Yeah, so I’ve gotten sucked into the iphone hype too.  Frankly, I can’t wait to get my hands on one, even if lil’ ole Charlottesville lags piteously behind the rest of the world with no 3G network.

I’ve been noodling about what location really means, especially in a user-pull application environment like the iphone. (I’m with the crowd that says, “Thank God iphone apps won’t run in the background - and dry out my battery in 15 minutes flat.”)

Rather than trying to come up with some New New Thing by smooshing together social networks, location and a handwave at a business model that involves trying to convince businesses to advertise “on the spot” sales to iphone users  (ummmm, nrme, anyone?)… I’m wondering instead, “What things are truly location dependent?”  I guess I mean something beyond just “Where’s the closest Starbucks?”

A few things have come to mind:

• tides
• sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset
• stars’ locations in the skies
• cheapest, nearest gas
• local food (http://www.localharvest.org/)

Hmmmm…. more ruminating is called for.

Then for the hell of it, I signed up.  And it hit me.  “This is brilliant.  It’s like IM away status, only it’s syndicated!”

Now, I am a dishearted twitter convert.  When will our beloved twitter get its legs back under it?  Maybe their new financing will help.

On a incredibly geeky side note, why doesn’t IE support CSS selectors properly, even in IE7?  What year is it?

I’ve no experience firsthand with building Drupal sites, but the platform seems to have lots of community support, and appears to be evolving at a reasonable rate.

Questions to answer about each platform:

• How hard is it to scale to 5E6 pageviews/month?
• How hard is it to extend the platform?
• Suitability of platform to CMS?
• Suitability of platform to social networking?
• Extensibility?
• Ease of integration of 3rd parties; Flickr, YouTube, OpenSocial.
• Suitability to hosting via EC2/S3.

Candidates so far include Drupal (PHP), Mephisto (Rails), SocialSpring (Rails), Joomla (PHP), OpenSocial, Typo3 (PHP),
All this begs a question for me, which probably misses the mark for my client’s clients… but… Why is anyone trying to build social networks anymore?  Don’t they realize that they should be building social networking applications, which ride on top of existing (now more-or-less open) networks?  (Eg., OpenSocial.)

Words that come to me are things like shameful, nauseating, broken, hopeless, confused, and ugly.

Myspace, you should be ashamed of yourself. And you deserve every bit of the ass kicking that Facebook sends your way. If your definition of “customizable” is godawful nested CSS “table table table table” nonsense, then… yeesh. I’m speechless.  That’s not a presentation layer.  It’s a pillow held over my face while I sleep.

Happy accidents? Unforseeable synchronicity that happens from time to time when I try to make art. A confluence of factors - a dash of creativity, a pinch of technique, a spritzing of awareness - come together to create a piece of art that somehow comes together to create a whole that seems to be more than the sum of its parts.

There seems to be a correlation between the rate of happy accidents and the psychic energy I devote to making art.  The more energy, the more happiness.  The relation does not seem to be linear, and it certainly isn’t predictable. (What kind of accidents would they be if I could predict them?) I welcome happy accidents, but they reveal what an abiding gulf there is between my technical prowess - my ability to execute - and my vision.  They even reveal a certain poverty in my vision.  If I can create these images - or simply be in the right posture and attitude to create the opportunity for me to receive them - then the standard to which I currently aspire is too shallow.

First, we want people to know what we put into the ice cream, and into the company itself.  These things are our competitive advantage, and hiding them negates them.  We want people to know that we use only local and organic ingredients.  We want people to know that our ice cream is made by hand, using the same recipes that harken back not just to your grandmother, but to Thomas Jefferson, and beyond.

Our assumption is that our customers are really very smart, well informed, and careful.  They know what they want, and hiding information about how we do business works against us.  Sooner or later, it all comes out, and so why have any secrets at all?

To that end, we’d like to nip the question “Why is this so expensive?” right in the bud.  We’ve gotten it sporadically, mostly from folks who are used to buying a half-gallon of Bryer’s ice cream for a few dollars.  When you compare the cost of Perfect Flavor against that, it’s liable to give you sticker shock.

Are we crazy to disclose the costs of our business so explicitly?  Will it come back to haunt us somehow?