Catching up

I've been on the West Coast for the past week or so now, here are some highlights:1. The Inhabitat holiday party, big ups to everyone who showed up.

2. Hanging out with Dave Winer - I've been blogging for what feels like an eternity now (five and a half years!), but oddly enough I'd never met Dave or even exchanged emails with him. We fixed that -- and chatted a bit about our MP3 player.

3. A 2 hour and 40 minute train ride to Merced that, thanks to Amtrak, descended into a Fellini-esque six and a half hour ordeal seated next to a really sketchy wannabe white gangsta dude with ADHD. Key moment was when he told me he's an illustrator. "So what do you draw?" I ask. "Drawings of the Grim Reaper smoking a cigarette," he responds, completely devoid of irony.

4. Watching the second season of Da Ali G Show with my dad.

5. Watching the first season of Extras by myself (no one else was interested). It wasn't bad, but it's just the same joke over and over again, innit?

6. Spending the better part of a day dealing with the inane bureaucracy that is AOL trying to resolve a minor issue that should have taken at most fifteen minutes. There are some amazing people there -- too bad they're surrounded by layer upon layer of idiots. 7. Steeling myself for CES + Macworld. I'll be back in SF for a couple of days next week before I head to Vegas, if you're fixing for a pre-CES meeting, drop me a line.

Inhabitat party in SF next week

I'm headed out to the West Coast next week, and as soon as I step off the plane I'm headed straight to the big Inhabitat holiday party that's going down on Wednesday at the Design Within Reach store on Fillmore Street in SF. If you're in the Bay Area you should swing by and say hi.

Waking me up

I had sort of an unusual day yesterday. Started things off by playing a couple of hours of Gears of War with Major Nelson and the winning bidder of our charity Xbox match, then hauled my ass over to the Meatpacking District to meet up with Ethan Kaplan from Warner Bros. Records. I'd made him promise to let me know the next time he was going to be in town, so he invited me to hang out at the shoot for Jamie Kennedy and Stu Stone's latest video. Best part was that the video just happened to be a shot-for-shot remake of Wham's "Wake Me Up Before You Go Go" -- complete with all the day glo/blacklight stuff, too. Weirdest part was when Jamie asked me not to blog what he was texting to Paris Hilton.

Beet.tv, Rocketboom, and Wallstrip

Completely by chance it's turned out to be a big week for me and the video blogs: Tuesday I was on Andy Plesser's Beet.tv, yesterday Andrew finally had me on Rocketboom (we'd been talking about me coming on for months), and today I'm on Wallstrip talking with Lindsay Campbell about set-top boxes.

I forget that there is no such thing as subtlety online

For the record Jason and I are just having some fun toying with the idea of starting our own gadget company. Why? Well, we're both incredibly dissatisfied with the state of portable media players and it's exciting to think about the possibilities enabled by this new world of low-cost contract manufacturing. Are we actually going to do anything? Probably not -- if there's one thing I understand, it's how difficult creating a new gadget can be, it's something I see first-hand every day at Engadget. That said, it's been interesting mulling over the idea in public, it's incredibly frustrating to see companies making the same stupid mistakes over and over and over again and it's hard not to want to do something about it.P.S. - Dave, how does the 21st look?