The book is equal parts politcal screed, hacking and culture jamming HOWTO, and David and Goliath adventure story. I've been reading about the book on BoingBoing and elsewhere for months and I think I read it far too critically to get the sense of how someone coming in fresh, or say in the target demo, might experience it. For now, I'll just say that it's certainly an interesting book.

Note: like all of Doctrow's works, you can download the book for free.

FuzzyCo grade: B

I love the bold stroke the kid always starts with.

(via Apelad)

Another 30 days, another 29 photos in my 367 Days project. (Oops.)

This month I've taken photos underwater, with a LightWedge, and noticed that I seem to be spying on myself.

Team Gerdes-Plus-Noah is proud to present another in our growing stable of odd little websites: Onomatopoetically.

The site was inspired by a site cartoonist Adam Koford (aka Apelad) put up -- Onomatopedia.com. On that site, Adam sells original cartoons inspired by onomatopedic words supplied by his customers. (I bought a cartoon of the word "poot".)

I like making funny sounds, so I thought it might be fun to do a similar thing with audio. The domains onomatopeia.com and onomatopoeic.com are held by a domain speculators or somesuch, but onomatopoetic is an acceptable alternate spelling and I liked the way that that it has "poetic" buried in there. Onomatopoetically describes how we're going to be saying these things and makes the domain name so long and difficult to spell that no one is ever going to be able to find the site*.

So the way it works is pretty simple. You suggest an onomatopoetic word (either a real one like "bark" or just some sort of sound spelled out) and if we like it, we'll record ourselves using it in a sentence and then post it on the site. It's likely to be pretty sporadic, so I suggest subscribing to our feed in your favorite feed reader.

* Oops.

FuzzyCo grade: A+

I'm not saying that JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound won Metromix's Rock 'n' Vote band-of-the-bands thing last night solely because we had just done a great photo shoot on Sunday. I'm just saying that looking that good has got to give you some confidence.

FuzzyCo grade: A

I'm eliminating the phrase "too much free time" from my vocabulary. Even before I came across this pithy sentence from Merlin, I had been thinking that a lot of the stuff that I do, other people would probably think was a waste of time. So, just because someone else has come up with an odd way to invest their energy, that's no reason for me to belittle them. Now, I'm still gonna laugh at them, but I'm not going to question their basic motivation for engaging in the activity. Cool?

Update: Making Light shares a video of Clay Shirky speaking at Web 2.0 and answering the similar question "Where do people find the time?" It's a 15-minute video and well worth a watch.

Mike talks about the song here and the video here.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

This last weekend was the first time all 12* of us have been together since Jeanne and Jeff's wedding a year and a half ago. Seeing all that family would be plenty for a long weekend, but we jammed it extra full: we saw some of Erica's old friends, caught up with Andrew for the second time in a month (bonus!), saw Prince Paul and Mike Doughty, and ate way too much good food.

(More photos, including non-silly family portraits.)

* Soon to be 14.

Ze Frank's new Color Wars series of online competitions has a contest called Young Me, Now Me where you try and recreate a photo from your youth now. I was just visiting my family in Austin and dad showed me some old photos he had just scanned. So here's me in 1972, sitting in my Grandpa's old Model A on the farm in Iowa. And me in 2008 sitting in my parents' Toyota in their front driveway.

Update: I'm a winner, in the category of "Most Changed in Appearance".