onfocus

Life in Roratonga: "When we tell our new landlord that we'd like to move into her house, she slowly gets up from the garden she's tending to and asks us what day it is. Then she asks which month."

O'Reilly put up some beta Amazon hacks from the book of the same name. These hacks haven't been through the entire editing process, so they're a little rough around the edges (hence, beta). Each hack (all separate PDFs) also has a complete table of contents, so you can get an idea of what's in the whole book. (Did I mention you can pre-order on Amazon? ;)

mistimed jump

An indpendent Amazon developer is keeping his eyes on the developer discussion board at Amazon and highlighting the good stuff on his site. [via the AWS Newsletter] This is cool, but it would be even better as a frequently updated weblog.

weblogs.com hasn't updated since 11:45 this morning. Which means Weblog Bookwatch and ORblogs aren't updating properly. (And a bunch of other services around the Web, I bet.)

Meg has a great idea for revitalizing tourism to Niagra Falls. Another way to improve tourism would be scheduling "natural flow" days at different times of the year where they open the dam a bit and bring the water flow back to its pre-dam volume. It would be a spectacular sight to see. In fact, people are trying to restore the flow. (Though I'm not sure how actively, because that page is out of date.) They could also go the other way and have "no flow" days where they let people see the rocks underneath the falls. (They did this once for research.) Though both of these may take away from the fact that Niagra Falls is a "natural" wonder because people would see firsthand that we control the amount of water rushing over the edge. Of course the least desirable option is to let Pfizer rename the falls for millions of dollars. It's only a one-letter difference—changing the signs would be easy.

If you're going to be anywhere near Portland tomorrow, be prepared to celebrate building the web at Webvisions. I'll be there—learning all I can. (Not sure if they'll have fighting robots, but I don't see why they wouldn't.) Rumor has it there will be wireless access, so I'll try to post what I'm learning.

If you're going to be anywhere near Corvallis this weekend, be prepared to celebrate art, science, and technology at da Vinci Days. I've never experienced them before, but I'm looking forward to it. The film festival looks interesting. And what small town festival would be complete without the traditional fighting robots? Or a giant robot (Juggerbot) destroying appliances? If I remember my history correctly, da Vinci had sketches of giant fighting robots but technology just wasn't ready to build them. So ahead of his time.

cool! Matt started PVRblog—news/how-tos/reviews about TiVos, ReplayTVs, and any other DVRs.

For $195 you can read the Jupiter Research report on using blog software for content management needs. Or for $0 you can read Matt Haughey's Beyond the Blog essay about using Movable Type for more advanced content management.

Dana Milbank at the Washington Post dissects the evasive tactics used by Ari Fleischer in his final meeting with the press. If you're thinking about becoming a public spokesman that has to continually evade subjects in the midst of difficult questions that it would be better not to answer, you may want to see how he does it. [via blargblog]