In Declining Your Friend Request, Apollo writes:

I’m on a large number of social networks. On some of them, people see my profile and add me out of the blue.

After receiving numerous such friend requests, particularly on new social networks, like Twitter and Pownce, I thought I’d put together a list [so you'll know why I declined your invitation].

I totally agree with Apollo. I'm only on a few social networks, but I receive a few too many requests "to be friends" from total strangers.

In fact, a few weeks ago one such request got me into some trouble. See if you can follow this: The potential "friend's" nickname sounded slightly familiar, so I followed the link to see who it was. The page was loading very slowly, and then Rich started talking to me in IM so I brought Adium to the front. One of his messages included a link, which (when clicked) opened in a new tab in Firefox. Time passed, and I forgot all about the page I'd been waiting for. Corinne sat down next to me, I showed her something, and then started shutting down the Mac for the night. As I closed my tabs in Firefox one-by-one (so I could be sure I wasn't leaving any unfinished work anywhere, as I've done many times), there was the link I'd followed from the "friend request": a page on Flickr with a model in all of her, uh... "natural beauty." NOT COOL.

Anyway, I don't care enough about the social networks to bother acknowledging most of the friend requests. I do feel the pressure to reciprocate with people I actually know, but mostly I just wish the networks would go away. How anti-social of me.

Immediately after "retiring" from the Prototype Core Team, I became active (for the first time!) on the group and finally did what I was there to do in the first place. The next version of Prototype (1.6) will have custom events. The custom events code in 1.6 doesn't look much like the code I described in my essay a year ago, but it's built on the same idea: piggyback custom events on one of the browser's built-in events. (The custom events code in 1.6 was written by a number of people, not just me.)

Anyway, the real point here is that I use Prototype for nearly all of my web projects now, and I contribute to its development. That's working on my own tools.

Plus, immediately after finishing my side of Prototype's new events code, I realized that the next version of Prototype didn't look quite right in BBEdit's function popup. (Some objects were listed as [anonymous] when they should have had names, and some class methods were listed as though they weren't contained by anything.)

So, I updated BBEdit's JavaScript module to fix that problem.

I'm rather proud of the JavaScript support in BBEdit, but (again) the real point here is that I love being able to work on my own tools! (See the BBEdit Disclaimer...)

The same is true for Conversant, which currently runs on Frontier, and which runs my site (and lots of others).

Being a tool-builder makes me feel like a real craftsman.

Steve Jobs wrote an essay about why he thinks the music industry should drop DRM (the 'feature' that prevents you from using music you've purchased at the iTunes music store on more than a few machines).

This greedy clown at Macrovision, Fred Amoroso, responded.

John Gruber translated Macrovision's response from “PR speak" to English. John's a funny guy.

Now Pudge, on /., has translated John's story from "Pundit-speak" to English. It's funny enough to have me laughing out loud most of the way through it.

Macrovision has been in the content protection industry for more than 20 years, working closely with content owners of many types, including the major Hollywood studios, to help navigate the transition from physical to digital distribution.

We've been helping and encouraging the entertainment industry to annoy its paying customers for more than 20 years.

I have an amazing power to state the obvious.

Very funny stuff. I'm glad that John linked to it himself, too.

(There's a lot more if you follow the link, that quote is just one part.)

Jed moved in with us at the end of July, 2005. His bedroom was in the back corner of our finished basement, right off the incomplete kitchen. My office is down here also, at the other end of the house.

I've always worked long hours — being self employed makes that almost unavoidable — but having Jed down here changed something for me: I regained a sense of family that (I'm ashamed to admit) I'd lost at some point in the years since Corinne and I were first married.

It's not that there was any trouble in our marriage. Not even close. We still felt like a couple, and we've always been in love with each other. We just weren't a family. Maybe it was related to losing Shane, I don't know.

Children aren't a required element of a family: I believe you can be a family of two. Plenty of parents-and-children "units" aren't very family-like. So, to my mind, children aren't the key.

Having Jed around provided me, at least, with that sense of family. The moment he left (Dec 6th), I was instantly aware of the loss of that feeling. I felt family-less.

At the same time, I became keenly aware of Corinne, upstairs, going about her day. She's home more now that she's not working, and her “office” (the bird room) is still having the drywall repaired and repainted, so she spends most of her time in her “new” office (the livingroom right above my head), or in the kitchen which is just one room over. I hear her movements, puttering around the house, talking to the animals or on the phone (or to herself!)

So what of it? I've found my lost sense of family by doing the obvious: spending more time upstairs, with the person (and critters) that make my family unique. I've totally stopped watching TV (for a couple of weeks, now), too, so when I'm upstairs I'm able to pay more attention.

Aside

Related to this — though I'm not quite sure how — is another change. I've been going to bed earlier and getting up earlier, every single day. Going to bed by 11 and getting up by 7 when everyone else is still sleeping, then having my breakfast and doing the readings out on the deck as the sun comes up.

Nothing earth shattering, but it's weird that this happened without my making a conscious decision to do it. For months I had been going to sleep extremely late, and then was too tired to get up at any decent hour.

Again, it changed when Jed left, but I think this is just one effect in a long chain of causes-and-effects.

I can't over-stress what a big deal this is for me. A lot of things in my life feel more “right,” now, than they have in a long time. And of course, this “sense of family” is stronger than it was when Jed was here (brother versus wife...). Plus, work has been more challenging and rewarding than it has been in years.

Questions

1. What will happen when the “bird room” is finished (possibly Friday, with a couple more days to move all the stuff back in there) and Corinne's office is no longer in the living room? There's no room for me to park in the bird room in the evenings, so it looks like we're going to replace Corinne's eMac with a used (or cheap and new) laptop so that we can BOTH be in the living room (or wherever).

   If we're going to do it, I'm hoping we can pick it up before MacWorld SF. It'll be handy for her to have her own machine, so she can still check her email after mine is stolen from the show floor. ;-)

   (Oh, hey, I hadn't yet mentioned that we're going to MacWorld...)

2. With all of these changes, all this new-found sense of family and rightness, will things get even better (or just “differenter?”) when we have the brand new baby girl here in the house?

   (Oh, hey, I guess I hadn't mentioned that yet, either!)

Some of us have recently been discussing the size of the Prototype library, my preferred library for DHTML/AJAX). Proponents of some of the other libraries play up their smaller file sizes, and it's true that this is a real issue for some people.

This little essay/how-to explains the basic ideas (the what, how, and why), and then walks you through setting up Apache on Mac OS X, to enable mod_gzip and serve compressed content. If you skip the editorial content and just follow the steps I've outlined, you should have everything up and running in fifteen minutes or less.

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