Today I undertook one of those early 21st-century activities that my grandparents could never have imagined — the Trip to the Household Hazardous Waste Recycling Facility. The used batteries have been piling up in the basement ever since I became a parental maintainer of battery-operated devices. The storeroom had those two cartons of strange substances in spray bottles and old paint cans left by the house’s previous owners. There was that old thermostat with the sticker on it that said, “Contains mercury — dispose of properly.” I did the right thing, finally, after ten years; I loaded up my trunk and hauled my vehicle down 880 to some godforsaken industrial zone in Oakland and waited in line to empty my vehicle of dangerous fluids.

The line was lengthening, and people were turning their engines off and stretching their legs, and the guy in the car behind me walked over and smiled and I realized it was Leonard Pitt — a performance artist who I’d gotten to know back in my theater-critic days. Somehow he and I had both chosen the exact same moment on the exact same day for our once-a-decade pilgrimages. When I knew his work Leonard was a movement artist and teacher and co-founder of the Life on the Water theater; these days he’s working on books — including “A Walking Guide to the Transformation of Paris,” which has been published in French and which Leonard says will soon have a U.S. edition. He has also founded the Berkeley Chocolate Club.

We left our cans of paint and thinner and such and said goodbye. The landscape was post-industrial wasteland, but it felt like East Bay small town anyway.

I started working with Andrew Leonard at Salon when he joined us in early 1997, and for several years I happily served as editor for his inspired technology reporting. At the height of the Internet boom I helped him conceive and execute a book project that we unfolded, chapter by chapter, online, in an early instance of a practice that has now become positively trendy. The Free Software Project had to be scuttled as Salon’s business went south, but even in its incomplete form I think it represents some of the best writing anywhere on the history of open source software development.

Today Andrew and Salon unveil the latest effort of this technology writer par excellence — a blog called How the World Works, in which Andrew will dig into some of the thorniest, gnarliest and most complex stories that reveal the strangely mutating dynamics of early 21st-century global capitalism. You can read Andrew’s introduction here. Or read about the strange saga of the run on polysilicon. The How the World Works RSS feed is here (or will be very soon!).

Derek Powazek and Heather Powazek Champ now live in the neighborhood I called my home for seven years, San Francisco’s Cole Valley. (I moved to Berkeley right as the area hit the steep part of the trendiness hockey-stick curve.) It’s a little place, sandwiched between UCSF’s hilltop campus and the wilds of Haight Street, with Cole Street’s two-block commercial zone serving as Main Street, and the N-Judah as a lifeline to the rest of the city. Recently, Derek told a heartwarming tale of collective action in the face of inconsiderate auto-owner behavior. It made me nostalgic for my Cole Valley days of mornings munching on cinnamon snails from the long-gone Tassajara Bakery and evenings downing Liberty Ale at the Kezar Pub. (But I don’t miss the perennial fog.)

My friend, the movie critic David Edelstein, has been writing wonderfully alive and intelligent pieces for Slate from its very beginning in 1996. That makes him a true Web old-timer. (He’s also on NPR’s Fresh Air.) But today the news broke that he is leaving Slate for Adam Moss’s revamped New York magazine, which will begin featuring his reviews beginning in January. Congratulations to David — the Web’s loss is New York’s gain, and those of us beyond the five boroughs now have one strong reason to point our browsers to nymag.com.

I must have been ten years old or so, and my older brother received a copy of The Who’s “Tommy” as a promotion for starting a new subscription to the then-young and wild new publication out of San Francisco, Rolling Stone. A free double album was something, in those days, and I fell in love with it — in particular, with a thick, crunchy, percussive-yet-harmonious sound that kept recurring on so many of the tracks.

I asked my older brother what instrument this was that sounded so great, and he — always one with great musical taste but less reliable musical knowledge — told me he thought it was a bass guitar. Years later I learned that, no, this was Pete Townshend’s electric guitar, playing what, even later, I learned to call power chords, with an edge of distortion I had come to love in many other songs on many other albums.

Link Wray, who died this weekend, is generally considered the inventor of that sound. To create the menacing yet (to me, at least) joyous chords in his 1958 “Rumble,” he apparently poked a pencil through the speaker cones on his guitar amplifier — a trick that would later be emulated by the young Ray and Dave Davies to obtain the rumbling sound of their first hit, “You Really Got Me.”

I have spent decades, now, in love with this kind of distortion. So RIP, Link Wray, 1929-2005 — thanks for the sound.

In this interview John Vanderslice, singer/songwriter and producer extraordinaire, talks about distortion and why we need it:

My old friend, game designer extraordinaire Greg Costikyan, has been ranting about the depressing state of the games industry recently. Tonight he announced that he is getting off his rhetorical duff and going to try to do something about its problems. He quit his job and is forming a new company called Manifesto Games.

Greg is also planning to write about the whole process of launching the company on his blog. Since he’s argued that one of the roots of the industry’s malaise is its business structure, he intends to write publicly about the fascinating game of financing his startup. He’s a sharp writer and he doesn’t suffer fools gladly, so that should be…fun!

A long long time ago, I saw Spalding Gray perform Swimming To Cambodia and many of his other monologues. One favorite bit was his account of being rejected for a part on some hack TV show. As the casting agent told him, there was one problem — a moment when a certain look passed over his face that could only be described as…thought.

If you like to see the expression of thought on TV, I think you’re going to like The Josh Kornbluth Show. I watched my old friend’s new interview show on KQED TV for the first time tonight. (If, like me, you missed the debut show Monday night, with Rita Moreno, they’re replaying it Friday at 10:30 p.m., and apparently a bunch of other times.)

As we watched Josh talk with Sen. Barbara Boxer about her new novel, my wife said, “Look, he’s still got the notebook in his back pocket!” Sure enough, the spine of a reporter’s pad was plainly, if minutely, visible on screen.

I smiled. Ages ago, when Josh was starting out in comedy and solo performance, I’d suggested that he carry a pad around so he could capture random ideas. (It’s a good idea for anyone who expects to create stuff.) Reporter’s notebooks are the best combination of capacity and pocket-fit. I became Josh’s supplier for many years. I don’t know where he gets them now; in the old days they were hard to find outside of newsrooms, but they seem more generally available today, online and from office-supplies warehouses. (The Long Tail delivers access to the Long Notebook!)

I can imagine virtually any TV producer I’ve ever met advising the host of the show: Lose the notebook! Maybe its presence on screen was an oversight, but I’d like to think that it is instead an indication of the show’s determination to present Josh, and his guests, in all the happy untidiness of our real lives.

If I remember correctly, I offered my “carry a notebook” advice to Josh around the same time that I had the enormously fun (though also nail-biting, for reasons that will become clear) experience of performing on a live radio show with him, broadcast regularly on the MIT station, WMBR. The show, titled The Urban Happiness Radio Hour, was an eclectic combination of humor, skits and music, loosely inspired by The Prairie Home Companion but with a Josh spin of mid-80s indie hip, Red Diaper Babyism, insane puns and self-deprecating neurosis. I was one anchor of a small voice-acting troupe. Our job of enacting Josh’s skits was complicated by Josh’s habit of writing the scripts, literally, up to the last few minutes before we went on the air. In certain cases, our performances had the spontaneity and verve of first readings because…they were first readings.

From what I’m reading on the blog for Josh’s new show, his current producer is running a much tighter ship. But one of the cool things about the Josh Kornbluth Show is that Josh and KQED clearly want it to feel a little raw, a bit rough; there’s nothing amateurish about it, but it’s utterly un-slick. It’s a world away from Urban Happiness — but not a galaxy away.

Some of my friends are up to good things.

Chad Dickerson, who was the chief force behind moving Salon into the modern age of computing back in 1998-99, and from whom I learned a great deal about technology and its management, is leaving his gig as InfoWorld’s CTO to take up a position at Yahoo, which is apparently opening a new research enterprise of some kind right here in Berkeley. Many congratulations to him.

Greg Costikyan, who I knew long before there was a Web, has posted the slides to a recent talk he gave titled “Death to the Games Industry. (Long Live Games.)” It’s a tour of the debased state of game development in an era of ballooning production budgets and distribution chokeholds, along with a call for a new model for developing games and a new “Indie Gaming” aesthetic. I have zilch time these days to keep up with the world of gaming, but reading Greg keeps me feeling at least a little clued in.

David Edelstein, a movie critic whose work has dazzled, provoked and enlightened me since we hung out together in the (long since renovated but then delightfully dingy) halls of the Harvard Crimson, is interviewed here on rockcritics.com. You can read David’s stuff all the time in Slate, and you can hear him every week on Fresh Air, but this is a more rambling personal conversation that feels a little like having a beer with David, something I don’t get to do often enough now that we live on opposite ends of the continent.

And, finally, Josh Kornbluth — hilarious monologist, oboist, mathematician manque and my former bandmate — will be hosting his very own interview show on KQED public television here in San Francisco starting this September 12. I might actually need to turn on the TV. (One of these years I will actually need to buy a new set; the one I’m using now was purchased 20 years ago with “scrip” from my job at the Boston Phoenix, which was an odd program the little paper had of letting employees take their pay in the form of heavy discounts on advertisers’ merchandise. Something tells me the technology has advanced since then.)

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. “

Steve Jobs’ recent commencement speech is really worth reading in full. It gets about as close to the bone, and the truth, as we could expect from a technology CEO, or anyone else.

I find it very hard to reconcile the awareness contained in these words with the reality of the executive pettiness that Jobs’ Apple keeps displaying (suing bloggers, banning publishers from its stores, and so on). But then smart and creative people are inevitably complicated, and the more successful they are, the less pressure there is on them to resolve those complications.

For starters, don’t miss the amazing piece John Heilemann contributed to New York magazine this week, which tells the saga of a lawsuit about child molestation at a famous choir school in Princeton, New Jersey. The lead lawyer was also a victim; his name is well known to the world that pays attention to the intersection of technology and law: Lawrence Lessig.