the tweney review

A friend asked if I could name a few San Francisco-based bloggers. It was harder than I expected, though there are certainly a few. Here’s an off-the-top-of-my-head list of bloggers I know of, in and around San Francisco:

Craig Newmark

Valleywag (a flagrantly commercial effort to capitalize on a particular region, not a human being who happens to live in that region–but what the hell)

Chris Nolan

Tom Foremski

Anil Dash though he’s really just a New Yorker living temporarily in SF

Ben and Mena Trott, founders of Movable Type and Six Apart

Evan Williams, the founder of Blogger

Chris Null

Cooking with Amy

Matt Mullenweg (Wordpress founder)

John Battelle (in Sausalito now, but hell, that’s the Bay Area)

Kevin Kelly (Pacifica)

Scot Hacker (somewhere in the Mysterious East Bay)

Seems like bloggers everywhere else are banding together around geography, throwing dinner parties and forming mutual admiration societies. What’s up with SF? Other than a few lame “West Coast Blogger” coffee mugs, we got nothing. This from the town that practically invented blogging.

Am I missing something here? C’mon, all you West Coast bloggers, it’s time to represent!

I’m spending way too much time listening to MP3s from New York radio station WFMU’s Beware of the Blog. Where else could you find enough versions of Stairway to Heaven and Tico Tico to fill up a Shuffle? Where else could you hear Stephin Merritt playing version after version of Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah, in response to the recent dustup about how his not liking hip-hop makes him a cracker? Or a hallucinatory Bob Denver surf video and a short about what happens when the Commies take over a small town in Wisconsin? Sheer genius. My hats are off to the DJs who find all this wonderful and weird stuff. And thanks to Scot for linking to it.

Escape from Chinatown,
uploaded by fueledbycoffee.

There’s a certain mad intensity to riding a bicycle in downtown SF–a bit like driving a car in Manhattan. You have to be hyper-alert, and a bit aggressive, in order to stay safe and get to where you want to go. It’s like a high-stakes video game. Already I’m starting to swear under my breath at cars and I’m sure I’ll be flipping them off before long.

Still, I live in fear that someone will sideswipe me or–my real paranoia–open a door in front of me. While I have excellent visibility–I’m up high, and I can see all around me–I know from driving experience that people in cars can’t always see cyclists clearly. This morning some fiftyish white guy in a black Mercedes did one of those San Francisco “I’m going to turn left as soon as the light turns green, before all the oncoming cars pull into the intersection” moves. Only I was already in the intersection. He stopped well short of me but it made me catch my breath.

So at lunchtime I rode over to Mike’s Bikes and picked up the brightest yellow windbreaker I could find, a Pearl Izumi Zephrr Jacket in appropriately-named “screaming yellow.” This thing is glaring safety-yellow–in the sunlight it is so bright that I probably qualify as a visual hazard. It’s so yellow that when you hold it next to other yellow things (like a banana) it makes them look orange. Plus it’s got reflective piping so it’ll show up in the dark, if I’m ever stupid enough to ride my bike at dark. It has only one pocket, on the inside, but that’s a minor drawback–it’s lightweight, cuts the wind, and is lightweight enough to wear even when it’s warm out.

I picked up some reflective stickers to complete the set. I’ll slap those on the helmet and my bike and maybe put a few extras on the jacket. To hell with fashion. I want to be seen.

I’ve started a new job as editorial director of PCMagCast, Ziff-Davis’s online events channel for consumers and small to medium-sized businesses. I’ll be producing, hosting, and appearing in online events and web seminars on a variety of technical topics.

PCMagCast is brand new, so don’t be put off by the unfinished look of the site or the small number of events appearing there now. I’m still figuring out what I can get away with, but my goal is to make this into a kick-ass venue for online tech events. I’m excited about this job and the potential is huge, partly because I think no one is really doing webcasting right yet.

There will be a lot more happening in the next month or two, and I’ll post updates here as I can. So stay tuned.

In the meantime, you can drop me a line at my work address: dylan_tweney@ziffdavis.com. The old home address still works too (see my contact page for details).

Just a note for those of you who are family members or especially interested friends: I’ve been posting photos in two places lately, Smugmug and Flickr. Here are the links to see the latest pictures (along with corresponding feed links, in case you’re using a news reader).

Tweney photos on Smugmug — [RSS feed - Atom feed]

Tweney photos on Flickr — [RSS feed - Atom feed]

Stopped by the Maker Faire yesterday at the San Mateo Fairgrounds–right in our neighborhood–and checked out some of the amazing contraptions and creations hacked together by amateur inventors, tinkerers, and madmen. Highlights included two huge jets of flame that shot 20′ or so into the air, courtesy of the very cool-looking Oakland-based welding arts cooperative, The Crucible. And just down the way from the fire cannons, a bunch of minimalist, hacked-together bikes by a guy whose website, Woodenbikes.com, details the wheeled contraptions he’s made out of 2×4s, plywood, and old curtain rods. I’ve posted pictures of the Jensen Tweney clan riding these bikes on Flickr. And Shacker has even more cool pictures from the “Faire.”

Would have stayed longer–I was fascinated by the rocket-launching happening in the parking lot and I really wanted to learn more about Prius-hacking in “The Ultimate Garage” but Clara was getting tired and my feet were getting sore. Great event, hope it returns next year!

Technorati Tags: makerfaire

Fon founder Martin Varsavsky wants to create a Wi-Fi network with a million hotspots. (By contrast, iPass–currently the largest network–has about 43,500.) He’s got his work cut out for him. Read more in my article for Technology Review, appearing today on the TR home page.

Fon Hopes its Hotspots Will Rival Cellular

Sure, you can browse the Web from your local coffee shop, thanks to its Wi-Fi connection. But what about leaving your cell phone at home and using cafes and other Wi-Fi “hotspots” to place free or cheap Internet-based phone calls using a laptop or Wi-Fi phone? Not yet.
…
Spanish startup Fon wants to change that predilection for cellular, with a rapidly growing Wi-Fi network owned by its users, rather than a big telecommunications company, and based on shared access. In order to create a large network of hotspots, the company is encouraging network members — mostly, average consumers — to give away Wi-Fi access in exchange for getting free access at other Fon hotspots. Members can use that access, in turn, for Web browsing, e-mail, instant messaging — or Skype-like Internet phone calling.

The daily haiku journal I publish, tinywords — which I like to refer to as “the world’s tiniest magazine” — has resumed publication. I’m working on some enhancements to the site which I hope to be able to announce in the next couple of weeks.

I’ve ended a short, ill-conceived flirtation with WordPress as the content management engine behind tinywords, and returned to the custom PHP-MySQL engine I built for the site. WordPress is a great blogging tool (I use it for the Tweney Review) but it wasn’t well-suited to the particular needs of my haiku zine. Unfortunately, I had about 6 months’ worth of haiku, along with their comments, that had been published on the WordPress site. I also really liked the design of the WP site, which was based on the lovely Manji by Khaled Abou Alfa.

So, I spent a few half-days last week porting the design, the haiku, and the comments from WP to my own system. Moving the haiku was easy; moving the comments, a little trickier. That’s because WP’s comments table was keyed to posts in its own table, which obviously have different ID codes than the haiku in my own database’s table. The process wasn’t pretty (export to CSV, import into OpenOffice Calc, munge data, clean up, rearrange columns, export back to CSV, then import into the new database) and took far longer than I thought it would. I hope I never have to do that kind of thing again.

Two lessons learned along the way:

1. Always test your SQL selection statements before using them in a “DELETE FROM” query.

2. Always make backups of your tables before running a “DELETE FROM” query that might, say, accidentally delete every last row in said table.

Many, many thanks to Scot Hacker at birdhouse hosting, which hosts tinywords, for restoring my accidentally emptied table from a regular nightly backup.

Much as I lean to the left, I have to admit that lefties often make really stupid choices when choosing how to stage their protests. Too often these protests happen out of some vague sense of anger and outrage, with very little attention to the message they’re conveying. ie: Bad branding. Case in point: Burning American flags during Gulf War I did nothing except piss people off. Burning dollar bills, now that would have been more on point.

Similarly, Critical Mass riders clog the streets of San Francisco on Friday afternoons, aggravating people who just want to get home to their families. It would make much more sense to hold the protest on Monday mornings. That way, they’d be stopping people from getting to work. Many people would sympathize with them, and they’d also have an economic impact, not just a symbolic one. As it is, I hate Critical Mass. And I’m an avid bike rider (and I don’t even live in San Francisco)!

One of the biggest bonehead moves by the left happened in 1994 during the protests against Proposition 187, which denied many services to illegal immigrants. Millions of people massed in the streets of LA, San Francisco, and Sacramento, to show their opposition to the bill. Many of them were waving Mexican flags. In one photo opp, the Prop 187 supporters had won the battle. Their pro-immigrant opponents had made the case for them, making immigration look like a Mexican invasion rather than a struggle for civil rights. 59% of the voters went for Prop 187, many of them no doubt terrified by the thought of an army of flag-waving Mexicans overrunning the state.

So it was good to see American flags in the recent rallies supporting immigration rights. In fact, Cardinal Roger Mahoney even told protesters to put away non-US flags. It shows that somebody has been paying attention.

Xeni has her spiky platinum hair. Cory has his chunky black glasses. Malcolm has his, um, hair. Seth has his ears.

I feel like I’m missing a branding opportunity here. What to do: Shave my head? Bleach my hair and spike it up like I did in the 90s? Wear a huge bone through my nose? Your suggestions are welcome.