The Palo Alto Apple Store, on a rainy winter night. Just 14 miles from The Mothership.

MacWorld starts in 10 days.

UPDATE: John Law has informed me that he installed the signs at this Apple store and many others.

Remember Suck.com, the great blog-like website that launched in 1995 and featured daily updates and articles? Well it’s a porn portal now and not much of one at that.

What really sucks is that Internet Archive Wayback Machine’s archives of Suck.com have been blocked by a robots.txt file. The Google cache of Suck.com has been purged as well. Man that sucks!

Ok, that’s now two porn-related posts from me today. I think I’ll call it a day.

UPDATE 1: Ah, the interweb comes through again. There is now a Suck.com torrent available for download, created from InJoke.org’s archives.

UPDATE 2: Steve Rhodes mentions in the comments that there is now an online archive: suck.eod.com. Here’s another mirror.

UPDATE 3: El Mariachi mentions in the comments that this was a DNS issue and that it is fixed now.

via Waxy.org

The “piranhas of the land” strike again. “Pack of angry Chihuahuas attack officer in Fremont” (AP story from SFGate)

Actually, the best part of this story is where it describes when the Fremont police went to the same residence on a previous call:

Two hours earlier, a homeowner in Niles reported that an intruder broke into her home and added pornography to her computer.

The woman said she woke up and was startled to see a stranger typing away on her computer. The intruder fled, but left behind an altered screen saver that featured images of “erotic Indian art,” Veteran said.

Killer Chihuahuas and porn, now that’s great journalism!

Google Associate Product Manager Clay Bavor was “curious to see what 250 pounds of Silly Putty would look like”.

The problem was that once together, Silly Putty doesn’t like to come apart, and none of us had any idea of how to deal with this effect. We tried everything: very strong people (didn’t work), scissors (stabbing worked, slicing didn’t), 28-gauge steel wire (broke), 22-gauge steel wire (broke), 16-gauge steel wire (too thick), and twisting and breaking (worked well for “smaller” pieces — under five pounds, that is.)

via Google Blog

How To Destroy The Universe: Part 5 begins touring the West Coast on January 26th, starting in San Diego. There will be two shows in San Francisco, one at Studio Z on January 28th and another on January 29th at Bottom of the Hill. Other stops on the tour include Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver and Calgary. Tickets are on sale now.

This year’s legendary line-up features Blixa Bargeld of Einstürzende Neubauten, Savage Republic, F-SPACE, The Living Jarboe of Swans, The Centimeters, SIXTEENS, Waldteufel (Markus Wolff of Crash Worship), Soriah, Synchronicity Frequency and others. Laughing Squid is once again proud to sponsor this amazing tour.

“The primary goal of the festival is to bring together seemingly disparate artists and elements, to challenge and tear down mainstream assumptions about what is culture, and to build unique events that are greater than their individual parts,” said How Destroy The Universe festival founder Ethan Port. “Our perception of the universe is defined by initial assumptions and prejudices, which can be altered through new experiences and perspectives. That’s why the festival uses the only partly sardonic slogan Destroy the Universe, Save the World!”

Zombie Bunny!

Zombie Bunnies are the new Monkey Clowns. Oh wait, maybe they are the new Pirate Santas.

Somebody buy this Zombie Bunny a plane ticket for next year’s Bunny Jam so he can fly out here and eat some bunny brains.

I recently started using SpellBound, a Firefox spellchecker for form input fields and textareas. It’s a great way to spell check when you are filling out forms or creating blog posts, when there is no built-in spellchecker. Trust me, when you make typos like I do, something like this comes in really handy.

The Thunderbird dictionary I’m using with SpellBound does not know what a “blog” is. Ok, I guess it’s just our little secret.

Looking to do even more cool stuff with Firefox? There are now over 600 Firefox Extensions available. Go open source, go!

Extensions are small add-ons that add new functionality to Firefox. They can add anything from a toolbar button to a completely new feature. They allow the application to be customized to fit the personal needs of each user if they need additional features, while keeping Firefox small to download.

via Jeremy Garica (Linux Magazine article)

The fine folks at Cardhouse have recently launched Phoneswarm, a experimental project where each week a different pay phone in a city is selected. People call the pay phone. Random people pickup the phone. You can make a difference.

Call now! Strangers are standing by…

Ted Rheingold has the scoop on an awesome surveillance camera billboard prank at the corner of 5th and Howard Streets in San Francisco. Here’s his initial write-up, follow-up report and Flickr photoset.

But this is one of those pranks where the jokes on us. The prankster is using superlative to remind us the society and culture we have come to accept: surveillance cameras on all sides; facial recognition reviews; and even nation-wide car journey monitoring. If you can’t see a giant surveillance camera out your window, I don’t think you’re looking hard enough.

UPDATE: SFGate: Culture Blog! did some more research and discovered the project behind this and other billboards is the Double Take a Billboard Project, in conjunction with New Langton Arts, The Creative Work Fund and Clear Channel Outdoor (shocking, I know). Here’s Ted’s follow-up.

Erick Schonfeld wrote a great article for the current issue of Business 2.0 on how Yahoo’s purchase of Flickr has been causing a shift in the corporate culture of Yahoo: “The Flickrization of Yahoo”

Eric talks about how Yahoo is moving toward people and community, while Google is focused on science and machines.

The Flickrizers’ most ambitious goal is to turn Web searching itself into a social event — the idea being that you can find what you’re looking for faster if you first see pages saved and tagged by people you know and trust. Done well, it could play as the triumph of the humans over Google’s cold mechanical approach.

This is an especially attractive idea to Yahoo veterans, since it harks back to the vision Yang and Yahoo co-founder David Filo had in their Stanford University dorm rooms: Categorize the Web and recommend the best sites for its users, using human editors. That vision had to be abandoned when the Web got too large. But this time the users and the editors will be one and the same, there will be enough to tackle the entire Internet — and Yahoo won’t have to pay them.

The Yahoo aquistion of Flickr has lead to the more recent purchases of Upcoming.org and del.icio.us. I’m sure 2006 will see even more change at Yahoo as it evolves from it’s old Web 1.0 ways.

Madman Shannon O’Hare is back again, reprising his role of Satan, this time in Satan’s Christmas Comedy Cabaret which takes place December 26th at 12 Galaxies and on December 28th and 29th at The Dark Room. Both venues are in San Francisco and each night’s show starts at 8pm, with tickets $7.00-$10.00 sliding scale.

Ultimate evil is on the loose this Christmas season, when a deranged preacher and his evil minions use a virgin sacrifice to summon Satan to San Francisco. Unfortunately Satan has problems of his own. God’s tapped the Prince of Darkness to throw a surprise birthday party for Jesus. So Satan organizes a “roast” for Jesus.

Thus begins Satan’s Christmas Comedy Cabaret, a wild evening of comedy, live music, magical illusions, burlesque dances, organic puppets, and video clips. Remember the time Jesus got busted by the Romans for getting wine in the viaduct? We do, and we’ve got it on film! Some of the roast guests include Death, Thor, Judas, Gaia. Plus, you never know when an odd deity or relative will manifest itself to give JC the royal treatment.

The brainchild of Oakland artist Shannon O’Hare (Satan) Through Eternity Tonite Productions, this show brings in some of the finest (or at least oddest) performers from San Francisco, including Hal Robins (Ask Dr. Hal), members of Cyclecide, artists Flash, Zizi, Michael Peppe, Kimric Smythe, and a cast of other malcontents and evil nutcases. And as special guests on the 26th, musical artists the Hobo Gobbelins and Esmeralda Strange!

This is the third cabaret show for Satan & his pals. Previous shows “The Satan Show” at the Art Barn and “Attack of the Zombie Girls!” at Cyclone Theater have been hits with the audiences. And this one promises to be even louder and crazier than before.

Chicken John’s Christmas Show takes place tomorrow night, Saturday, December 24th (Christmas Eve), at 12 Galaxies in San Francisco. Show starts at 10pm and is $5 to get in.

17 years ago, Chicken John started a tradition. Family holiday for people without families. On Christmas Eve, no one should be alone. So he threw a show. Here’s how it works: everyone brings a stupid gift or two, and puts it under the tree. Chicken hosts a game show that everyone in the club plays for like 3 minutes. Everyone wins. You open the gift that you select for winning right there on stage. When we run out of gifts, the show is over. Last year the show was 3 1/2 hours long. It was either the greatest thing anyone has ever seen or the worst show on Earth. This year promises to be worse. We invite you to endure:

A CHAOS CHRISTMAS CAROL with: Chicken John and friends

Join Dr. Hal, KROB, Jascha, Phx and the Odeon gang as we decimate Christmas. Everyone gets a present.

Opening act: Knees and Elbows featuring Janay Growden and an all star cast.

Yesterday I finally took a tour of the historic Anchor Brewing brewery, which is located in the Potrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco. This is something I’ve wanted to do this for years. Anchor is one of the oldest independent breweries in the country and is a San Francisco institution. Anchor has an amazing history which includes when Fritz Maytag bought failing brewery back in the 60’s and breathed new life into it. Fritz is still running it today and was hanging out in his office as we took the tour. Anchor is also one of the breweries that helped kick-off the microbrew revolution which has led to a much wider variety of good beers that are available around the country.

The tour is excellent and I highly recommend it. Our wonderful brewery guide Kate first gave us a little history on Anchor and how the beer is brewed, then we toured the brewery from the beginning of the brewing process all the way through bottling and packaging. After the tour we got to taste their 6 main beers: Anchor Steam, Liberty Ale, Anchor Porter, Summer Beer, Old Foghorn (their Barleywine Style Ale) and of course this time of year they also brew their special Christmas Ale, which is one of my favorites. They started making the Christmas Ale in 1975 and each year it is a different secret recipe, complete with a special new label for the bottle each season. Their very first Christmas Ale is what eventually became their Liberty Ale, which they still bottle today. Anchor also has a distillery located across the street where they make Old Potrero and Junípero Gin.

Of course I took a few photos while on the tour:

Photos from the Anchor Brewery Tour

Special thanks to Ted Rheingold and Chris Heuer for setting up the tour reservation and convincing a few geeks to leave their computers for part of the afternoon to learn about and drink really good beer.

UPDATE 1: Kristie Wells shot some photos of the tour as well, including a few of owner Fritz Maytag.

UPDATE 2: Here’s some more Anchor Brewery tour photos from Andy Kaufman.

Yesterday WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg announced the launch of Automattic, an umbrella company for all of the various WordPress projects, including: the WordPress open source blog tool, the hosted version of WordPress: wordpress.com, the comment spam plug-in Akismet and the forum script bbPress. WordPress developers Ryan Boren, Donncha O Caoimh and Andy Skelton will be working with Matt at Automattic. Matt had recently left his job at CNET to work on WordPress full-time.

Automattic Inc. is a bootstrapped startup from a handful of people passionate about making the web a better place. So far we’re best known for our work on WordPress and other projects but we have a lot of other interesting things in the pipeline as well. We are strong believers in Open Source and the vast majority of our work is available under licenses like the GPL. We are not seeking funding.

digg is a highly addictive website where users submit tech stories and other users “digg” the stories they like. If a story receives enough “diggs”, it moves to the front page. It’s a quick way to get a snapshot of popular stories in technology (they will be adding other categories soon). Check out Eddie Codel’s detailed write-up on digg. Speaking of Eddie, he and Irina Slutsky recently interviewed digg founder Kevin Rose for Geek Entertainment TV at the last SuperHappyDevHouse. If fact, that very same interview has been submitted to digg. So sign up for digg and digg it!

Digg has been gaining rapid popularity and Michael Arrington recently reported via TechCrunch that digg is close to surpassing Slashdot in terms of traffic. But hey, there’s no reason to choose between the two, Micheal also did a TechCrunch write-up on the newly launched Diggdot.us, a website that combines the results of digg, Slashdot and del.icio.us popular items. Sounds like a great menage et trois.