] Pacific Gas and Electric Co. has moved back the estimated
] time that power will be restored to San Franciscans by
] several hours, according to PG&E spokesman Brian Swanson.
]
] Earlier in the day, PG&E officials said they expected
] power to be restored by 10:30 a.m. Now they believe that
] the outage will last until the evening for some
] customers.

My power just came back on about 20 minutes ago..

SF power outage may remain until evening

John Perry Barlow has started a blog!

] Here I am, in the lobby of the highly attitudinal W Hotel
] in San Francisco, creating my very first blog entry.
]
] Joichi Ito, a blog sensei if ever there was one, is introducing
] me to the Blogosphere. I'm wary. Am I too old a dog to blog?
] Am I actually too sick of things virtual to plunge myself
] deeper into electronic immateriality?
]
] We'll see.
]
] But, I am motivated. For years, I've been sending out
] BarlowSpams and then privately enjoying the responses,
] both from friendz and friendz of friendz. Now I will have a
] place to pass to these on to our little community and, with
] luck, grow this into something besides my own little
] personality cult.

BarlowFriendz

] I am sorry to announce that BlogShares will not be
] reopening after the current technical difficulties are
] resolved. Currently, the database server is dead and
] looks to be for the next few days.
]
] The latest system crash has highlighted to me that
] deliverying a fun, useful service for the BlogShares
] community requires an active operator and developer. As
] most of you are no doubt aware I've been neither for the
] past couple of months. That has led to a decline of
] quality service, new features and ultimately income for
] the site and it looked likely that there wouldn't be
] enough to pay for next month's hosting.

BlogShares's database imploded, and its creator has chosen not to pick up the pieces.

BlogShares - Closed Down

They agreed to provide this information, and said they had no problem telling users how to solve the problem. I, in turn, provided webspace and bandwidth for them. The bottom line: after two days of lies and false starts, and milking my institution's generosity by providing almost 100,000 downloads and 0.7 terabytes of data transfer, they NEVER posted any information about how to solve the problem that they promised to post. Their agenda seems clear, and that's sensationalism, melodrama, and attention. The full email exchange is here:

[ insert Michael Moore joke here ]

via BoingBoing

more on ipodsdirtylittlesecret.com

] In fact, Wallop is Microsoft's venture into the red-hot
] social-networking arena, using the common Microsoft tack
] of piecing together existing technologies and packaging
] them for the novice user. Those technologies include
] Friendster-style social-networking capabilities,
] super-simplistic blogging tools,moblogging, wikis and RSS
] feeds, all based on Microsoft's Instant Messenger
] functionality.

Wired News: Will Microsoft Wallop Friendster?

] If someone like Karl Rove had wanted to
] neutralize the most creative, intelligent, and
] passionate members of his opposition, he'd have a
] hard time coming up with a better tool than
] Burning Man. Exile them to the wilderness, give
] them a culture in which alpha status requires
] months of focus and resource-consumptive
] preparation, provide them with metric tons of
] psychotropic confusicants, and then... ignore
] them. It's a pretty safe bet that they won't be
] out registering voters, or doing anything that
] might actually threaten electoral change, when
] they have an art car to build.

Barlow on Burning Man and Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger.

Another amazing dispatch from Barlow. As usual, I find myself either agreeing with everything he says, or at the very least find some great insight in it.

[BarlowFriendz] 9.8: Spectacles in the Desert

] Sources inform Globes that Israeli start-up
] Huminity has raised $2-4 million, at a company value of
] $10 million, after money, in its first financing round.
] Sources close to the company said a leading Israeli
] venture capital fund, a US fund, and the CEO of one of
] the world's largest Internet companies participated in
] the round, which is close to completion. Huminity
] cofounders Oren Rossen and Nir Ben-Halevy declined to
] disclose details about the round.

I still have yet to receive any feedback from _anyone_ about Huminity.. Is anyone out there still using MS? Anyone?

Someone install this damn thing and tell me about its networking protocol..

] Huminity, which develops Internet-based software tools
] to manage personal and professional networks, launched
] its first financing round when it had a working product with
] 400,000 customers worldwide. In recent months, the two
] entrepreneurs made progress on developing the software,
] which uses extremely low-cost open code. Rossen said they
] had personally invested $30,000 by the time they launched
] the first version. He added that the company's cash burn rate
] was $3,500 a month.

The "extremely low-cost open code" they speak of appears to be something called Inxight Star Tree Studio.. Something else that I can't run right now.

Globes - Social networking software co Huminity raises $2-4m

Top 10 reasons why British people think poorly of American visitors:

...

8. They don't know who Guy Fawkes is. ("Who? Guy Fox? Nah, don't know him... Is he from New Jersey?")

The Gunpowder Plot: Guy Fawkes

An encyclopedia that is created and alterable by everyone, licensed under the GNU FDL.

Wiki to the extreme.. In the licensing area, they even keep the threat letter templates they use and keep track of all the places and articles they know of that use the content without the required attribution.

wikipedia

Halloween in San Francisco is awesome. The whole city goes nuts.

I recovered well enough from that whole asthma attack thing to have one hell of a good time last night.

Went to a great party, ran into many friends. Saw mjr's new band, a surprise d33z reunion, and a two man punk act from Israel. I didn't actually wind up going to the Castro/Market area at any point, but the whole mission was filled with people either coming to or from.. Much chaos. Lots of random things happening all over.

General theme this week has been good news. Several friends have landed good jobs recently, others are have success pushing some cool projects forward, etc.. In short, good things, a departure from the suckyness of recent. I hope it continues. I'm starting to get a good feeling about 2004 as it grows closer.

I spent most of today unpacking stuff from boxes that have been in storage for two years. Normally this is one of my least favorite part of moving, but this time its been like unwrapping xmass presents all day.