In English, word order is really important. Consider the following:

• I don't really like Celine Dion.
• I really don't like Celine Dion.

Personally, I agree with the latter. (Substituting "Michael Bolton" doesn't change this.)

On KCSM, I caught the last half hour of a fascinating documentary called Beijing or Bust. It follows six Chinese-Americans who move to Beijing to live and work, as they discuss their reactions to a rapidly changing China and their dual identities as Chinese and American. (I later found out that the filmmaker, Hao Wu, has been detained by the Chinese government without a stated reason and has been denied access to a lawyer. Argh!) It will air again on KCSM this Sunday at 2 AM. Fire up the VCR… (I'm too cheap to get a Tivo)

Updated August 5, 2006: I’ve found a new way to reach a BofA customer representative, at least in California:

• Call 1-800-622-8731, which is listed in the BofA’s Contact Us page.
• Press 1 for more options, then press *.

I’ve removed the old information, since it just seemed to be confusing people.

Ping points out how computer people love to use the word "performance" when they really mean "speed," and that performance is about way more than just speed.

I finally read an essay that Daniel e-mailed me over a year ago. Professor Henry Jenkins, director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, has written about fan fiction as a medium through which ordinary people change their relationship to popular culture from being passive consumers to active participants in its creation. He uses fan films of Star Wars as the primary case study. The essay is long (it’s literally a book chapter) but a good read.

• Henry Jenkins, “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars? Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture”, in Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, editors. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. pp. 281-312, 2003.

Lately there's been a bumper crop of JavaScript libraries for creating Ajax applications. At first, it was largely a grassroots effort, and to this day some of the most popular libraries like Prototype, script.aculo.us, Behaviour, Dojo, and MochiKit are maintained mostly by one person.

But now the big boys are joining the party. Yahoo has a modular user interface library that assumes you're doing most of your client-side development in HTML and JavaScript and just need help smoothing out the warts in those languages. Adobe has an HTML-centric framework called Spry. Taking a vastly different approach, the Google Web Toolkit lets you write Ajax applications in Java, and then compile them into HTML and JavaScript. And Microsoft has a library code-named Atlas, which includes both a server-side ASP.NET library that doesn't require JavaScript and a client-side JavaScript library.

The best part: all are available for free, and all but Atlas is open source. (Atlas will have a "reusable modification license," whatever that means, when the final version is released.)

Last month I was in Montreal for the CHI conference. I came away impressed by the city; it really is a wonderful blend of Europe and North America. (The signs are all in French, but everyone speaks English!) The original city center still has blocks and blocks of historic buildings intact, while downtown and surrounding neighborhoods have an urban energy to them. There’s also an extensive “Underground City,” which came in handy during the first few rainy days.

I visited a few great museums and historic buildings, including the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Montreal Botanical Garden, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and Mary Queen of the World Cathedral, which is a ¼-scale model of the Vatican’s St. Peter’s Basilica.

(I’ll put up photos once I figure out how to export my metadata from Adobe Photoshop Elements to Flickr.)

• My photos of my trip to Montreal and CHI 2006

(I never did figure out how to export metadata from Photoshop Elements to Flickr… Updated June 27, 2006)

There would be more innovation in mobile phones and services if they were as open as personal computers and the Internet are today. A grassroots movement of Silicon Valley tinkerers are pushing such an agenda, the Homebrew Mobile Phone Club, whose name pays homage to the famous Homebrew Computer Club (where the Apple I was first introduced). I'm sure the wireless carriers will fight this tooth and nail to protect their "walled gardens," just like AOL and Prodigy did back in the day, and I hope the results will be similar.

Kepler's Books in Menlo Park may have barely survived, but other venerable indies are hurting. The main Cody's Books store on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley is closing. I have fond memories browsing through (and even buying!) books there. Although its two smaller stores will remain open, this hurts.

Jorge Cham did speak at Stanford after all, which was good for me since it made my drive a lot shorter (although I was prepared to drive up to Berkeley…). And his talk was one of the funniest I’ve ever been to. It was also packed; the Clark Center Auditorium was filled with guffawing grad students (along with a couple of brave professors and undergrads). Whenever he does his next speaking tour, I highly recommend it, especially for all you grad students and ex-grad students (however you became “ex”). [photos]