So, Melbourne - a pet wallaby from Wrightstown, Pennsylvania finally escaped on June 12th. He then bounced about a bit, deliberately making neighbors think that the "poor little beast was lost". Once that was established, he clambered down into his secret lair beneath a large Oak tree to begin his grand, but unfortunate experiment. His recently completed device: the Transformer-Teleporter had just been completed - all the necessary parts and power had been procured, and the time had arrived. Melbourne's goal was to transform himself into a powerful and large kangaroo, transport himself back in time, and across the planet - so he could arrive (as a kangaroo) in a free and wide open Australia. To be a free kangaroo - two years earlier, half a meter taller, and half a world away was his aim.

The best laid plans of Wallabies and Men often go awry - as they did in this case. Melbourne did succeed with his invention, but his aim and calibration were off. The fantastic device threw him back through the space-time continuum, but only two months, not two years. He was indeed transformed - alas, not into a grand kangaroo, but into a female wallaby. And he (rather, she) was catapulted across the ocean - but the wrong ocean indeed. She found herself on the other side of the Atlantic from her Pennsylvania home, and rather than the warm skies of Australia, she found herself under the dour gray skies of Scotland - on Islay, the southernmost of the Hebrides Islands.

Melbourne despaired, unsure of where she was, what had gone so horribly wrong. She set to work to replicate her device, to try and set things right again. She scoured farmhouses and barns for whatever gear she could find, stopping only to nibble on the foreign grasses from time to time. Several days ago though, her efforts came to a tragic end. While hopping across a small back road, a tangle of power cords in her small arms, she was struck by a speeding van, and died from her injuries. Melbourne the wallaby was found on June 8th, much to the bewilderment of the entire island of Islay (pop 3,400).

What? You've got a better explanation?

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Makes sense - but may just be preaching to the choir - JohnKerry.com takes out a text ad in Google's search results for "miserable failure". (For those who didn't know, lots of folks have been linking to the Biography of GW Bush using the words miserable failure as link text, so Google associates the two.) Looks like some folks have been doing the same to Michael Moore and Jimmy Carter as well. Screen cap of the JohnKerry.com ad here, in case it evaporates.

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Another cool thing about Cory Doctorow's talk about Digital Rights Management being public domain - Anil can make an HTML copy of it, Matt can make a tweaked HTML copy of it, and then I can take it apart for fun, randomize the words, and reassemble it into this: Doctorow DRM Cory Research: talk Microsoft (randomized every time it loads). It's made up of Cory's words, Matt's CSS, Anil's markup and my randomizer. Can be unintelligble sometimes, can be funny others. What's nice though - if you skim it, you can still sometimes get the original gist.

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Yes Kokogiak.com has been redesigned. It's an effort at consolidation, simplification and having some fun. Reasons/things of note:

• Both Blog and Low-threshold links will be combined into this right column
• Blogger now used instead of my creaking old system that I rolled myself ages ago (commenting comes as bonus)
• Cave Bear (kokogiak) spine separating left (past work / projects) from right (present train of thought)
• No (almost no) visible 90 degree corners as part of the design. I am sick to death of the boxy-boxy-boxy aesthetic that my older pages had, and that has really been overdone. Yes content on the web is contained in rectangles - this we know, but calling attention to that in the design is wearing thin
• Break with the old. I have just recently changed my physical location (new home, new town, new state, new coast), why not reflect that online
• xhtml, css, true fluid design. The design holds up to giant or small fonts, xhtml/css test suites, etc. and my own need to have it look a certain way regardless of the end-user's method of viewing it.
• Gathering all of my past work into one cohesive place - the listings on the left. A lot of older stuff I'm proud of was gathering dust in old virtual shelves. It's nice to bring them all out

For past reference, here are the past versions of kokogiak.com homepage:

• Boxy-boxy Most Recent version
• Dark + Boxy Very IE-centric thought went into this old layout
• The Big Picture Giant background image, small blurry boxes with transparency - more clever than useful

Comments are now open, there are some tweaks to come, feedback is welcome. Please let me know if you notice anything that looks broken.
 

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I certainly don't live in Seattle anymore. Boston (and Eastern Massachusetts) is an entirely different animal.

The Good

• More rural than I thought - more Farms than were expected, not as urban
• Groovy new animals I see fairly often Turkeys! Beavers! Black Squirrels!
• Extra thunderstorms. Seattle has maybe one thunderstorm per year. We've had about 20 in just the past few months
• Actual variable weather. It's warm one day, cool the next. A week can get you snow, hail, warm sun and a windstorm - in that order
• Actual variable landscape. Watching the trees filling in from winter to spring has been great. Can't wait for Fall
• Family nearby, makes a lot of difference

The Bad

• Rudeness - people are initially gruff, then after a few minutes, can become warm and neighborly
• No sense of customer service. Have never been treated so poorly by people in stores and on the phone
• No sense of what a place looks like "from a distance". Out west, most towns or neighborhoods can be seen from a nearby hill, or across the water. Out here, you are either "in a town" or not
• No interesting horizons, No mountains. That lump in the distance is always just a cloud, never a mountain
• Not nearly as health/eco-friendly as Seattle. (Health Food stores are novelties)
• Mosquitos! Ack! They seem to love my West-Coast blood. I'm doomed
• Humidity. Doomed again
• "Taxachussetts" indeed, we're taxed separately on many many things, lots of paperwork and beauracracy.

The Different

• No "unincorporated" areas, all towns abut each other, like a big jigsaw puzzle. Counties seem like meaningless entities here
• My sense of "place" has changed, for example, thinking of Washington DC as "just down there" on a map, rather than "way over there", and "The Ocean" is to the East, not to the West
• No "grids", nothing is laid out evenly, or North-South, or straight (streets, towns, developments, neighborhoods)

The insane (Driving in Eastern Mass)

• Fast! In Seattle, if I drove at 75mph, I'd be flying past everyone, and would get pulled over for sure. Here, if you're going 75mph, you better stay in the right lane - most people will be angrily passing you at 80-95mph!
• Dangerous - always expect the other guy to do the wrong thing, because when they do (and eventually they will), you're prepared
• Left turn aggressiveness. Need to make a left turn across traffic on a two-lane road? Hug close to the double-yellow line, and when you're nearly stopped, dip your front-left tire about 2 feet into the oncoming lane, to show them you are serious about wanting to turn left. Sit and glare and wait for your opening
• Idiots on motorcycles. Have seen many candidates for Darwin awards. Example: Two motorcycles, side-by-side, 100mph doing wheelies on I-495 for about 1/2 mile or more
• Hilarious and non-standard signage. Favorite: Warning sign that says "Bad Intersection", Runner up: "Enter here" sign right above the "No Entry" signs at a "T" station
• Cowpath highways - barns and telephone poles encroach into the damn road (don't think I'm exaggerating either), forget about sidewalks or shoulders
• Roads breed aggressiveness (rotaries, long uncontrolled 2-lane highways, too-brief on and off-ramps)
• Auto Insurance - state-controlled, complicated, varies depending on which town you live in (where you "garage" your car)

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