When I was looking around SFGate’s tech news section to cannibalize it for that column I’m supposed to be writing, I found this article about an e-mail exchange between the former FEMA director and his staff. Remember all that stuff I was saying about “never assume evil when incompetence will suffice?” Yeah, scratch that. There’s a reason they don’t ask me to do political analysis on “Week in Review.” I’ll just stick to thinking about videogames and TV shows.

There’s also this really unpleasant story on SFGate’s gossip blog, which I wish I hadn’t read. What that post doesn’t mention is that to get access to it, you have to first find Chloe Sevigny.

Nothing like the internet to make you really hate humanity. The fact that I’ve pretty much completely switched over to vampire hours doesn’t help, either. I’m hoping this is just a phase, and next week in LA will get me over the hump and back on schedule.

And in NaNo news: my word count is only 2901, making me 2100 words behind schedule. It’s okay; I relish adversity! And they’re all bad words. Not swear words, just boring descriptions and trite and cliched dialogue and situations completely devoid of any inspiration or interest. But the philosophy of the whole exercise is still in place: turn off the editor, write just for the sake of writing, and see what grows from that.

This is kind of neat: I wrote this little web application as a tag browser for Flickr photos. It works kind of like an advent calendar; you click on a tag to see a random picture from that tag pop up. You can click on my name at the top of the page to bring up a list of my contacts, then click on one of those names to see their tags. I only tested it under Safari and Firefox for mac, so it may not work on other browsers. And be aware that on a dialup connection, it’s going to be intolerably slow.

The app itself isn’t all that spectacular, but the potential is really neat. I mentioned that Flickr made its programming interface available to the public, so you can write your own front-ends and websites to get access to all the data stored on flickr. It’s a great idea, and I’m finally starting to get why people are so excited about the whole “Web 2.0″ business.

It was also my first stab at doing something with AJAX, which is apparently the big buzzword for web programmers. It just means that you can interact with a page without forcing a reload of the entire thing; Flickr does it a lot, as does Netflix. It’s pretty cool.

I just went outside for my just-before-bed cigarette to find a Klingon passed out on my front steps.

He was moaning and occasionally mumbling phrases (in English) like “got to get…” and “no man don’t do that…” before rolling over. He was on his side, so I don’t think he was in danger of doing a Jimi Hendrix. I’d like to help the guy, but I don’t know whether to call a cab or a transporter.

No teddy bears were involved.

*Go away!