Writing now from the secret underground lair in Lake George, NY, where Rich and I have gone into hiding for the week to write v1.0 (or maybe v0.1) of OpenBoxOffice, codename OBOe.

Major decisions so far:

1. We're going to use Ruby On Rails. So far, despite the "YOU WILL DEVELOP TEN TIMES FASTER" claims, this has mainly involved 12 frustrating hours of installing, reinstalling, compiling, cursing and recompiling poorly-documented code libraries.

This is only made more frustrating by the breathless and semicondescending tone of the tutorials. Actual quote: "Now, that is way beyond cool--it's awesome! OK, calm down and enter a test record." Thank you, Tutorial, for reminding me to calm down, lest the eldrich beyond-awesome power of your code seer my soul.

Anyway, I'll let you know when we get agile.

2. Theme song for the day: Jan Hammer Group's Evolove. (Picture it as the 70s movie "getting stuff done" montage theme.)

I'm working with Green Media Toolshed and Bryght to build a light-functionality easy-to-use ASP version of Drupal.

One major part of the project is improving Drupal's user-interface. Drupal's standard UI is basically a big complex web of jargon and checkboxes. This actually makes sense for Drupal's core constituency of data-crazed web junkies, but of course doesn't work so well for non-tech-savvy folks.

So the plan is to use a few custom wizards, some CSS, and the new Forms API to dumb down Drupal's control panels, making them less powerful and more easy to use. Hopefully it can be implemented as a single contrib module, without requiring custom themeing or forks from core. We'll see.

So far all I have to show is this new version of the admin menu: Custom CSS plus graphics from Project Tango, inspired by Development Seed's UI work for VoteNoPowerGrab.com.

On the way are new UIs for Taxonomy, User Management, and some other stuff.

MP3ing: This guy Malcom Kipe on Merck has an album out of really nice simple instrumental hiphop and sample-monkeying. Nothing crazy or revolutionary, but that's probably why I'm playing it a lot.

Thoughting: The new bubble is here, kids. Last week at SXSWi the number of VC-fueled $5000 open-bars was out of control. Now 37 Signals is on the cover of Business Week for supposedly bringing KISS-style opensource dogma to the masses. I spend a lot of time lately alternating between excitement and ambivalence about all this.

Coding: The new freelance career is busy! Event-organizing tools for the World Food Programme, site redesigns for Ashoka, and miscellaneous work on a half dozen smaller projects.

Designing: I dislike having Toneland as a "personal blog" and tjones.cc as a "professional site". I've been experimenting with ways to merge them. My latest attempt is a moo.fx/flickr/del.icio.us hybrid that I'm not really happy with yet.

Listening: to Bruce Sterling's SXSWi keynote, in which he basically tells everyone there that they are obese and backwards. Not that I necessarily disagree with him. I'm trying to decide if it's all hand-waving or actually substantive. I'm also processing how a lot of people seem to be making a living as conference-track wide-eyed motivational-speakers-slash-public-intellectuals.

I'm working from the wifi at Crumbs & Coffee on Columbia, and have noticed some very suspicious behavior.

I'm trying to read a blogpost at MusicThing titled "Radiohead's Gearporn Blog"- but all I can see is:

Now, you might think initially that this is just a well-meaning firewall recognizing the word "PORN" and trying to protect the good patrons of C&C from unchecked public pornography browsing. I know I did, which is why I was stunned (stunned!) to find that the first three actually-potentially-offensive websites that occurred to me (FleshBot, SuicideGirls, Rotten.com) all traipsed past C&C's firewall with no problems.

So it's become clear that the target here is not in fact actual pornography. No- what we're actually seeing here is a deliberate campaign to combat the growing menace of unchecked public vintage synthesizer buffery. (This is also the only possible explanation for the name of the firewall's manufacturer: "SONICWALL".)

More on this as further news warrants.

We're having Dodge City's first Drupal Meet-up Thursday evening. (Drupal being the kick-ass open-source content-management software that powers this blog, along with most of my professional projects.)

Currently, we're expecting some familiar faces (Eric, Emily, Justin, Mike M and others)-- but also, and more importantly, some local Drupal heads I've never met before.

I couldn't make it to DrupalCon Vancouver last week (saving up for SXSW!), but am pretty excited by the community, energy and nefarious plans for global domination that came out of it. The goal for Thursday is to create something similar, but smaller and local.

We've just launched the new IndependentCourt.org, one of the key stars in the growing constellation of posses gearing up to combat the Samuel Alito SCOTUS nomination.

This marks my first web launch as a solo freelancer. Look out, world.

Some other good Alito links:

• Alito's America is CFAP's main Alito website, which has easily the coolest political logo of 2005.
• Tuesday's NYTimes had an Alito article titled-- I am not making this up-- "Alito's Grit Is A Plus". Bizzare headlining aside, it's a somewhat fascinating chessmove of expectations-setting political theater from the Administration. Terrance's and Scott's deconstructions are both good reads.

DKP has a new blog about robotics.

LUPR is a Max/MSP app that plumbs a directory structure for random audio files, then filters and remixes them in BPM time. Saturday evening, Mark convinced me to let it loose on my laptop and record the output, and I was pretty happy about the results. If you like ambient sound collage, give us a listen.

I also really like Mark's LUPR demo, sombaa.mp3, in which he demonstrates either less of a penchant than me for horribly time-synched drums, or possibly just that his hard drive contains fewer breakbeats than mine.

LUPR's output always reminds me of the ambient bits from Mr Brubakers Strawberry Alarm Clock.

Does anyone know how to scrape an RSS or Atom feed from a blog that doesn't include one?? I want to read Blissblog, BoomSelection and CTPoliticalWatch without having to think too much about it.

In December, Kid K wondered "When's the DJ bot coming?".

It has come.

(As with most such things, it turns out to be way better to THINK about it than it would be to actually try to make engaging music with it. But still, it's a TURNTABLE ROBOT, man!)