I was wandering the web before starting my real work this morning and I noticed that someone is working on a Wiki using Amazon S3. It seems like an interesting project with some interesting ideas inherent in it. The whole idea of doing remote content for an application is kind of crazy in some ways when it feels like we’ve all spent a lot of time at some point on caching mechanism and such to avoid taking a performance hit by going to the database which should be a lot more trivial than hitting S3. However, I think that it’s a kind of interesting proof of concept. In some ways, the whole idea of a mashup leverages the idea of using another web application to do something so that you don’t have to. Most of the applications of this that we’ve seen so far involve things like mapping that are overly complex to reinvent for every application on the web, but as everything gets faster and building applications becomes more about mixing and matching building blocks, it doesn’t seem crazy to swap out your own filesystem for a distributed one. Especially if there was a good interface layer.

Today, I went with JB and Chris to the Maker Faire at the San Mateo fairgrounds. JB had reminded me that I had originally intended to go because it was one of those events that was so close that I couldn’t in good conscience not go. All in all, it was pretty fun. It was really geeky, but geeky in an all over the place kind of way. There were the random renaissance fair booths scattered all over, but a lot of the booths were individuals that had put together cool pieces of art/tech. Of the corporate booths, Yahoo and Microsoft probably had the biggest presence there. None of us were convinced to go out an buy an Oragami device even after playing with them in the Microsoft area. SixApart was there (mostly promoting Live Journal it seemed), but I kept myself from talking trash. There was a fairly large train set involving many, many legos that was really fun to watch.

The highpoint of the day was watching Segway Polo on a really small field. We started watching a game and I turned to JB and asked, “Is that Woz playing?” A short while later Woz said something and JB and I agreed that it must be Woz. I started thinking that it was too bad that I didn’t have my camera, but then I figured that because of the sort of event that it was, I should be able to find a photo on flickr.

I’d recommend the event to most people if they’re thinking about trying it next year. I bet that it will probably be slightly bigger and better in the future.

You might need to be a comic book fan to appreciate this video at youtube. However, if you’ve ever thought that Civil War Re-Enactments are funny, you owe it to yourself to give this a look.

I’m now running wordpress 2.0.2, and I’ve been pretty happy so far.  It was running a little slow, so I tweaked some settings and I got it running a little faster.  Hopefully, I’ll get some time to play around with it this weekend, but I’m probably going to burn most of Sunday getting my geek on at the Maker Faire.  The blog is currently using the theme k2, which is an updated version of the wordpress default theme Kubrick.  It’s got a lot of cool features, but I don’t think it’s quite what I’m looking for.  I’ve also been looking at a theme called Leaves Revamped that appeals to the minimalist in me.  I’m hoping to take some of the visual elements of Leaves Revamped and play around with the features of k2.  In the end, this will work for now.  I had been putting off the whole blog move until I moved the images on blogger to flickr, but I looked and I didn’t have any images from after September so I figured I might as well just move it.

In totally unrelated news, I spent the entire day trying to figure out why my new work laptop (a thinkpad t43p) kept suddenly locking up.  After letting the IT department play around with it and not get anywhere, I ended up using the update software that came with the laptop update everything it wanted to.  That included the bios, some firmware, and a few drivers.  It hasn’t frozen up on me as I’ve been playing around on it here at home, but it worked fine over the weekend too.

Recently, I started using FeedDemon on my work pc. It’s part of the NewsGator suite of applications that includes NetNewsWire for the mac that I’ve used for a long time. What’s really cool is that you can sync your read and unread news items across the different client applications. Mostly, however, I’ve been using FeedDemon which has a nice concept of News Bins. These are named folders that you can put items into. Lately, I’ve been keeping track of all the stuff that I wanted to blog about and here’s some of them.

I read a really funny post this morning for a hypothetical Samuel L Jackson movie called Bears on a Sub. You have to read the post, if just for the pictures.

If you share a tivo with your significant other, at some point you may have wanted to tivo something that you didn’t want other people to watch. From that idea comes this post.

There was an interesting article in the Merc about finding a job in the bay area that included some stuff about Netflix.

For all of you that have some sort of DirectTivo setup, it looks like Tivo and DirectTV have decided to extend their partnership.

Here’s a funny comic about internet predators on Yirmumah. (I know, internet predators aren’t funny, but this comic is.)

If you haven’t watched The Boondocks on Cartoon Network (based on the comic strip of the same name), then you need to either tivo it or get the dvds. [Netflix page] Seriously, it’s kind of like Spike Lee meets South Park. I’d give it 10 zibs (which is great unless you believe in the theory of the wrapping zibs metric originally put forth by Joe (or possibly Ryan)).

In other tv news, Prison Break is coming back for another season (supposedly, they are going to break out at the end of this season), Heist is pretty much cancelled already, and 24 is going for at least 3 more seasons. Current talk is that next season of 24 is going to take place in London.