Author: Jeff Hester

This year marks the 21st annual Temecula Valley Wine & Balloon Festival. I first visited the festival 15 years ago. I was a fresh transplant from Orange County (the O.C. for those of you who watch the WB), and it felt like my duty to check out this local 3-day event. What could be cooler than wine tasting and watching colorful hot air balloons float by on a back drop of rolling hills and sunny blue skies?

Reality didn’t live up to expections back then. The event location is a regional park with one small, two-lane entrance. Parking was a couple miles from the actual event; we had to hike to the shuttle, then wait in a neverending queue. The day itself was fun. Overpriced food; booths full of cheap knick-knacks and a relentless sun that vaporized any attempt to block it with sunscreen.

Then came the coup de grace — the exit. Everyone had enough at about the same time, and getting out of there took well over an hour. Not good, considering I lived only about seven miles away. The kids were sun burned. Everyone was tired, overheated, dehydrated and cranky.

But that was 15 years ago. Certainly they’ve worked out the kinks in the meantime, right?

That was the thought that drove me to suggest the excursion last Friday night. Drive in after work, enjoy the sunset, the balloon glow and the live music. We’d miss the heat altogether and the worst of the crowds.

Getting there was a piece of cake. Very smooth, and relative to 15 years earlier, we were able to park much closer. The balloon glow was beautiful. The laser show was too long (Note — when they started playing Lee Greenwood, that should’ve been the end). But once again, the traffic ruined an otherwise nice evening. It literally took an hour and 15 minutes to escape the parking lot. The only solace we found was in watching other drivers jockey for position as four lanes merged into two, and then again into one.

It may be another 15 years before I’m willing to try it again.

On the subject of nurturing connections…

Some people have a list of websites that they routinely and regularly visit. Mine is terribly short — too short, really. One of the sites I stop by on an irregular basis belongs to a friend. Steve has for a long time maintained a chronological list of some of the sites he runs across in his net travels. He calls it dropping crumbs, and it serves two purposes. First, it lets other people take a look at what strange esoteric stuff he’s run across, but probably more importantly to Steve, it gives him an easy way back to those sites a month or two later.

Well the other day I was scanning the crumbs, looking for some tasty morsels when I ran across a site called DPRP, or the Dutch Progressive Rock Page. Prog-rock has long been a favorite genre of mine, ever since my musically-inclined cousins Matt and Mark turned me on to Genesis back in the early ’70s. Being of Dutch descent (mom was a van der Ploeg), my curiosity led to click.

DPRP is a nice little site, and I was surprised to find that the majority of the coverage was on current prog-rock bands. Yes, prog-rock is still alive. And not only alive, but there is actually an annual prog-rock festival in nearby Whittier.

Another click and I was at the website of CalProg 2004, a day-long progressive rock festival coming up on July 3. It’s not likely that I’ll get the day off from the family to attend, but I was intrigued to check out the lineup, which includes Enchant, Erik Norlander, IZZ, Mike Keneally Band and Neal Morse.

I downloaded the sample MP3s, and after a listen, decided I needed to get to know these bands a little better. A quick search at Amazon, and I was proud owner of two CDs by band called IZZ: Ampersand, Volume I and I Move. The epic track Star Evil Gnoma Su is currently my favorite, with all of the qualities that make progressive rock great.

At lunch with Steve, I explained how because of his dropping crumbs, I had learned of two new websites, invested thirty bucks in a band I had never heard of before, and my life had been enriched. So now that I’ve closed the loop with Steve, its your turn — go check it out and let me know what you think.

One of the forum scripts that I’ve used on a few sites is Snitz Forums. It’s a semi-obscure forum, mainly because it’s ASP-based when everything else these days uses PHP. But that’s neither here nor there.

Perusing the forums recently, I ran across a link from fellow Snitz-er Bookie, who posed the question: What if people treated their houses like they do their websites? It brings to mind a good point. Web publishing has become so easy, anyone can do it. This low point-of-entry has a way of democratizing the web, but it also accounts for the vast amount of drivel, damnable design and nonsense clogging up our virtual arteries.

Somewhere along the line, it seemed like a good idea. An email newsletter to help promote my busiest site: BigBlueBall.com. I had done it before; starting and stopping without any sort of regularity. But then back in February in a moment of temporary insanity I committed to cranking them out bi-weekly.

It’s not that they are that long, or that so much time goes into pulling them together. But sometimes it’s just a drain on my brain.

Then to put the icing on the cake, I get people — subscribers mind you — that report my humble little newsletter as spam! Not a lot, but for the last issue about 7 reports were received by my email host, Constant Contact.

I hate spam. I get enough of it myself. But I detest being accused of spamming. People signed up for the newsletter. Constant Contact has stringent anti-spam requirements. They are a legitimate email service, and requests to remove yourself from the list are promptly honored.

When someone reports my email as spam, they are automatically and permanently removed from the mailing list. The newsletter has been published every two weeks for the past three months. So by now, folks have been seeing it on a regular basis. In theory, they’ve received several issues before deciding to claim the newsletter is spam. Did they bother to actually read the damn thing?

I’ll keep my eyes propped open for a few more hours and crank out another edition, but with the diminishing returns and the aggravation, I’m not sure how long it will go on. Chris Pirillo over at Lockergnome has been claiming that RSS will overtake email newsletters. Well I’ve had RSS for a while, but the jury is still out on that. I think it’s still too techie for most people.

What do you think? Am I a fool to continue the newsletter?

I finally got an invitation to open a GMail account, thanks to a wonderful friend. If you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past month, GMail is the new web-mail service that Google is testing. When they launch, they promise free email accounts with a whopping 1 GB of storage — enough to keep all your email archives online. In exchange, they will use their AdSense technology to display relevant advertisements next to your email.

AdSense scans the text of the message looking for certain keywords, then displays text ads that match those targeted keywords. The technology was launched about a year ago for website publishers, and in fact, I use it on the BigBlueBall forums and many of my other websites. They are typically the least intrusive form of online advertising I’ve seen, and are usually very effective at displaying ads that are relevant to the content they appear next to.

For some reason, the privacy wonks are having a field day with GMail, declaring it a travesty; a violation of personal privacy. Some nonprofit groups even sent a complaint letter to California attorney general Bill Lockyer, claiming that GMail’s automated keyword bots somehow violate federal wiretap laws.

California State Senator Liz Figueroa, a democrat, is drafting legislation to block Google from offering the service even before they begin, claiming that GMail is “an absolute invasion of privacy.” A quick search through Google news reveals a long list of articles lambasting the proposed service.

I’m a big advocate of personal privacy. But this time, most of the privacy advocates have it all wrong. The risk of privacy invasion is no worse than with any other email provider. All email services — Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, AOL or your local ISP — have the ability to read your email. Unless you encrypt your email (which 99.999% of us do not), your email could be read by someone working for the email provider. For them to do so would be unethical and likely illegal, but it is possible. Yet we trust them to blithely ignore our emails, and assume that the only eyes to see them will be the friends, family or associates we sent them to.

In the case of GMail, people are not reading your email, nor are they creating a mysterious profile of you and your interests. A software program is simply looking for occurrence and frequency of certain words that advertisers think will translate into dollars or euros.

Is it technically possible that Google could extend this technology for a more sinister purpose? Perhaps profiling your interests and then selling your GMail address to spammers? Certainly. But then, so could any email provider. Why am I not concerned? Because if Google or any other email provider ever got caught doing that, it would mark the end of their service.

Customer loyalty is built on service and trust. Google has both by the truckloads, but if word got out that they were the bad guy, their fortunes would disappear before you could say “dot-com-bust.” And remember, this is an optional service. Spooked by privacy concerns? Then don’t sign up.

Meanwhile, I’m having fun with my new GMail account. Feel free to reach out and email me: jeff.hester[at]gmail.com

I invested some time in my daughter today. Her Human Hereditary and Evolution class required a trip to the Museum of Man in San Diego’s Balboa Park. I went along to keep her company, unplug for a while and enjoy the beauty of Balboa Park.

The exhibit she was studying dealt with human evolution. I’m not uninterested in the subject, but after two hours, I had consumed more than I cared about the ancestry of our species. The most interesting part dealt with the future evolution of man. We already have battery-operated mechanical hearts, cochlear implants and hip replacements. Why not install upgrades, like Lee Majors in The Six Million Dollar Man. “Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology.”

Robo-sapiens. Personally, I’d dig a few upgrades. But I digress.

After two hours of milling about the museum, I’d had my fill. We bought a book that went along with the exhibit, and headed to downtown’s Gas Lamp Quarter for lunch. The weather was warm and sunny, so we ate outdoors. Afterwards, I continued my good father role, smiling and practicing my patience as she shopped for clothes at Nordstroms. Thankfully she’s picky; the excursion only cost me a pair of earrings.

It was a beautiful day. Note to self: I must repeat, often.