Go, Do, Be.

• ALL
• PHOTO
• TECHNOLOGY
• MUSIC
• FUN
• FOOD

Almost sounds like he wants to be John Madden.

Like all my boards, this one came to me via Craigslist. Unlike the rest, this green 10-footer is a magic board. The 'magic board' is a special match-up between the traits of a surfboard and the style/strength of its surfer. Swaylocks is loaded with posts about magic boards.

I found the ad on CL while I was travelling. A quick email and call to a friend arranged a pickup. J & J completed the transaction for me. They met the seller at his house in SF who told them that he had used the board for tandem surfing. He was leaving SF and didn't want to bring the board along. J & J squeezed it into their hatchback (somehow) and brought it over when I got back to town.

The brand is SF, a small board-making operation and surfshop in San Francisco. It's a sweet-looking board: Nice green tint, 10' x 23" x3.5", triple-stringer, big fin in the finbox. Big, round rails and lots of volume. Kinda heavy though: lots of glass. When it gets into a wave, it really screams down the line. I've taken it to Linda Mar on small days, Ocean Beach on big days: the board works amazingly well in all conditions. Magic.

A few years back, I experienced a mishap. I paddled out at Linda Mar for a rare midweek after-work session. The waves had some energy and the paddle out took timing and paddle-energy. One incoming wave brought a surprising payload toward me: some hairy dude mis-timed his duck dive and ended up catching the wave backwards. The dude's fin jammed into and cut through the nose of my board. Sure, better the board than my shoulder or neck -- still I had a hole about 'that big' in my heart. Would this kill the magic?

I took the board up to the SF surf shop for repairs. Let John Schultze the board's maker fix it and it'll be good as new. John did a great job with it. When I picked up the board, he remembered making it. We talked about it a bit:

John: "Have you tried it in Bolinas? I made it for that wave."

Me: "Why yes, I have. In fact this board seems to really sing on the waves at Bolinas. It's a perfect match."

Me: "Can you make me an EXACT replica? 3-stringers, single-fin, resin tint? that and the magic. Don't leave out the magic. Oh yeah -- and a tail-block."

John: "Nope. Can't work with giant blanks like that anymore."

Me: gasp! "Then I better take care of this thing."

Today, the board is mostly watertight. Lots of little dings and spider-cracks put this thing at risk for getting waterlogged and eventually destroying it (not to mention hairy dudes who can't duckdive). Each year around my birthday I wax this thing up and drag it up to Bolinas for some magic.

I meant to post a rocker-shot too, I'll do this later.

The deck has the dimensions and says 'For Scott at Ocean Beach'. Who is Scott? Why did he sell the board? What's he surfing now?

Just watched Diamonds Are Forever for the first time in a while. I forgot just how kooky and absurd this movie ended-up. It's especially bizarre given the fact that the previous film (On her Majesty's Secret Service) James got married (zoiks!) and then his new bride was killed in an alpine drive-by shooting!

How do you follow that drama? Well with the absurd duo: Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd of course. Give Rosencrantz and Guildenstern a bottle Château Mouton Rothschild, a timebomb in an ice cream sandwich, a flaming kabob jab that goes horribly wrong.

SEE?

Seems like there are other foodie chips melting through the Bond cookie.

I've been mucking around with Twitter and Facebook lately. There are a few folks who have been using these services to post info about how the surf is. I don't live close to the beach (yet), so I like to see what's happening before I jump into the car and make the trip.

I sent a message from my phone this morning. Even though the surf was lame. The message was published all over the place (microsyndication). Here's how it worked:

1. I emailed a photo to twitpic.com which...
2. updates my status on Twitter which...
3. the @StokeReport user follows. If my tweet contains "SMLM", stokereport will publish my tweet on stokereport.com (and even pull the image off twitpic it seems, nice!).
4. also, http://greacen.com has that little widgety thing over there on the left. Your browser will pull the image from twitpic and put it onto this page.
5. also, Twitter will pass my status update on to Facebook.com

Guess what? Most of these nodes along the way have their own RSS feeds for others (services or people) to slurp & read.

• Stokereport
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Twitpic

Thinking about this plinko-esque publishing flow is a little dizzying. I've been working on web site flows for a few weeks now. It's often helpful to map out a flow to see what's really going on. Graphviz is an open source tool for producing network diagrams and flow charts that I've been using for mapping high-level flows. Here's what a map looks like for the publishing flow I described earlier:

digraph TwitterSurf {
size="6,6";
ratio = fill;
node [style="rounded,filled,bold" shape="box" fillcolor="skyblue"];

/* Set up specific shapes */
Phone [style="rounded,filled" shape="oval" fillcolor="grey"];
"RSS Aggregators" [style="rounded" shape="box3d"];

/* relationships */
Phone -> "twitpic.com" [label="Email with attachment"];
"twitpic.com" -> "twitter.com" [label="twitter api"];
"twitter.com" -> "facebook.com" [label="facebook/twitter bridge"];
"twitter.com" -> "stokereport.com" [label="if post contains 'SMLM'" style="dotted"] ;
"twitpic.com" -> "greacen.com" [label="widget/embed" color="red"] ;
"twitter.com" -> "RSS Aggregators" [label="rss feed" color="darkorange"] ;
"facebook.com" -> "RSS Aggregators" [label="rss feed" color="darkorange"] ;
"stokereport.com" -> "RSS Aggregators" [label="rss feed" color="darkorange"] ;
}


If you ignore the []s, it looks like a terse version of our list up above. Here's the flowchart those instructions produce:

Kinda neat, huh? I find the way this goes from text to sitemap really intriguing. This -> that; that -> next; other -> next; makes sense to me. Graphviz does a great job of putting this all together in an easy-to-digest graphic.

There are a few rails front ends to graphviz (demo) that might make a web tool for this possible. I could see this becoming a handy planning tool for our organization.

Questions:

• Anyone ever use a tool like this for making sitemaps or high-level flows? What tools work well for modeling these interactions?
• What other publishing tools are you using to propel your tweets? (where's my linkedin hook?)
• Has anyone run into ownership issues with this plink-esque publishing?
• Does this have a name? Let's call it microsyndication.
• What's the best way to get metrics for this kind of publishing? Is there a way to measure in this distributed/microsyndicated system? How many people read my surf report?

Thanks for reading.

We did it. Congrats to everyone who put their songs onto the site. Thanks for all your hard work; I had a great time listening to all of your songs.

I got about 28 songs up there, a few are even keepers. Of my stuff, I feel good about these:

• 2/03: Istanbul
• 2/06: Put Down That Bag Of Rocks
• 2/17: Up In The Attic
• 2/19: Special Sauce
• 2/25: Put A Burrito In Your Mouth

This URL will take you to all my songs.

This player has everything that was uploaded. Steal the embed code if you want this on your site.

Here are some of the most listened-to songs from the month: 247 0203_bruce_2nd_time.mp3
196 0204_bruce_3rdwave.mp3
192 0201_derek_a_song_a_day.mp3
190 0205_bruce_shouldabeenalespaul_.mp3
176 0201_greacen_oh_hell_oh.mp3
173 0203_greacen_istanbul.mp3
163 0202_derek_jury_duty.mp3
163 0202_bruce_timesup.mp3
160 0204_greacen_trouble_sleeping.mp3
159 0215_bruce_base.mp3
158 0203_derek_where_is_walt.mp3
158 0201_peter_all_that_i_can_feel.mp3
157 0206_bruce_thank_you.mp3
152 0204_bruce_whatthe.mp3
149 0202_greacen_2wo.mp3
147 0204_derek_disneyland.mp3
146 0203_ryan_in_to_the_night.mp3
146 0201_seth_the_best_place_in_the_world.mp3
145 0131_seth_the_day_before_song.mp3
143 0209_greacen_master_of_the_mall.mp3
142 0203_peter_twothreeohnine.mp3
140 0213_derek_hawaii.mp3
140 0205_greacen_bring_it_back.mp3
139 0216_greacen_watching_all_the_good_ones_go.mp3
139 0202_peter_all_of_them.mp3
136 0212_bruce_alone.mp3
132 0208_greacen_wafflepalooza.mp3
129 0212_derek_taxonomy.mp3


Pretty evenly distributed. I remember Bruce's stuff got a lot of attention last year too, but it seems like the earlier songs are still getting plenty of play. \

We're almost to 13000 song streams at this point and if the traffic followed last year's pattern, people will still be listening for a few more days.

Starting to think about Song-A-Week for the rest of the year. Email me if you want in on this.