This month both my personal blog, Ascent Stage, and my Flickr account turn 20 years old. 

I’ve gone back through all of it — 862 posts, 30,558 photos. Other than endemic linkrot, an unfortunate smattering of Flash-based content, and services whose embed functions have crapped out (looking at you Flickr video, YouTube, and Google Maps), it has been a very pleasant journey through two decades of me. What follows are some thoughts on the evolution of the site, interspersed with my twelve most viewed (publicly-accessible) Flickr photos from the past two decades. (Here’s the 10,000th photo posted and, very recently, the 30,000th.)

Since 1996 I had maintained a personal website called, pretentiously, hypertext ::  renaissance. This site had no content management system — definitely not what would come to be called a blog — all hand-coded with table-based layouts, frames, and   hacks. It was a beautiful mess, all mine, and visited by precisely no one. I loved it. Many rough years passed with browser-specific HTML atrocities, cgi-bin Perl scripts, and transparent single pixel GIFs. But help was on the way: personal blogging software. As a former grad student studying the English Renaissance how could I not jump onto a platform called Movable Type?

But we’re starting in 2004. Google had just introduced Gmail. Flickr was launched as a social photo service built on the corpse of an MMO gaming platform called Game Neverending. The social bookmarking site del.icio.us was in its pre-acquisition heyday. Feedburner brought the first bit of Web 2.0 cred to the Chicago tech scene. Javascript was having its moment with the Ajax framework. Mozilla’s Firefox 1.0 browser was attempting to cut into Microsoft’s then-95% share of the browser market with IE. MySpace had just passed 1 million users. Facebook had only just been created in a Harvard dorm room. Twitter was two years in the future. The iPhone, three years. My wife and I had two kids under the age of three. I decided to start blogging.

I have always loved writing and tinkering with software. And with a debilitatingly broad curiosity that has led me into countless hobbies, projects, and side quests blogging was a perfect outlet. But more than that, blogging itself seemed like fulfillment of the promise of the still relatively new web — the democratization of publication. So much more than the hobbyist/nerd niche websites of the late 90s, weblogs were full platforms to let anyone anywhere communicate in a relatively non-amateur way. Even better, as this was before the coming of fully hosted blogs, spinning up your own meant doing it outside any big corporation’s monetization imperative or walled gardens. This was the second coming of Gutenberg, at least to young me who liked writing about such things. 

I got the platform up and running but the site needed a name. I wanted something hopeful, forward-looking, and ever-so-slightly nerdy. As a spaceflight dork I chose Ascent Stage, the piece of the rocket that goes up. (Eventually I had to explain this. And yes I do also own descentstage.com. I’ve often considered crafting an anti-hero version of me there.) First post: Oct. 1, 2004 about my best buddy Matt’s art show. (And he’s still making beautiful things, 20 years on.)

Reading back through everything some patterns come through almost immediately. Many posts were very short, 2-3 sentence observations or comments on links. It was a need for something like Twitter several years before that service was launched. I even experimented with something I called microposts, basically manual snippets in the blog margin. What doomed these is that they were never integrated chronologically with main site posts or in the main RSS feed. Twitter solved this particular problem, but it created quite another. My blog posting rate dropped off a cliff in the early years of Twitter, but, given the service’s 140 character limit (which was delightful), the length of individual blog posts expanded greatly.

Microposts failed but the marginalia survived and continues to this day. It’s a persistent collection of featured site sections, latest public photos from Flickr, interesting links (powered today by Pocket, but formerly pulled from del.icio.us), and books I have recently read (pulled from LibraryThing). In some ways the margin is the oldest section of the site, at least in concept. It’s a throwback to a time when open, interoperable, embeddable web functionality was everywhere. A web made of many pieces loosely joined. Being distributed these pieces have broken many times through the years, but that’s the thing about a garden without walls: there are always new plants to find further afield.

Many posts in the early years were lists of favorite things like links, gadgets and software — most of which no longer exist, given the pace of technological change and startup frailty. And yet the reminders of what caught my fancy — such as what my backpack carried on international trips — have some historical and emotional value.

And speaking of the latter, one early topic category called The Darnedest Things (and a broader one called Kids) was a running diary of observations on parenting two and then three small children. My kids are only just now discovering these snapshots with equal parts fascination and horror. Like finding a lost diary.

Hurricane Katrina was a catastrophe for many, including my extended family. In an era before widespread social media Ascent Stage was a collection point for information as my wife’s grandparents fled coastal Mississippi. Eventually it was where our family could see that their house was destroyed.

Oh the music nerdery! These were the early years of MP3 files and online music stores, mostly pre-streaming. Having already ripped my entire CD collection to digital I was prepared for the onslaught of music organization, visualization and analysis tools that came about in the early years of the millennium. Hoo boy, I had some fun:

• The Mashability Index — an attempt at visualizing the most mashed-together artists from thousands of songs.
• Evolving my music genome — an attempt at using Apple’s Genius music recommendation algorithm to cross-reference its output recursively, highlighting duplicate tracks. This, I posited, would ultimately generate a playlist where my musical interests overlapped, each track of which being a root node for all the music that I have come to love moving forward from that point. It sorta worked.
• Culinary turntablism — using a traditional Chinese rotating food serving platter and the dishes placed upon it like a player piano roll. You should have seen the incredulity of my colleagues in Beijing over the course of a multi-hour meal as I assiduously noted when dishes were added and removed to the rotation and how many revolutions they made.

I dabbled in short album reviews on the blog, but mostly used it to distribute novelty remixes (like this one, danger!) and what I called giftmixes (like this one from 2011), lightly-mixed continuous collections of tracks for friends. These were also the days of my participation in the DJ collective known as Beat Research Chicago with Jake Trusell and Jesse Kriss. Such fun as we lit it up at Villain’s in the South Loop for a few months. Music was also a huge part of a series of bonkers holiday parties thrown by my wife and I. With a custom-built DJ booth, handmade electroluminescent jackets, and a steady stream of Chicago police officers demanding we turn it down the three final parties called Out of This World, Around the World, and The End of the World became legendary. I sure do miss those electroluminescent jackets.

Like any good blogger I wrote a lot about food, but very specifically about recipes and experiments in Southern Italian cuisine, relatively unloved in the USA. It was cooking as ancestor worship, basically. These were also the years of winemaking and brewing as well. Of course I had to do it the hard way, ginning up everything from colonial-era Applejack and wine from wild-picked raspberries to an Irish red ale in memoriam.

And then there was work blogging. The lion’s share of posts on Ascent Stage to date were written while I worked for IBM. Most of my time there was spent working on cultural heritage and related projects in Russia, Egypt, China, Ghana and dozens of other far-flung locales for shorter durations. These were the most formative years of my early career and the fact that I wrote about them at such length, naively in some cases but always with extreme curiosity and wonderment, brings me immeasurable joy. We got not one but two History Channel documentaries out of this work, not a single pixel of which seems to remain available anywhere on the Internet. I do know that Omar Sharif said my name in one of these, but you’ll have to take my word on that.

Then there was the brief but intense dalliance my colleagues and I took in virtual worlds, like Second Life, as we were researching technologies for our work in China. This roller coaster seemed to stop abruptly … and yet given the current fascination with AR and VR headsets and open world gaming these days it seems pretty clear that we were way out in front of the technology back then. What’s old is new. No more so than with AI. The blog documents one of my favorite memories at IBM at the very end of my time there in 2011: serving as a human test contestant while training the AI supercomputer called Watson as it prepared to compete on the game show Jeopardy. I beat the AI on one question. A single question.

I left IBM in 2011 which corresponds pretty precisely with the end of frequent posting on Ascent Stage — but the writing that did happen got longer and in some ways more serious. The reduction in posting is likely not that I had more time to write while working for IBM but because I had so many more outlets in my new role as Chief Technology Officer for the City of Chicago. Also, my travel during this time fell to nearly zero. And then of course there were the continuing effects of microblogging via Twitter.

My professional and intellectual focus at this point was primarily on urban design and technology. Even before I joined the mayor’s team, Ascent Stage had become an outlet for exploring the intersection of data, especially open data, and the experience of life in cities using Chicago as a platform. Here are some highlights:

• Our second city — an essay I was asked to write by WBEZ in Chicago and which, in retrospect, seems like the beginning of my deep thinking on cities and technology. A favorite.
• Lessons from unmaking urban mistakes — wherein I extract six examples from the past to guide us as we explore a future of networked urbanism. Holds up.
• What the public way means in the networked age — an ode to the sidewalk as the original social network.
• When tech culture and urbanism collide — still not sure we’ve learned to be skeptical about urban solutions coming out of Silicon Valley, a giant suburb literally built around the cult of the garage.
• City of Big Data — another career highlight participating in the curation of an exhibit at the Chicago Architecture Foundation (now Chicago Architecture Center), weaving my prior museum work into current interests.
• What we talk about when we talk about smart cities — one of the last in-depth treatments I gave to this subject before it moved to the saner side of the hype curve.

But really Ascent Stage has been the most fun when it was just cataloging the odd and the interesting, even when I didn’t realize it at the time. Here’s a selection:

Turns out not 20 days into even having a blog in 2004 I made an aside about my dislike for Donald J. Trump. (This hasn’t changed.) He tore down the Sun-Times building which, admittedly, was an unlovable eyesore on the Chicago River, right outside my window next door at IBM Plaza. We documented the whole thing and created a timelapse video, which I believe is my most watched video on YouTube. The refrain “there’s beauty in the breakdown” of the track we set the video to, “Let Go” by Frou Frou, hits differently these many years later living with the other things Trump has wrecked.

My friend Len introduced me to sensory deprivation tanks, something I enjoy to this day as a vehicle for relaxation and meditation. That in itself wouldn’t be very interesting except that the local ABC news affiliate did a story on it. Their spin? Harried working dad uses sensory deprivation to deal with stress. My wife was having none of it. But I was not done with the tanks. Through a series of experiments I brought a waterproofed iPad nano and heart rate monitor into the chambers to document taking all the senses away but one. Altered States it wasn’t. Scientific it wasn’t. But, hey, I was dealing with stress.

It’s tough to choose a favorite moment on the blog over twenty years, but the back-and-forth it prompted with my favorite novelist, Richard Powers, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, has got to be close to the top. I had mentioned Powers early on in a post which prompted a reply in a now-defunct electronic literature forum. But it was in 2007 that I directly called him out for a claim that his then-latest novel, The Echo Maker, was written completely by dictation using text-to-speech software. He replied, convincingly and humorously. This was the essence of the early web, nailing a note to tree in a dense forest of websites and having it be found (by someone famous, no less). I’m sure this still happens via social media, but the direct access it seemed one had to experts of all kinds in the early days of the web still seems magical to me.

Lego bricks occupy a lot of space on this blog. And in my house. And in my life. Building crazy things got me through the pandemic lockdown (and an audition on Lego Masters, twice), but well before then it was the launchpad for a small business with my two young sons. When our first child was born I used some paternity leave time to convert his photo into a grayscale mosaic and then posted a how-to. This got picked up somewhat widely around the web and eventually led to our establishing a service to do it for others, called The Brick Brothers. We received a letter from the Lego Corporation, which I thought would be the boys’ introduction to the concept of cease-and-desist, but which was in reality a congratulations. I couldn’t love those Danes more.

Pretty sure this blog earned me honorary citizenship in Italy. I had been writing about my Italian heritage for a few years, having studied there in 1993 and learning about the spectacular and relatively-undiscovered province of Basilicata, the region from which my family hails. It began with the help of Ancestry.com as my kids and I traipsed all over Chicago locating graves and places from old photographs. Some folks in Basilicata noticed and eventually invited me to come to Barile, the town of my great-grandparents, as their guest. It was an odyssey I will never forget in no small part because of the rarity of serving as a tour guide for my aging parents. Bringing it back home I wrote 1903, a piece of speculative fiction and genealogical detective tale that is easily one of my favorite posts.

Going back through two decades of cultivating this weedy garden, I’m reminded of seeds planted way back when that flower today. As early as 2009 my interest in restoring ecosystems is evident which today manifests as a broad study of how complex systems (like dinosaurs and towns) fail. And it’s probably why you’ll find more recent posts about underwater exploration and coral reefs, including a fundraiser I launched for Marhaver Lab in 2022. The last two years of Ascent Stage have been dominated by long-form, multi-part adventures. Last year my daughter, niece, dog, and I embarked on an epic multi-state tour of the American West in a jalopy camper trailer hauled by an electric vehicle. This was an extraordinary trip in many ways, not the least of which was being able to document how to actually do it logistically. This year’s adventure has mostly been about horror — cancer, sure, but really horror movies. Starting with a Zombiefest in 2008 through lockdown binge-watching horror has long been a theme explored in these posts. This year most of the pixels spilled here have been devoted to deep dives into the places in these movies, specifically a segment called The Terror Tourist which I contribute to a podcast out of Salem, Massachusetts called the Heavy Leather Horror Show.

So that’s it. That’s 20 years of self-publishing. It’s possible that one day blogs will be seen as a period-specific format, much like silent films are to the early 20th century. I hope not, of course, as their personality and authenticity seem ever more important as the web fills with AI-generated slop curated by corporations inimical to the hyperlink.

Like anything online the picture this blog paints of me is incomplete at best, an artifice of persona at worst. But it is me. I’ve detailed many highs in the posts and photos linked here, but the blog also documents some low points — let’s call them bumpy landings before I ascended again. On this eve of a new life phase which will surely have its share of mission calamities, I’m glad for it all. Here’s to many more orbits.

_________________
End transmission.

Quick note about changes to the blog.

I’ve moved everything over from a Movable Type installation to the WordPress platform — something I have put off doing for years. I loved MT in the early years, but upgrades and patching became increasingly onerous, as the community of developers and support dwindled. So, yeah, WordPress.

The irony is that most of the pain of the transition was in ensuring that nothing much changed. The biggest hurdle was ensuring that the permalink structure of MT carried over for archived posts so indexed and internal URLs did not break. So, though the MT-to-WP import worked well, I had to touch every single post to make sure the permalink was correct. Add in various formatting issues and it was pretty hellish.

I got at least one inquiry this year about whether my new job at the city had forbidden me from blogging. That’s absolutely not the case. It was a combination of an increasingly-crufty blog platform, the way Twitter allows you to post an idea without actually fleshing it out, and just the timesuck of getting my feet at the city.

But that’s all fixed now. I fully intend to return Ascent Stage to the mix of way-too-long essays and who-cares ephemera that has characterized it in the past.

Not all the functionality (or design) of the old site is replicated here — and I am not entirely sure I got all the broken internal links. (External linkrot, well, that’s just the way of the Internet.) But it should be fairly stable.

Some reminders of other tendrils on the web:

• Photos at Flickr
• Links at Delicious
• Updates at Twitter

Also, here’s my really big head on a “personal page”.

Do enjoy.

For the 2008 recap I thought I’d pair my own narrative of narcissism with some cold hard server metrics to see if people liked reading what I enjoyed writing most last year.

First, here are the posts that I’m most fond of.

Zombiefest – What happens when you have a free weekend, a lot of alcohol, 17 movies spawned from the Night of the Living Dead, and a brother to consume it all with (oh, and a bar that wants you to DJ). Here’s the first part of the results.

Iraqi on the corner – A local tale of hatred with a global context.

Evolving my music genome – What the iTunes Genius music recommendation algorithm to really says about me. (Hint: it says I don’t know what the hell I am talking about.)

The biophony of Trout Lake – Nature’s interweb.

Are you smarter than a student in 1924? – Also, did you know that the South lost the war?

Recursion – Art’s long tradition of picture-in-picture.

Love of Country – An explanation of a big reason I went to Ghana. Still makes me well up a bit.

The Gigglesnort Hotel – The next in a series of posts trying to explain to myself why I am so messed up.

10 Days in Ghana – How I came across a man butchered to death with a machete and other initial thoughts.

An economy of enslavement – Visiting the last places Africans saw before entering New World bondage.

Ghanaian handicraft series – A six-part series on traditional crafts in West Africa and the amazing people who practice them.

Sally Struthers go home – My take on the West’s wrong-headed approach to aid in Africa.

Call of the wild – Why trembling in your tent while a lion roars in the night is not so much different than that one musical passage that gives you the chills.

Rocks and hard places – Of cashew schnapps, faraway families, tribal chiefs and spirits in the material world.

Africa is a way of thinking – Probably my favorite post of the year, if not the most important. To paraphrase a related post, the things I saw in Africa will be with me forever, ineradicable viruses of the imagination.

Tom bo li de say de moi ya, yeah Jambo Jumbo! – How I almost died on safari in Kenya.

Slave to the cliché – If you love Powerpoint, don’t read this. No wait, definitely read this!

But most of all, I missed YOU – It’s a list! On a blog! Has to be good.

Can I blow things up? – A post almost four years in the queue: the announcement of the Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time project.

The mashability index – Visualizing why certain artists get mixed together more frequently than others. This was fun.

At the end of the world. – Looked forward to this all year and it did not disappoint.

And here’s the top ten most read posts (that were written in 2008) according to the server logs. Clearly I have no sense of my audience. I guess I only like 30% of you.

1. How big is the Forbidden City?
2. Forbidden City: Revealed on the History Channel
3. A happening in China
4. Favorite links of 2007 (see, people love lists!)
5. Recursion
6. Soar with turkeys
7. Zombiefest
8. Danger! Animated GIF from the early web! (What the hell?)
9. At the end of the world.
10. Testing 1-2-3

Thanks for reading, folks.

Here’s last year and my favorites from 2006.

Seems like there are more first-time visitors to my humble blog than there used to be. This might be a function of my linking Twitter updates to Facebook status, which if you do the math means that a lot of non-geek acquaintances are now alighting on Ascent Stage without a clue in the world what the hell is going on. Welcome, dearest friends!

Thought I’d take a brief moment to explain the name of the blog, something I’ve never rightly done.

You get some hilarious pronunciations and questions, especially when trying to give out the URL over the phone in an interview, say. “A cent, as in one penny?” “Ascent’s ‘tage, like Hermitage?” “Nascent Stage, you mean like an infant?” “ASS-ent stage, what is this porn?”

Simply, an ascent stage is the part of the rocket that goes up as opposed to being the one that breaks for going down. Sadly, in the post-Apollo era this has mostly been the only stage a rocket has. We ain’t landing anywhere with a rocket as long as we have a Shuttle.

Ascent stage refers usually to the upper half of the lunar modules that we put on the moon. The descent stage landed the astronauts (counteracting the moon’s weak gravity); the ascent stage put them back up to link with the Service Module whose rocket would take them home. Simple enough.

But why the name? What I’ve always liked about the concept of an ascent stage (in addition to the space dorkiness) is that it implies progress, upward motion, forward movement. But also a discrete point in time, or phase. There’s also something very slightly sad about it too, because to ascend means you descended at some point and you’re leaving something behind. (In the Apollo case this was the descent stage itself.)

There’s a classic image from the last Apollo mission where they left a camera specifically poised to capture the ascent back up to the orbiting command module — something which had not been done on previous missions. Not sure what it is but there’s something eerie and solemn about the footage that was captured. Two guys in a rickety polygon blasting off from a much more stable looking bottom half, which is now left to decay on the moon forever.

So, that’s kinda the rationale or feeling behind the name itself: progress, ascendancy, upward motion … tinged with mystery, loss, even desolation. My blog.

By the way, I’m considering a redesign. Input welcome. Via CAPCOM, naturally.

It’s taken years, but I finally have backup where I want it. (Oh yes, dear readers! It’s another post about data backup. Recline your chair and prepare for a mind-blowing post.)

My reasons for backing up seem to be changing. Certainly there’s still the raw, precious data. Family photos and video, certain media projects — these things have to be saved for posterity. But increasingly my reasons for wanting a backup are more about state than data. I want to return to the state my machine was in more dearly than I want the data it once contained.

Think of it in more concrete terms. What if you everything in your house — every single physical item — had a double in a storage facility? What if every time you bought anything you bought two and put one in a self-storage bin? Then your house burns down (and all your loved ones are safely vacationing on Maui). You can reconstruct your life from the storage facility, but it will be a massive pain in the ass. The state is all fooked. The effort involved in getting it back to a livable order is overwhelming, basically the same thing as moving — an act which ranks just slightly below death of a spouse in terms of personal stress.

Ideally you’d want a legion of robotic moving specialists to reconstruct your house according to the old plans and place everything back as it once was. A bonus would be the option to redirect the robots as the spirit moved you, but at the very least you’d have an automatic replica. This is the source of my fascination with bootable clones.

The fact is, most of my data is replicable. My iPod and laptop all contain enough of my music library to reconstruct it if the main machine should fail. My calendar is online. Personal mail’s all IMAPped up to the Great Google in the Sky. Work e-mail, replicated from servers. Photos are all on Flickr; video at any number of services. The set of truly precious, non-online-dwelling data is getting smaller and smaller by the day. Basically source files only.

My prediction is that in the near future state is all we will care about. You won’t even think about data being local or remote. But you will care about speed-to-recovery. And that’s all about the little things, how your machine behaves, how your kitchen was organized before the fire.

There are corollary effects of this attitude. Recently to alleviate some of the space pressure of five people in a home we decided to clean up some of the impromptu areas of storage in the house that had persisted since we moved in. You know what I’m talking about. Boxes that never got completely unpacked. Stacks of crap that made do in a guest bedroom only because you didn’t know where else to put it.

I undertook the foolish exercise of building an attic in my garage. I can hardly hammer a nail straight much less build a structurally sound platform. Most of what we moved up there was non-essential: books, college notebooks (wanted to throw away but couldn’t — I’m going to need that Intro to Lit Crit some day,damnit!), winemaking equipment, random crap.

So I got it all up there. Stored. Except it wasn’t really stored — wasn’t really backed-up — unless I knew it was there. And this again is the influence of Google. Unless you can search for it, unless you know precisely how to get it back, you might as well throw it out, delete it. So I took photos of everything up there, where it lay in the attic. And for the books, well, it got a bit geekier as I finally finished cataloging and noting the location of every last volume with the superb Delicious Library.

Do I care about most of that crap up there? No. Do I care that I know the state of that crap. Absolutely. And that’s the thing. If the garage burned down I would be OK. The stuff is replaceable. The index to that data is not.

Maybe I’m overthinking this because my father and brother are in the self-storage business. But I think not. Spring cleaning for me is really spring tagging.

As the Space Shuttle program goes, so goes Ascent Stage. It’s time for a fundamental redesign.

The backend’s been upgraded to MT 4.1 and good things are in store for the user experience too.

I shall endeavor to redo the website for less than the US $1B pledged to make pretty new American rockets. But only slightly less.

Sorry for any bumpiness.

Some housekeeping over here at Ascent Stage mission control. Site-dwellers may have noticed that the micropost area is no more. I staved it off as long as possible, but the little area for one-liners was up against a ticking clock.

You may remember that a while back I switched from a manually-updated area (pain) to one powered by the unstoppable Twitter. Thing is, in the interim with the advent of @reply functionality, Twitter became a two-way communication medium. Suddenly my carefully-crafted bon mots and trenchant insights (yes!) were subject to contamination by my irrepressible urge to respond to people. I knew I had to switch it over.

So what we have now is a running excerpt of everything that happens in my Twitterverse, including responses to people without the original context. Like listening to one half of a phone call. It is remarkably freeing, not having to care about what’s there, just letting it flow. And, as Joi says, it really does kinda threaten blogging as we know it. Microposting is the new posting.

So if you’re on Twitter, you can get it all sans-ramblings of the main blog at twitter.com/johntolva. The Tweetstream is not, as yet, spliced into the main feed. (Feedburner, arghhh!)

Some links for you:

Follow Tweets old school thread style at quotably.com.

Fantastic Mac desktop client (kinda made it all click for me): Twitterific.

Twitter inspires all kinds of creative uses such as the ioubeer service and this fun mashup by pal Bryce.

Happy tweeting!

Heed little Sisyphus shoveling the mound that never gets any smaller.

Ascent Stage is being upgraded. I’m bound to screw something up. Gloriously.

(If you need something to do in the meanwhile flip through Stick Figures in Peril at Flickr. Always good for a laugh.)

359 links posted in 365 days. I just went back through them all and plucked out the most unusual, thought-provoking, or interesting of the lot. In my opinion, of course. Kinda interesting (depressing?) to note the trends of topics that capture my attention over time.*

(As a sidenote, if you’re not receiving these links in your subscription to Ascent Stage add this feed here. It combines the main posts with the links. For you site-visitors the links are called Marginalia and are over in the right gutter. All links historically live at del.icio.us.)

Mindstorms Autofabrik
LEGO robots that build LEGOs. How Skynet began.

How to Speak a Book
Richard Powers on writing fiction by dictation. I knew there was something different about the style of his latest novel.

100 Years of the DJ
From “music waiter” to international superstar. A great audio-annotated timeline.

Vintage Charleston video set to Daft Punk
I enjoy watching this very much. The moves at the end are approximately 60 years ahead of their time.

No ducking foie gras law
Doug Sohn, mastermind behind the greatest hot dog joint in Chicago, takes a stand against an asinine law.

Spaceport Sheboygan
Bratwurst Capital of the World and … the Midwest’s only licensed space launch facility? What the hell?

wikisky.org
Space. Annotated.

One Picture, 1,000 Tags
Museums begin to understand the value of user-created descriptive taxonomies. Says the Met: “There’s a huge semantic gap between museums and the public.” Well, yes.

Wrigley Beer Vendors
Trading cards for the most important people in the ballpark. Fantastic.

Music textile
A fabric-based MIDI controller that is interesting because it raises the possibility of a music score itself acting as the instrument.

How to Turn a Book Into a Picture Frame
Creative. Try matching book themes to photo subjects.

The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel
Hilarious recounting of America’s greatest engineering accomplishment. Viva Maciej.

Forget team-building, shoot an after-work music video
This made my day, maybe my week. Apparently these co-workers did this in one take. Watch ’til the end.

Best Venn diagram ever
So, so true. I am not truly happy right now.

a.placebetween.us
Plot a point between two people. Want to find a bar to meet your mate equidistant from you both? This is your app.

Baseball Geography and Transportation
Alex Reisner explains the impact of changing modes of transportation on player culture and ballpark symmetry. Very well done.

reCAPTCHA
OK, this is currently the most brilliant thing I’ve come across in 2007. Simple, beautiful.

Serial Port: A Brief History of Laptop Music
Serious, thoughtful primer on the laptop as more than just a digital turntable.

Incredible! Why Roger Federer may be the most amazing athlete ever
This is not new, but I never tire of watching it. Kudos to Roddick on his sense of humor too.

Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail
A High Line-type project to convert an abandoned elevated rail line into a linear park through Chicago.

Baby monitor in Illinois picks up live video from NASA mission
See also, how John would be arrested for parental negligence.

If Real Life were like Second Life
Giggle. (Love the away person.)

Dunning-Kruger effect
“The phenomenon whereby people who have little knowledge systematically think that they know more than others who have much more knowledge.” I have an in-law who suffers from this. Or rather, the rest of the family suffers from it.

Thousands of rubber ducks to land on British shores after 15 year journey
Amazing story of bath toys washed overboard in the Pacific that have made their way to the Atlantic.

Bud Light Swear Jar
One of the commercials that didn’t air. By far the funniest. I was crying at “Doesn’t count.”

Man(y) With a Movie Camera
Very cool idea for a “remake” of Vertov’s classic with user-submitted clips.

Watch the World(s)
My god. This is wonderful, gorgeous. Vincent would be proud.

People are reading more in the UK than they were in the 1970s
Interestingly counter-intuitive theory: “Books are ideal to fill gaps in people’s schedules – and with busier lives there are more gaps.”

The Manualist
Hand-fart soloist. (Thank you, Internets. Thank you.)

An entire prison does the Thriller dance
Not sure what to say about this except to wonder how many death threats the choreographer got. Impressive organization.

Barry Bonds surpasses Ty Cobb as the Biggest Asshole in Baseball History
Some contest: “Bonds’ Assholery has been enhanced by illegal drug use. Chemically induced “roid-rage” has artificially inflated his numbers. Ty Cobb established his record fueled by nothing more than bourbon and cold, steely hate.”

Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther’s Original “Adventure” in Code and in Kentucky
And you thought all English professors did was explain iambic pentameter, eh?

Flickr timeline with Simile
Rob Smart answers my call for a simple timeline view of your Flickr photos. Well done!

Venice charges rude tourists extra
I don’t disagree with this, though it might be nice to have the rudeness quotient work both ways, i.e. a rude shopkeeper discount as well.

Sara and I just got engaged!
Did YOU laser-cut foam core as part of your marriage proposal? No, I didn’t think so.

The immaturity of consumers (or “I want a refund!”)
Glad I am not the only one who thinks that the whining about the iPhone price drop is ridiculous. If you did not think it was worth $600 why did you buy it? (‘Course I’m not going to say no to the $100 rebate.)

x is the new y 2007
Roo Reynolds plots the permutations of x is the new y (e.g., “white is the new black”) based on Google results. Impressive and humorous.

Soundtracker
Fellow baldy Darren Shaw creates a Last.fm for playlists.

Seth’s Blog: Thinking about this war
The War on Terror as a marketing problem.

The Virtual And The Far Away
Gorgeously deserted, compellingly human. From my work pal Jeff Berg.

someecards.com
ecards for when you care enough to hit send

Amazon MP3
Whoa. Millions of songs. Not an iota of rights-management. Your move, Apple.

The Open Workspace Environment: “Where a human becomes a human resource”
Including tips on limiting your odor waft radii, abolishing prairie dogging, comparisons with prison cell square footage, and more.

DOT Unveils Sidewalk Compass Markings
What a great idea. Chicagoans, don’t get your hopes up. The first compass needed by the CTA is to direct it in removing its head from its ass.

Reverse Graffiti
Brilliant. Subtracting grime from walls to create art. But be warned: cleaning a wall may get you arrested.

“The half-life of an irregular verb scales as the square root of its usage frequency.”
That is, the more frequently an irregular verb (to be, to have, etc) is used the less likely it is to evolve into a regular verb (e.g., the past tense of “chide” has become “chided” where in the past it was — wait for it — “chode”.

The Moby Quotient
A handy formula to determine “the degree to which artists besmirch their reputations when they lend their music to hawk products or companies.”

The Future of the Music Business
Hint: one genre of music already provides the model.

Make a Mixa
Forget CD’s. Put your next mix on a cassette tape USB drive. Love it!

Using McDonalds’ As Pizza Toppings
And I thought the Goblin Cock was innovative. As described: “a culinary Frankenstein cooked by Bizarro, a crude combination of deliciousness into an artery-jamming fatty Voltron.”

NeoVictorian Computing
Mark Bernstein’s insights into the software developer as artisan. A good read.

The wisdom of clouds
Cumul.us is a merger of multiple weather feeds, user predictions, and suggestions on what to wear (and buy) to combat the elements. An excellent idea.

This salad container topographic map is genius.
Yes, I would have to say it is.

The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts)
Great exposition on the new e-reader from Amazon that people are ga-ga about.

Japan’s melody roads play music as you drive
This is so great. I have often thought that the sound of changing pavement is a lot like half the stuff in my music library. And that’s a good thing.

Forgotten Chicago
Bookmarked so I don’t, you know, forget.

An Open Letter to a Guy I Work With Who Always Comes Into My Office to Tell Me He Sent Me an E-mail Right After He Sends Me an E-mail.
I’d like to append my name to this letter. I HATE when people do this.

Electronic Music Writing Guide
Need to write an electronica review? Here’s your cheat sheet. I particularly like “an arduous slab of Powerbook abstraction.”

The Worst Band Names Of ’07
Worst? I think not! Deny the creativity of this sampling, just try: The Asbestos Tampons, Harmonica Lewinsky, Slut Barf, Coach Said Not To, Bi Furious. And yes, they all have MySpace pages.

Our Dumb World | The Onion
Now an annotated Google Map and Earth layer. A new country is “featured” each week. Hilarious.

You know those computers you see in the movies…
Most of the “fictional interfaces” you see are designed by this guy. What an awesome job to have.

Update:: And here are a few I liked from my stint as Guest Editor of Coudal’s Fresh Signals.

Dopa, funkadelico, scratchare, and suckeroni. Hip Hop Italiano blends American slang and dialect from the bottom of the boot. Viva comic opera.

Zombies vs. Robots, a new comic so conceptually sound it is self-evidently perfect.

Intimate Exchanges is a “multi-play” where two actors make decisions Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style, cycling through 10 characters and 8 different plays. It can be perplexing, but each show is a new experience. Here’s the decision tree.

If you can’t describe it in 17 syllables, perhaps you shouldn’t be drinking it.

This bed sheet with printed rulers should finally give you the data you need to protect your territory.

Underpass as Photoshop. View Layers.

Tom Phillips selectively draws right onto the pages of a Victorian novel. Brian Dettmer takes it a step further and carves into the z-axis of a book. It’s all about layers, you see.

Vader’s labored breathing? Just pausing between sets.

Peter Feigenbaum’s gorgeous model railroad slums.

* Top tags for my links: music, chicago, humor, space, design, art, maps, tools, language, travel, video, visualization, china, secondlife, photography, nasa, google, lego, mashup, ibm, architecture, mac, museum, blog, books, cubs, map, audio, baseball, flickr, ipod, history, web2.0, baby, film, parenting, social, web, gadget, itunes. Yep, that’s pretty much me.

Personal blogging is by definition a bit narcissistic. Compiling a list of your own favorite posts of the year, well, that’s downright solipsistic. But so it is. Here’s the best of this year, in easy-to-digest narrative format.

I started 2007 strong by challenging a MacArthur Genius and getting it handed right back to me. Beaten, I went to Russia and contemplated empire. Not content with the glories of the past, I experienced our glorious future of levitating trains in Shanghai.

Full of the future, I discoursed on how to change the world in the here and now, remembering our human knack for figuring out how to destroy the planet utterly. I started local, though, helping envision a better sewer.

But that was all so deep. So I got drunk on a rooftop and focused on the people who really matter, including those I never had a chance to meet. This all led to the meaning of life, naturally.

Now enlightened, I was able to pull back into my iPod-shell and dream of random things. Then I took my parents to Italy on a journey that was both wonderful and harrowing and learned how nothing is ever really random. Like Star Wars, just one story in a much larger universe.

So I relaxed by shooting rockets at friends and, ahem, aiming for the cornhole. Too much of a good thing, but of course nature has a way of balancing things out.

I shook my fist at the natural world and turned to man-machine interfaces and technological humanism. Take that!

But I was too bold. The long arm of the law, aided by border paranoia and Big Business, nearly got me for the love of artisanal fakery.

Nothing left to do at this point but have fun, so thelovelywife and I organized a small get-together.

And that, friends, was 2007.

Here’s last year’s best-of. For god’s sake, is anything improving around here?