GONE FISHING

See ya later. More soon.

American Apparel: Valeria in Montreal

They get it. Valeria in Montreal, nice way to sell clothes, but even better, to actually build a factory and give people jobs ... now that's hot.

You So YouTube!

We have a large appetite for funny people dancing in funny ways on YouTube. Check out OKgo in the backyard and Okgo on treadmills.

Gothy Vids

There is something so classic about heavy metal Gothic videos. They all look alike. Big dining room table in big dark mansion, cobwebs on candlesticks, pierced girls with much mascara. Top 20 Countdown, some things you can just always depend on.

LittleDoorMouse

You've been so quiet lately ... thanks, yes. True. Lots going on and blogging isn't easy these days.

Summer Fruits

--From La Tartine Gourmande by Bea Peltre

Late August: Peaches, Beaches, Outer Reaches

Hope you can take some time to just take it easy in these last few weeks of summer. I was reading some old blog posts here about winter ... actually ... I was reading some old blog posts here and they all seemed to be about winter. That's because winter in Boston starts in mid-October and ends in mid-May it seems like.

Anyway, it's that end-of-summer peach cobbler, beaches full of crisp fall morning weather, long boat rides out beyond where you can see, past the outer reaches. Enjoy them. It's slipping through our fingers, this lovely summer, like grains of sand.

Back-To-School No Cupcakes

There's something happening at schools, I think it's about the allergy thing, that you can't bring food into school -- no cupcakes, no birthday food for your kid's birthday -- no nothing and no peanuts and nut things and treenut foods and on and on and on.

I remember when moms brought cupcakes to school. When did that stop anyway? Does everything I remember about school -- old school school -- not exist anymore?

Don't you love the photo -- Bea Peltre, La Tartine Gourmande took it. Her blog is so delicious.

Rain In Harvard Square

The fight has begun. The summer weather is fighting it out with the fall weather and I know who's gonna win. This day feels more like September than August.

School starts in two short weeks. I think I'll do back-to-school stuff in my Stylefeeder badge today.

Mass Mass Transit

The transit system here in Massachusetts ... Boston really ... is awfully good. This morning, though the bus was so packed full, the driver just waved me away when I tried to put my change in the fare box.

And I was miffed, because I had been standing at the bus stop for ten to fifteen minutes fishing every nickel and dime out of the bottom of my purse and I was so thrilled with myself for coming up with a truly linty minty messy pile of metal to pay for the bus.

So, man! The bus guy didn't even want my darned money ... how do you like that?

I decided by the end of the long, slow, jampacked ride to repurpose my fare and buy a bagel at the Dunkin Donuts in the Harvard Square T station. Happy ending.

Polo Shirt MIA

So this is me listening to my ipod in a polo shirt I bought about 2 months ago and I have no idea where the shirt has gone to. This is because my kid wears almost the same size as me now, so he might have grabbed it, together with the fact that my laundry basket is black-hole enabled, put things in and they are sucked into oblivion never to resurface, or are permanently adhered to the bottom of the basket or just go somewhere unfortunate. I like this shirt. I would like to find it and wear it again before the Boston snow returns in a few weeks or so.

Glad To Hear Doc's Back To The West Coast

Doc was here meeting with us yesterdaty and I knew he was going to fly back to Santa Barbara early this morning. Amazingly, it sounds like he got in just under the wire ... that is, just under the massive security effort that started this morning. Check it out.

Chuckle Laugh

Someone in our office, wait ... someone in the offices we share .... no wait, someone who was visiting someone in the offices we share, has a very funky chuckle laugh.

Chucka, chucka, chucka laugh.

Very annoying.

So needless to say we all sat around imitating it all afternoon.

Excellent use of our time.

Stylefeeder Loves Bikinis

So it's a new day and yesterday I filled up my Stylefeeder with shoes, but watch how much Stylefeeder loves bikinis!

Pretty Chinese Music Video on YouTube

Seen this?: Wilber Pan, Bu De Bu Ai (Have To Love) kind of cool and kind of cute.

And here's the English rapped-out version.

Adding Shoes To Stylefeeder

Amy at Thoughts in Random Patterns has inspired me big time ... so here comes a pile of shoes for my Stylefeeder badge below. Check it out.

La Tartine Gourmande

I Love Girls Who Love Shoes

Amy at Thoughts in Random Patterns is one of my shoe girls, I can tell!

La Tartine Gourmande

If you haven't added La Tartine Gourmande, (Bea's Kitchen) to your list of blogs -- do it now. NewsGator it, Bloglines it, MyYahoo! it right away and blogroll it too.

It's the best. Makes me hungry for a second breakfast already.

La Tartine Gourmande

La Tartine Gourmande

Wikimania Sounded Fun

Glad everyone had a good time in Boston here at Wikimania. I got a chance to catch up with some of the folks on Friday night, but had a lot of other stuff to do*, so missed most of it.

[*Like watch this video. I mean, who can get enough of Snakes On A Plane?]

Reading The Long Tail

I was in San Francisco last week and I've been meaning to pick up Chris Anderson's new book, The Long Tail. As I blogged before, I walked by the book a few times in the Harvard Coop right here in Boston by my office, but didn't have a minute to stop to buy it, much less to read it.

Then Wednesday night in North Beach (SF) I had dinner with the Scobles and Robert mentioned how much he appreciated Chris' book giving his book Naked Conversations a big kick in rank on Amazon, because they had paired the two books.

So the next day I was at the Ferry Building in San Francisco and wandered into Book Passage. It was a beautiful beautiful day and knowing I was heading back to Boston and would have time on the plane to read the book, I asked the clerk if they had The Long Tail.

She said they couldn't keep it on the shelf and didn't have any and that it was probably being reprinted because it was doing so well. Way to go Chris! Then a young ubiquitously pierced skinny guy in black jeans who worked there said he thought there was maybe just ONE copy in the store. He looked it up in their inventory -- the inventory seemed to agree with the woman, no books in the store.

He said, (at this point, I'm kind of loving the ring in his brow and wondering where else he was pierced), let's go check the shelf anyway.

Then we go to the shelf -- bravo for his persistence -- and there are TWO COPIES! I grab one. I buy it.

I go to lunch at Hog Island Oyster. I have an amazingly good lunch and then it dawns on me, "Halley You're In San Francisco ... and Chris is the editor of Wired and his office is here." I'm not too nutty about getting famous authors to autograph their famous books, I can live without that, but in this case, it seemed crazy not to take a stab at it.

I texted my assistant in Boston and asked her to text me back the phone and address of the Wired offices. She was like lightning and I called Chris to see if he was in town -- it seemed highly unlikely as most authors of new books are on endless book tours and NEVER at home when their book comes out.

Amazingly, he was there. I finished lunch and headed over there. What a sweetheart he was to interrupt his afternoon to show me around and chat a bit and sign my book. The Wired offices are just as cool as you would expect them to be and Chris is much nicer than you'd expect him to be.

I hopped the number 30 bus back to the other side of town, heading for North Beach, randomly I picked a seat on the mostly empty bus. There was a copy of the San Jose Mercury News (business section) tucked between the seat and the inner wall of the bus.

I picked up the paper to read a piece about VC's investing in start-ups. It had been a great day, I had a great lunch, a great book, a great meeting and as I looked at the paper a totally great and weird thing happened. There was a picture of me -- yeah ME?! -- and Peter Merholz and someone else right on the front of the paper, and a story about a UI and Design event at Yahoo I had attended on Monday. I looked over at the other passengers ... an old Chinese man, a skinny girl in black and white striped tights ... and wondered if anyone noticed I was looking at a random newspaper with a picture of me in it. Totally weird.

The next day I fly home reading the book from SF most of the way back to Boston. I had thought it would be too much about blogging and not have enough of a broader context about business. I was wrong. It's a great book and readable for a wide range of people. You don't need to know about blogging or RSS or anything to get right into it. It's smart and interesting and flies by (as I flew by) and I nearly finished it by the time we touched down. You gotta get this book.

Please Help Me Out: Stylefeeder Beta

We need you! We're trying to hit a critical mass of users over at Stylefeeder, so we can really test the thing, run it hard and fast, see how it holds up.

If you haven't tried it yet, please sign up and tell me what you think [I'm halley at gmail dot com]. Once we get it cranking, we'll see all the places it's holding up, all the places it's falling down, all the places it's coming apart at the seams and then we can stitch the whole thing back together.

Stylefeeder is like a visual bookmark of all the cool things you love -- love to buy, love to eat, love to read, love to look at.

Good To Be Home

I was in San Jose and San Francisco all last week, staying in perfectly nice hotels and all, but ... not home sweet home.

So it's nice to wake up in my own place and my own bed this morning. The only real Heavenly Bed!

MY PILLOW
MY SHEETS
MY READING LAMP
MY BOOK
MY BED

I made tea and drank it in a cup. Half asleep in my kitchen, my stuff is in place. My cabinet has my dishes, I know with barely opening an eye, just by reach where my morning tea cup is waiting for me. Ceramic white with blue flowers -- something Italian I bought a long time ago.

MY TEA
MY CUP
MY SPOON
MY KITCHEN FLOOR

I took a shower with bath gel, shampoo, conditioner.

MY SHOWER
MY BLUE OCEANUS BATH GEL
MY SHAMPOO
MY CONDITIONER
MY TOWELS

It makes a difference. Out my window are the noises I know and count on. In a hotel, there are other strange noises which squeak and squeal through the night, making my sleep a little more fitful than usual.

The predictability of it all is the ultimate luxury. It's me -- me where I live -- and my place knows me and I know my place.

Not Away, Just Home

Wanted to post something colorful. Don't get the wrong idea, I'm not away, home but was thinking about all the fun I've had in Florida.

Things We Said Today Lyrics

by Paul McCartney and John Lennon

You say you will love me
If I have to go.
You'll be thinking of me,
Somehow I will know.

Someday when I'm lonely,
Wishing you weren't so far away,
Then I will remember
Things we said today.

You say you'll be mine, girl,
'Til the end of time.
These days such a kind girl
Seems so hard to find.

Someday when we're dreaming,
Deep in love, not a lot to say.
Then we will remember
Things we said today.

Me, I'm just the lucky kind.
Love to hear you say that love is luck.
And, though we may be blind,
Love is here to stay. And that's enough
To make you mine, girl,
Be the only one.
Love me all the time, girl.
We'll go on and on.

Someday when we're dreaming,
Deep in love, not a lot to say.
Then we will remember
Things we said today.

Me, I'm just the lucky kind.
Love to hear you say that love is luck.
And, though we may be blind,
Love is here to stay. And that's enough
To make you mine, girl,
Be the only one
Love me all the time, girl.
We'll go on and on.

Someday when we're dreaming,
Deep in love, not a lot to say.
Then we will remember
Things we said today.

Wikimania: We Hate Wikis

Okay, the truth is out now. I whispered to a very well-known blogger (not Doc) tonight at dinner, "I actually hate Wikis ... " and he said, also behind his hand, to hide the words, "Me too."

And I said, "I love Wikipedia of course, but I hate Wikis."

Things We Said Today

Do you know that Beatles' song? You better dig up the lyrics.

Some of the things we said today: Why we love Dave Winer ... easy answer ... he's so fucking fearless. We were getting nostalgic about when blogs were fearless and who's still fearless, and he is.

And of course, so is Chris Locke. And we miss him and we miss that and really ... that matters a whole heckof a lot.

To have the balls to tell the truth.

Most wonderful.

Fun To Be On KRON

It was fun to be on KRON talking about BlogHer, but I hate it when I take myself so damned seriously. Good Lordy Lord.

Oh No, Not That!

Oh no, I'm in the mood to blog like DAYS OF YORE! Oh no! Don't Do That?!?

You mean, like in the old days when nobody ever read our stuff and so we could just tell the truth.

Ut Oh!

Dinner With Doc

Well ... where to start ... it was lovely to have dinner tonight at Legal's in Harvard Square with Doc Searls and 5,280 of his closest friends. But really we got a chance to talk and there were lots of wonderful things he had to say.

BlogHer 2006: Saturn Sky

I have to say, driving around in a silver Saturn Sky convertible was incredibly fun. Check it out.

I met up with Isabel Kallman of Alpha Mom TV and we tore around the BlogHer Conference trying not to run any other moms or women bloggers over -- that's never a popular move.

Here we are on the GM Blog. Now, how do I get them to send me one of those delicious cars?

Last Night With The Scobles

North Beach in San Francisco is the Italian neighborhood, with great history, great food, great street life. We coaxed the always-too-busy-lately Scobles into town for a terrific dinner at Trattoria Contadina in North Beach, a lovely little Italian place right on the corner of the hilly junction of Union and Mason, where the cable cars go rattling and creaking by and that roooshy-rooshy noise of the cables in the street hums under your feet.

Trattoria Contadina was packed last night and all for good reason. The food’s great, the ambiance is classic North Beach and so so SF. We love the Maitre d' (or Maitresse d') Gina.

Maryam and I haven’t gotten a real quiet moment to ourselves for a while – and barely did at BlogHER this weekend where she was the belle of the ball, rightly so with her great performance as a speaker on the subject of being private and public in your blog, being naked and clothed and how to chose which state of undress to indulge in when.

At dinner, Robert was having a fun and funny time messing around with his great kid Patrick, age 11ish. Those two are like two 11 year olds and of course remind me of my own 11 year old who unfortunately couldn’t be with me on this trip, but was having fun with HIS dad back East.

I’m so glad Robert and Maryam will be back in the Bay Area, seems like they’ve been in Seattle for way too long, although I’m sure the Seattleites have the exact opposite opinion. They’ll miss them sorely.

I was regaling them with stories about a prehistoric piece of pizza we found under my son's bed which prompted a total down-to-the-last-bit-of-dust-and-tiny-Lego-piece room cleaning. His room will never look the same.

There was a rather large number of GI Joe's lost under the bed, including one who had lost all his tiny camo army clothes and I ended up dressing in a cotton gym sock for decency's sake. He looked a bit like a tough mermaid in that getup.