.:justwerks software:.

Having taken the Water Wiennies and the Jarts out of the closet, now seems like an ideal time to put Rough Type on ice for the summer. Posts will be rare for a spell....

Sunir from Fresh Books emailed me a couple of weeks ago to let me know that he was coming out West in order to help break the continental divide. How? With a traditional Canadian summer time BBQ!

Sunir, Colleen, and Redwerks are hosting a roof top BBQ this evening starting at 5:30pm, and they’re going to kick everyone out at 10:30pm to find another watering hole. Let them know you’re coming via the Upcoming entry.

It’s great when we have more people traveling physically between different high tech centers in Canada. I already feel bad enough that I don’t make it to Victoria or Calgary often enough, and that the most often connection between the Canadian Internet Mafia tends to happen at conferences…in the US So thanks to Sunir for taking the initiative and to Colleen and Redwerks for hosting.

And yes, a thousand apologies for the extremely last minute notice – I had originally planned to be down in San Francisco at the Structure 08 conference, along with Trevor O and Layerboom (his virtualization / cloud computing startup that we’re working with here at Bootup). C’est la vie! Now I get to enjoy charred meat in Canada, instead!

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Sunir from Fresh Books emailed me a couple of weeks ago to let me know that he was coming out West in order to help break the continental divide. How? With a traditional Canadian summer time BBQ!

Sunir, Colleen, and Redwerks are hosting a roof top BBQ this evening starting at 5:30pm, and they’re going to kick everyone out at 10:30pm to find another watering hole. Let them know you’re coming via the Upcoming entry.

It’s great when we have more people traveling physically between different high tech centers in Canada. I already feel bad enough that I don’t make it to Victoria or Calgary often enough, and that the most often connection between the Canadian Internet Mafia tends to happen at conferences…in the US So thanks to Sunir for taking the initiative and to Colleen and Redwerks for hosting.

And yes, a thousand apologies for the extremely last minute notice – I had originally planned to be down in San Francisco at the Structure 08 conference, along with Trevor O and Layerboom (his virtualization / cloud computing startup that we’re working with here at Bootup). C’est la vie! Now I get to enjoy charred meat in Canada, instead!

The rise of cloud computing raises a lot of legal issues, and one of the thorniest involves the variations in national laws governing the storage and use of personal and other information. Controls on data threaten, for instance, to prevent certain information from being stored in data centers outside a user's home country, hence eroding some of the efficiencies promised by a global cloud. And yet does the location of the data center really matter?...

At my favorite local coffee shop, Lorraine gives me shit when I purchase coffee in a paper cup, "You... are not saving the world."

She's right. I'm not, and it's actually worse. Each time I reach for a sip and this sad little corpse of tree flesh greets me with its pathetic weight and palpable sense of Al Gore guilt, I'm lonely.

I'm missing a key member of my creative posse.

A Box Full of Fail

The next chapter in documenting the accessorizing of my obsessions was an investigative report on paper. I've got 27 links regarding the history of paper queued up and ready to be read, but I don't honestly care a lot about paper. I can’t separate the notebook from the paper.

In fact, I’m pissed at paper. Forget about the environmental guilt, cups made of paper are a sure fire way to ruin any cup of coffee because they change the taste. Coffee mugs are the only way to go and I’ve spent a lot more time fretting about mugs than paper. That’s the other thing Lorraine doesn’t know: I’ve got a box full of failed coffee mugs.

Unlike prior excursions, with coffee mugs, we can brief. There is no need for comparison tables. There are just two use cases that define a great coffee mug: Driving and Writing.

Driving

The Driving case is tactical. How do I move from point A to point B without spilling scalding liquid over me and the car? Technology has provided a bevy of James Bondian metal travel mugs guaranteed to safely transport a hot beverage, but this technology comes with a cost. After three uses, like paper, your coffee tastes like whatever material your mug is made of.

This means I'm paying two bucks for the privilege of not being scalded by a cup of coffee that tastes like old aluminum.

No.

Plastic, while less hip, suffers from the same taste degradation over time. Glass-lined or not, three uses and the taste of old coffee and angry plastic permeates every sip. This conveniently leads us to the first key construction point for the perfect mug:

It must be made of ceramic. After years of foul tasting cups of coffee, I've discovered a ceramic travel mug, while a hazard if dropped, is the only material that doesn't affect the taste of the coffee. Combine this with the cleverly designed removable plastic top and you have the Pottery Barn travel mug:

Will it last? I don't know. Can it survive a drop? Probably not. Will I lose the top? Probably. Does it deliver my coffee as intended? Yes. I have six.

Writing

The Writing use case is strategic because it's an essential part of my writing process. Right this second, I'm editing this article and, as you might expect, there is a process. First, I sit up. Writing is serious business for which your spine must be straight. I also lean my head slightly downward, looking up at my words as I write. Occasionally I mumble what I'm typing… no clue why.

And then I stop and I take a sip of something from a ginormous coffee cup... which is when I really start writing. The sip of coffee is a pause with weight. As I described in I Don't Multitask, these moments of silence are invaluable. They are when I step out of what I'm doing to consider what I'm going to do, and for this brief journey I need a companion, and that's my coffee mug.

To understand this relationship, you have to consider the sip. It's a conversation and that conversation has two elements:

It must begin with character. The appearance of the coffee cup needs to speak.

It must continue with weight. A full coffee cup is a two-handed affair. The coffee must be blistering hot and a threat sitting three inches to the left of my keyboard. Reaching for my mug is a commitment. It is a reminder that, "Hey, we're focusing elsewhere for moment. Don't screw this up. I'm hot." My coffee mugs are ginormous. My sips -- carefully orchestrated.

It's a brief conversation and it has only one goal: a creative elsewhere.

The Posse

I'm only addressing half of this situation. There's a coffee bean article to be written, but it's time to get back to management and design, so I'll cut to the chase: whole bean + grind at home + French press = FTW.

A great cup of coffee is not just a gorgeous caffeine administration vehicle; it's part of your creative posse. On my desk, all within a 12 inches my hands, I have the iPhone, the Zebra Sarasa gel pen, a sweetly decaying Field Notes, and the Life is Short coffee mug. None of these items are required for me to write -- they are conveniences -- but they are essential to accessorizing a moment of creative, companionable silence.

Back in 1993, Eric Schmidt, then the Sun kid, now the Google dad, wrote in an email to the telecosmic George Gilder: "When the network becomes as fast as the processor, the computer hollows out and spreads across the network." The Economist closed its recent article on cloud computing by sketching out a picture of where this technological trend is leading: In future the geography of the cloud is likely to get even more complex....

Wikipedia has long promoted itself as "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." But Jimmy Wales offers a new, circumscribed slogan in a column in today's Observer. Wikipedia is now, according to Wales, "the online encyclopedia in which any reasonable person can join us in writing and editing entries on any encyclopedic topic." The old slogan was the language of the bazaar. The new one is the language of the club. (Disclosure: I'm on Encyclopedia...

Alan Taylor's photojournalism blog, The Big Picture, has been receiving some well-deserved praise. Check it out....

If supermarkets today decided to give away hot dogs for free, then more people would consume hot dogs at their cookouts this weekend and fewer people would consume hamburgers - even if people in general like hamburgers a bit more than hot dogs. Demand is elastic, and it tends to move in the opposite direction from price. Make something cheaper and people will buy more of it, often substituting it for something else they would...

Aphorism #1: To a man with a blog, everything looks like fodder. Geert Lovink ends his 2006 essay Blogging, the nihilist impulse with this remarkable paragraph: Can we talk of a "fear of media freedom"? It is too easy to say that there is freedom of speech and that blogs materialize this right. The aim of radical freedom, one could argue, is to create autonomy and overcome the dominance of media corporations and state control...

Brendon threw up a facebook group.

Jordan created a Strutta game: Most compelling reason for Caterina and Stewart to move back home contest!

Vancouver is Beautiful from Jordan Behan on Vimeo.

So, upload your video to Strutta and let’s get them to move back.

Also, you’ll be able to find everything here: www.bringcaterinaandstewarthome.com soon.

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Here’s a very cool concept for a site that can generate a ton of equity value vs. the effort put into building it.  I actually know that Lowell has put a lot of energy into building out Loud3r, and it shows, but compared to what DWave is trying to do, it’s no huge technical accomplishment.  It just works.  On the web, what matters most is a fast, clean, easy to use site that give me only the information I want. In fact, I’m sure my friend Brian Sugar over at Sugar Inc (home of the popular site popsugar.com among others) would agree with Lowell’s approach to chunking up vertical content sites based on domain name vs sub-domain name like Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop.  Regardless of what you think, you should check it out, bookmark/subscribe to the sites that are relevant to you, and see how it goes.  As for me, I’ve pointed my RSS reader to found3r.com.

PS: I’m still holding out hope for similar, more personalized, feeds to starting coming out of the Something Simpler offices.

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Donat Group’s Rochelle Grayson was profiled in the article on Sunday.

“What I love about the tech industry is that it’s incredibly creative. It really thrives on creativity and innovation,” says Grayson, 39. “You have to be adaptable and prepared to re-think things all the time.”

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Reactions to my Atlantic essay continue to roll in. In today’s Globe and Mail, columnist Margaret Wente becomes the latest writer to fess up to an evaporating ability to read long works of prose: Google has done wondrous things for my stock of general knowledge. It also seems to have destroyed my attention span. Like a flea with ADD, I jump back and forth from the Drudge Report to gardening sites that list the growing...

Unfortunately, we’ve had to postpone the Founders and Funders event that was to be held tomorrow, June 17th. We’ll be updating this post with details on the new date once it is finalized.

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In a column about my Atlantic article in the Sunday Times (London), Andrew Sullivan draws on his personal experience as a prolific blogger to describe what the Web has given and what it has taken away: In researching a topic [online], or just browsing through the blogosphere, the mind leaps and jumps and vaults from one source to another. The mental multitasking – a factoid here, a YouTube there, a link over there, an e-mail,...

Speaking of the Singularity - and how can you avoid it, really, these days? - Douglas Hofstadter, author of the classic Gödel, Escher, Bach as well as, more recently, I Am a Strange Loop, spots the misanthropy that lies beneath the sunny surfaces of the AI millennialists and many other techno-utopians: Am I disappointed by the amount of progress in cognitive science and AI in the past 30 years or so? Not at all. To...

Leonard Pitts Jr., the Pulitzer-Prize-winning columnist for the Miami Herald, admits that he, too, has "forgotten how to read": I do not mean that I have lost the ability to decode letters into words. I mean, rather, that I am finding it increasingly difficult to read deeply, to muster the focus and concentration necessary to wrestle any text longer than a paragraph or more intellectually demanding than a TV listing. You're talking to a fellow...

In an essay written for Tim Ferriss's blog, Josh Waitzkin, the former chess champion who was the subject of the book and subsequent film Waiting for Bobby Fisher, writes of his recent experience in returning to his alma mater, Columbia, and sitting in on a class taught by Dennis Dalton, "the most important college professor of my life." Dalton, writes Waitzkin, was describing the satyagraha of Mahatma Gandhi, building the discussion around the Amritsar massacre...

In reading some of the comments posted online about my Atlantic piece, I kept coming across references to the article being "four pages long." At first I wondered, "Can't these people count? The article is six pages long!" (OK, five pages if you exclude the illustration and titling.) Then I realized - duh! - that people were referring to the online version of the article, which indeed is divided into four "pages." (Of course, a...