We arrived today in Estes Park, Colorado. We’re here at the YMCA of the Rockies because my wife’s company puts on a big yoga conference here every year. This is the first time we’ve all gone, including the kids. We walked out from dinner and were greeted by a trio of elk, just hanging out by the side of the road. The two big guys were locking horns and obviously engaged in some sort of vying-for-the-female ritual. They were all oblivious to the gathering crowd of human gawkers. They behaved as if they owned the place. Which in a way, of course, they do.

Blogging will be lighter over the next week as I’ll be on the road — family vacation (at least for me and the kids) in Colorado near Rocky Mountain National Park, then on to Dallas for a talk, hosted by the Society of Information Management.

In the meantime, I’m going to queue up the next Code Reads — one that I have not yet read, so it’ll be new to me as perhaps to some of you: Daniel Berry’s The Inevitable Pain of Software Development, Including of Extreme Programming, Caused by Requirements Volatility. Thanks to Will Sargent for the suggestion.

It’s now about a year that we’ve been doing this series and I’ve completed 12 installments, so the appropriate thing to do is to stop fighting the inevitable and accept that this is a monthly schedule! What I will try to do is keep that monthliness honest. So this paper will be the October edition. That should give me plenty of time…

Apologies for slow blogging. Been working in parallel on a number of important tracks. Some interesting stuff coming up shortly. In the meantime, I will trouble you with this rant on a trivial annoyance.

If you use a Windows computer for any period of time, your system tray — the little box next to your clock on your task bar — will get clogged up with a million and one icons you don’t need or care about. The tray is useful for stuff like “safely remove hardware”, but it’s stupid as a location for applications. That’s what the “quick launch” icons are for; that’s what your “start” menu is for; that’s what any number of other utilities are for. When an application pushes its icon into the system tray it’s almost always redundant — a case of corporate overreach.

So when renegade applications insist on putting their icons in the system tray anyway, in a sort of desktop manifest destiny policy, I get peeved, and I try to figure out how to banish them. Usually, though not always, it’s possible.

I hate to think of something as routine and plumbing-like as Quicktime as a renegade application, but in this way, at least, it is. I went through the “get this thing out of my tray” routine with Quicktime a long time ago; I found the “preferences/advanced” dialogue that let me express my wishes; I did so and thought that was the end of it.

Today, suddenly, it turned up again. I soon realized I’d recently allowed Apple’s auto-update install a new version of Quicktime. OK, I’m willing to turn this sort of routine patching and maintenance over to the software companies — I’d rather they worry about it than have to worry about it myself.

But how rude is it to overwrite a user’s preferences and force the reappearance of an annoying icon that you’ve already ordered the program to suppress? Why does Apple do this stuff? To me this is just one tiny but telling instance of the company’s perpetual dance between delivering useful innovations and behaving as a desktop Big Brother that pretends to know better than you do what you really want.

Me? I just want Apple to keep its fingers out of my system tray.

Last Saturday morning I visited the nearby KPFA studios to chat with my old friend Josh Kornbluth, who was guest hosting the “Morning Talkies” show. It was a lot of fun sharing a radio studio with Josh again — we’d collaborated many years ago, in Cambridge, on an ebullient but slapdash variety show that was plagued by all sorts of live-radio mishaps. Something about our on-air reunion seemed to summon that spirit; as we started our interview, someone barged into the studio and began hauling boxes out on a dolly. Before she was done she’d even tried to nab my tote bag. It threw us off track for a spell, but we managed to regain our composure and have a great chat about Dreaming in Code, blog-reading addiction, and how to manage one’s informational diet.

You can listen to the show here. The same hour features two other great guests: Gray Brechin, author of “Imperial San Francisco,” talking about the Living New Deal project; and Berkeley philosophy professor John Campbell on the nature of perception and questions like, do colors have any reality independent of our individual perceptions? (I’m a little late posting about this — busy round here right now — but better late than never!)

This morning the Guardian published an op-ed I wrote following up on my post a while back, “There is no “first blogger.’ “ Its slightly verbose title is The blog haters have barely any idea what they are raging against. It was fun to expand on the argument and offer my own case for the long-term significance of blogging after a decade (or so).

It was also interesting to reread the piece (which I wrote a couple of weeks ago) after my post last night about corrections in the Times archive:

This confrontation between newspaper and blogosphere could easily leave you exasperated at both the Wall Street Journal’s sloppiness and the bloggers’ occasional self-righteousness. But as you rolled your eyes, you might miss the dust-up’s most interesting angle: the flurry of blogged retorts to the paper produced an accurate record of the facts around blogging’s rise. Bloggers aren’t any better than Johnny Deadline at getting facts right the first time around, but they’re a lot more efficient at correcting their own, and everyone else’s, goofs.

Meanwhile, Slate’s Jack Shafer pooh-poohs the Clark Hoyt public editor column about fixing the Times archives. Shafer thinks Hoyt’s specific examples are weak and that people who are aggrieved over errors in old Times stories should just combat the bad information by building their own Web sites.

I think this dismissal reflects head-in-the-sand thinking on Shafer’s part. It’s great that the Web lets people go out and publish their own retorts, but that doesn’t let newspapers off the hook. Professional journalists have no idea how frustrating and infuriating it can be to try to get a newspaper to fix a mistake. Even today, typically, the response from most newsrooms is defensive and the likelihood of obtaining satisfaction much smaller than it should be. As journalists, ourselves, when we face such problems we know how to pull the levers and we often get special, collegial treatment.

If the Times is capitalizing on its archives, it ought to take more responsibility for the new currency it has granted to old stories (and their errors). Shafer’s attitude is that people who are hurt by these old stories should go out and fix the problem themselves. I’d do that, if I were in their shoes, but I’ve been a journalist all my life. I don’t think the Times can take such a cavalier stance. Because in the end, if the paper tells its subjects that it’s their responsibility to establish an accurate public record, people will start wondering why they need the paper’s version of the record at all.

LATE UPDATE: JD Lasica’s post reminds me of the piece he did for my Salon Technology section back in 1998 titled The Net Never Forgets. These aren’t new problems; they’re just new for the Times — and it has, well, a longer tail of old issues to resolve.

Rick Kleffel did a really nice piece about Dreaming in Code for NPR’s Weekend Edition, and it aired this morning. I was traveling back from Seattle today so I entirely missed the broadcast. But the piece has its online home here.

There’s some nicely edited bits from the interview Kleffel did with me earlier this year, shaped to fit the context of a series Kleffel has been doing about first-time authors. He presents the book as both a product of my personal obsession and a chronicle of the OSAF team’s obsession with their product. There’s even a Moby Dick reference. Check it out!

One thing about leaving a job after 11 years is that you need to adjust your information infrastructure. I thought I had my email transition down, but there was a weak link in my forwarding plan, exposed this past weekend when a mailbox at my service provider that I assumed was empty (it was all forwarding) instead filled up. I don’t think I missed any important email but if you sent me something over the weekend and got a “mailbox full” bounceback now you know why.

For reasons that I can only assume were coincidental, the day after I posted about leaving Salon my Feedburner setup broke. I only caught up with this yesterday. I believe it’s fixed and my RSS feed should be working fine, but if you notice anything funky, let me know. Of course, the odds are that any such funkiness will result in the absence of updates, meaning you wouldn’t even see this post…

I took a quick trip to the DC area at the end of last week to talk about Dreaming in Code to the folks at The Motley Fool. It was a blast. The Fool, as it’s known, has been around online from the earliest days of the Web; like Salon, it’s had its ups and downs, weathered many storms, and is now in a growth phase again.

The engagement happened because a developer who worked for the company happened to read the book, liked it, and thought it would be a good topic for the rest of the company to learn more about it. What I heard from the “Fools”, as they call themselves, is the same thing I’ve heard from lots of other software developers: they feel that the book captures the elusive nature of their work, and they want their colleagues to read it to learn, in greater depth, about the difficulties of creating software.

I’m home for a few days, then heading up to Seattle for Gnomedex. It’s an event I’ve heard about for years, but never made it up there before. If you’re going too, let me know!

We’re back from our travels-with-children — in Monterey, marveling at jellyfish and otters at the aquarium and frolicking at the remarkable “Dennis the Menace” playground (who knew?), and then in Napa, camping at Bothe Napa park.

Now that I’m back at my desk, here’s my news: I’ve left Salon. The day before our vacation was my last day at the company I helped start up back in 1995.

There’s no Big Reason for the move, rather an aggregation of many smaller motivations.

We’d made considerable progress on the project that I was leading for Salon, but we were still a good way from being able to open it up to users, and that was disappointing. Meanwhile, I came up with what I think is an exciting idea for a new book project, and found myself increasingly drawn in that direction.

I still love Salon, and will be cheering it on from the outside. I remain, modestly, a shareholder, and I remain friends with my former colleagues. I hope to continue to write for the site occasionally. But I’ve worked at Salon for over ten years (roughly the length of time I spent at the Examiner). I’ve seen it from a tiny startup through bubble mania and bust woes and into maturity. It’s time for something new. Shaking things up at least once every decade seems like a reasonable schedule!

For you loyal Wordyard readers, I hope to provide a greater volume of posting. My energies are now going to be deployed in three directions:

(1) The new book. I’ll be writing much more here about it as the idea, and work on it, jells.

(2) This blog, which I’ve tended for six years. In addition to a more regular schedule for Code Reads, I’ve also got a couple of other ideas for more in-depth reporting and writing projects here that I expect to be unveiling.

(3) Freelance writing and speaking engagements. (If you’re interested in having me come talk — either about the themes of Dreaming in Code or other trends and issues in Web publishing, drop me a note at speaking /at/ wordyard.com.)

That should keep me plenty busy!

This is family week here — we’re off with the kids for a few days on a couple of short trips. Blogging will be light. Next week I’ll be back with some news about some personal changes and new projects.