I got an email from a friend:

On August 20th, my wallet and phone were expertly removed from my hand bag between uptown espresso and the corner of Queen Anne Ave/Mercer. It probably took place as I walked through the people waiting for the bus.

I just got a phone call from the Seattle Police department saying that a call was placed from my phone to a “victim” that day. Apparently, they have a suspect in mind but no proof. He takes phones and bank cards and tries to remove money from the downtown Bank of America main branch (no camera there) and uses the phone to place calls.

Please mind your valuables when you walk through that area.

Many things here worry me:
1) The cops called back darn near a month and a half later. I know that no one was hurt per se, but come on, how long does it REALLY take to do an investigation???
2) The downtown BOFA DOESN’T have a camera?? WTF!!!!? You’re a bank for goodness sakes! I can’t really figure out how to say just how frustrating and apalling that is.
3) Lower Queen Anne is going to hell. There was an attempted robbery, a shooting, a drive by shooting, and much more last weekend. I can’t even walk my daughter at night on the weekend anymore. Will I soon not be able to take her out at night at all??

Tomorrow night (Tuesday) at 7PM the Eastside Weblogger Meetup will happen. I’m marked as a maybe right now, but am leaning more towards a yes. Main reason I’m maybe is that I’m still feeling super tired and drained, and I hate to say yes only to bail out cause I’m too tired to drive (that just feels too lame.)

Hope to see you all there!

I’ve been watching with great interest the podcasting of Adam Curry and Dave Winer and have thought about doing some audio blogging experiments leading up to possible podcasting.

The one key issue I see with audio blogging is the interface through which people scan for information. Most people today are able to skim text MUCH faster then they can skim audio. If I offer any audio, I also want to make a transcription available. Not only can people skim the text, but it will make my audio feeds search engine friendly (of course until Google can crack audio and offer search results based on the spoken content within them…)

At Gnomedex, Scoble put forth how easily he can rip through 900+ rss feeds, but that he can only get through a couple audio feeds in the same time frame. This is a HUGE problem with all audio blogging solutions.

I have been searching for ways to take encoded mp3 files and convert the spoken word to text, but all I’ve found is text to mp3, nothing in the reverse. Does anyone know of any offerings that can do this? If not, who’s willing to step up to the plate and make one?

UPDATE: via Dave Winer: John S Rhodes posits a possibility of an audio search engine by Google where what I mentioned above would be part. Any resources to do this now though??

Dan Gilmor made mention of a great idea during the content panel of Gnomedex. He thought that the next progression of interaction would require the ability to use permalinks for comments so that you can link to them in cross blog posting instead of just the original post. Excellent idea!!

I just tweaked the wp-comments.php file in my Wordpress installation to do just that. I got my code ispiration from Nick Momrik’s “Recent Comments entry” on the Wordpress wiki.

His is nice in that it’s a hack that you can throw in your my_hacks.php, but it only pops up a list of the x most recent posts when called. I wanted to go a step further and make every comment on every post be permalinked. So I replaced this block of code:

<ol id="commentlist">
. . . . .
</ol>


with the contents of this file.

Now I just need to suggest this to the Wordpress development team.

UPDATE: Matt wrote to tell me that this is already possible with Wordpress out of the box. You just click on the time at the bottom of the comment. Maybe we just need to publicize this a bit more, I had no idea. Oh well, I’m keeping my tweak live as I think the way I implemented it is a bit more visible to newbie bloggers.

I got back from Gnomedex at a little after noon PST this afternoon after waking up at 4:30AM to get ready for my airport shuttle. I can’t say how great it is to be greeted at the airport by a child running up and giving you a 10 minute hug interspersed with chants of “dady, daddy, daddy!!”

The entire time in Lake Tahoe was probably the most productive time I’ve spent this year. Even though I got little to no work done, I was more productive? Yep. I got my focus back, I got my energy back, and I have a sense of clarity I haven’t had in a long time.

I feel kind of bad that my first post wasn’t as high quality as I prefer, but I wrote it between sessions before getting my coffee – Chris WHY did the first session start at 8:30AM???! I also should have popped off a few more entries specific to the sessions and the conference while I was there, but I was so busy keeping up with the sessions, trying to remember to eat, and taking notes/writing down thoughts that I just didn’t have the time. Chris posted about this Feedster link. I suggest going there to see everyone’s take on the show. Don’t cry or sigh though, all the thoughts swarming in my head as a result of Gnomedex ARE going to make their way into these pages over the next few days to weeks.

I didn’t get to network as much as I had wanted, but I was feeling drained and run down most of the show. I did make it to every event and got so much out of every one. The host of speakers was incredible. These folks are incredibly intelligent, are creating trends, have such rapport with each other, and are not past sitting down at a table of us “common pleebs” to chat it up and give/receive opinions.

I was most impressed by the sheer dynamism projected by Wil Wheaton in his presentation. I’m not quite sure what I was expecting, but what I got exceeded whatever that was. So much so, I actually did something I’ve never done and stood in line for a book signing. It took me a day to come up with the question I should have asked while I was there, but I’ll pop it up here in case Wil’s checking his trackbacks (fairly likely I would imagine… ) Wil, what has been your most fulfilling poker hand and why? Was it because you took down a big timer like Phil Fucking Hellmuth, was it because you got the rocks and just led everyone down a path of disaster, or some other reason?

I have so many things on my to do list now – sites to check out, tweaks to do to my site and blog, items to write, experimental audio/video blogging concepts, and much much more. I also have a couple product/service ideas, hell- I even have a possibly patentable process that jumped into my head at one session.

But for now, I need a day or two to recuperate. Good night everyone…

Just got done listening to the Future of Security p a n e l and it got me to thinking. Unfortunately my brain was too slow to come up with these thoughts during the session to get input, but maybe they can get some traction after the fact.

I’ve got two trains of thought:

TRAIN 1:
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There was discussion of having ISPs shut down users that were compromised, there was discussion about Microsoft no longer supporting security upgrades for WIndows 98, and there awas discussion about how people have insecure platforms and need to make themselves more secure.

Why aren’t people doing this? Why do the words anti-virus and firewall make them go “huh?”? Grandma and Grandpa understand jpgs from the CDs of pictures they get sent, they vaugely understand the Internet and how to get on it. What they don’t understand is security, why it’s important, and most of all how the hell to implement it regularly. My question is how do we make this need known to everyone? How do we get them to if not do this themselves, at elast be as aware of the need as they are aware of how to browse the web.

To use a car analogy (they seemed popular) – people know their cars need tuneups regularly. Most don’t know why or even how to do it, but they take them in to get it done. How do we get people to see that their computers are the same? Maybe there’s a business in a computer Jiffy-Lube of sorts where you can drop off your box and get it patched, scanned and up to date while you wait. Do this every month for $10-$30 a pop and you’ll run so fast and smooth, it’d be worth the money.

TRAIN 2:
=======
There was discussion of software that can detect and shut down phising sites before they get posted.

My question is this: When will software be commercially available and targeted towards ISPs that will allow them to scan their server’s virtual sites’ pages for possible phishing scams?

Bayesian algorithims adn other methods are getting much better in terms of detecting spam intelligently. What would be nice is using the same R&D that’s been brewing for years and applying it to scanning of web pages. ISPs running this software could quarantine pages and sites dynamically that match profiles established by current phishing sites, past phishing sites, pages that are fairly similiar to those of major phishing bait but are not hosted by said sites.

Imagine being able to stop the phisinhing before the emails go out, and if not, having teh site be shut down before people get the chance to get scammed.

I just saw the Amber Alert Ticker on another blog and was psyched that such a thing exists. Whenever there is an active Amber Alert, it turns yellow and gives the details of the alert.

I’ve already added it to the top of my Kelsey and Who’s Your Daddy category pages. I don’t know yet if I’m going to add it to every page, as I don’t want to start diluting my blog with tickers here and ad space there, but it seems particularly pertinent where it is.