Friendster has critical mass. I just recently met two new groups of people, and both are hooked into Friendster. I knew about it a while ago, but I prefer to be a follower, instead of a leader in these “invite your friends” things. Looks like it is time for me to follow along and invite some friends to join. Hopefully Friendster will last longer than Six Degrees did last time this idea came around. ...

You should be seeing better spelling on this weblog from now on, since I added MTSpeling.pl to my MoveableType installation. Unfortunately, you have to patch MT itself to integrate it, but it was no big deal. There’s no way to add words to your personal dictionary on the server side, but I have an idea for how to do it, which I might try out. If I get it figured out, I’ll post it here. Basically, I’ll write a CGI script called “add-word.cgi” or something. Then I’ll arrange for every potentially misspelled word to be a link to a javascript function which submits the word to the CGI, and possibly even makes changes using the DOM so that the word is no longer a link, and no longer marked as misspelled. ...

I took my first real sailing lesson today. It didn’t really cover much more than previous lessons, but getting more practice is always welcome. Also, you can learn the same thing a different way from two teachers, then integrate the best of both. Today’s teacher dislikes judging the wind direction using the weathervanes on the top of the mast, and instead taught us how to judge the wind direction by looking at the ripples on top of the waves. That’s a useful skill! ...

Wouldn’t it be cool to charter this boat for a week or so? I might get a chance to. More info when I know it for sure…

Corporate Mofo discusses the Matrix universe in detail too deep for a philosophical lightweight for me to comprehend. But he picks up on, and explains something I noticed too. He says: Not coincidentally, most of the people in Zion seem to be black or Hispanic, which makes perfect sense: If you’re a white suburban Matrix resident, driving your Matrix SUV to your Matrix golf club, why doubt the nature of reality? ...

I went to the blog.meetup.com meetup for San Jose tonight. I met a cool group of people there. Conversation was good enough I forgot to leave and go get dinner, so tonight I’ll just have to subsist on a cookie and a mocha. Geek food! A while ago, I went to one other meetup, which was only so-so. It seems that bloggers are naturally a bit, uh, different socially, and that feeds into a successful meetup. Like the blogosphere itself, any lull was immediately filled with an interesting tidbit, keeping the conversation going. And then the brainstorming on any given topic ran to unpredictably strange ends. Somehow we manged to invent outsourced bus driving and coffee drinks with bacon bits. ...

I watched Ars Digita, because I sensed something important and interesting was happening there. I was saddened when it all fell apart. To me, it was an important part of the tale of the dot-com days. I found an article that looks to be an interesting insider’s view on things there. Update: Eve has removed the article from her website.

I saw Matrix Reloaded today. It was pretty good, I guess I’d score it a 4 out of 5. Not like the original Matrix, which was an 11 out of 5! I remember leaving the theater after the first Matrix thinking, “Wow, that movie has changed the playing field of Sci-Fi movies forever.” And it turned out I was right. This time I left the theater thinking, “That was a good movie, and I’m glad I went to it.” Which, compared to some of the crap that you see in the theaters, is a pretty huge compliment. ...

When I got up to Arnold, I heard on the radio that the Calaveras County Fair and Frog Jumping Contest was running this weekend. So after I finished my chores (restack the woodpile, clean the gutters, sweep the roof, replace the disposer), I went down to check it out. It has been so long since I’ve been to a county fair. It was fun. I called Andrew and Holly and alerted them to join me. They had a good time too, and Holly says she got lots of up-close pictures of people just being people. ...

I was really looking forward to sailing lessons this weekend, but I got the schedule wrong and it turns out the first class is next weekend. I’m going to use this weekend to go up to the cabin and get it ready for the summer. Got to get all the flammable stuff away from it before the vigilantes (also known as the “Meadowmont Property Owners Association”) send us a nastygram. ...