Next week, I'll be taking a roadtrip in California (after a friend's wedding in Kansas). I need your advice on people to visit and places to see! My friend and I are still quite flexible in our travel plans.

Currently the approximate plan is this:

Sun 7/24: arrive in San Diego

Mon 7/25: San Diego beaches, zoo??

Tue 7/26: drive to San Francisco

Wed 7/27: hang out in SF with Coleman, Jesse

Thu 7/28: more SF: the city, or some Silicon valley, or beaches, Monterey Aquarium, museuems, etc.

Fri 7/29: down to LA; see Jenny in Pasadena and Beth in Santa Monica

Sat 7/30: LA; drive back to SD

Sun 7/31: catch 7:45am flight back to Boston

Offers
of places to sleep and specific non-city things to do along the way
(Napa Valley is intriguing) are especially appreciated. I'd also like to meet some interesting new people, especially some Silicon Valley types who could help me figure out whether or not a geek like me should be living there instead of Boston.

In his book Beyond Fear, security expert Bruce Schneier
writes:

“Slices of life with immediate visual impact get
magnified; those with no visual component, or that can't be immediately and
viscerally comprehended, get downplayed. Rarities and anomalies, like
terrorism, are endlessly discussed and debated, while common risks like
heart disease, lung cancer, diabetes, and suicide are minimized.

“The global reach of today's news further exacerbates this
problem. If a child is kidnapped in Salt Lake City during the summer,
mothers all over the country suddenly worry about the risk to their
children. If there are a few shark attacks in Florida — and a graphic movie
— suddenly every swimmer is worried. (More people are killed every year by
pigs than by sharks, which shows you how good we are at evaluating
risk.)”

One of the things I routinely tell people is that if it's in the news,
don't worry about it. By definition, “news” means that it hardly
ever happens. If a risk is in the news, then it's probably not worth
worrying about. When something is no longer reported — automobile deaths,
domestic violence — when it's so common that it's not news, then you should
start worrying.

(quoted in Crypto-Gram, May
2005)

Schneier points out that watching the news doesn't help us assess risk more
accurately. But this is just one case of our larger, erroneous assumption
that the news is important and relevant. Do you expect someone who reads
the New York Times every day to have a better grip on what's going on
around her? To be more engaged with society? If so, you don't realize quite
how irrelevant the news is.

The news is like broadcast sports: entertainment, not education.
Some people read the news and then debate other people who read similar news
about the meaning and implications of such news. The news serves as a
shared experience, something that is greatly useful in supporting
interaction between people and enabling them to socialize and learn. But
it's still entertainment. In fact, it functions much like professional
sports: for the players and coaches, knowing the range of teams, strategies,
and performance statistics is vital to doing their work; but for most people
it's just a prerequisite to sitting around at lunch, establishing an
allegiance around shared interests, and allowing us to explore our
connections with the people around us, an urge all humans have.

And that's what's really important: your connections with the people
around you. That's where you have power to effect change. Unless you're a
lobbyist or diplomat or close personal friend of Someone Very Important,
your influence over national policy is very, very tiny. Your influence on a
lover, friend, family member, coworker, or neighbor is much higher. Your
potential influence on a new friend, business partner, blog reader, or even
random passerby is also high. Knowledge that supports your relationships
with these people is relevant and important to you, but will never make it
onto TV because it's rarely thrilling, exotic, and novel.

This doesn't mean you're not allowed to care about what countries the US
invades. A lot of that far-away stuff will affect you and those you care
about, especially years and years down the line. But even in those cases,
having an impact requires a social force comprised of many individuals. And
the intimate bonds that foster loyalty and trust come from helping your
buddy fix his broken down car, or sharing a grill-out with friends, or
discussing an interesting book. Nothing fit to print, but damned
important.

I'm not a huge fan of fireworks. Although fire is cool, expanding smiley faces in the sky don't impress me anymore. But when my girlfriend Nicole proposed that we watch the world-class Boston fireworks from a two-person kayak on the Charles river, as close to the launching barge as police would allow, it seemed like the superlative fireworks experience. Besides, even if the fireworks sucked, I'd get to zip around the Charles on a kayak and take some pictures.

We started at Charles River Canoe and Kayak, whose Boston (Brighton) location is about 7 minutes away from my house. We got there kinda late, but not late enough. After waiting in line, indemnifying CRCK from responsibility for our certain deaths, and receiving a quick lesson on how to paddle, we set off into the Charles from their dock.

Kayaking requires a lot of arm and shoulder work. Unlike a canoe, your legs lie straight along the bottom of the kayak, and do nothing except anchor your butt to the plastic seat. But for these drawbacks, you get a fairly fast and maneuverable little boat. A two-person kayak sacrifices some of the speed and maneuverability of the singular variant, but in return you get help with paddling and, depending on where you sit, either the ability to hear your companion's voice or stare at the back of her head.

It's also important to paddle in a coordinated fashion. "Whoever can steer best should be in back, and the person in front sets the pace," they taught us after we selected a $1000 plastic pod to spend the next 5 hours in. After about hour 4.2, I think these lessons clicked in and we mostly went straight and didn't have any jarring paddle collisions. (It turns out the secret is to pay attention to what's going on right in front of you. That was never an issue on the single kayaks I've used before, because mostly you want to look away from the canoes you're ramming as their inhabitants may be tempted to splash you… while they still can.)

On our way to the fireworks barge, I got rather hungry and we came to a live-parking-only dock so I could get a hot dog. The dock was seething with young men and women, in little clusters mostly discernable by shared seating towels and spoken languages. I climbed over them, still wearing my silly little life vest (seriously, the water of the Charles is great stability control) and eventually found the sausage stand. I shuddered as the last tentacles of yuppiedom clasped around my neck, and paid seven dollars yes seven whole American dollars for a sausage with peppers on a bun. Oh well, at least it was a tasty sausage. And I could return to Nicole, who was sitting pretty on a kayak in front of hundreds of increasingly drunk folks ("does that thing have a V-8? heh heh heh"). On the way out, an hispanic guy offered us some seating space and vodka, and it seemed genuinely kind and friendly, harkening to a society and culture where young strangers don't need to be afraid of each other. Of course, we already had better seats planned.

Here's where we planted ourselves: video 1, 3.6MB .avi: In front of the barge.

The fireworks themselves were surreal. Closer than I'd ever been: the explosions filled my entire field of vision, and then some. Shockingly loud. And there we were, floating in the middle of hundreds of thousand of people, paddling backward so the current didn't draw us into the restricted zone. I don't have any more words for it, so instead see video 2, 14.5MB .avi: The most amazing fireworks I've ever seen.

How did it end? Two hours of strenous paddling, strapping a kayak on foam blocks to the roof of my coupe, and 5 hours of sleep before returning the boat and heading to work. In other words, a perfect urban adventure.

link

FinancialContent is using the RSS <category> element as the basis for a spec expressing information useful to financial analysts. Dave says he hasn't seen this approach before, but look at the RSS 2.0 spec, the category element has a stock symbol under a financial news site's domain as an example! So the novel part might be someone actually publishing a spec about this.

This seems like an excellent way to extend RSS. If the form of the <category> element can possibly express what you need, why prevent your feed from being intelligently handled by all the existing category-aware aggregators? Compatibility is courteous.

Brookline by Jonathan Coulton.

Listen to the mp3 and read the lyrics.

link

Check out the recipe visualization at the end of this clam chowder recipe. It compactly combines ingredients, sequence, dependencies, and actions. As someone rightfully quipped, this is how Edward Tufte would do recipes.