'll probably stick with my non-software-aided presentations generally in the future. I consider it the equivalent of a tie: gotta have one for certain situations but it's more comfortable not to.

Here's hoping the full video arrives soon.

And by bunch of stuff, I mean a lot of stuff. Something like 1,200 photos so far, with another thousand likely to make it on there. Like I mentioned previously, I think this is way too much for anyone to get much out of it without a tour guide, but I figured you might like to know.

This page of collections is probably where most people would want to start. A lot of this is elsewhere but the Flickr interface is faster and easier for a lot of things, so you might discover stuff you didn't check out before.

It's pretty easy to dump stuff in; not so easy to arrange and tag things so they have all the old information. As time presents itself, I'll tinker. Until then, enjoy the cascade.

OK, in a word: ROFLcon was fantastic.

Many other words come to mind: Perfection. Delight. Surprise. Thrills. Variety. Triumph. Every positive adjective I can think of, superlative words on the bottom of my bag that have not seen the light of day in many months, come out with fervor and stick to ROFLcon's side with no ill fit. This was a special, special event and I am so very lucky to have been a part of it.

Like many ideas, it came in a flash and with a lot of scratching of heads and skeptical eyebrow raisings. I don't pretend not to have been part of that contingency. In fact, I was likely a leading candidate for Grand Poobah of Doubt. Asked to help organize the event, I spied some of the mailing list and quickly retreated from any administration or backstage duties, fearful of the time sink and resulting disaster tarring my jacket. I was left on the mailing list for the administrators, however, and it was there I witnessed something quite inspiring indeed.

Over the months of planning, these kids (and they really are kids, barely in their twenties and a few of them not quite there) saw through barrier after barrier, secured many thousands of dollars in funding, called and cajoled and convinced attendees and speakers to play a part in the conference, and hatched something brilliant.

ROFLcon, to summarize, was lauded as a "conference of Internet memes". Memes, in this case, mostly meant "celebrities", and celebrity from actions and events more than positions or wealth. These were the kind of celebrities who could be summarized with a noun and a "guy" or "girl" appended at the end: Tron Guy. Sweater Girl. One Red Paperclip Guy. Chuck Norris Facts Guy. I Can Haz Cheezburger Guy. On and on, and over time this list grew quite large indeed.

The whole thing wrought large, actually; upon the weekend of this happening, hundreds had been joined up, either as attendees or speakers. These speakers included myself: I was asked to give a historical presentation, and my indifference to this assignment grew to heady anticipation as I saw what a gathering storm was occurring.

Slated for Harvard's halls, the event grew so large it was moved to MIT, along several buildings. MIT organizations helped with space and logistics. The organizers reached out to other groups for promotional items, ads, printing, and artwork. It became very real.

Of the two days, Friday was a work day for me - I was one of the first presentations. My talk, "Before the LOL", attempted to give an overview of the rise of cutesy little ideas being passed along for the hell of it, along with a sense of how human beings have always kind of acted the way they do online. I touched on some pretty out there subjects like slow-scan ham radio and office copier art. It pulled off very well and was well liked by the audience as far as I can tell. More details will come on my talk as it goes online and I assemble some related material about it.

The rest, however, was me just being awash in the fun. It is rare to be at an event where I am not just fascinated by the names on badges, but consistently amazed by them. Administrators of sites I use daily were next to artists I'd known for years. Old friends came out of the woodwork, while I made entirely new ones. I autographed items, and resisted the urge to ask for autographs myself.

Did I agree with everything said and every characterization of the ideas presented? Of course not. That's not the point, to find like-minded folks to parrot to you everything you already knew. Echo chambers are not worth getting out of bed for. This was a place where certain things were assumed (we all use the Internet, we've all seen these famous things to various degrees), and what came next was a celebration of being alive while being online.

There are many writeups of the event, and many photos. People did their jobs of capturing this whole event and I feel quite redundant going into detail. But I will take note of several things.

First of all, there was a real vital sense of fun and joy throughout the event. It wasn't "for" anything; not selling a product, introducing a new technology, forcing a hipness down our throats until we were dazed enough to sign up for whatever it was we needed to sign up for. It just was, like assembling a huge party of cool and smart people and just letting them go. I've been told the SXSW conference is like this, but SXSW sells stuff: bands, movies, books, products, technology. This just was, a celebration of people who spend time online walking around and basking in the joy of communication. I don't see enough of that.

Second, an event like this is ripe, one might even say begging, for exploitation and cynicism. Writers whose job is to sneer at everything around them are also in abundance regarding this event. Like any other conference of folks assembled around a theme, it's easy enough for someone to dash off a handful of cramped thoughts about being there, scarfing down the free pizza and checking their Blackberry for new calls, than it is to accept that there was something special there. There was. I felt it and throughout the weekend I was part of it.

Kudos to that gang, those people who worked so hard so near where I live so that I could have my horizons split wide and my circle of acquaintances bound in directions I'd have not dreamed possible.