This is going away.

fakesteve says that “windows ruins seattle’s fireworks”:http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2008/01/windows-fucks-up-seattles-new-years-eve.html – and he’s right, of course.

When you ride north tonight,
Can I tag along and charm you back into my life?
When we get to where yer goin’,
Will you marry me,
Right down on the dusty ground?

Because that’s where I wanna be all the time.
That’s where I’m gonna be from now on.

from the song ‘Marry Me, The Cowboy’.

“Programming is hard, lets go scripting…”:http://www.perl.com/lpt/a/997

“Rails is a Ghetto”:http://www.zedshaw.com/rants/rails_is_a_ghetto.html – happy new year!

Behind a sign, behind a
script, the blank, before.

A long Antarctica of hotel sheets.
Away, I could be anyone.

But closer, the cloud bank’s light-bloom,
the snowfield’s drone.
The empty-never-empty.
A whiteout, a swarm.

The freeway we no longer hear, the sound
no story rises from.

The underlying: breakfast over, dishes done,
and put away, and you
are here, and here

you are. The underlying: I’ve touched
you again, before knowing
I wanted to touch you.

– Jessica Johnson

number of times I can listen to Rhett Miller’s “Come Around”:http://youtube.com/watch?v=Mq5KYuhWOaE continuously before feeling as I must be on anti-depressants: 9

I knew today would be awful from the moment I awoke. I would be made to suffer in a quiet, desperate way. It’s as if the wind was out of me, left to catch my breath, with everything unsettled, rendered open and raw, shaken ajar. It could all slip away. It could all drift away.

You, restless reader, probably don’t feel the same. Not yet, not quite right now. Sometime, someday, you just might. In this harrowed moment, the songs of Paul Gozenbach are warmth, a steady ship, a little lighthouse of hope. His songs are there when you need them.

“A Man Without Qualities” – off of JYPU’s self-titled EP 1999.

-“unspeakable records”:http://www.unspeakablerecords.org/ [new, seattle based!]
-“Jim Yoshii Pile Up”:http://www.jypu.net/ – [RIP]

While its not the time of year for breezy indiepop that reminds you of summer days spent dreaming away, “California Snow Story”:http://www.letterboxrecords.com/calbio.htm from Glasgow have captured me over the past few days with just this style of music. Perfect pop!

News of an “Apple patent for wireless ordering”:http://mashable.com/2007/12/27/apple-starbucks/ has spread rather quickly. The gist of this patent is that Apple will allow iPhones and the iPod Touch to connect to a brick-and-mortar retail location for pre-advanced ordering of an item. The idea isn’t new by any stretch of the imagination and frankly Apple tends to patent just about every idea that they can possibly drum-up.

The rub in the initial reports was that they hypothetically positioned the experience at a major coffee retailer whom they’ve already got a digital experience with. [who could that be? -ed] Now, those initial reports were all well and fine when you consider that its just a few name drops as to the overall possibilities of a technology architecture such as this, but what was lacking was the basic facts: its just an simple idea. The above report carried the possibility a little bit too far. Laying next to this rather forwarding thinking idea is the hardened fact that a Point of Service system (the cash register) is an extremely locked down network making implementing such an idea for suggested retailers a networking nightmare. How Apple solves for this is the true genius but still, admittedly, a little bit unknown.

The trick, if Apple were to do something more with this idea, is to allow for network agnostic ordering to take place that allows a POS to allow orders to fall directly into the queue in a seamless manner. I wouldn’t tie this “web ordering” to a POS or any pre-existing digital infrastructure in a store but perhaps use bluetooth, bonjour, or something akin to

a) notify you if you’re within a networked range
b) allow for the user to select a pre-defined set of functionality based on this service location
c) user interaction would broadcast to a management system in store \ over the web?
d) somehow get the front of house or POS system to recognize that there is a new order in the cue.

Starbucks and Apple did something quite original in the Wi-Fi Music Store at Starbucks in that you’ve got digital goods available instantly at a physical location. Within the purely digital realm, handling and managing of data is a breeze. Bringing the digital to the physical, however, is much more complicated.

In the end, I think we’ve got a blueprint for the future: a store that has digital features but is still a face-to-face customer interaction location. Despite my overall depression when speaking with most people, despite a service agent constantly smiling and trying to make the experience a delightful one, you cannot remove this relationship from any physical store. People demand face-to-face customer interaction. “They always will”:http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/752-personal-attention-drives-apple-store-success.