Dave Kellam

It’s really hard to start writing about Vogue for Men, then again some organizations can write an entire article. There should be more than a few obvious jokes to work with, but the project on a whole just seems like another addition to the already massive pool of magazines. It may survive, it may not. I can’t see myself buying it.

I’m guessing that they’re trying to pull in an audience of modern, fashion-conscious men (you get a slap in the head for allowing meterosexual into your brain). I’m also going to go out on a limb and guess that they spent a lot of money photographing George Clooney and gave a five-year old some licorice to design the cover for them.

Look at it. I mean really look at it. Try to tell me that cover isn’t seven different shades of ugly — from the logo, to the use of four hundred different fonts. For a magazine that’s pimping style, it’s hard to figure out how this cover escaped into the wild.

It seems like you can’t turn around on the internet these days without running into the phrase “Web 2.0”. Some of the chatter is positive, some is negative — I’ll weigh in with the latter group. Why did they let this one leave the brainstorming session? Web 2.0 sounds like a bad Microsoft concept or at the very least an immature product. Then again, why stop at Web 2.0? It seems sort of minimalist. We should really go all-out and call it eXtreme Web 2005 Mega Enterprise Edition.

There are a lot of smart people around making a lot of smart things, but they need to stop pimping the phrase. I don’t think anyone can really step back and say, “Yup, sure looks like a point upgrade happened sometime around April. What do you think Frank?” That said, it’s mostly a marketing endeavor — people work well with acronyms and buzzwords. Take AJAX, there’s been some backlash related to branding a technology that’s been around for years, but it’s given everyone a common point to rally around.

Inventing buzz words is cool, I understand the need — but Web 2.0? We can do better. Why not come up with a term like AJAX that actually describes the underlying paradigm shift? How about Dynamic and Fluid Technologies (DAFT) or Dynamic User-Dependant Environment (DUDE) or Fluid Interactive Services Hub (FISH)? I could go on.

The whole web 2.0 thing is a semantic argument and kind of a pissy little thing to bring up, but no one in the “Web 2.0” crowd actually reads this site, so it doesn’t matter.

Back from the camping trip to Charleston Lake. We had great weather and and a great place to camp at an interior site. We canoed in — definitely a lot easier than hiking with the gear. It was relaxing to spend a few days outdoors.

The only problems on the trip were the raccoon and my camera batteries dying. The broken lcd on my camera is brilliant white and sucks up the juice if I forget to turn it off (easy enough to do in bright light), so I only really have photos from the first day. Alanah managed to conserve her battery for the whole trip and got some great shots out of the canoe. For more, take a look at my photoset or Alanah’s on flickr.

The raccoon (whom we dubbed Franz) had the audacity to make an attempt on our duffel bag full of food, despite the fact that we were sitting right beside it. Not just once, but three times. The first night he managed to eat a loaf of bread by jumping off a picnic table and clawing the bag open (it was separate from the main bag due to laziness). The second night he somehow managed to abscond with another loaf of bread and some hotdog buns despite no obvious signs of tampering with the bags in the tree. We suspect Franz has invented teleportation technology. Will investigate further.