Last year (almost to the day!) I decided that I was going to quit blogging for awhile. A few months later, I returned. Perhaps the same will hold true this time around, but I’m just not feeling like the blog is doing it for me lately.

I can be found on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Thanks for reading, and so it goes.

[Jeffrey Zeldman] Our personal sites, once our primary points of online presence, are becoming sock drawers for displaced first-person content. We are witnessing the disappearance of the all-in-one, carefully designed personal site containing professional information, links, and brief bursts of frequently updated content to which others respond via comments. Did I say we are witnessing the traditional personal site’s disappearance? That is inaccurate. We are the ones making our own sites disappear.

Back in 2001, I started writing content to The Furrygoat Experience for two reasons: First, I wanted a have a place to share interesting links or news items - I figured if I was muddling around with something like building a home theater, playing with embedded devices, working on interesting projects while I was at Microsoft, etc., someone else must be interested in the same thing. Second, I wanted a place to drop little nuggets of information so I wouldn’t have them all over the place - links on my desktop, random emails, etc. In other words, this site was a ‘backup brain‘.

But what happened?

It’s 2008, and as Jeffrey (and Chris Pirillo) point out, the ‘decentralized me’ is taking place - personal content is being strewn all over the Internet. My personal ‘vanity’ site is becoming just that - a placeholder for my online presence and the occasional post, while my live day-to-day content is pushed regularly between YouTube, Flickr, FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Upcoming, Delicious, etc.

Now, that’s all great, but I’m not sure how I feel about this yet.

On one hand, each site is dedicated to a specific set of functionality, and for it’s particular feature-category (photo-sharing, videos, events, etc), they usually do a fairly good job of managing and aggregating data.

On the other, it drives me nuts to have all of my ’stuff’ all over the place. Perhaps its some basic instinct, but I like to have a centralized place where all my “stuff” is (which is why I have the blog).

Of course, this feeling (obviously shared by others) is what has lead to the rise of the latest Internet craze - the ‘lifestream aggregator‘ class of sites. Great - another website to manage a bunch of websites I have managing my stuff. It’s a never ending cycle, and feels like we’re in a constant pattern when it comes to our data: expand, contract, expand, contract, expand, contract. Lather, rinse and repeat.

Now, I know this can’t be a storage problem - I have over 600gb of free space on my Dreamhost account, with most of the space being unused today. Perhaps it’s just a simplicity problem - it’s a lot easier for me to quickly push some status update to Twitter, or publish a video on YouTube without having to worry about video transcoding, finding a viewer that works cross platform, etc.

Anyways - its interesting times.

Sometimes, it’s the little things that make you happy. For me, it’s always been when Rainier Cherries make their debut in the local stores signaling the beginning of summer.

While I’ve always thought heading down to Pike Place Market and picking them up is a better deal (and more fun), having them available in the local QFC is just downright convenient. This summer, the contest will be to see which is more expensive: gas prices per gallon, or cherries by the pound.

Right now, cherries are slighty more expensive at $4.99/lb, local gas is at $4.41/gallon for regular.

I bet this flips by July 4.

Brought to you by Where the Hell is Matt?

Direct link to video

While I agree with the key points that Nancy Duarte of Duarte Design makes about presenting (knowing your audience, usage of images and fonts, etc), I feel that it’s my duty to point out that while I really enjoyed it, my wife fell asleep while watching An Inconvenient Truth.

Ya know, the new Clone Wars movie may actually turn out to be pretty cool.

[TV Squad] I’m convinced they were parodying the Legion of Doom’s methodology from the Challenge of the Super Friends which ran from 1978 to 1979 on ABC. Their simple goal was stated in the opening credits: the conquest of the Universe, with a subordinate goal of the destruction of the Super Friends. They failed every time, and I think that’s partially due to poor planning.

As I read through today’s headlines on Techmeme and Technorati, peruse my social networks and tweet my life away, I can’t help this overwhelming feeling that all of these Web 2.0 companies have business plans that are no more credible than the Legion of Doom’s plan to ‘travel back in time to prevent the most powerful Super Friends from existing’.

Where have all the software companies gone? Does anyone make products any more?

Perhaps Tyler Durden is right: “Only after disaster can we be resurrected“.

Coincidentally, my neighbor decided to put in a sprinkler system this week. I wonder if all that digging and noise (there was a concrete slab they jack hammered) in their yard sent those little creeps straight back into mine.

Looks like an early morning run over to Home Depot to pick up some weapons to help me in this seemingly never-ending fight is in order.

As usual, the pre-WWDC Apple predictions and hype is now in full force, so I thought I’d throw my own in.

Here it goes: I predict that I will buy whatever iPhone or iTablet is announced.

(Photography: ‘6strings‘, creative commons license)

I’m somewhat of a pack-rat when it comes to old email.

While I don’t keep every deleted and sent item (unlike others I know), I have a pretty good archive of email that dates back until early 1998 in several Outlook PST files. Over time, I’ve found that keeping interesting links, documents, conversations, etc., in mail is one of the best ways store and easily find information. Using IMAP, it’s also a great way to keep things automatically synchronized between my mail ‘access points’: phone, laptop, web.

Additionally, the folder metaphor for mail organization broke down for me a long time ago - Now I just keep everything in a folder by year, and keep my Inbox relatively empty. Who cares how messages are organized? Using mail’s built in search (especially Spotlight) enables me to find things way faster than just looking around for a mail in a specific location. David Gelernter wrote (thanks to Michael for the link):

“If you have three pet dogs, give them names. If you have 10,000 head of cattle, don’t bother. Nowadays the idea of giving a name to every file on your computer is ridiculous.”

While talking about file systems, the same applies to mail.

Now that I’m on a Mac, having all that data locked up in .PST files left me with only one choice to move them forward: Using Outlook under Fusion, I cracked open those old dusty archives and dragged them into year ‘folders’ on my IMAP server. The process was incredibly easy, now I have to deal with a few winmail.dat files (TNEF Enough looks like it should do the trick).

What am I going to do with all that data? Frankly, I have no idea. It’s nice having it around and easily accessible, and it makes interesting reading to see what you were thinking about 8-10 years ago. Although, I think it’s safe to delete that Costco renewal email from 2000…

[ValleyWag] Want to see Paris Hilton’s MySpace profile? How about Lindsay Lohan’s? Don’t worry about those pesky privacy settings. Thanks to “data portability,” a faddish technology movement that the Valley has been buzzing about for months, you can see any profile you want on MySpace.

Security between two endpoints is as only as strong as the weakest link.

While users should naturally demand and expect privacy, we live in a world of the social network du-jour. Now, I’m not saying that data portability shouldn’t be blamed or that users shouldn’t feel comfortable living in the world of the ‘cloud’, but users really do need to become more aware about the hazards of being online. They shouldn’t be so giving of their personal information and publishing private details to every social network under the sun. The only way to guarantee that it doesn’t go all over the internet is not to put it there in the first place.

For some odd reason, IT 24-7’s head reminds me of another famous Microsoft legend.

We received your application for an ISSN. The resource named on your application appears to be a personal blog. According to international ISSN assignment policy personal web pages and personal blogs are out of scope for ISSN.

For additional information, please go to the following website: http://www.issn.org/en/node/327

Thank you for your interest in the ISSN.

Bummer.