Over the past several months, I gradually butchered my last WordPress template, so I’m starting fresh today with Cutline 3-column split.

RSS-only readers, move along, there’s nothing here to see. . . .

update: I just realized that I unwittingly chose the same template as Cameron Marlow, which means it must be good. Cameron is a man of taste (note that he chose the more elegant two column theme, versus my three).

I’m going to be at Mashup Camp Dublin this weekend (see the post over at the Yahoo! Developer Network blog).

Aside from the tech festivities, I am looking forward to spending a little time getting to know Dublin. Besides being a home brewing nerd, I spent a lot of time in college studying James Joyce and I count Dubliners as one of my favorite books of short stories. I’m a digital packrat, so I have digital copies of all of my college papers, including a couple I wrote about Dubliners:

• “A Prisoner for Life”: Joyce’s Portrayal of the Hopelessly Bourgeois Artist in “A Little Cloud”
• Outcast From Life’s Feast: Joyce’s Characterizations of Self-Absorption in “A Little Cloud” and “A Painful Case”

Perhaps someone out there will draw some inspiration from my own hopelessly bourgeois self-absorbed college writings. 😉

In any case, if you’re in Dublin and want to get together for a pint to chat about tech, beer, or James Joyce, drop me a line (chad -AT- chaddickerson.com) or just come to Mashup Camp and say hello. I’m really looking forward to the trip!

I couldn’t sleep this morning, so I got up at about 4:30am and twittered one of those meaningless messages that was really just a “hey, is anyone up?” sort of thing. Shortly thereafter, I got a direct message via Twitter from a friend in Vietnam who I had been trying to hook up with recently saying, “still up?” I IM’ed him immediately to say I was, then he called me on his VoIP line from Saigon. It was 8pm there and the Halloween festivities were just winding down — you could hear the sounds of his sugar-amped kids in the background. We had a nice chat.

Wow, this Internet thing is just huge.

Bangalore Open Hack Day is going on right now — wish I was there! My trip to Bangalore last year for our internal Hack Day and BarCamp Bangalore the next day was amazing (I never did get around to writing something longer on that experience, as I intimated in this blog post).

Good luck to everyone involved (and may the weather be with you — looks likes the wind has already entered the picture).

Can’t wait to see what emerges. With hackers like Premshree involved, it’s guaranteed to be good.

The NYT is reporting that the Industry Standard is relaunching at IDG, led by InfoWorld CTO Derek Butcher. With Derek involved, the probability for success is high (when I left InfoWorld for Yahoo, right after speaking with our CEO about my departure, I said, “don’t post the job or interview anyone else — promote Derek immediately.” It wasn’t a difficult choice.)

I’m looking forward to seeing how this turns out! I have enormous respect for IDG and the people there (see my ode to founder and chairman Pat McGovern to see one reason why).

Six years ago, as the shock of 9/11 continued to set in on that day, I decided to go on a long bike ride in the Berkeley hills to clear my mind. Since the attacks happened early in the morning west coast time, most people like me stayed put and there was nothing else to do but devour CNN. At some point, that was too much and I had to get out of the house.

On my bike ride (it was a beautiful day in Berkeley, just as it had been in NYC before the attacks) through the strange magic of the brain, I thought of phrases in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land — the “unreal city” and the “falling towers.” The throngs of people walking over the Queensborough Bridge to escape Manhattan reminded me of the “crowd [that] flowed over London Bridge” in Eliot’s poem. When I got to the top of Grizzly Peak, I could see the entire bay laid out before me, and San Francisco was safe and sound in the distance. I don’t think I’ve ever appreciated the tranquil city as much as I did that day. (Update: I took my camera with me that day. The photo below is SF on 9/11 as viewed from Grizzly Peak in Berkeley — click for the full-size version).

Below are the prescient passages from Eliot. In my mind, they will forever be associated with 9/11.

……

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

……

What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
……

It’s not that often that a ranked SEC power rolls into Berkeley to play a ranked California team — but that’s exactly what we’ve got in Berkeley this evening. I’m a lot less interested in the football game itself than I am in the idea of a bunch of football-loving Southerners showing up in Berkeley. A little while ago, I called my good friend and Berkeley neighbor Andrew (a Florida Gator) to discuss the juxtaposition of cultures. Andrew had just returned from a walk around downtown Berkeley, where he reported an older gentleman decked out in Tennessee Volunteer orange saying in a syrupy drawl, “I think I smell marijuana.” (I’m not betting on the game, but I would bet my life savings that he did in fact smell marijuana).

So, back to the culture clash. On the home team side, you’ve got Berkeley, perhaps the most liberal city in the United States. Wikipedia’s entry for Berkeley reports that the 2004 presidential election went like this: 90% for John Kerry (54,419 votes) versus only 6.7% for George W. Bush (4,010 votes). 6.7%? Shocking! I was thinking more like 2%. To bring the spirit of Berkeley a little closer to the present, the Cal-Tennessee game has surfaced a controversy with some tree-sitting protesters near the stadium, proving once again that in Berkeley that the real football is politics. The police have put a fence around the tree-sitters for the game, ostensibly to protect the tree-sitters from the football fans, and vice versa. On the one side, you’ve got the Berkeley tree sitting pacifists singing “We Shall Overcome” and on the other side, you’ve got rabid Tennessee fans singing “Rocky Top.” I think that the fence is an absolutely fine idea.

On to Knoxville, the home of the visiting Tennessee Volunteers, where the real football is actually football. The election returns for Knox County (where Knoxville is the county seat) went something like this: 62% Bush, 37% Kerry. The capacity of Neyland Stadium in Knoxville is just shy of 105,000 in a city that reported about 173,000 people in the 2000 census. The folks in Knoxville really care deeply about football. Other than with my buddy Andrew, I don’t think I’ve had a single conversation about football in my nine years of living in Berkeley.

I’m not criticizing Knoxville by any means. I grew up in North Carolina and spent a decent amount of time in Tennessee and have a lot of affection for the state. I think Berkeley would probably benefit from the kind of unity that a good sports team can bring to a community. I’m just saying that Knoxville and Berkeley are very different, and where different cultures collide, sometimes it’s fun to go get right in the middle of it. A little while ago, Nancy and I decided to go for a drive around Berkeley to see how things were shaping up pre-game. Just what I expected: blase Berkeley residents (there’s a football game today?) mixing it up with fired-up Tennessee fans in brilliant orange spilling out of every drinking establishment in downtown Berkeley, linked together only by mutual looks of puzzlement.

No fences between the Tennessee fans and the Berkeley residents there in downtown away from the stadium, but I got the feeling that both parties thought they were peering into an exhibit at the zoo. The only difference was which side of the invisible fence they thought they were on.

For reasons that make little practical sense, I’ve been holding on to the same email account for 13 years now, paying $9.95/month for a dial-up account that I never used just to keep the address. I just cancelled it today: chadd@mindspring.com is no more. The customer service rep sounded uniquely pained when she noticed that my account originated in August 1996. The address actually reaches farther back than that. It was my first e-mail account (sort of).

When I got my first e-mail account at work in early 1994, it was chadd@nando.net (the visionaries at the News & Observer started an ISP — back when newspapers still could be bold and daring). It was from my nando.net address that I sent my first emails and made a number of silly USENET posts. When Mindspring bought the nando.net ISP business, my beloved nando.net email address became chadd@mindspring.com. Then Earthlink bought Mindspring and my account went along with it.

So, bye-bye chadd@mindspring.com — I will always remember you as my first.

Before I get into my mini-review of Ryan Adams’ show in Berkeley on Tuesday night, I should state a few facts for the record about my almost-relationship with Ryan Adams. Forgive me in advance for the indulgence — I need to get a few things out of the way.

• I grew up in Greenville, NC — about 70 miles from Ryan’s hometown of Jacksonville (not to be confused with the Jacksonville in Florida in the same way that the Greenville I grew up in shouldn’t be confused with the one in South Carolina). There was nothing between us but Kinston, and that ain’t saying much (see map). (Ryan, if you’re reading this, I know you’re at least chuckling.) Ryan put in best in his song “Jacksonville Skyline” (note: Jacksonville doesn’t have a skyline): Well, Jacksonville’s a city with a hopeless streetlight / Seems like you’re lucky if it ever changes from red to green (off Whiskeytown’s Pneumonia, one of my all-time favorite albums, period)



• One night in the summer of 1995, I had nothing to do one night and my friend David Menconi invited me out to see a band in Raleigh that I had never heard of and really didn’t care about (I think it was this show — only their 7th outing). The band was fronted by Ryan Adams, who I only knew as a guy who played in the Patty Duke Syndrome, a local punk rock band. The transition to “alt-country” didn’t make sense to me, but Ryan explained it in the first Whiskeytown 7-inch, “Angels are Messengers from God”: I started this damn country band / ‘cuz punk rock was too hard to sing. I first encountered this 7-inch when I did the 2-5am Monday morning shift at WXDU (I followed the much-more-lively Sunday night 11pm-2am hip-hop show, and I always felt like I was breaking up a party when I arrived for my shift and segued over to my set. Well, ok, I actually was breaking up a party every time).
• I came this close to having Whiskeytown play a house-warming party in my backyard when I lived in Raleigh in 1995.
• Tenuous connection #345: My favorite band while I was in Raleigh (in the era of Superchunk, Archers of Loaf, et. al.) was Picasso Trigger. Lisa Cooper, the guitarist, became a good friend of mine when we found ourselves washing dishes and delivering pizzas at the same suburban Pizza Hut (see #2 in “Five things you don’t know about me“). I had a major punk rock crush on Kathy Poindexter, the lead singer of Picasso Trigger. I think Ryan did, too: he wrote “Lo-fi Tennessee Mountain Angel” for her. (side note: John, the drummer from Picasso Trigger at the time, made it on “The Price is Right” shortly after I left NC. I helped him change the tire on his van once. Another brush with fame.) Lisa Cooper, if you are out there, email me! The last time I saw you, we ended up a party in Atlanta and the Indigo Girls showed up. Decidedly not punk rock.

OK, with that out of the way, here’s the mini-review, and I emphasize “mini.”

First of all, I feel sorry for the folks who caught Ryan in SF on Monday night if this SF Weekly review is on target: “The whole atmosphere gave off the sterile vibe of a show neutered of any spontaneity. . .” The Berkeley show was as spontaneous as any Ryan Adams or Whiskeytown show I’ve seen. Contrast the SF Weekly review with what these bloggers said:

“as most of us settled into our seats, Ryan went up and down the aisles taking song requests from fans all over the theatre, kneeling down or grabbing an empty seat nearby in order to attain eye-level with them as they shared a conversation.” [link]

“Ryan Adams was really funny and made everyone laugh the whole time: he barked into the mike randomly and whispered weird things about how he gets wedgies often, and then violenlty unwegied himself.” [link]

“He was so funny throughout the show, lots of very entertaining banter between songs…about Cheez-Its, his not-boxer-but-not-brief underwear that was driving him crazy, all kinds of hilarious stuff. He really seemed to be enjoying himself. It was a great night, and well worth being ridiculously tired today!” [link]

“5 stars for one of the best shows of 2007.” (Nicholas H. on Yelp)

“He was definitely the most chatty and entertaining between songs as I’ve heard in a long time. From singing an impromptu custom birthday song to a girl a few rows up from us named Summer Rae Brown (it’ll be the smash hit of her summer for sure) to making up poems about his love for Cheez-Its (me too, Ryan, me too) it was hilarious.” [link]

Aside from his engagement with the audience, this was a great show, plain and simple. The band was ridiculously tight without seeming at all mechanical, and I felt that sense of amazement that you only feel at a Great Rock Show. All I can say is: wow. Ryan is a certified Rock Star.

Here’s the setlist:

A Kiss Before I Go
Please do not let me go
Goodnight Rose
Peaceful Valley
Two
Easy Plateau
Beautiful Sorta
Mockingbird
Happy Birthday (Summer Rae Brown)
When Stars Go Blue
I Taught Myself How To Grow Old
Everybody Knows
Let it Ride
Blue Hotel
Elizabeth, You Were Born to Play That Part
Dear Chicago
Wildflowers
What Sin Replaces Love
Cold Roses
Shakedown On 9th Street
I See Monsters