I landed in Seattle and comfortably settled in at plush Monaco Hotel.  Flight here was uneventful except for the usual strip show at SFO.  In my room, I found a backpack full of goodies and a glossy folder of the schedule.  And a booklet of event attendees' bio and photo arrived just a minute ago, fresh from the printer.  So far, I am impressed by the well produced red carpet treatment.

I'll have to miss the dinner tonight to get together with an old pal but I see that Dave, Chris, and Liz are attending as well.

Disclaimer: Because I am a pushover with people who are nice to me, my views on Microsoft will be biased until the red carpet treatment effect wears off in a couple of weeks.

Watching Dave spread the podcasting meme is like watching Moses split the Red Sea.  Simply amazing and much more effective than infomercials and brainwashing.  The cool thing is that he is just doing and talking about what interests him but his activities are slowly eating up our mindshare.  It's a new form of evangelism.  Devangelism?  Nay, it's Davangelism.

Wow.  Suddenly a new cool expression appears out of the blue to enrich our culture: herring fart.  While the recent discovery that herrings communicate by farting is probably not good news for Red Herring, I doubt those stinky fishes are saying much, not even enough to qualify as micro-content.  On the other hand, I am tired of the expression bullshit, so the discovery of herring fart is good news to me.

I am also glad that Mother Earth doesn't communicate the same way because we'll have many more Mount St. Helens if she did.  After all, she has a lot to say to us.

Recently, I stomped on the Firefox team and Tim Bray.  Yesterday, I stomped on Jonathan Schwartz and Technorati.  I would like to give myself a yellow flag for unnecessary roughness as they do in football and take it easy for a while.  While I write posts as I see it and feel like it, I think I have been doing too much stomping lately and my feet needs some rest.

Jonathan Schwartz filed patent applications for per-employee software pricing.  Awesome.  Maybe I should file a similar patents for per-chair, per-desk, and per-floormat software pricing methods and offer them at a much lower license fee.  It doesn't have to be items an employee has usually only one item of.  While I am at it, I can file patent on software pricing schemes based on thousands of other business sizing metrics and millions of derivatives.

I just had a IM chat with Didier again.  Didier is now just a few days from moving back to Bordeaux, France but he was angry about Tim Bray's recent post:

Tim wrote recently in Helping Them Lie:

Google is getting some well-deserved flak for emasculating the Chinese version of Google News by suppressing headlines that point at things the government of China doesn’t want its citizens to read.

…

By suppressing the headlines that point at forbidden material, Google is actively aiding and abetting the Chinese government’s marketing program.

Back in June, Joi Ito wrote, in response to Dan Gillmor's post about Iran's net censorship, about a conversation he had with a Sun employee he met:

I once sat next to a guy from Sun Federal, a Sun Microsystems subsidiary, who was on his way back from selling a filtering system to a government.

Going further back on News.com:

Amnesty named several U.S.-based companies as alleged suppliers of technology used in the Chinese government's crackdown on Internet speech. These included Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Nortel Networks and filtering software supplier Websense.

Oops.  I know Tim is an upstanding guy and I don't think he was aware of the role his own company played with China's Great CyberWall, but I can understand how his post might appear to some people like a display of hypocrisy.

For companies like Sun, profits are profits but business practice that undermines the moral ground of its employees, particularly an outspoken one like Tim, can hurt them badly.

Disclaimer:

As for me, I have not participated in anyway with the building of their firewalls or news filtering infrastructure.  However, I am perfectly willing to sell them anything they want as long as it's legal and there are profits to be made.

While I fully sympathize with those suffering from the Chinese government's newage campaign of tyranny, it's ultimately a battle for the Chinese citizens.  If they are putting up with it, I am not going to waste time shaking my fingers indignantly.  I think it will happen eventually but not any time soon.

On the other hand, fingershaking is a great exercise for those with full stomach.

If you are an entrepreneur, checkout Joe Krause's blog, Bnoopy, where he writes about the experiences and lessons he learned while starting up Excite.  I enjoyed every one of his posts so far and Joe is just getting started.  BTW, welcome to the blogosphere Joe.

It's full moon outside.  In Korea, everyone is going back to their home town to celebrate Choosuk, Korean Thanksgiving of sort.  For my family, there is no hometown to go back to.

My family is from northern part of Korea which is now North Korea.  I was born in Seoul which is nowhere in people's hearts.  There are just too many neon signs, asphalts, and endless rows of characterless buildings to give it a sense of place to long for.  Our family never went anywhere on Choosuk and I thought Choosuk was just a holiday of sort until I grew up and started reading Korean newspapers.

I suppose I could visit North Korea, but there is no one to go home to.  My father's younger brother supposedly lives there and I am sure there are many relatives, but they are strangers to me.  Yes, they will look like me and I am sure we share some of the strongest family traits like frequently forgetting to zip up.  Still, the place feels like wet cloths.  I don't want to put it on.

Speaking of forgetting to zip up, I did it again today although my son's zipper was proper.  It saddens me that my wife has been rather lax at inspecting my zipper ever since my son has gotten old enough to wear pants.  My father, my son, and I have yet to simultaneously forget to zip up at the same time but I am sure it will happen someday, a family event to remember.

For my son, I guess Redwood Shores is his hometown.  Did you know there are no redwoods in Redwood Shores?  My son and I corrected that mistake by planting one a year ago in our backyard.  In another couple of years, we'll have to move it somewhere else, a hidden spot where it can grow as tall as it can be without nudging disgustingly expensive houses aside.  In about a hundred years or so, everyone will be able to see it, hopefully even from the 101.

After writing the Mobile Orgasm post, I thought of Wishstore: an online retailer that sells imaginary products.  I think such a website would be entertaining enough to draw traffic and generate decent ad revenue, particularly since people will be drawn to product sections they already have some interests in.

Besides, if an imaginary product is popular enough, someone will make it.  Kind a dream come true for manufacturers, isn't it?

A raunchy post to celebrate Friday.

Gina Lynn's article on Teledildonics reminded me of a recent IM chat with Didier.  When Didier sent me a picture of a cellphone with old fashion telephone handset attached to it, I told him that attaching a dildo might be more marketable.  The raunchy idea is certainly more useful than Teledildonics which has to be hooked up to a computer.  And it's simple to make also: just use the audio signal as input just like those cellphone headsets do.  Upscale version will use Bluetooth, of course, instead of the usual 2.5mm jack.

I think the idea has legs although it would kind of awkward standing in the middle of the street talking and thumbing your girlfriend into orgasm.