Matthew Gifford

Gabe is a lucky guy. Yesterday, he got an accidental preview of the upcoming MINI Cabrio.

Man, that's a nice looking car. Except for the new center gauge cluster. That part still needs some work.

Some people are putting together a free audio version of Lessig's new book. Great idea, AKMA.

It's amazing how our minds play tricks on us.

Lawrence Lessig has made Free Culture, his latest book, available as a free PDF.

Rowena is the newest addition to our household.

What would a weblog be without cat pictures?

Some independent music stores are thriving despite the competition from illegal downloads on the Internet.

The stores are finding that file sharing can help create a buzz online that can lead to more sales, according to a panel of independent music store owners who spoke at the South by Southwest Music Conference & Festival here Friday.

I don't really have anything to add. This Wired News article says it all.

Yesterday, Jenn and I threw this together for lunch. It ended up being excellent, so I thought I'd share it with you.

For 2 servings, you'll need:

• 3 boneless, skinless chicken breasts (approximately 12 oz.)
• 1 red bell pepper
• 1 dozen button mushroom caps
• 1 dozen cherry tomatoes
• 1/4 medium red onion
• red pepper sauce
• lime juice
• oregano
• cumin
• salt
• black pepper
• baby spinach
• roasted pineapple salsa

Cut the chicken, bell pepper, and onion into chunks. Put the chicken, pepper, onion, tomatoes, and mushrooms on skewers. Drizzle the lime juice and pepper sauce on the kebobs. Season with oregano, cumin, salt, and black pepper and put them on the grill. On each plate, make a bed out of a couple handfuls of baby spinach. Spoon some of the salsa over the spinach. Be careful not to use too much, as it will overpower the rest of the flavors. When the kebobs are done, slide the pieces of meat and veggies off the skewers and onto the spinach.

That's all there is to it. Enjoy.

I, for one, welcome our new pill bug overlords. (via Boing Boing)

John Gruber has some brilliant thoughts on the difficulties of writing for the web. This is a must-read essay for web publishers and developers of publishing tools.

This is something that's been on my mind a lot lately. Every day I see customers and co-workers struggle to put their thoughts on the web because writing in HTML forces them to think about how when they should be concentrating on what.

The two most common methods of solving this problem seem to be WYSIWYG editors and alternative markup languages. In my opinion, a WYSIWYG editor is the ideal solution to the problem. There are two major problems that I have with the editors that I've found: They write atrociously bad markup and they only work in IE for Windows. (There may be exceptions to these points, but I haven't found them.) Alternative markup languages, on the other hand, don't really solve any problems because, well, they're still markup languages. The author must still concentrate on how. In fact, for those of us who know HTML, these alternatives are even more painful to use because they offer no real benefits while requiring us to learn a new syntax.

If you've read John Gruber's post, you'll know that he's written a text-to-HTML script called Markdown. It can be used as a plug-in for Movable Type and Bloxsom, a Unix filter for BBEdit, or a standalone script. I've decided to give it a try in BBEdit. So far, I'm quite impressed. Yes, you still have to worry about how (like I just did to make that word italicized). But it's much more natural then writing in HTML.

If I'm as happy with it in a few days as I am right now, I just might have to add it to my weblog software.

I hate to see your broken face
This world would give you anything
As long as you will want to
As long as you will want to
I hate your state of hopelessness
And that vain articulateness
Your loser type wreck wanna be
Not a pretty sight really
In another world it'd be funny

I hate to see your broken face
A lazy life of fatal waste
Of fashionable cynicism
The poison they want you to drink
Oh no man that's too easy
Oh no man that's so easy
We weren't talking 'bout happiness
Apply your leading potential
To be useful to this planet
The world would give you anything
As long as you will want to
As long as you will want to

Thanks to Stereolab.