DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Driving to the City Saturday morning, we caught a glimpse of Armageddon on 101N — peeking over the high guard rail, I saw what looked like about 100 cars strewn across four lanes of highway. I thought I saw a bulldozer, too, but that was probably a synaptic misfire brought on by the stress of carnage.

Equally shocking was that the highway was completely empty beyond the wreck — meaning, there weren’t 10,000 cars waiting for a lane to open. It was eerie. Highway 101 is never empty, especially not at 9:00 AM on a Saturday.

After passing through the Waldo tunnel, we saw the reason for the empty highway. Police were forcing everyone to exit 101N into Sausalito, at the bottom of the Waldo grade. 101N was closed! Another thing I’ve never seen.

Southbound traffic was moving quickly across the bridge. I asked the woman at the toll booth what radio station would broadcast traffic information, so I’d know when I could get home. She said “The CHP will have the road open by 5:00 PM.” 5:00 PM?! What kind of wreck takes all day to clear?

We heard the story an hour later: around 2:30 AM a driver had lost control and slammed into an SUV, killing the smaller car’s two passengers. [Insert SUV high-bumper rant here.] Because the road at the site of this accident is a steep downhill with blind turns, 26 more cars piled into first two. The CHP had been on site for something like seven hours already.

The Chron ran a full report on Sunday, with a better explanation for the initial crash: HUGE PILEUP IN SUDDEN BLIZZARD

More coverage: Marin Independent Journal (for 14 days only, hmph)

So, let me get this straight: if you have a deadly peanut allergy, you shouldn’t eat these peanuts because they’re produced in a facility that processes peanuts.

Ways to use del.icio.us:

del.icio.us is an open-ended system. You decide how you want to use it.

I think most bloggers and journalists have two primary uses for it:

• Store bookmarks for future reference/research
• Tag one’s own blog entries / articles, both to promote them to anyone monitoring those tags and to track the articles’ reach

I’ve done some of both, and I think the result is clumsy: my own blog posts appear in the same list with the rest of my bookmarks. Mingling these two disparate data types seems nonoptimal, as if Flickr wouldn’t distinguish between “my photos” and “my contacts’ photos.”

I spoke about this briefly with Jon Udell at Etech. He distinguishes the two data types by tagging his own articles with his name. It’s an easy solution for accessing “stuff I wrote” quickly, but doesn’t address what I think is the more interesting question: “show me my bookmarks but not the stuff I wrote.”

del.icio.us has a tag intersection feature to allow retrieval of bookmarks tagged with both of two terms, but it doesn’t currently have a negation feature. There’s no easy way to tell del.icio.us “give me everything tagged ‘foo and not bar’.”

Yes, I could write my own filter, sigh.

The pastry chef at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego does a pretty phenomenal job. In my four days at Etech I witnessed over a dozen varieties of coffee cake, cheesecake, cookies, petit fours, frangipani, croissants, napoleon, upscale Krispie treats, on and on and on, a heart-stopping convoy of white flour and sugar and eggs and an occasional taste of nuts or berries as if just to break up the monotony.

I like desserts, but not the first thing in the morning, which is when they served half these pastries, with three kinds of coffee and no juice. I don’t like eggs so much, but I’d have strangled a chicken if it meant not eating a half-pound of banana bread for breakfast again.

You could argue that the conference organizers really know their audience. What refreshments would 1200 alpha geeks desire more than sugar and caffeine? In retrospect it was surprising they didn’t serve Bawls for breakfast.

I commented to one of the O’Reilly staffers that the food at the Web 2.0 conference was far and away better than what we’d been served at Etech, and he pointed out that Web 2.0 costs twice as much. It’s O’Reilly’s flagship tech conference, I guess, so it comes with a high profile, a full bag of schwag, and a plate of eggs.

I don’t get out much. I work at home; my commute is about 12 seconds, even when I stop to put shoes on. For years, the farthest I’d get from my front door in a typical workweek was the end of the driveway, which is where the mailbox was. Now that I’ve moved, the mailbox is a solid eighth of a mile away, and up a mean hill, so I don’t even retrieve the mail any more.

One of the unexpected consequences of being within maybe 20 feet of a landline about 98% of the time is that I am only barely cellphone-literate. I own one, but I’m happy to leave it in the cabinet with the car keys, because I only use them together and then only every once in a while.

This week is exceptional, because I’m (a) out out town and (b) carrying a cellphone all day. I keep the phone in vibrate mode now, after an embarassing cellphone-novice experience at a conference last year in which it rang, at maximum volume, while the phone was in my shoulder bag, and it took me two rings to realize it was my phone making that terrible noise, and another two to realize that whether or not I realized it was mine, everyone within fifteen feet did, and two more for me to dig it out of the bag and frantically silence the thing. And then about a minute later, it rang again to tell me I had a voice message waiting. The withering stares from other conference attendees had already shamed me out into the hotel lobby at that point, fortunately.

So anyway, I was sitting at lunch today chatting with a guy about his new startup. I guess I was leaning forward because my traitorous phone was smashed up under my hip, affording it excellent bone conductivity. The phone rang, in vibrate mode, and I nearly jumped out of my seat. I actually yelled. I had no idea what was happening, but my adrenal glands were pretty sure that running away would be a good idea.

All things considered, the fact that I work with computers all day is pretty surprising.