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Horn tooting

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Somehow I missed the fact that this humble blog made CNet’s “Top 100” list some time ago, in the “Tech Business” category. Thanks, CNet! I’ll try to live up to the billing. I’ve generally adopted the “blog is a mirror of the blogger” philosophy here; rather than trying to niche-ify the blog as a product (everything you always wanted to know about ROUTERS!), which is certainly a good business strategy, I’ve allowed the blog to reflect my own interests across tech, politics and culture. I can fairly well guarantee you won’t find much sports or celebrity news here — but beyond that, almost anything goes.

I have some new ideas and approaches to the blog that I intend to start experimenting with when work on my book, Dreaming in Code, is done. The handful of you who have been paying attention may recall that I completed a first draft of my manuscript before the holidays. Well, we’re still in the middle of editing, and making progress. I hope to be done soon, and when we are, I’ll be posting a lot more about the book and related subjects (basically, software development and its discontents). For those of you who’ve inquired in e-mail, wondering as to my health, or the health of the project: sorry for the slowness. Publishing, like software, has its own rhythms.

In other news on the “self” front, I am proud to see this site’s homely name over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation on a short list of blogs that helped that group with a membership drive last November. It’s fine company to be in. (And if you didn’t join back then, you can still join now.)

An announcement about Salon Blogs — and more

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We started the Salon Blogs program three-and-a-half years ago, in July, 2002. Salon’s business wasn’t exactly thriving at the time, but we knew that there was an explosion of energy and creativity happening in the universe of blogs, and we wanted to figure out a way for Salon to participate. We lacked the resources to build our own system, so we partnered with Userland Software, which provided the software for users and took on the work of running the back end for us.

In charging a modest fee for our product, we were rowing upstream, since free alternatives were already available and would only grow more plentiful. Nonetheless, we were delighted and proud to see a smart little community grow under the Salon Blogs banner. Writers flourished; projects emerged; more than one book contract was obtained.

Still, 2006 is a whole different universe from 2002. Salon — today, thankfully, on a firmer financial footing — is beginning to explore some new ideas and approaches to the realm that business types call “user-generated content” (or, sometimes, “social software”), visionaries call “citizen’s media,” and old-timers like me still think of as “interactivity.”

I have the good fortune, and the challenge, of leading this exploration for Salon: this is the main focus of my work here, for now. As a lot of you know, I served as managing editor from 1999 until late 2004, when I took a leave of absence to write my book. It was the best job I’ve ever had — but five years is a long time to be managing anything, particularly during the roller-coaster ride of those particular years. Since last fall, Salon has been fortunate to have Jeanne Carstensen in the managing editor’s seat — and I get to go build some new things, which has always been my favorite role.

Since, among other possibilities, our new projects may involve a new approach to blogs, we’ve decided to stop taking new sign-ups for the existing Salon Blogs program. It doesn’t make sense to keep inviting people in that door. One big issue is that the Radio Userland software that the program is built around — and that I’m still using for this blog — turned out not to be the ideal tool for this sort of project. It installs easily, but long-term maintenance can be hard, since the program and all its data sits on your own hard drive. (This post by Paolo Valdemarin explores the topic further.) Radio had some very cool features ahead of its time, including a great built-in RSS-feed reader; but for many users those don’t outweigh the essential awkwardness of hosting all your blog data on your desktop machine. That model, whatever its strengths and weaknesses, is one that the world has moved away from, and Userland is putting more muscle behind developing other products.

Current Salon bloggers should not be alarmed (though I know some will be anyway). Your blogs will continue to live at the same Web address they’ve always had. You don’t have to do anything or change anything if you don’t want to. Userland has assured us that they’ll continue to run the blogs.salon.com server for you. The updates and ranking pages will remain in place, too.

You can keep blogging as you always have — we’re not shutting anything down. I imagine some current users will decide to look at alternatives; for those who decide they want to move their blogs, we and Userland will do what we can to help you with the transition. Or you may want to wait and see what Salon has to offer as this year progresses.

While we don’t yet know exactly what it will be — that’s part of the fun — if it attracts the sort of creative spirit that Salon Blogs has, we’ll know we’re on the right track.

(For those of you interested in the discussion about these new Salon projects, there’s a letter to readers up on the site now, and also a discussion in Table Talk — world-readable, but only Salon Premium subscribers can post.)

Hack your socks

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I have returned to work at Salon — more on that, and what I’m up to, anon. But first, a meditation on “life hacks.”

I attended the original “Life Hacks” talk that Danny O’Brien gave at the Emerging Technology Conference in 2004 and was intrigued to learn how leading geeks organized their lives and files. (For instance, store everything in plain text files — they’ll never become obsolete or unusable, like fancier file formats.) When Merlin Mann started up his personal-productivity blog I was further hooked. There’s something irresistible about observing how software engineers apply the inhumanly rigorous logic of their calling to the mess of daily life: Sometimes it’s like a train wreck, but often the rest of us can learn something.

Life hacks now appears to be something of a minimovement, with its own Gawker Media blog called Lifehacker and an O’Reilly book apparently in the works. This page on Mann’s site offers a fine overview of the sort of “Hints from Heloise” meets “The Wisdom of Crowds” stuff we’re talking about here. Suggestions range from the violently ingenious (“Keyboard improvement — For those with a PC keyboard who don’t have perfect typing skills: rip out the ‘insert’ and ‘caps lock’ keys…”) — to the sneakily devious (“Messy house? Always keep several get well cards on the mantel….. so if unexpected guests arrive, they will think you’ve been sick and unable to clean”).

So here is my little contribution to the great parade of Life Hacks.

I have long felt that time spent matching socks is time lost forever. There is no edification, no lesson to be mastered, no pleasure to be wrung from the ordeal. Music can alleviate the boredom but not fully redeem the experience. I have achieved the zen of washing dishes, and even the tao of sorting laundry. But socks — nah.

So here is my method allowing you to Never Ever Sort Socks Again (patent pending):

(1) Throw out all your old socks (or donate them, if they’re presentable).

(2) Decide what color socks you need. The fewer colors the better. I’ve gone minimalist-retro: there’s the black socks, and there’s the white socks, and that’s it.

(3) Purchase large quantities of socks in those colors. You can get different brands/makes for each color, as long as all socks of the same color are exactly the same.

(4) Just dump the socks in your dresser drawer as is from the clean wash — don’t sort or pair them. When you need a pair, grab any two of the same color — they’re guaranteed to match!

Your socks will all be of the same vintage, and as long as you mix them up periodically and don’t let some languish at the bottom of the drawer, they will wear evenly. When they become grimy or sprout holes — go back to step (1).

This method comes to you fully tested. I have eaten my own dogfood. It works, I promise you.

But wait, you say you want color and variety and style and pizazz in your life?

I say: buy some sweaters!

The immediate jewel of our souls

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“Namespace” is one of the great terms from the world of programming that I encountered in the course of my book research. A namespace is a defined set of labels (in programming, usually for variables or addresses or the like) in which each label can be assumed to be unique. “Namespace collisions” happen when two such sets overlap and cause unplanned-for ambiguities: the word “fender,” for instance, has one meaning in the namespace of auto parts and another in the namespace of electric guitars.

The original namespace, the ur-namespace, as it were, is the set of names we use for one another — the names in the phonebook. In the age of the global Net and search engines, this namespace has become pretty unstable. People with names like “John Smith” have always had to cope with identity confusion, but today, we all face collisions with other people who share our names.

My name isn’t quite so common, but not so uncommon, either, I have learned. When I worked as a theater and movie critic in the ’80s and early ’90s for the San Francisco Examiner, I discovered that a screenwriter who bore my name was beginning to have a successful career. For years I received congratulatory notes, including one from a fundraiser for an educational institution I once attended, who had to be disabused of the notion that I had newfound riches to share. I still get occasional emails from aspiring screenwriters begging me to look at their work.

Over the years I also discovered that there is a Scott Rosenberg in the Bay Area who is a jazz musician and composer. Since I confine my musical efforts to friends and family, this was less of a problem.

Now, though, it seems there is yet another Scott Rosenberg who is actually writing movie reviews for the San Francisco Examiner — which is, itself, not in any way the same newspaper that I wrote for a decade ago (that Examiner’s entire staff was absorbed into the Chronicle; the new Examiner is a freebie owned by conservative billionaire Philip Anschutz). This is distressing — and I can foresee a lifetime of search-engine confusion for both this newcomer and me. I wish he’d, like, have used a middle initial in his byline. (I’m sure he wishes I had done the same.)

There’s a new industry of startup companies and Web services trying to help organize the human namespace on the Internet. I’d heard of one called Zoominfo, “the search engine for discovering people, companies and relationships,” and I figured I’d see how well it handled the profusion of SRs. Not good. First name on the list is one Scott Mitchell Rosenberg. Who’s that? Zoominfo says it’s me — Salon exec and writer, former SF Examiner writer, and so on. Only where’d the “Mitchell” come from? My middle name is “Alan”! Zoominfo also lists another “Scott Mitchell Rosenberg” as a luminary in the comics world. Ahh — this must be the guy who let the “scottrosenberg.com” domain lapse a few years ago, allowing me to obtain it.

Zoominfo actually lists a “Scott Alan Rosenberg,” but it claims that he’s the jazz musician. Could the jazzy Scott and I have the same middle name? Or is Zoominfo just hopelessly confused? It’s got a whole bunch of other Scott Rosenbergs, including one who is the president of something called “The Rosenberg Group.” (That “the” is a little optimistic; Google says there’s a whole slew of “Rosenberg Groups” out there.)

Wikipedia has developed a practice of providing “disambiguation pages” so that when you search for information on, say, “Python,” you can say whether you want the page about big snakes, the page about the programming language, or the page about the British comedy group.

I think that the Net needs disambiguation pages for people. Really, the whole world does, too.

Waste land

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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.

Chicken delight

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Enough with the turkey, already. My palate belongs to Szechuan food, and this weekend, after the leftovers were gone, I returned to a quest I have sporadically pursued for years now. I have been seeking to duplicate, in my home, the experience of the perfect Kung Pao Chicken — a dish I have occasionally, but less and less frequently, enjoyed in restaurants.

The dish I seek is a simple-looking but complex-tasting stir fry of small cubes of dark-meat chicken lightly dressed in a thick but scant dark-brown sauce that clings to it — without forming a soupy, goopy pool on the plate, as so often emerges from inferior Chinese restaurant kitchens. Mixed in with the chicken are some quarter-inch scallion rounds from the thicker (white) end of the plant, and, of course, crunchy peanuts. The sauce has flecks of ginger, a touch of sweetness, a hint of sesame richness and a slight vinegar pucker. A half-dozen or so blackened whole red chilis complete the picture, or rather, set it aflame. This, to me, is Kung Pao Chicken — gongbao ji ding, also sometimes called Szechuan Chicken with Peanuts.

A recent article in the New York Times by Howard French provided some interesting background to the dish from a restaurant in the city of Guiyang. In Guiyang, unlike in the neighboring province of Szechuan, it seems they do not believe in adding peanuts to the dish at all, nor do they use dried peppers. I certainly have no idea which regional variation deserves the “most authentic” label, and I don’t doubt that the restaurant French profiled might be worth the visit. But I can tell you that the recipe the Times provided — gooped up with way too much arrowroot starch, and relying on chili paste rather than whole peppers for the bite — offered nothing like the experience I seek.

I have made the recipe from my favorite source of Chinese cuisine knowhow, Mrs. Chiang’s Szechwan Cookbook, and it is tastier, for sure; it provides the essential tip that you should buy raw peanuts and fry them in the wok (so many restaurants simply toss in a handful of cold dry-roasted Planters nuts at the very end of cooking — feh!). But even Mrs. Chiang’s offering ends up a bit gloppy, not quite right.

I recognize that my run-of-the-mill home range simply doesn’t provide the level of heat that a high-powered restaurant-kitchen wok can use to flash-fry ingredients, seal in flavors and produce the right consistency in a sauce. But I’m still convinced there is a good recipe out there for what I’m seeking, and I’m going to continue hunting for it, and experimenting with adapting the recipes I have, until I achieve kung pao perfection. At such a time I will share my findings.

Crunch, fuzz, twang

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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:

  The holy grail in lo-fi is often how to produce distortion, how to get low levels of distortion that are complicated and beautiful, distortions to balance out the beauty of western harmonic music. Distortion to my mind equals sex and violence, and if you don’t have sex and violence in rock ‘n’ roll then you’re totally done for. It might be the kind that’s on an Eno-Fripp record, but it’s still there — there has to be a dangerous quality to it somewhere. It may be supersubtle but it has to be there.

Time flies when your writing’s fun

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Well, I’ve researched and researched, and written and written, and now I must revise and revise. When I actually have a manuscript turned in to my editor — before Thanksgiving, for sure! — I will exhale and write a bit here about the process, and how things have turned out. I should also be blogging a bit more henceforth. Thanks for bearing with me through this hiatus.

In the meantime, I should mention that Salon is celebrating its 10th anniversary this week. It’s hard for me to believe that ten years ago I was a disaffected ex-theater critic, technology columnist and fledgling HTML adept making the jump from print to online. I knew it was risky, and the fact that our money-making plans were strictly theoretical made me think, okay, this will be fun for a year or two, then Salon’s likely to go down the tubes and I’ll make a living freelancing.

After a fun year became two, then three, then four, I moved over from my job as technology editor to managing editor, taking on a lot of responsibility for things like budgets and site management. And I began to think, hey, this thing might actually last! Whoops — cue the bursting of the dot-com bubble. The moment I started getting confident, suddenly it really did look for a while like Salon might go down.

But by then I was hooked. I was determined to see it through, as was everyone else who stuck it out, and I put my back into a lot of difficult and creatively unfulfilling work to do my part to help Salon survive. It was only last year that I felt comfortable enough about the company’s stability that I could think about taking a book leave this year without feeling like I was abandoning ship. Things are definitely on the upswing, but, you know, I’m a little wary of feeling too confident. Old wounds and all.

By now you may have seen Gary Kamiya’s history of the site — it’s hilarious, deftly captures much of the heart and soul of Salon through the years, and brought back a torrent of memories for me. My angle on some of the history might have been different: Gary’s less focused than I’d have been on Salon’s place in the evolution of the nascent field of Web publishing; he’s more immersed in consideration of Salon’s place in the general milieu of political and literary journalism. I always worked one step closer than him to the business side of things, and many steps closer to the technical side of things. My version of those aspects of the story may be a little less Stranger in a Strange Land and a little more In the Belly of the Beast.

When I’m a little less written out I may trot out some of those tales. Or maybe I’ll just wait till Salon’s 20th.

For now, as I near my own milestone of a finished book, I toast all my current and former Salon colleagues, and look forward to rejoining them in January. More on that, soon, too.

Hello? Is anyone there?

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Holed up writing here as I have been for some time, I was not prepared for my household’s sudden surge of popularity these last few days. The phone has been ringing off the hook! Why, Barbara Boxer called me yesterday, and this afternoon, as I was disentangling a particularly overwrought sentence, the phone rang, and it was Warren Beatty on the line. He was very sorry to interrupt , but he wanted to make sure I would vote against the Schwarzenegger propositions tomorrow.

These recorded phone calls by celebs and pols are scary enough, but now they’re also throwing fever-pitch telephone plays our way. Over the weekend we got barraged by a robocall minidrama three times (one, ironically, was recorded on our answering machine — direct bot-to-bot communication!). It was a tale told by a parent who says he watched his daughter die after she took the morning after pill; she could have lived, maybe, if we only passed a law that said that you can’t get an abortion unless you tell your parents. Or something like that — the sound effects were so aggressive I couldn’t really figure out all the details, and I tried to tune it out. In the handful of amped up seconds this audio spot spat out, there was no way to tell whether it was supposed to be a true story or a dramatization or something else. All that came through was pure anger.

I’m sufficiently insulated from mainstream TV that I have missed out on the worst mutations of political advertising over the last decade. Now they’re coming after me by phone. Yikes! It may be time to go off the analog grid entirely. At least I can delete spam from my email account on my own schedule. Can’t I sit down to dinner without being interrupted by hysterical recordings?

Josh Kornbluth’s new show

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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.