Our friend Russ is planning coming to town in a few weeks – he’s an excellent photographer who wants to actually sit down with me and build a Flash website for his work. He’ll be here in a few weeks.
So will, hopefully, a new RSS feed for Deckchairs, which I now feel deserves to literally come out of the box. There are so many very good sites on RSS, which allows you to publish your information to syndicated content aggregators and, more interestingly, allows folks to see your content by just typing in a few words or downloads channels of information for you automatically. It’s not for the information faint-of-heart, RSS, but it’s another way to tell people what you do or don’t think.
In other news, I’ve had a strong hankering to own the domain name idontknow.com. The folks that own it say they develop websites and provide hosting, but doesn’t “idontknow” seem a like a poor name for a consultancy?

I’m very honored to say that Seth Godin pointed out MANOVERBOARD on his weblog yesterday — I only found out about it today through a prospective client.

I’m incredulous that 5,000 folks have died because of the tragic heatwave in France. I calculate that the same number of people, proportionally, that would have died in the U.S. would be 25,000 — about half the size of the town in which I grew up in Pennsylvania. What really piques my curiosity, however, is how many people died in Iraq who have not had electricity or clean water in three months; this is not to level blame on any one party there — rather, it’s a sad commentary that statistics are only kept by Western countries about Western countries. The U.S. currently does not keep records of Iraqi casualties.

It appears that President Bush, who once looked like the A. E. Neuman character (did W. have his ears redone recently?), felt that rollling blackout that did not occur in Texas was not a biggie. This New York Times article puts the lie to his “concerns” about terrorism and his compassion for citizens and their economy. I feel a sudden need to print, herein, the first two short paragraphs (as I heave up my evening Coca-Cola) of the article.
Bush Doesn’t Let Blackout Upset Lunch With Troops
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
SAN DIEGO, Aug. 14—President Bush was having lunch with troops at the Miramar Marine Corps Air Station when Joe Hagin, his deputy chief of staff, told him of the massive blackout on the East Coast.
But unlike the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when news of another New York catastrophe sent Mr. Bush on an odyssey on Air Force One, today he continued his lunch and went ahead with plans to attend a $1 million political fund-raiser here this evening. Still, he spent the rest of the afternoon on the phone trying to sort out the damage and the cause of the power failure with his top national security aides.

I recently purchased the newly released Contribute for Mac, which allows non-technical folks to control the content of their websites. I’m looking forward to having my clients do the posting, editing, managing, maintenance, and mucking up of their text and images. Concurrently, I was at the playground about an hour ago, and a fine couple cheered on their straggly-looking child as he pushed (and pushed again) my own out of the way on the slides. I was (and still am) livid. I almost had a minor meltdown in front of them, but decided to let it go; it was next to impossible for me to get that angry before having a kid, and I’m not proud of it now. But I wonder to what society that couple contribute.

Last night was somewhat electric, despite the lack of electricity. My wife and I kept saying how lucky, how fortunate, we were that we were not stuck in the subway or some elevator (both of which we were on earlier in the day) in Manhattan during the massive wave of blackouts here. We spent a few hours in the park, had a very early dinner lit by the remainder of the day’s rays, sat outside and talked with the newly friendly neighbors around here, and then lit a hurricane lamp to read by. I found my old Sony shortwave radio, and we listened to the news for a while, before going to sleep. Sitting outside was beautiful, the air was not moist, and it was beautiful to hear few airplanes in the sky. The sound of the stars rang strong. I don’t wish non-electricity on anyone, but yesterday evening was fine.

What can I say? Between my daughter having a cold, and me working until the bones fall out of my fingertips, that’s it. I’m working on a redesign of Deckchairs and other MANOVERBOARD sites . . .

When we were on vacation last week, there were two almost-teenage boys playing within earshot of us much of the days at the lakefront. Both were packing the immensely heavy new Harry Potter book, which looked to be about 15 pounds (in weight). (I wonder if J.K. Rowling is hoping to make her thin-wristed fans heavyweight champions.)
But more interestingly, the two boys played all day long in the guises of the book’s characters — taking on the roles of H.P. et. al. — and they talked incessantly about the plots, ploys, and plans within the tale. I tried to recall what book captured me and my friends’ imaginations at that age, back in 1979 and 1980. And the only thing I could think of was No One Here Gets Out Alive, the romantic tale of Jim Morrison’s life and death, and I realize now why Gen X is so screwed and screwy.

There comes a time in every person’s life when they want to send people to a website but hate typing in long, long, addresses, like http://www.superlongaddressthatiscumbersometotype.com/about/101010.html or something like that. I learned today of a few serious, but simple services (these are usually the best kind on the Web (e.g. Google) that will convert that monster into a tiny little Web address. General information on these URL generators can be found here but the one that seems most useful and smart is TinyURL a free service. It’s good for making affiliate links, such as those posted here at Deckchairs to books, music, and videos sold at Amazon.com, unknowable and making the Web, a little more, well discrete.
Theoretically, TinyURL is essentially an address masking service, allowing users to (permanently, because the new URL sticks around forever) hide the links they really want to post. I’m not sure I yet fully understand the potential implications for spammers and other Interschmucks with such a service but there are many legal and ethical rationales for NOT wanting to employ TinyURL. Here’s how to contact me with your thoughts.

Seth Godin, writer of the provocative (in a business sense as a compared to Michel Houellebecq’s new novel called Platform which is creating a huge stir in the small media) Purple Cow, has asked in his weblog today, “what should Google do next.” As a small-time follower of Mr. Godin and Google, here is my emailed response to him: