After wandering over to the Apple Store, and somehow getting interviewed by VentureBeat, I had eventually arrived home while Sarah was putting Adela to bed and was sitting on the couch when she came out of the nursery.

“Pretty shaken up, huh?” she asked. I nodded.

“Thinking about your legacy… what you’ll leave to the world?” she asked. I nodded again.

“You have Adela. You’ll leave a wonderful daughter.” I nodded again.

This is true. Even as she said it, I was thinking, “And Adela will bury me one day. What will she say? When she looks around at the world I’ve given her, will it be better? Will she even think I tried?”

It’s not like I need a level of impact equal to Steve Jobs for that answer to be yes. My mother was a school teacher for decades and every time a former student would say hello at the grocery store—their own kid waddling behind them—they’d say, “This was daddy’s 1st grade teacher. She taught daddy how to read.” Likewise, my father was in state government for many years and now runs a non-profit trying to increase college graduation rates. His organization has recently enjoyed a bit of media success, featured in everything from the New York Times to Gawker. Between the two of them, literally hundreds if not thousands of people are going to be better educated.

My parents are older than me. They’re even older than Steve was yesterday. There is time left. As friends forward around inspiring quotes like…

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.

…I’m reminded how lucky I am. I love my profession. Web design marries the creative and analytical parts of my mind like nothing else I know (maybe music?) and I truly believe the Internet is the second—spoken language being first and the printing press third—most powerful force for bringing humanity closer together. It is truly an amazing time to be alive.

I hope that Adela will be able to see that these pixels I push around all day are about that. Not just snippets of code or sexy gradients but about illuminating information and spreading ideas, about nurturing a new medium that will one day supplant everything from television to radio to books, about democratizing communication until anyone can talk to anyone about anything and the planet begins to understand that we’re all in it together.

That is a worthy legacy.

Just last week, AT&T was in the news for two major stories, revealing them as… I think the legal term is “dicks”.

On Tuesday, classified documents were released confirming that they did indeed help the NSA with their warrantless wire-tapping activities. They didn’t just look the other way while the NSA did all the work but coordinated with them, re-routing traffic and purchasing equipment to make surveillance easier. The first of these “spy rooms” was constructed in San Francisco, about four blocks from my office. To be clear, this is not stepping out of the way to let justice be served—the wiretaps are illegal—it’s more like approaching a mugging in progress and offering the mugger a bigger gun.

Then on Wednesday, AT&T announced plans to “filter content” over the internet. They’ve outlined a plan where their servers will monitor the data packets sent through them and delete any that are found to by infringing on copyrights. They feel that somehow, by contributing to the infrastructure, they own what it carries. Imagine your water company deciding when you’re allowed to have water or your power company deciding when you’re allowed to have power. For even less of a stretch, imagine your telephone company (quite possibly AT&T) deciding which phone calls you can make or receive. Consider further that something like “copyrighted content” is not uniformly illegal, as legality depends on usage, and you’ve got a real bull-in-a-china-shop situation (fitting because filtering internet content is a criticism often aimed at the Chinese government).

Put these two together and you see an AT&T that uses their power irresponsibly and, quite possibly, illegally. Not an ideal partner for Apple, whose been trying to keep their image clean. Yet when the iPhone comes out on June 29th, the only way to get it is along with a Cingular/AT&T plan. What’s a nerd to do? Here are a few possible solutions.

Steve’s “blog” has recently had some fairly landmark posts on it about Apple’s perspective on DRM and their environmental policies, both of which have been in response to popular activist campaigns (the Free Software Foundation and Greenpeace, respectively). Perhaps they’d be willing to listen to reason on why telecommunications companies constantly monitoring our communications is not an ideal feature for “our digital life“.

The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) continues to fight the bully telecoms in multiple arenas. Oh that’s right, AT&T is also starkly against Network Neutrality and even funds astroturf groups to represent a non-existent public outcry in their favor. Almost forgot that. So the second possible solution is to set up a monthly donation to EFF equal to or exceeding your monthly donation (i.e. bill) to AT&T.

The last option is to wait for the iPhone to become available on Verizon (only marginally better on the Net Neutrality front) or another service. This could happen after the exclusive partnership with AT&T is over (see, even Apple gets locked into lame 2-year contracts) or by someone unlocking the iPhone so it can be used with other carriers.

My current plan is to wait on the iPhone. Mostly this is because I’ve learned my lesson on buying 1st generation new product lines from Apple, having purchased one of the first G4s back in 2000 and one of the first MacbookPros last year. Both are phenomenal machines, with just a few kinks that have since been worked out. But, unless I wait the full 5 years, this doesn’t address the political aspects of avoiding AT&T. Also to consider: does it make a damn difference? I’ve been boycotting Sony for almost ten years now and I don’t think anyone but my mom even knows. Ultimately, I think it’s a “can you look at yourself in the mirror-like shiny Apple logo?” issue. And that’s a question we need to ask ourselves over more than just the phone we use.

Sure, there are claims that his self-aggrandizement (the hubris of suggesting that climate change is caused by humans!) has all been to bolster his name recognition for a presidential bid. However, couldn’t he have made an equally interesting movie about the dangers of proprietary data formats? The answer: yes.

For some reason he chose climate change, despite being almost 60 years old—clearly beyond the reach of the majority of its devastation. He has kids, but their affluence will likely guard them as well. Why care about climate change? What’s the dark secret? What’s the nefarious, shadowy, wicked, dark, dark secret that has him so concerned about the future of our planet and its people?

Tuvalu.

That’s right. I know I probably just blew your mind. You may not even know what Tuvalu is. Follow the money and it becomes much more clear.

Fact: At some point during his Congressional service, Al Gore invents the internet.

Fact: After a failed bid for the presidency, Al Gore becomes Chairman of Current.tv, a progressive television channel/community.

Fact: The top-level domain extension .tv is the country code for the island nation of Tuvalu. Something that only the inventor of the internet (or residents of the Federation of Micronesia) could possibly know!

Fact: Due to climate change leading to rising sea level, Tuvalu is sinking. The entire country will likely disappear entirely if trends are not reversed.

Put the pieces together. Who has the most to gain from Tuvalu not sinking? Al Gore. Who has the most to gain from stopping climate change, thereby saving Tuvalu? Al Gore. Who has put up a $25 million bounty to the creator of a machine that sucks Greenhouse Gases out of the atmosphere, thereby slowing climate change without addressing root causes, thereby not necessarily saving Tuvalu? Al Gore.

I rest my case. The Norwegians must be told.

What follows, after the necessary introductions, are direct quotes from Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in last week’s Newsweek interview and the recently released “Thoughts on Music“, respectively. I admit a slight bias may have come up during editing.

Steve: Hello, I’m a Mac.

Bill: And I’m a PC.

Steve: There are many smart people in the world, some with a lot of time on their hands.

Bill: I don’t think the over 90 percent of the population who use Windows PCs think of themselves as dullards.

Steve: Music purchased from Microsoft’s Zune store will only play on Zune players.

Bill: There’s tons of people who help make those decisions, so I wouldn’t overstate my role in the past… I don’t know why Apple is acting like it’s superior.

Steve: Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats… This is clearly the best alternative for consumers.

Bill: That’s for my customers to decide.

Steve: Any company trying to protect content using a DRM must frequently update it with new and harder to discover secrets.

Bill: It’s totally according to plan, and that’s why we have the whole Windows Update thing.

Steve: Microsoft’s recent decision to switch their emphasis from an “open” model of licensing their DRM to others to a “closed” model of offering—

Bill: If you just want to say, “Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along,” that’s fine.

Steve: Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.

First, you have to love Apple products. They’re really pretty on the outside, but they run some sort of Unix type thing on the inside. Just like webmasters. We have to be comfortable using Photoshop one second and vi the next. Of course, if you don’t actually use a Mac to do your webmastering, you’ll have to balance things out by owning lots of iPods (they come in several “gotta catch’em all” sizes).

Next, you need to be super-organized. Webmastering can be very stressful, what with managing a co-located server running all the very latest versions of lots of Open Source software, editing standards-compliant XHTML Strict files by hand, and manipulating custom graphics pixel by pixel. To handle all of these high-tech tasks, you need a Moleskine. That’s right. Nothing says “I’m a cutting edge webmaster,” like a 200-year old notebook. Feeling a little Luddite? Balance it out with a Fisher Space Pen and you’ll be right as rain (which, incidentally, you could write during—the Space Pen can write underwater, upside down, and even in space!).

Finally, you’re going to want to drink a lot of coffee. This will do two things for you. One, it will give lots of energy to accomplish all of the unreasonable tasks that are constantly asked of you by your tech-ignorant staff. Second, it will make you jittery and paranoid so all tasks asked of you seem unreasonable and that you are vastly more intelligent than everyone else.

I’m sure I have other secrets that make me a smart webmaster. Some may have to do with findability, progressive disclosure, or the application of Zipf curves to traffic patterns, but they’re harder to grasp. Just stick with the basics (above) and you, too, can be a smart webmaster. Oh, and go vote for RAN in the Squidoo poll.

New Year’s Eve itself I spent mostly on a train. I finally got back to my house a little stinky from three days aboard the California Zephyr, so I hit the shower. At the stroke of midnight, I shared a Times Square moment with my cat and roommate, donning festive hats and whirling noisemakers for approximately 8 seconds before returning to what we were doing.

As the buzz of the New Year is coming to an end, the real work must begin in earnest. As I mentioned before, I normally actually do whatever it is that I resolve to do on New Year’s. In the past I have decided to go vegetarian, leave Indiana, and throw a rave. Done, done, and done.

My 2000 resolution, coming true.

Beginning with the standard resolutions, I resolve to better manage my time and money. I further resolve to do it using cool programs only available for the Mac so that 1) it doesn’t feel like work and 2) my PC friends are not only jealous of how well I manage my time and money but would be forced to buy a Mac in order to keep up. I am a Jones, afterall; keeping up with me is the Usonian way of life.

GTD is powerful enough, but MidnightBeep’s Inbox is taking my practice to that next level. It’s less lightweight than kGTD, which I had been using previously, but so far I’ve found the added rigamarole forces me to think my projects through a little more.

On the money front, I’m using IGG’s iBank. It has everything I was looking for (most notably a pie chart telling me how much I spend on Soy Mochas), but also gives me projections on how much I’ll be worth 5 years from now. It’s possible that I haven’t configured it properly yet, but otherwise I’ll be sitting on $65k. Ladies, that qualifies me as a “strong buy”. Plus, all of this money will be in the friendly and capable hands of San Francisco’s brand new New Resource Bank, so my money can be the root of rooftop solar home equity projects instead of, you know, evil.

My final New Year’s Resolution declared me instead of me declaring it (which sounds like one of those “In Soviet Russia…” jokes). I was hitting the snooze bar on my alarm clock—which I’ve done consistently since my mom stopped waking me up—and I noticed that my alarm clock didn’t have a snooze bar. It quite clearly has a “drowse” bar.

Sometimes we hit the ones we love.

This gave me great pause, as I’ve had this same alarm clock since high school. How could I have never, in 10 years not noticed that I had a drowse bar? Something must be done about this oversight. Thus, my final resolution is this, “to try to observe the world with new eyes each day, taking as little as possible for granted.”

So far, I’ve noticed some very interesting things. First, almost all of my pants are 2 inches too short. So it’s off to thrift stores with them. Second, dentists are a very strange cultural phenomenon. Why do we pay people to shove sharp metal objects in our mouth? Finally, Apple has some sort of cellphone now. How long have they had that?

I urge everyone to take a look at your world today and try to find something that surprises you. Post your findings below.

It’s not the first time O’Reilly has expressed his unmitigated hate toward the city of San Francisco. Almost exactly a year ago, he told Al Qaeda, “You want to blow up Coit Tower? Go ahead.” This time, his current rhetoric is more aimed at our gay pride parades, “pot shops”, and mocking of Christianity.

I should know better than to assume anything O’Reilly says is rooted in reality, but assertions that San Francisco is some sort of secular playground is ridiculous. I’ve attended services at Glide with a Jewish friend and managed to make it to a Solstice or Beltane party every once in a while, too. Further, the Mission District is very Catholic and there are neighborhood celebrations around Confirmations or Baptisms every week.

So what exactly are “San Francisco Values”?

He’s hitting on something with the gay pride parades. San Francisco definitely values diversity. The tremendous Chinese New Year Parade has been named one of the world’s top ten parades. I loved going last year and seeing all the little kids dressed like puppies for the Year of the Dog. Last week’s Dia de los Muertos celebration was a beautiful colored stone in the mosaic of cultures that is San Francisco.

The “pot shops” crack may be a crack at our hippie heritage and I’m pleased to say that the treehugger’s have left a lasting legacy. San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland are all in the Top 20 greenest cities in the U.S. according to the Green Guide. Personally, I take one of the four excellent forms of mass transit San Francisco has (none of which use gasoline) to work every day.

One thing that Bill has left out, however, is San Francisco’s value of innovation. I’ve long said that the DNA of San Francisco contains, across the board, the “I wonder what’s West of here?” gene. That spirit of imagination and adventure has given the world some amazing things. Considering just the illustrious internet marvels, the Bay Area is home to Apple, Craigslist, Flickr, Google, Yahoo, and YouTube among many, many others. Let’s not forget popsicles and fortune cookies!

One more invention that had its root in San Francisco that Bill O’Reilly may be especially thankful for and not even know it. On a foggy day in September, back in 1927, Philo T. Farnsworth brought to life a device without which the world would never come to know the No Spin Zone, the motherfucking television.

Diversity, sustainability, and innovation? Those are San Francisco values and Congress could sure use all of them.

The term “Conspicuous Consumption” was coined in 1899 to describe (with no small amount of disdain) the buying patterns of the Nouveau Riche. They suddenly had lots of money and wanted to let everyone know. Huge cars, lavish mansions, fur coats, sparklin’ dookie, etc.

Who’s sexier: George Cloonery or Al Gore?

The same thing seems to be happening with the trend-setting creative class in the present day. These Nouveau Righteous have developed a conscience and, by god, they’re going to let people know. Fashion magazines this summer were abuzz with the new “Eco-Chic” trend (as opposed to Eco-Chick, which is always in season). Everyone was checking labels to make sure they were toting certified organic, sustainably cultivated, fair-trade clutch bags that really reflected their worldly values on the way to the plastic surgeon for lipo, in their Hummer.

Evangeline Lilly thinks you should wear more hemp.

Making known one’s ethical affiliations is nothing new. Bumper-stickers proclaiming preferences for love-making over war-making could have grandkids by now and the colored-ribbon frenzy of the 90s has merely evolved into the colored-bracelet frenzy of the 00s (no, not that one). Still, there’s something about the ultra-ubiquitous white iPod as symbol for cultural capital that suggested to me that this (RED)^TM coalition was more about capitalism than activism. Afterall, fancy iPods and Bono go hand-in-hand.

The (RED)^TM campaign (yes, they’ve trademarked the term “(RED)”) has a wonderful manifesto that explains their intention with the branding strategy. My favorite bit is reproduced below:

(RED) is not a charity. It is simply a business model. You buy (RED) stuff. We get the money, buy the pills and distribute them. … If they don’t get the pills, they die. We don’t want them to die, we want to give them the pills…

Does that read like a protection racket to anybody else? “Hey kid, buy this iPod or Africans die. I could help ‘em out y’know, all you gotta do is buy this iPod. C’mon, you wouldn’t want anything bad should happen.” This is strange to me, because the (RED)^TM products seem to be priced exactly the same as their non-African saving contemporaries, what kind of “business model” is that?

The new face of activism?

In the end, I don’t think this campaign is truly about leveraging the power of consumption to help resolve the world’s tragedies, it’s leveraging the world’s tragedies—and the incredible transformative power of activism—to further fuel consumption. Otherwise, we could skip the iPods and just send $10 to The Global Fund ourselves and save $189 plus tax. The truth is that many corporate business plans rely on Third World poverty to keep costs down and if we really want to address global inequities, it’s probably not best accomplished by pouring money into the very institutions that have perpetuated them.

Men with common ideals coming together into a communal living environment such that brother can hold brother responsible to a shared oath… This was the promise of fraternities. Making assurances that others would not profit unscrupulously from another’s work, encouraging creators to share their artistry with the world such that each may grow in the sharing… This was the promise of copyrights. Things have, er, drifted a bit since then. Nowadays, most peoples’ interactions with fraternities and copyrights involve hazing incidents, sexual assault allegations, Cease-and-Desist letters, and “This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.” errors on YouTube.

Exclusivity is not an evil on its own, the idea that a fraternity or copyright should belong to those who put the work into it seems like a basic right. Still, any closed system tends toward groupthink (via a genetic inbreeding of ideas), easily evidenced in people thinking its okay to make others swallow goldfish or pay $2.99 for a “My Humps” Ringtone. In many ways the Open Source community has paved the next evolutionary step here, recognizing the importance of interoperability as a glue to bring together smaller, autonomous parts. While one programmer may “own” the calendar plug-in and another the event plug-in, both benefit from being able to share data (and, of course, opening up the components to the community can help even further). The current copyright players seem to have taken Sacred Oaths never to reveal the Inner Secrets of the DRM Brotherhood. Sony and Apple, I’m looking in your direction.

Abusive behavior, in contrast, is an evil on its own. There are no excuses that can be made for the now infamous RIAA suits against little girls, dead grandmas, and a family without a computer for file sharing. The RIAA has sent too many innocent freshmen to the hospital. It’s not much of a stretch to compare the Sony Rootkit fiasco with slipping an unsuspecting girl a roofie.

The collusion behind the scenes, the winking, nodding, and nudging, is just as bad with copyrights as with any fraternity. The Blu-ray format, for instance, is vying to become the next step beyond DVDs (holding up to 9 hours of HD video) and is being heavily marketed by a coalition including content-owners Sony, Disney, Time-Warner, and Fox along with hardware manufacturers Apple, Dell, HP, Panasonic, etc., all of whom are very pleased about the Blu-ray’s built-in DRM and working together to help it succeed. Like a frat house rivalry, the competing HD-DVD format has risen to egg their front door.

There is a reason to be hopeful for both fraternities and copyrights. For every Old School there’s a New School. The fraternity of which I was a part in college was then undergoing a massive shift to re-invent the college fraternity experience with their Balanced Man Program. While outlawing not only hazing but pledges all together (if you’re asked to join, you’re in) and providing a series of challenges with increasing levels of community responsibility, it has seen a 90% undergraduate retention rate and 3.0 national average GPA.

Likewise, the sluggish caterpillar of the copyright has transformed itself into the magical butterfly of Creative Commons licenses. Despite all the hub-bub around Google’s acqusition of YouTube last week, which some surmise is more about protecting Fair Use laws than business models, up-and-comer video site Revver is already putting CC to work—and passing the profits on to the creators.

I have plenty to say about LonelyGirl15, but I’ll hold it for another time.

But let’s back up a second. First, what are microformats? Just this evening I found myself explaining them, which is difficult without a running start. Once upon a time, a single webpage contained both the contents of the page and how those contents were supposed to look. Webdesigners learned clever tricks that made pages pretty but insanely huge and complicated consequently. Ask anyone who has been designing websites longer than 3 years about “nested tables” and you’ll see the terror in their eyes. We’ve come along way since then, separating the content (as XHTML) and the design (as CSS); but soon we realized there was more to be done. The content we had was just meaningless words, what did it describe?

For instance, here’s a random (but true) statement:

Last weekend I saw Björkestra play at the Great American Music Hall with my friend, Anne. They played Björk greats like "Human Behavior", "Joga", and "Oh So Quiet" with an 18-piece jazz ensemble. The venue was incredible and the band itself phenomenal.

Lots of things are going on here. I’m describing an event, I mention a person, a list of songs, and give a review. You, a human of greater than average intelligence (you are reading Stanifesto afterall) and capable of parsing language for its meaning, immediately recognize all of these things. A computer just sees a string of letters and numbers interrupted by commas, periods, and quotation marks. Not very useful.

Enter microformats. With microformats, you can do a little behind the scenes work (adding some XHTML tags that say things like rel=”friend” or class=”rating”) and soon a computer sees EVENT, PERSON, LIST, REVIEW. To see microformats in action, download the Tails extension for Firefox, which drops a little green square in the corner of your browser whenever it sees microformats on the page you’re viewing. Then scripts that will take those microformats and do useful things with them, like “Map that location on Google” or “Add that person to my address book”. Which brings me to the point of this post… finally!

My Addressbook was chaos. There was one group called “work”, one called “personal” and then a big pool of unorganized people. I never knew where to look (would my cubemate Japhet, in whom I often confide great secrets, be contained by “work” or “personal”?) and would frequently find people I did not remember a damn thing about. I had plenty of content, like phone numbers and email addresses, but no way to make sense of it.

Nice photo, dude.

There’s a microformat for relationships called XFN. As an example, you could link to someone’s else blog and use XFN to note them a colleague that you had actually met in real life (with an easy rel=”acquaintance met colleague”). I opened one window to the XFN Quick Reference table and another to my Addressbook and started chugging away. There were some tough decisions to be made (is my father a “friend”? is this person a “muse” or a “crush”?) but a clearer picture of the people in my life and how they relate quickly came into view.

Crushs are just a click away!

The next step was adding some Smart Groups that will scan the notes field and organize folks into groups automatically. No need to decide whether or not to drag them into “work” or “personal”, just tag them honestly and they’ll show up where they need to be. Japhet ended up in both “Co-Workers” and “Friends”, which sounds just right to me.

Microformatting is not really intended for local applications, it’s really more for making better sense of publicly available information. So it’s really quite thrilling to me that it was so incredibly useful on a personal level. Like RSS and AJAX, microformats are another great example of the internet community at large (and not a closed corporation) constructing a product to meet their own demands, in an open and organic way. I’m excited to see what else I can apply them to.

Maybe this blog?