It’s been a gorgeous day today, highlighted by a mini-picnic with Heather, Richard, Tantek, and [forgot name] in Yerba Buena park for lunch. I’ll leave you this Friday with Ella’s version of “Blue Skies”. For extra credit compare it with Robert Glasper’s rendition.

Get your own hypo-allergenic cat today. “The mission of ALLERCA is to produce transgenic lifestyle pets and develop new technologies in the various disciplines of animal life sciences.”

Apparently Bnet also has a blog thing going on WordPress called Leadership Now. Looks interesting if you’re into that sort of thing.

Best Software Essays of 2004 over at Joel on Software.

The Technorati cosmos for wordpress.org is finally working again and reports 94,678 links from 43,489 distinct sources. It’s also really, really fast.

Lycos Europe rolls out more WordPress hosting integration. Hat tip: Wordlog.

I’m going to be in Boston for the WordPress meetup this month. My plan is to hit every city that has one eventually. 🙂 Free copies of WP to anyone who shows up, and I’ll bring stickers too.

Carthik pointed out to me this thread that says Tripod in Sweden is offering one-click WordPress installs.

Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun, is doing a WordPress powered blog over at ZDNet. It has comments enabled too, something he said before wouldn’t happen. Bing!

The Weblogs.com/changes.xml, used by hundreds of update services and tens of thousands of bloggers, is now password-protected. Not sure what this means. Update: False alarm! It seems to be back to normal now.

If you’re up for a morning laugh you should read one of the most brain-dead posts on open source I’ve ever seen. So many different things are mixed up there it’s hard to keep track, it’s like twenty issues tangentially related all being tied together in a conspiracy theory that is interesting but frightening. I left a comment but it hasn’t shown up yet. Update: The comments and pings have been updated and they’re letting all viewpoints through, so speak your mind over there if you want to.

Liz Lawley and her site Mamamusings are being maliciously google bombed by a comment spammer.

This reformulation of enclosures is completely useless except for adding an optional “description” attribute. I think enclosures are groovy but fundamentally inaccessible in ways that are ultimately harmful to the web. Why not just take a cue from HTML and allow three optional attributes: title, alt, and longdesc. This wouldn’t break backwards compatibility with anything and while honestly it probably wouldn’t be used much at least the possibility is there for something. Perhaps Matt May could give some feedback on this.

“I’m as restless as a willow in a windstorm, I’m as jumpy as puppet on a string, I’d say that I had spring fever, but I know it isn’t spring.” This version by Brad Mehldau is one of my favorites because of what they do with the time.

Rob says “I don’t like Scrivens” and the discussion you would expect follows. Can’t… not… link… it. Maybe we should start a poll? “You dissed Zeldman? You are so off the island!”

Pete Sheerin, yes that Peter Sheerin of ALA and Pete’s Guide fame, is investigating using WordPress for his site. How did I find this out? He registered for a bug tracking account, I guess he’s about to report some bugs. Can’t wait. 🙂

“Music Is Not a Loaf of Bread” says the Wilco guy.

I can never spell “guarantee” right, I always end up googling it. Maybe if I blog it I’ll be able to remember. Other words that I consistently mess up: “separate,” “Wednesday,” and “bourgeoisie.”