(in other news, just installed leopard. some bits driving me crazy — translucent menus are the dumbest idea ever — but other bits are nice. seems snappy.)

Okay, the good news is that we don’t actually have moles in our front yard. The medium-to-bad news is that we have gophers. Or, rather, gopher (singular), we think. A new piece of home lawn care trivia: moles present as big mounds of dirt in your front yard. Gophers present as a gradual & widening area of dead grass and soft spots in your lawn. And moles are carnivores, looking for grubs & such, while gophers are vegetarians, only hoping to eat the roots of all the plant life that you love.

Somehow I’m comforted by the thought that it’s a gopher and not moles, and not just because I feel an affinity with Bill Murray now. Somehow moles seem incredibly alien & unknowable to me, while gophers seem more like your friendly mammal-next-door.

All the same, my favorite gopher is a dead gopher, at least in the vicinity of my front yard, so we’ve set a trap for the critter, so we’ll see how it goes. (Yes, I know that this is an incredibly unhip and unfriendly post to write on Blog Action Day, but it’s eating my yard, man. Gotta get this fixed. FWIW, our “mole guy” is a super-smart & friendly entomologist from UCSC who’s found that Silicon Valley types (and Woodside folks in particular) are happy to pay $55 per critter for removal.)

Great, great book. I didn’t really mean to read this — but I was at Logan a couple of weeks ago with nothing to read (a very strange happenstance for me), and this was the best thing I could find to read at the bookstore there. I’m really happy I picked it up — fantastic look at why Americans eat the way we do, how food gets to us, and some of the implications of living the way that we do. 3 sections: (1) the industrial food chain, (2) organic (both industrial organic and local organic), and (3) hunting & gathering.

The book is full of little tidbits that I didn’t really know — things like how “super-sizing” came to exist, that we didn’t have high fructose corn syrup until 1980, and how morels appear in forests following fires as a crisis defense mechanism.

But also full of major themes like why corn completely, totally dominates our food chain (and it does in ways that are much more pervasive than I really thought). And the ethics of meat eating. (For the author, he ultimately decided he thinks there’s nothing particularly wrong with the philosophy of eating meet, but there’s much wrong with the practice of how we do it today.

Anyway, lots and lots of great insights here and things to think about — has already affected the way that I notice the world around me. And has made me a little ill every time I think of all the corn I’m eating now. (It’s everywhere!)

This is a special opportunity, I think. I joined Mozilla 2 years ago when we were just 15 or so folks, and my title was Business Development lead — even though we didn’t really know what it meant. But in the 2 years since then, I’ve been fortunate to be part of something unique & great — the growth of Mozilla.  FWIW, I had only generic business/entrepreneurial background before joining to do BD — but was able to work with Chris Beard, Mitchell Baker and others here to build something of an ecosystem of partners, and to help make our economics more sustainable.

At PCF, there’s a similar type of opportunity — but even more at the ground floor — the opportunity is to figure out open video from the beginning, and to mix the business, open source, and non-profit angles all together.

If you’re interested in making sure that the future of video on the web stays open, I’d encourage you to take a look.

There’s the basic emotion of thinking back to when I read Tolkein for the first time — read my parents’ old editions of them, naturally — and it was fun to discover this whole new world that Mom & Dad already knew about. Same for CS Lewis.  And that stuff is awesome — I can’t really wait. Kathy & I already love helping Sam as he develops his sense of humor.

But the collateral effect is that I found myself often wondering about what it was that JK was trying to communicate — what she was trying to help her readers understand.  So I really started appreciating some of the things she was trying to do, and appreciating her craft more than I had done previously.  That’s a pretty tremendous gift that I’ve gotten from Sam already — and has applicability far beyond just Harry Potter or even books.

It’s also fun to think about the characters that we all grow up with — the people and places and ideas that become part of growing up, learning how the world works, learning who we are. I think about the persistent characters in my life — Bilbo & Frodo Baggins, Gollum, Darth Vader, Kermit the Frog, Big Bird, Animal, Aslan, Winnie the Pooh — and wonder which ones Sam will know & care about — which ones will be real for him. Maybe Elmo and Bob the Builder and SpongeBob and Harry Potter — who knows. But I’m excited to find out.

but my first thoughts are these:

1) keynote is mostly the same. the auto-alpha stuff is going to be really, really handy for cleaning up graphics

2) pages seems to have been considerably de-sucked. in fact, it may not actually suck anymore, although i’m not prepared to pronounce it non-sucking. word processing mode is a huge leap forward, if not actually an innovation, and change tracking looks like it works (and it looks beautiful, fwiw)

3) numbers is going to take some time to get my head around. i *think* it’s a spreadsheet that’s more about communicating than figuring, but we’ll see. the expressiveness there is shockingly good, and, as usual, it looks fantastic.

anyway, more soon. this release is going to be a little brutal for the Mac BU of Microsoft.

(i still would really like these rich client apps to auto-save to something like Google Apps on the server side.)

I have a feeling that it’s going to cause a very funny consequence — I think that all sorts of software/hardware vendors are going to start making their UIs flickable, flingable, draggable — and, very often, in incredibly inappropriate ways. Sort of like when everyone thought that “drag and drop” was always appropriate for everything, when sometimes it just wasn’t (isn’t).

Anyway, after 3 weeks, I have a high level of attachment to the iPhone. I’m about to get on a plane to London, and will need to switch back to my Blackberry Pearl — more about that in a posting soon — and already I’m feeling a little sad about it.

Couple of days delayed, but the very good folks at the Participatory Culture Foundation have just relaunched the awesome Democracy Player as Miro! They’re on preview releases now, and just about ready to release 1.0.

For anyone who’s interested in high quality video online, it’s something you should check out. Great stuff, with even some bonus Mozilla juice baked in.

[I'm very proud to be on the Board of Directors of PCF.]

yesterday was like that for me — spent most of it up in San Francisco, where the weather was glorious — but mostly I met a few new & interesting people, spent time with some old friends, worked on some things with folks I really get along with well, made a bunch of progress at work, and even wished one of my very best friends a happy 40th birthday. ended & topped off, of course, by making it home in time to put SPL into bed (he’s in a great mood lately (always) and exploding with new language) and spend time with Kathy.

some days are just like that. pretty great.

Hmmm… There seems to be a bug where I can’t see all my tags, so this one will be uncategorized for a while.

I’m finding it both harder to really understand how I feel about time lately, and easier to just enjoy its passing. Yesterday was a rocky day, with the aforementioned naplessness — and SPL subsequently falling asleep in my arms when we walked around the block later. But after a short nap & dinner, the two of us just kicked around the backyard, throwing the frisbee & kicking the soccer ball — and time could have stood still, for all I noticed. It was just a sweet, carefree bit of experience we shared — the type of time that I’m learning to appreciate more & more.

Another essay by Murakami in the New York Times this weekend is great — it talks about how he writes like jazz.  My favorite bit of the interview is Murakami quoting great jazz pianist Thelonious Monk:

One of my all-time favorite jazz pianists is Thelonious Monk. Once, when someone asked him how he managed to get a certain special sound out of the piano, Monk pointed to the keyboard and said: “It can’t be any new note. When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are there already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound different. You got to pick the notes you really mean!”

Fanastic. If you mean a note enough, it will sound different. I’ve always felt that something was different in great works — Murakami’s especially — and maybe this is it — the intensity of meaning, of nuance.

After Dark is good so far, but not my favorite. It takes place in the midnight-to-morning hours of Tokyo after the trains have stopped running. Sorta like Murakami’s “Eyes Wide Shut.” We’ll see how the 2nd half goes.