Rough Drafts

One of the minor irritations of being an adoptive parent is the probing, too-personal questions that strangers feel like they’re entitled to ask you. I usually find these questions easy to deflect, but some parents get really upset by them. So, if you’re an adoptive parent and you get angered by the

The similarities between YouTube and Napster are uncanny. Copyright-infringing content, sudden popularity, a seeming direct connection to the pulse of popular youth culture, scandals, a San Mateo address. (I’m not the first one to notice this.) But the similarities run deeper. YouTube is architectur

I love the loud jazzy text-movies of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, which has been around for a few years and continues to produce funny, engaging new works in the same vein. Granted, their use of Flash technology doesn’t sound like a recipe for entertainment: words flash on-screen in stark black

I’ve been having a hell of a time getting Technorati to recognize the “haiku” tags I add to every original poem posted on tinywords, the haiku site I publish. I’ve tried everything I can think of: tinywords is a registered blog on Technorati, every haiku carries an internal “haiku” tag link as well

Guess again: The #1 video sharing site is Yahoo Video, followed by MySpace Videos, with YouTube in the #3 spot. That’s according to numbers from MediaMetrix published by Erick Schonfeld. Of course, with 16.1 million monthly visitors to Yahoo’s 21.1 million, YouTube is not far behind at all — and it’

Recording phone interviews is relatively simple: Get an $18 mini recorder control from Radio Shack and plug one end into your phone, the other end into your tape recorder. But what if you’re doing the interview on Skype? Hot Recorder ($15) seems like a slick solution, and it works, up to a point. Yo

The Haiku Apprentice, by Abigail Friedman (Stone Bridge Press, $15), is both a gentle introduction to the art of haiku and a charming travelogue. The author was a diplomat in the U.S. Foreign Service, serving in Japan, when she stumbled upon a haiku-writing group. The book describes how she was welc

411 directory assistance calls are one of the biggest ripoffs of the mobile phone world: they cost between $1.20 and $1.75 per call, plus airtime charges. In contrast, a service like Google SMS will cost you at most 20-50 cents in text messaging charges — and you can get 3 listings per request inste

Just for fun I thought I’d make a list of paired words and phrases that exhibit obvious (and opposing) rhetorical slants: global warming – climate crisis illegal alien – undocumented worker low budget – lean liberal – progressive muckraker – investigative reporter blogger – citizen journalist mainst

The “long tail” is digerati shorthand for the the increasing profitability of companies’ backlists–the formerly neglected niche products that used to be kept in stock just in case one of them suddenly turned into a breakout hit, or because they were simply necessary to have a fully-stocked store. No

Just for kicks, and because AdBrite has such cute branding, I decided to check out its advertising network. I’ve been using Google AdSense for awhile (and just got my first $100 check from it last month, woo hoo) but I’m open to alternatives, especially if they stand a chance of making me a little d

When I was a kid, the more gears your bike had, the cooler it was. Yet San Francisco is just crawling with single-speed bikes. On closer inspection, I found that many of these bikes don’t even have coaster brakes–they’ve got direct-drive chains. As long as the wheels are turning, the crank is turnin