Rough Drafts

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

I’ve been listening to Ry Cooder’s album Chavez Ravine for about half a year now. It’s an amazing album — an impressionistic, lively, even danceable historical tour through the Chavez Ravine neighborhood of Los Angeles — a predominantly Mexican neighborhood that was bulldozed in the 1950s to make ro

Set among the servants and masters in a huge, old Irish castle during World War II, this is a masterfully-written, very modern, short novel (published 1945) with beautiful, restrained description and pitch-perfect dialogue. There’s very little interiority–you almost never learn what the characters a

Seven years ago, I started a company called Utipia with two other people: a fellow journalist, and a talented developer who happened to be my brother. We wrote a business plan, raised some money from friends and family, incorporated, and built a working demo to show how our clever content could be c

My story on the Sony Reader and the e-book market is the lead story on Wired News this morning. Check it out! Wired News: Screening the Latest Bestseller Electronic books have traditionally gone straight from the manufacturer to the remainders bin — but the market has never gone away entirely, despi

Bound to Please, by Michael Dirda What can I say? I haven’t felt this transformed by a collection of essays since I read Jeffrey Steingarten’s first book, The Man Who Ate Everything. Like Steingarten, Dirda has an infectious enthusiasm for his topic (for Dirda it’s literature, instead of food); an i