The 11th Annual Urban Iditarod takes place this Saturday, March 5th, 2005 at noon in San Francisco. Here are some photos and press from previous years.

In the Alaskan Iditarod, more than sixty dog sled teams race across the frozen tundra from Anchorage to Nome. In our urban version, teams of “dogs” lead by a musher will pull their sleds (shopping carts) through some of San Francisco’s most touristed areas. These teams of barking humans must negotiate through the unrelenting and unforgiving dangers of San Francisco’s urban frontier. As an incentive to run, dogs and mushers alike will have several “rest stops” to replenish lost fluids and discuss tales of mayhem. The course is over three miles, so dogs and mushers alike need to be ready and able to run their tails off.

For more info, including how to register, check out the Urban Iditarod website.

Jef Raskin passed away yesterday. Jef created the Macintosh project at Apple, along with the concept of “click-and-drag”. Over the years he made many other contributions to computer technology and was a great collector of computer artifacts. DigiBarn Computer Museum has a Jef Raskin section which includes interviews and items from his collection.

Last night V. Vale of RE/Search hosted a round robin reading from his new book “J.G. Ballard: Quotes” at the legendary City Lights Books in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. Quotes from the book were read by (from L-R in the above photo) David Pescovitz (Boing Boing), Joe Donohoe, Eric Paulos, Karen Marcelo (SRL), Mark Pauline (SRL), Ken Goffman (aka RU Sirius) and SM Gray. Vale (on the right with the mic) even had a special surprise to open the night, a recorded greeting by J.G. Ballard, that Vale taped from a phone call made earlier in the day to Ballard at his home in Shepperton, England.

Here are a few photos I shot of this event.

I highly recommend picking up a copy of “J.G. Ballard: Quotes” which can be ordered directly through the RE/Search Publications online store. Even if you are not familiar with Ballard’s work, the J.G. Ballard quotes book that V. Vale assembled is a wonderfully insightful and often humorous look at our culture, society and what the future has in store for us.

Finally, here’s a J.G. Ballard quote on the “internet” from the book:

“Twenty years ago no one could have imagined the effects the Internet would have: entire relationships flourish, friendships prosper…there’s a vast new intimacy and accidental poetry, not to mention the weirdest porn. The entire human experience seems to unveil itself like the surface of a new planet.” [Pretext, 2004]

Ladies and Gentleman, start your TiVo’s! Last year’s Power Tool Drag Races are going to be featured on a 4-part Discovery Channel program. The scheduled air dates are February 28th and March 7th (parts 3 & 4 have not yet been scheduled). Here’s the full schedule.

In the meantime, check out the PTDR photos I shot in 2004 and 2003.

If you want to help support Power Tool Drag Races, please buy some of their stuff.

UPDATE: Discovery is airing all 4 episodes at least one more time.

The squid-positive folks at Mule Design Studio have recently announced a new tentacular product to spruce up your iPod: The Cephal-iPod

Your iPod’s glaring whiteness is relaying signals back to the humans. Protect yourself from harmful rays in style with this hand-crafted hip cozy made of (possibly) organic felt.

Mule Deisgn is also behind the wonderful “Welcome Squid Overlords” t-shirt. Having been a squid overload for many years now, this t-shirt makes me feel quite at home and I plan on adding it to my collection very soon.

“Elvis Trooper has left the Death Star”. Here are a few photos from WonderCon 2005.

Hunter S. Thompson meets his last deadline. Goodbye Gonzo…

photo credit: Alan Arpadi

The first big comics convention of the year, WonderCon 2005, takes place this weekend, Friday, February 18th through Sunday, February 20th at Moscone Center North in San Francisco.

Our friends at Last Gasp will be debuting their new Zap Comix #15. Sergio Aragonés, Kevin Smith, Harvey Pekar and many others will be there as well.

UPDATE: Here are my photos from this year’s WonderCon.

Photographic evidence of last night’s always-brilliant Ask Dr. Hal show.

The last remaining Doggie Diner dog head has found a new, permanent home on a median strip across the street from its original location. From today’s SF Gate: “City gives a dog a home”

For more on the infamous Doggie Diner, check out doggiediner.com.

Here are a few photos from last night’s WordPress 1.5 Upgrade Party, hosted by Matt Mullenweg in San Francisco. I was able to upgrade our WordPress (the script that runs this blog) installation in just a few minutes. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

Technorati tags: wordpress, upgradeparty

WordPress 1.5 was released today. WordPress is the weblog script that we use for our blog. This new release is a major jump forward for WordPress, which in our opinion is the best weblog script out there. It’s really easy to install and configure, with a variety of community developed templates to choose from. WordPress much more secure and robust than many of the other weblog scripts out there and best of all it is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). If you have been holding off starting a blog, your wait is over.

Of course Laughing Squid Web Hosting supports WordPress on our servers and in fact it’s the weblog script that we recommend to all of our customers.

Congratulations to Matt and the worldwide development community that have made WordPress possible.

UPDATE: here’s the official annoucement

Google does it again with Google Maps. Here’s The Odeon Bar, as mapped by Google. Check out that drop-shadow action and interactive scrolling. This is how things should work.

BORG2 needs your spare change to fund art at Burning Man.

The Flying Pig Sex Disaster Fundraiser takes place this Saturday, February 5th at The Shipyard in Berkeley.

We’re spare changing our way to a quarter million dollars!

And we’re going about it in the normal sort of way, by asking you to bring us your spare change, so we can put it inside a giant articulated metal sculpture of two pigs making beautiful love, which we will then set on fire as they fly around the Shipyard in Berkeley; as they burn, the change will fall out of the pigs and onto a giant metal collection plate, cling clack cling, making sweet music as only two flying, fornicating, bursting to the seams with spare change pigs can. Nothing weird about that; the pigs love it, we get money to fund art at Burning Man, and you get rid of all that spare change that’s been sitting around your closets in coffee cups, shoeboxes and old fishbowls.

Mark Morford has written an excellent article for SF Gate pondering why it is that people continue to use Windows. He makes some excellent points and I jumped ship once OS X was released and haven’t looked back since (finally a Unix destop that does everything I want it to, not to mention that the hardware is great).

“Why Does Windows Still Suck?”
Mark Morford, SF Gate, Friday, February 4, 2005

Mark writes:

Here, then, is my big obvious question: Why the hell do people put up with this? Why is there not some massive revolt, some huge insurrection against Microsoft? Why is there not a huge contingent of furious users stomping up to Seattle with torches and scythes and crowbars, demanding the Windows Frankenstein monster be sacrificed at the altar of decent functionality and an elegant user interface?

There is nothing else like this phenomenon in the entire consumer culture. If anything else performed as horribly as Windows, and on such a global scale, consumers would scream bloody murder and demand their money back and there would be some sort of investigation, class-action litigation, a demand for Bill Gates’ cute little geeky head on a platter.