Just one of those moments that makes it all worth it. Gorgeous light streamed through our big, impossible to open, difficult to clean, over designed loft inspired windows bathing the too small apartment in pinks, yellows and oranges. This photo was taken from the roof of our six story apartment building as the last night turned the sky line into silhouettes.

Roughly 31 minutes ago some botnet left a gibberish comment on a blog post from July 2003, “That certain kind of tired”.

Oddly enough I remember very little about what was going on in my life at that point. I say odd, because here I am reading a diary entry where I’m situated in time, and space (Providence, July 2003), and I’ve posted a hyper specific list of recent movements (“38 hours of bus travel, 19 hours of car travel, 12 hours of air travel, 7 hours of train/subway travel”), yet nothing about that travel comes back to me. An odd unforeseen (by me at least) consequence of diarying in public is I’ve left out the context in preference of the shape of things. I wonder what I’ll make of my Twitter stream 6+ years on (assuming any of it survives and is accessible).

In contrast, my grandmother recently found a box of my great grandmother’s diaries (her mother-in-law) with nearly daily entries for a 20 year span, sometimes obscurely personal in nature, but never the intentionally obfuscating dance of public performance that my old post is.

And there is another kind of unanticipated (again probably only by me) forgetting in that post. A mere 6 years into the life span of that post, of the 5 links in that post, only one of them still works. (and all of these links to the sites of web dorks)

The title of the post is a phrase I borrowed from Jessamyn. Her server seems to be down. Hopefully it will come back up. I can remember thinking as I quoted it that I was pretty sure I’d met her, but I wasn’t sure when, but given our overlaps (mutual friends, mutual alma mater, similar geographic patterns) we’d meet again some day. I still think we will, but it hasn’t happened yet.

And I remember vividly, even though its only alluded to briefly in that original post in an attempt at wit and snark, that just prior to writing that post was the first time I met my good friend Aaron in person. We sat outside on the porch at The Otherside Cafe on Newbury St., in Boston, and talked about many many things including my first, but hardly my last, attempt to make him explain RDF to me.

It was an amazing show. Everything conspired against it: lousy cavernous venue, weird crowd, show boating instrumentalists. But it was awesome.

And I was transported back to the first moment I ever heard Leonard Cohen. Those first minutes of Pump Up Volume when “Everybody Knows” comes rolling out of Christian Slater’s pirate radio station, and it was the coolest thing I’d ever heard. Later I wondered how many of us got involved with helping start Indymedia because of that movie.

But that’s not why it stuck with me. You see, when the sound track for Pump Up the Volume came out that song wasn’t on there. Or rather it was, but it wasn’t the right version. I just had a tape of a tape of a tape, sound wasn’t great, and certainly didn’t come with any liner notes explaining that the version included on the sound track was from Concrete Blonde, whoever they were. Disappointment. Really profound disappointment.

And I didn’t know what to do. I was stuck. Transported back to that moment in the early 90s as an adult I could probably find a solution, but honestly I’m not sure. It wasn’t until I got to college, met other people who had been touched by that song, that I ever heard the name Leonard Cohen, and even then it took us a while to obtain a copy of it. Instead we spent a lot of late nights watching “Pump Up the Volume”. Eventually, it was the first MP3 I ever downloaded.

The double barreled revelation really hit me hard. First just to see him play it. Second to remember what I spend most days forgetting, how profoundly the world has changed by the Net and particularly by the Web. It’s trite, and I lived through it, and I live with it everyday, but I rarely get the distance to see how much has changed. And that little distance gave me some hope.

Kind of like the first time I heard that song.

This is the idea I’ve been trying to place with again, really starting just this week, rejecting the consensus about how to blog that’s emerged over the last couple years, and holds up Digg-ability and Techcrunch-i-tude as good indicators. Dan, of course, said it better.

It’s probably an indicator of slipping into my dotage, but a new stray link and I’m happily back wandering through those early archives, even my own, having stumbled across a rather odd review of the rather minor Ruled Britannia, circa 2003 earlier this evening.

What I can’t figure out is why I’m seeing a huge spike in employment inquiries (most totally ridiculous head hunter crap, and some really awesome “work on stuff that matters” style projects), the Web is full of the most innovative stuff I’ve seen in years, and everyoneiknowisdoingawesomeshit.

Some days its hard to stay pessimistic.

Some of my earliest photos on Flickr are of going to see fall colors in VT and NH, with our friends Rob and Rima, in October 2004. (whose son Elias was a month old yesterday)

Head out in search of the fabled Red Hook ball field food vendors. For 30 years they’ve been congregating on the weekends in Red Hook to feed the hordes who show up to play and watch soccer. And its widely agreed to be the best Mexican and Latin American food in the 5 boroughs.

Last year they had a brush with extinction as the city, in its bid to clean up the neighborhood and make it yuppy/Ikea safe shut down the proceedings citing sanitation issues. Eventually a compromise was struck, and a handful of the vendors are back, now in plumbed trucks. The food is still very very good, but their numbers are reduced. My favorite was the pupusas loroco con queso.

But even before that a flat tire drove me into the The Bike Shop and the Coffee Den across the way, where they serve a decent cup of Gorilla. Need to get those kevlar tires.

From there we walked along the water front, dramatically changed from our last visit two years ago. And found to our glee that Steve’s was still serving their swingles, frozen chocolate dipped key lime pie on a stick.

On the ride back I wandered into Fort Greene park, and wondered if I’d found a portal back to Dolores Park. So startled I forgot to take a photo.

And then, at the end of the 13 mile loop, blocks from home, tripped over a fafi and Koralie piece, paint not quite dry.

I hear 4Barrel is open. Congrats to Jeremy and the crew!

This photo is from a morning when MSG, Blaine, and I wandered over to find the back door closed, and so peaked our head. Jeremy took a break from painting and sanding to pull some shots, and show us around the bones of the store. Excited to see the finished product, but I think I’ll be nostalgic for how it looked that morning.

We tromped up to our roof with friends and neighbors to watch the fireworks in the rain.

IMG_3450, originally uploaded by curlyjazz.

A family ritual, originally uploaded by curlyjazz.

We go for coffee at Gayles every Saturday morning I’m in Santa Cruz.

Some of you have heard, some of you haven’t, but Jasmine and I are getting up next week (June 12th) and moving to New York.

The plan is to go on working for Flickr, and fly back to SF once a month or so. So if you could plan your camps/parties/meetups/conferences accordingly that would be swell.

Looking forward to seeing you all on the East Coast. (And while we haven’t really gotten a feel for the new apartment [in Williamsburg], its looking like we might even have something resembling a guest room.)

We’ll be driving back via the not most direct route (which will surprise no one who knows us) that takes us past the Grand Canyon, Austin, and New Orleans. (thats as far as the map I’m looking at goes) So any suggestions for anything from sights, to food, to places to stay, to good people along those stretches, to great audiobooks to fill up empty bits in the road are all appreciated.

And what a long, strange 10 years it’s been.

Skipped lunch to spend a couple of hours this afternoon hanging at Mojo cafe this afternoon with Mroth and Blaine getting trained up by Steve. Love this photo Mroth snapped.

1. Interesting to see my “Flickr is the 2nd largest API ” meme work its way up the tree. I didn’t make that factoid up per se, and I’d probably stand behind it if pushed, but I did reason from very limited data. (also AWS screws up the story, is utility computing an API?)

2. Still haven’t quite adjusted to the transition of OAuth from being a personal project that the “Paranoids” (official title of Yahoo’s internal security experts) were angry at me for working on (against Yahoo policy for Yahoos to work on security related projects), to a the company wide standard, at least on paper.

Historically there were a few days between the end of one year, and the beginning of the next that people took to be days out of the normal flow, a chance to do the things you didn’t have time to do, or weren’t allowed to do the rest of the year. This is the origin of Carnival, and Mardi Gras and related ceremonies. (this is according to Bakhtin, I’m not wearing my calendar geek hat when I say this, so be warned)

We no longer have the wonderful concept of a few days each year out of time, but once, every four years we do get a leap day. Don’t waste it. – Happy Leap Day – 2004/02/29

I totally wasted it today. We had been planning a dystopian leap year party. I wrangled databases instead.