Like a Monkey in a Zoo

Janet & I went to the LA Zoo a few weekends ago. It's a pretty nice zoo located on the northeast end of Griffith Park.


They had a lot of monkeys, lemurs, gibbons and chimps, plus a large gorilla exhibit. A giant Asian elephant exhibit is also currently under construction. It fills most of the center of the zoo and looks like it will be pretty cool once it's completed.


When we saw this koala cozied up napping in the tree, Janet said, "I wish I was all covered in fur." I said that in that event our first date would probably have been pretty weird and awkward.


This guy looked pretty cozy, too, napping in the dirt. I told Janet I wished I was covered in alligator skin. She ignored me.


I don't know what the fuck this is, except it's some kind of deer or antelope that's really small and I believe native to Narnia.


I just like this guy.

DOs & DON'Ts

DO

You made it to the top of Mt. Hollywood. You're awesome, dude. But you know what would be awesomer? Doing some push-ups at the top of Mt. Hollywood. Yeah, you really are a champion.

DON'T

Sure, it's 10am, and I'm walking around on Hollywood Boulevard with a guitar. Of course I am. That's because I'm a fucking musician, just like all these other random dudes walking around Hollywood with guitars at 10am.

DO

I think she's waiting for her friends Paddington the Bear and Sir Digby Chicken Caesar, who are either inside buying cigs or looking for clues. Whatever, I'll stand under your Umbrella ella ella eh eh eh.

DON'T

Age is just a state of mind, man.

Recent Work

Here are some freelance projects I worked on recently. I developed both sites in ASP.NET 2.0 with SQL 2005 databases, and both have protected admin CMS components so that the clients can manage their own content. Simple Power is a power reseller in Texas, and Brash Entertainment is a video game company in Hollywood.

Janet Gots a Jobby-Job

After contracting for Ogilvy for a couple of weeks, Janet was offered a fulltime position as copywriter on the agency's creative team, which she of course accepted. Founded in 1948, Ogilvy & Mather is one of the largest, most well-respected advertising agencies in the world, with 497 offices in 159 cities around the globe. Ogilvy is responsible for many memorable campaigns you've probably heard of, including "Don't Leave Home Without It" for American Express, among others. In short, Ogilvy is O.G.

When reached for comment, Janet had this to say: "I can buy clothes again!" Prior to Ogilvy, Janet was a freelance copywriter in Los Angeles, and can be seen working from her home office in the undated photograph below.

Mine Is Bigger

You may or may not know that Janet has an unusual love for things that are really huge or really tiny. I'll leave it to your imagination to figure out which of those categories I fit into, but when I recently stumbled across a comically oversized universal remote on Woot, of course I had to buy it.



I bought two, actually. Janet sleeps with the other one.

Will you add me as a friend?

HUGE sent me to the O'Reilly Graphing Social Patterns conference in San Diego to get the industry perspective on social networking from representatives of Facebook, MySpace, Google, Netvibes, Friendster and a slew of start-ups with ridiculous made-up names like Meebo, Bebo, Jabber and more.

It's a little funny that I was sent to this conference, as I've almost made a point of ignoring invitations to join the various social networks, or at least being a very late adopter. I may have been the very last person to finally get a MySpace account, and I only did it for the record label. Now I find myself in a room full of people who actually think Twitter is fun and useful... and a lot of them are making money off this stuff. So, sitting alone in my boxers and socks in my dark hotel room last night, I took a long swig of bourbon, swallowed it along with my dignity and signed up for a Facebook account.

Getting back to the point of the conference, the majority of the attendees build Facebook apps. That's the hot new sexy thing that's making college students into millionaires, and everyone wants in. But beyond that, the main recurring issue was defining and supporting open standards for social web applications and portable data.

Like it or not, social networking is quickly becoming one of the major ways people spend time online, and Charlene Li of Forrester Research projects that social networking will be ubiquitous by 2013. But with the proliferation of all the new social networks and applications requiring registration, managing personal data becomes more and more of a problem and barrier to entry.

When I sign up for a new social network or web service, why should I have to re-enter all my personal data and re-add you as a friend? MySpace knows we're friends, my phone knows we call each other frequently, Gmail knows we correspond regulary, AIM knows we're connected... with universal standards and APIs for transporting and accessing data, users would be more invested in their own data, knowing they could take it with them from site to site, and it would benefit everyone.

This requires a big shift in thinking, especially for the large, established corporations, who would ostensibly have to start giving away their vast collections of data, grown over years and years. They have to stop thinking of the data as theirs and realize that it belongs to the user, and allow users to take it with them wherever they choose to go. Similarly, they should stop thinking of their website as the only place they want users to spend time and allow their apps to be taken where the user does want to spend time. One speaker suggested a strategy of taking the top one or two things that people come to your site for and allowing users to take those away in a widget.

Fortunately, some of those major players are already leading the way. The DiSo Project is an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of distributed social networking concepts, using technologies such as OpenID, OAuth, Microformats and others. Facebook and MySpace have both announced support of Google's OpenSocial standard, and Netvibes has taken initiative in developing the Universal Widget API specification.

At HUGE, we are not only building social applications for Disney, we're building an entire social networking platform, so we have the unique opportunity to both support and apply open standards to this project from its inception to insure future compliance.

1000 bonus points for anyone who read this far.

Race Report: Los Angeles Marathon 2008

I ran the 23rd annual Los Angeles Marathon yesterday morning along with 25,000 other runners, cheered on by a purported 1,000,000 spectators along the way. The LA Marathon is one of the largest in the country, and the crowd of runners at the start was unlike any I’d seen before. Despite being relatively close to the front, it took me three minutes to cross the start line after the gun went off, but it was a perfect day for running — sunny, in the 50s, with a slight breeze — a welcome improvement over Surf City.

The course started in Universal City, wound down through Hollywood and made its way south of I-10 through many of LA's diverse neighborhoods, eventually finishing downtown. Running has been a terrific way for me to explore LA. After all of my long runs, I've probably seen more of LA on foot than I have in a car, and this course offered some great new views, especially of downtown. If I was to criticize, I’d say they missed an opportunity to route us through Beverly Hills or Santa Monica (hello, the beach?), but I did enjoy the run, and I have to give kudos to the organizers for pulling off an extremely well-oiled event. I finished in 3:35, another personal best. California has been good for me, I guess.

Afterwards, my support team (Janet) rushed me to Tom Bergin’s, our favorite neighborhood bar, to replenish my essential fluids. Tom Bergin's has been pouring fine ales and whiskies in LA since 1936, and the horseshoe-shaped bar was supposedly the inspiration for the TV show "Cheers." Everyone doesn't know our names yet, but as often as we frequent Tom's, it won't be long.