Caricatures are mean 

I'm sure that Blaugh.com, the new web comic site, will be a huge hit. The site is slick, cartoons are hot on the net right now, and it seems like Chris Pirillo is a wizard at ideas and making them work.

But! I do so dislike caricatures. They're mean. I know they are an established art form, but it's just plain mean to exaggerate a person's worst features. If somebody ever made one of me I'd want to crawl in a hole and never come out. So I'll have to make sure I never get famous if that's the price.

Johannes > Phillip > Phillip > Adam > Phillip > Adam > Ellis > Vernon > Richard > Me > Adam 

I've been on a blogging binge. I'm going to try to pry myself away and dip into a new book on the 1709 Palatine migration to New York. I got myself interested in it again blogging on July 4 about my dad's family's Mohawk Valley roots.

The 300th anniversary is coming up soon. My folks were in a 2nd or maybe 3rd wave, landing in 1711. I don't generally like canned tours but if somebody packaged one about this I'd do it. It would be neat to create something like the American westward pioneers reality trips. You'd get a group, which would tend to be descendents through self-selection, and have them almost roleplay the series of events, following the trail from the Lower Palatinate to London refugee camps to New York City to the valley. Apparently the first wave of 3,000 immigrants caused some logistical problems in New York, the city's population being only about 5,000 at the time. Imagine that.

(The first Phillip's nickname was "Lipps." My older son, Adam Bellinger [Lastname], is the only person in the world with that name.)

Listened to the Building Bridges session from Bloggercon 

I might post some reactions later. Did that mailing list post-session discussion ever get started?

Give me some blurtback 

Does everyone see my Who Said lit game podcast in the upper left of the Podcast.com page? Or am I still logged in to podcast.com and don't know it. Tell me what you see while I go looking for a cookie.

If it's the former, thanks, Kosso, and that makes me want to reverse my podfading trend. (What would that be called, the opposite of podfading? Podbrightening?) If the latter -- well, there I go blurting ignorance again, but I blame computers for that. Blurting didn't get published in typewriter and quill days. And that's why I think comments are important, to get blurtback.)

Testing something 

My blog is loading slower than other OPML blogs.

Commenting out the activeRenderer iframe first and see if that has an effect.

7/7/06; 7:51:13 AM by A - It does seem spunkier, but it's hard to judge when opml.org is so variable. Now I'll try re-revealing the comments board feed in activeRenderer, but hiding the chat iframe, which is on my hosting account.

7/7/06; 7:56:03 AM by A - I can't tell.

Maybe it's all those embedded mp3s, which will be aging off the page soon. I'll just keep an eye on it.

Such a big deal 

After the news about Rocketboom yesterday, the thrust today seems to be "why is this such a big deal?" (Today, meaning Thursday, I'm writing this just after midnight.) It may be that we latched on to the gossip because the blogosphere is maturing and becoming more like society in general. The stars are rising and falling and we're watching and commenting. Everybody likes truelife stories about change, conflict, mystery, ambition, attractive people, money. It's OK to wallow in it for a bit, I think. I'll start complaining about stories like this dominating the conversation when they drag on like Laci Peterson, but I think internet people are smart enough to get bored and move on when a story goes cold.

Imagine what it will be like when we have the first blogger murder of passion.

Maybe a good choice 

Dave said there's speculation Amber Dawn MacArthur might be interim RB host. She'd be a good choice. She strikes me as sort of a G4 TV host type, the kind of girls my sons like so well, a little more real than Amanda.

(Later: No wonder she struck me that way. Kiwi Bloke says she was a G4 host; didn't know that.)

Josh Kinberg interview 

Video interview from last September. I remembered having watched this when I heard the news about Rocketboom yesterday, especially the remarks about his role in early Rocketboom. He gets into it about halfway in. Kinberg is developer of FireAnt, a video aggregator with a player that never seems to give a rat's patootie what format the video is or which codecs you don't have.