Rough Drafts

You’ve Got PayMail AOL has announced plans to charge for sending some e-mail, in hopes of curtailing spam. But skeptics aren’t buying it. By Dylan Tweney, for Technology Review

I’ll be covering/moblogging O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conference in San Diego next week, for Wired News. If you’ll be at the conference, drop me a line and let me know how to get in touch with you during the show. My email address is on my contact page. UPDATE 3/6: You’ll find my blog entries o

From our seats at the very top of the balcony the dancers, in their brightly-colored pants and tank tops, looked as small and unreal as fairies. “Can I pick them up?” Clara whispered to me. We went to see the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater perform in Berkeley last night. It was an amazing dance

Career columnist Penelope Trunk has a great idea in her column this week: The caffeine nap. Drink a cup of coffee, then immediately take a short 15-minute nap. By the time you’re done napping, the caffeine is kicking in and you can wake up quickly, alert and refreshed.

Aerogel is the world’s lightest solid — and also the most porous. I’ve got a story on Wired News this morning that explains all about this really cool material, how it was used in NASA/JPL’s recent Stardust mission, and how some companies are commercializing the stuff. This story was really fun to w

I’ve got not one, but two stories about search engines appearing today. Here Comes a Google for Coders, on Wired News, talks about a startup search engine called Krugle, which will let programmers find source code and documentation online. Krugle debuted last week at Demo. My story adds some details

Dear Steve Jobs: Next time you update the iPod and iTunes, can you please make the music styles listed in the equalization settings the same as the default music styles listed in the “Genre” field for each song? That way my iPod could automatically adjust the EQ based on the genre of each song. It [

From underneath the dragon, the Chinese New Year parade in San Francisco is a fast, loud, and exciting event. Children scream and reach their hands up for the lower edge of the dragon as we sweep it over their heads. Keeping up with the runner in front of you takes concentration. Sometimes, around a

PowerPoint really is evil. (from Presentation Zen, via Zawodny)

I’ve temporarily put my haiku site, tinywords, on hold. (Apology here.) During the break, I’d like to fix some nagging technical issues with the site. Top of the list: Find a mailing list manager to replace Mailman. I’m looking for suggestions. Mailman’s good points: Free. Mailman’s bad points: Exce

Chronicles of Narnia is a pretty good movie, with some truly beautiful visual effects (especially those to do with snow, fur, and talking animals). But Tilda Swinton as the White Witch is an awesome villain, maybe one of the greats — right up there with Darth Vader and Khan. I was cheering for her t

When you install iTunes for Windows, it defaults to the setting that automatically keeps your iPod in sync with your iTunes library. That means if your computer doesn’t have much music on it, and you plug in an iPod that you’d topped off with music from another computer, all the music on your iPod w