But then I noticed the wheels were literally frozen to the ground. Literally, connected to the pavement with four or five inches of solid ice. It seems everyone had shoveled the snow out of their parking spaces into mine, and now a solid layer of vengeful ice is keeping me from driving my car.

So today, I bought 75 pounds of rock salt and poured it all around the wheels. Tomorrow: liftoff.

In contrast to my relatively boring life, a mail from Alex:

From: Alex Graveley
To: Nat Friedman
Subject: Re: genitalia

> regale me with tales of your grand adventures abroad

Well I've just returned from riding around a moped in the hills of Chaing Mai. On the winding way up I sort of lost control and took the bike into a 2 foot cement gutter. I was fine and some kids stopped and helped me pull the bike out.

Everything was great until on the way down the engine died. Luckily, the same kids who helped me pull the bike out, came along and with the help of a screwdriver got the engine running again.

The sad part is that for the remaining descent the kids followed me and made fun of me in Thai. I'm not entirely sure but I think they were being really cruel and hurtful, and probably calling me gay.

-Alex

Don't write friendster off. Classmates makes $90 million a year. 8 March 20038 March 2003 An interesting letter about using the phrase "Bush is out of control" on your web page.

My friend DaveM sent me this, which is brilliant.

Last night, a bunch of us went to see Greg Palast talk. He is the guy who broke the Enron story, and the 2000 Florida election scandal, wherein tens of thousands of black voters (who overwhelmingly vote Democratic) were expunged from the voting lists by order of Jeb Bush.

He signed my copy of his book.

Costin.

Miguel and I have a plan to create universally syndicated identities. More to come. 9 March 20039 March 2003 Hey, neat, someone generalized my apology card idea. Mine are cooler, though, since they're nicely printed on cardstock and I rubber-stamp the date on with one of those librarian date stamps.

And of course because I can use them for other things.

(How come people do this kind of thing without letting you know? I found out from my referer log.)

One of the things I've been hacking on with a high level of intermittence is my dashboard idea. The basic notion is automatic search of your personal information space as you go about your regular daily activities: reading and writing email, browsing the web, talking to people on IM (at least, these are my regular daily activities).

The dashboard in action.

I wrote some text about this project, but it was too long and boring for my blog, so I put it here.

The thing Miguel and I have been hacking on today is a free and open Friendster replacement. Partly because they are soon going to start charging people, and partly because we can do better.

The idea we have that they don't have is: building an open, distributed system that allows public identity publication, so that you can syndicate yourself with XML the same way you syndicate your blog with RSS.

Right now we're just dicking around in an amateurish way, mainly trying to figure out what 'select' means in SQL, but soon the world will feel our power.

Syndicated identity visualization in your face.

Naturally, you want centralized servers to do things like anonymous messaging, notification, etc. So our standard consists of an XML schema and a server interface for all the interesting interactive services.

Unfortunately, we still need a nice web UI, and those are so boring to write. Miguel started on something using ASP.NET. Of course, we will build this into livejournal too. (Yes, I know about lj_connect; don't confuse a butterfly for an owl).

In other news, I really have to stop reading news web sites late at night. They make me so angry these days that I can't sleep, so I've been kept up till 8am by political rage a little too frequently. 12 March 200312 March 2003 Hack o' the day.

And yesterday, I finally had the Fiat towed to a garage.

At a peace vigil in Virginia.

Friday I boarded a domestic flight in Germany (Hannover to Frankfurt) without showing any form of ID.

Hannover airport, 5am.

Mom.

Yesterday my friend Rony pointed out that potassium iodide pills are seeing brisk sales online.

Mainly, I just can't stop being so fucking sad and angry. Somehow it feels like Bush's unequivocal warmongering gives me license to be more of an asshole too, like that's the way things work now: don't compromise, don't understand, be an asshole, it's okay, you're allowed. You know, prison rules.

I think I have a full-on mullet.

And Pat's like "Here's what I don't understand. There's no way he can get out of there in 48 hours. You think he's got all his shit boxed up and ready to go at the drop of a hat? He's got to pack, he's got to get his electricity and gas disconnected, he's got to setup mail forwarding with the Iraqi postal system, and do you have any idea how hard it is to get a flight out of Baghdad right now?"

Driving in Virginia. Where I dun growed up.