Just finished watching several episodes of Alton Brown's Feasting on Asphalt, where he and a small crew travel America, off the highways, eating only locally made food (that is, nothing corporately processed or prepared).

It's amazing, watching someone passionately committed to a concept—real, carefully-prepared food—delivering on it. It's quirky and risky; you never know how it'll turn out. But the food is usually excellent.

Risks are worth it. It's inspired me to think more about my risks.

I'm also re-evaluating my routines and plans and such. After a productive Monday, and feeling a little ill today, I'm looking at my work and asking myself:

1. Is this really helping humanity?
2. How do I feel about it?
3. What can I reframe to be more powerful, effective, useful, etc.?

Questions worth asking, I think.

Back from a weekend retreat with some church high schoolers.

I won't bore you with the details, and will instead go straight to the conclusions: I learned that efforts to meet new people are usually worthwhile. And when they aren't, it's very clear and you can move right along. I learned not to trust second-hand information. I learned that the best way to meet folks in a large group is to attend one of their special functions. I learned that a true retreat is one which removes you from your routine permanently.

So I'm planning to revise my routine tomorrow morning.

Twitter, Twhirl, and FriendFeed

I've been using these three technologies for about a week now, and I definitely have enough experience with them to say that I'm hooked. Not massively so, but I'm using them.

Twitter is basically a group IM client in a website. You join, and add all your friends on the service. You and your friends' posts are all displayed together, chronologically, just like IMs. But it's a semi-permanent record; you can glance down the list, see someone's note, and quickly reply. And all your friends see your reply and can join in.

But Twitter's a website. Twhirl packages that up into a desktop IM client (Windows and Mac). Twhirl works exactly like an IM client. So you can have an ongoing conversation with your friends, over the course of days.

Now consider FriendFeed, which aggregates all your friends' Twitter, Digg, del.icio.us, YouTube, etc. messages, along with the ability to vote and comment on each entry. It's like a mini-forum for everyone's activity.

So Twhirl gives you a 24-hour chat channel with all your friends, and FriendFeed gives you a 24-hour forum with all your friends. For free.

FYI, I'll be at a retreat this weekend that has no cellphone or internet coverage, so I'll be completely out of touch for Saturday and most of Sunday.

Went and saw Iron Man. No, I'm not going to review it, except to say I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I do want to point out the benefits of having Jon Favreau directing. He got started in Hollywood by witing Swingers and directing Elf. He's a comedy and drama director.

This gives him great respect for dialogue. The actors sound like they're realling talking to each other, instead of intoning lines.

And the movie moves. Many action movies suffer from an uneven "suspension bridge" structure, where the action scenes are the towers and everything else is suspension cables. You spend most of the movie on suspension cables, waiting for the next good part.

Not so Iron Man; everything besides the action is kept interesting enough—funny, well-acted—to keep you watching.

Indie film directors can't afford to make a bad film. So give them a solid property that they like, and you'll get a solid film.

A recent chart posted by cnet shows that Facebook apps are primarily used "just for fun." And there have been a number of blog posts lately (particularly The problem with Facebook) which trash Facebook, saying that the site is effectively pointless and not worth any money.

Allow me to step forward in defense of Facebook.

I know people who spend a lot of time on Facebook. Who use those silly little apps. And who are looking at the ads.

Granted, the apps haven't figured out how to make money yet. Same was true of the web circa 1995; lots of websites, most of them look-at-my-cat pages, and almost nobody was making money yet. It took a little time.

This is like complaining that Penny Arcade is useless and worthless because of its silly humor. Doesn't matter; it can still make money.

R. Buckminster Fuller:

The things to do are: the things that need doing: that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will coneive of your own way of doing that which needs to be done—that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual. Try making experiments of anything you conceive and are intensely interested in. Don't be disappointed if something doesn't work. That is what you want to know—the truth about everything—and then the truth about combinations of things. Some combinations have such logic and integrity that they can work coherently despite non-working elements embraced by their system. You will find the world responding to your earnest initiative.

Wrote 2,500 words of tutorials for Your Online Life, my next major venture. Not bad. But I need to write at a much faster pace if I want to get this site done by Friday.

I'm worried that I'm over-reaching myself. I've started to look at other money-making opportunities, too. I may have to supplement my income with some web-based consulting work; anyone have any recommendations for good websites?

Meanwhile, I'm advertising my tutoring services on Craig's List. We'll see what happens, won't we?

Back from another great trip to see Saalon and LWQuestie (their IRC names, to presere anonymity). We watched Hard Boiled, which is certainly the best John Woo film I've seen. Though granted, I've only seen another, A Better Tomorrow.

Came back and been watching cheesy sci-fi films from the 1950's and 60's. Most are oddly earnest. They want to be true to themselves, despite the incoherent plots and poor editing.

But, for example, the one I"m watching right now features the classic slow-motion iguana as a dinosaur. Was this convincing at any point after Flash Gordon?

Toffee Bars:

Combine a pound of light brown sugar and a pound (four sticks) of butter until light and fluffy. Add two egg yolks and 1.5 teaspoons of vanilla; mix well. While it mixes, sprinkle in a pound of flour and half a teaspoon of salt. Spread this mixture in a well-greased 8.5"x11" pan, and bake at 350 degrees for half an hour, until the bars are golden brown.

Meanwhile, chop up four ounces of walnuts or pecans, and get out a bag of milk chocolate chips. When the pan comes out of the oven, sprinkle most of the bag of chocolate chips onto the bars, wait a few minutes, and spread the melting chocolate evenly. Sprinkle with the chopped nuts. Cut into rectangles before it's completely cooled.

Half a bag of chocolate chips creates a thin layer of chocolate; a full bag creates a very thick layer.

Try not to eat them all in one sitting.

Long, good day. Finished copying some BBC Radio productions from old audio cassettes to MP3. Wonderful to have technology that does all this quickly and easily. Of course, that's ignoring the hours I spent setting up that technology.

It's odd. I'm still without a full-time job, and I feel none of the gnawing dread I expected. I know I can't keep this up forever, of course, but I've got months before I need to worry, and I'm not worrying. I'm just chugging along with various projects.

Not as many projects as perhaps I should, though how many "should" I do? I've been gardening and drawing and cooking and designing RPG adventures. Some work on potentially paying gigs, but...geez, why not enjoy my life? I could have a heart attack tomorrow.

Funny, that; I keep defending my lack of "productive" behavior. Shouldn't need to. This is my life.

Which makes it tough to blog sometimes. What do I really need to tell the world? Aren't my actions enough?

A local Asian bistro organizes its flow of people in a way I don't think I've seen before.

You enter on the left side of the restaurant. Along the left wall are giant menus, so while you're waiting you can choose your food. The menu is made up of proteins and sauces, so you choose, say, "chicken" along with "sweet and sour sauce." In front of you, in the corner, is a counter where you order your food and pay for it. You're then given a large red disk with a number on it, along with your drinks.

Next to the counter, and along the back wall, is the kitchen, separated from the rest of the restaurant by a low wall. So you can see the food as it's being prepared.

The rest of the bistro is made up of tables. Each table has a cylinder with chopsticks in it, and in the center is a thin pole with a clip at the top. You find a table, sit down, and clip your red disk here. When your order is ready, it's brought directly to your table.

This is admirably efficient. The restaurant needs only one server; you take your own drinks to your table, so the server's only job is to take food to tables. There's no need to print up menus, either.

The problem is cultural dissonance. You walk in, and there's nobody to guide you. You stand in a line next to a giant menu, then you get up to a counter where you're expected to remember your combination of protein and sauce. Then you're handed a disk and told to go sit down.

This is uncomfortable for a first-time visitor, and nothing will make it seem familiar. Even after the food has been delivered, the visitor will still remember the discomfort of ordering. The logic of it won't erase the emotional feeling.

It rarely does.

Just finished a very fun dinner party at my house, just my parents and a friend. If you ever need a business manager, hire Julie Brown. (If she had a blog, I'd link to it.)

These dinner parties are fun and interesting. The idea: I want to get interesting people together. My ideal would be to have each participant say during a conversation a week from now, "Oh, yeah, I was talking to someone who does that at a party a few days ago. Lemme call Brent and get her number."

Heck, I know plenty of people. And I know that because I sat down and wrote out all my contacts. Wouldn't it be nice to put 'em together and see what happens?

I'm beginning to think that the hardest part about teaching (for me, at least, right now) is figuring out where to start so that the student(s) will understand. What do you assume that the student knows?

You can't know what that student knows when they walk into the classroom, or signs up for a course. Even if they took another course, how much did they learn?

Does this mean that you should define rigorous prerequisites, and hold students to them?

I prefer that the instructor provide a lot of "catch-up" material for students who don't understand the assumed fundamentals. Have a few handouts for those who may not have fully grasped everything you need them to know.

Not that hard.

Here's the arcade game cabinet, which I've dubbed "The Machine":

And here's the full list of games I have installed and running on it:

• Asteroids
• Battle Zone
• Centipede
• Castlevania (original)
• Contra
• Defender
• Dig Dug
• Donkey Kong
• Donkey Kong Jr.
• Donkey Kong 3
• Frogger
• Galaga
• Golden Axe
• Gorf
• Heavy Barrel
• Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
• Joust
• The King of Dragons (Golden Axe clone, but very very good)
• Lunar Lander
• Macross Plus (vertical shooter)
• Mega Man
• Mega Man 2
• Mega Man 3
• Missle Command
• Mobile Suit Gundam (Street Fighter clone)
• Mobile Suit Gundam EX Revue (better Street Fighter clone)
• Ms. Pac-Man
• Q*bert
• Rampage
• Shinobi
• Sinistar
• Sonic the Hedgehog
• Space Fury
• Star Wars
• Street Fighter II: The World Warrior
• Super Gem Fighter Mini Mix (cutesy versions of various beat-em-up games fight each other)
• Super Spacefortress Macross (vertical shooter)
• Super Spacefortress Macross II (side-scrolling shooter)
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - Turtles in Time
• Tempest
• Tron
• X-Men (four-playing side-scrolling beat-em-up)
• X-Men: Children of the Atom (Street Fighter clone)
• Xybots (technologically amazing first-person game)
• Zaxxon

Yeah, I'm having fun with it. Play every day. Now I just need to get a marquee and side art. And coin slots (that wouldn't require coins). And install lighting for the marquee.

Inspired by Brennen's entry, here are my most frequently-entered commands:

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf \
"%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}' |sort -rn|head
216	./die
97	vi
38	cd
34	ls
17	su
15	./generate_homepage.py
14	./upload.sh
11	b
9	apachectl
6	ftp

"die" rolls dice, which I've used a lot for role-playing. "b" opens my blog in vi. So, what does this say? I've rolled a lot of dice and edited a lot of files, I suppose.

In other news, the arcade game cabinet is done. Loaded with several dozen games, and sitting in a corner of my living room. Every day or two, I load up Galaga or Battle Zone and blow off a little steam.

Amazing little games. Beautiful designs.

No question, I'm enjoying my time off. I scheduled a few major projects today, but the weather was so gorgeous I finally decided to stop and enjoy it. And after a couple hours of sitting in the garden, a glass of iced tea in one hand and a book in the other, I got to work painting. So it all worked out.

Then held a Skypecast with a compatriot from Accidental Creative, and sat back and watched DVDs. I'm nearing the end of Overman King Gainer, an anime mecha series with fantastic character development. And I watched an entire classic "Doctor Who" miniseries, "The Genesis of the Daleks."

I've been a long time coming around to Doctor Who. I forced myself to watch bits and pieces on PBS during my teens, mainly because of the size of its fanbase. There was some good writing and acting, on occasion, but it was mostly pure cheese.

Then I got used to it. I realized that the cheese was okay. I could enjoy it, and/or look past it. I found that Doctor Who excels at adventurous SF. It's a bit like the Republic serials; sure, the sets are cardboard. That's not the point.

Last night, after watching a bunch of videos from TED, I had two revelations:

One: I need to cut my active creative projects down to two (one primary, one alternate).

Two: I need to play every day.