Rainy weekend

Don't get me wrong: we need some rain here. But I'd prefer not to stand around in it for an hour and a half, and I'd prefer not to drive in the dark through a downpour. But it's been a good weekend. Let me back up a little.

Yesterday the chaoswolf and flower_cat had a FurCon staff meeting; I went out for a walk and it was drizzling, so I mostly hit some surplus joints and window-shopped instead. Got some cash, which I knew I was going to need today.

Today I went to the Dickens Faire with flower_cat and grendies, who is visiting the Wolfling for a couple of weeks. It was merely drizzling on the way up, which was a Good Thing, because when we got there the power was out. So we stood in line in the drizzle (which occasionally rose to the level of "moderate rain") for about an hour and a half. Power came back just about the time they were starting to hook up the generator. They gave us a bit of a discount (15%) on admission.

It seemed smaller than in previous years; the crowds were thinner (though that may have been due to the late start -- many people simply gave up and went home) and a couple of familiar booths were missing. The live music was as good as ever, though. The food was good, but the booth that served French onion soup was missing.

We were sort of looking for something mildly extravagant "for the house" -- coming up on your 30th anniversary does that, I guess. We ended up buying a pewter goblet from Ballena Bay -- the base is a pair of dragons either battling or nuzzling; it's hard to tell, so we're free to interpret it any way we like. I also picked up a couple of CDs from Danny Carnahan. (While tracking down the link, I discovered that he's a member of a band called Wake the Dead, billed as "the World's First Celtic All-Star Grateful Dead Jam Band." Their CDs will be arriving in the mail sometime this week.

Driving home, the rain started picking up about a third of the way home. By the time we got to San Jose it was downright torrential. Luckily there wasn't much traffic, so the idiots had room to maneuver. One of the problems with the start of the rainy season in California is all the idiots who either learned after it stopped raining in the spring, or who have somehow gotten out of practice over the summer.

On the whole, I'd consider this a pretty good weekend.

Tim Berners-Lee has a blog

You'll find it here. (Update: and the LJ feed at bernerslee. Thanks, johno.)

In 1989 one of the main objectives of the WWW was to be a space for sharing information. It seemed evident that it should be a space in which anyone could be creative, to which anyone could contribute. The first browser was actually a browser/editor, which allowed one to edit any page, and save it back to the web if one had access rights.

Strangely enough, the web took off very much as a publishing medium, in which people edited offline. Bizarely, they were prepared to edit the funny angle brackets of HTML source, and didn't demand a what you see is what you get editor. WWW was soon full of lots of interesting stuff, but not a space for communal design, for discource through communal authorship.

Now in 2005, we have blogs and wikis, and the fact that they are so popular makes me feel I wasn't crazy to think people needed a creative space. In the mean time, I have had the luxury of having a web site which I have write access, and I've used tools like Amaya and Nvu which allow direct editing of web pages. With these, I haven't felt the urge to blog with blogging tools. Effectively my blog has been the Design Issues series of technical articles.