onfocus

As I was describing Jon Stewart's appearance on Crossfire with sk, I was comparing him with Andy Kaufman because he's pushing the boundries of the audience. And David Weinberger's post—Stewart on Crossfire—compares him with Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor. I think Stewart is making the leap from great comedian to icon.

What country do we live in, again?

"President Bush taught three Oregon schoolteachers a new lesson in irony - or tragedy - Thursday night when his campaign removed them from a Bush speech and threatened them with arrest simply for wearing t-shirts that said Protect Our Civil Liberties..."

Bend.com: Teachers' T-shirts bring Bush speech ouster. [via Jack Bog]

William Gibson is blogging again.

Here are 16 photos from my trip—Yosemite Oct. 2004.

My friend Jake just let me know that he was in Yosemite this last weekend too. He posted some great photos from his trip.

I just got back from a quick trip to one of my favorite places, Yosemite National Park. Not only was I in one of the most beautiful spots in the world, I was away from politics, TV, and the web—and it was good. I have a mountain of photos to sift through, and I'll be posting some. I couldn't decide which one to post first, so I just grabbed the first photo I took on the drive into Yosemite Valley.

Evan is leaving Blogger (Google).

An article I wrote for O'Reilly Network is up: Hacking Books with Safari Web Services. You can get book catalog info via Amazon's API, but Safari's API is the first to make some of the contents of books available to developers. The article is about creating RSS feeds with the Safari API to track what offline books are saying about specific technologies.

If you're in Oregon you only have eight days left to register to vote. The deadline is October 12th. It only takes a few minutes, and then you get to brag for four years that you didn't vote for the guy who won. If you don't vote, you don't get to talk about politics with anyone, ever. Those are the rules as I understand them. You can register in Oregon here. If you're somewhere else, check out Jason's Voters Information Guide for the 2004 US Election to find out how you can register.

Last night I finished Foucault's Pendulum. It's been on my bookshelf for years, but I have a tough time reading fiction—especially something this long. So I feel like this is a good accomplishment, and fiction may not be a lost cause for me after all. One thing that was really disappointing though, was that the plot was revealed in the summaries of the book. If you read what the book is about on Amazon, or even on the book jacket, they give away the last 100 pages. So I knew what the preceeding 400 pages were leading up to. The surface-level plot wasn't the best part of the book, but I was still curious about how the main character got into his predicament laid out in the first chapter, and that was the structure holding the book together as the story moved to different points in time. So throughout the book I felt that I knew more than I should while I was reading. I guess that's why if there's a movie I really want to see I'll do everything I can to avoid reviews and previews because I want to be in the experience rather than aware of it. Anyway, that aside, it's a great book that demonstrates the complete flexibility of truth, meaning, and history—and that's all you need to know going in. Now, on to the nonfiction books that have been piling up on my "to read" list.

I recently told a reporter from The State in South Carolina that weblogs are like a "global bowling league". It made sense at the time. ;) TheState: Blogs across America.

The past week or so on Metafilter, Matt has had a note about registering to vote at the top of every comments page. You can disable the notice by clicking a link saying you're already registered—this sets a cookie to let the MeFi server know the note shouldn't be displayed for you anymore. It's very simple, and if ads are going to fund the web (grumble) why not try commercial click-vanishing ads like this? I bet people would be willing to click on ads at sites they frequent if they know that doing so will make the ad disappear for a limited time. It would be easier for readers than blocking the image server, or using other technical tricks to defeat ads, advertisers could get more click-throughs, and both sides could acknowledge openly that ads are annoying. With click-vanishing ads I'd see them and think, "hmm, there's another ad. Better click it to get rid of it."