We rented a snow cone machine for the party. I was smashing ice bags for two hours this morning because the machine wouldn’t work unless the ice was in teeny tiny bits. I covered the ice bags with a Hello Kitty towel to keep it from splashing. When the neighbor kids asked why I was repeatedly hitting Hello Kitty in the face with a hammer, I just looked at them and hammered faster.

I’ll talk more about this on Monday, but for now I will say that I could not be happier with where I am.

While the efforts to define semantic web technologies are theoretically proscribed in an open standards process it has the imagery of a politburo directing the proletariat. It may well be that these core technologies reside on a level of the geek stratosphere that is well beyond the vast majority of us regular folks, but we don’t need to be reminded of it.

#berkman10 jimmy wales: if we designed restaurants the way we design digital social spaces, we wouldn’t give knives to steak diners

-@jobsworth (aka BT Global Services CIO JP Rangaswami), reporting what @jwales - aka Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales - had to say on Wikipedia, Civility, and Deliberative Democracy at the Berkman @ 10 conference at Harvard Law School

NB Twitter has been down a LOT today, more than it’s been up. Very annoying.

@loiclemeur lots of video comments on that link; faces obscured. no idea which one you meant, no way to skim them, not worth my time. fail.

-@kevinmarks (aka Kevin Marks) in response to Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur’s enthusiasm for video comments on blogs

(NOTE: In general, I am interested in further exploring video comments on blogs, but I think Kevin raises good points in a succinct way.)

I’m thinking a whole bunch of cyclists got together and were all, these outfits just aren’t there yet. How can we make them more ridiculous?

-@Dooce, aka Heather Armstrong, who was very charming and had great hair on Nightline last night

[S]crew cleantech short-term. Give me a battery for my laptop and mobile phone which doesn’t need to be charged every day. Figure that problem out first before you even think of considering the Tesla Roadster ready for mass consumption. The same goes for any other new innovation regarding cleantech…

Don’t get me wrong, I myself am thinking about cleantech more and more every day, especially as an investor deciding where to place my bets…But I really dislike when the conversation becomes all visionary and people don’t even consider the basics before becoming all “innovative” on you.

So says Paul Jozefak (@pjozefak on Twitter), partner at a prestigious European venture capital firm and all-around good guy.

Gosh, who knew people - such as these would-be visionaries - were so emotionally wrapped up in the idea of being “green”? Oh, wait…

I’ve blogged before about how dubious I find the “sustainability” bandwagon, the anti-human motivations of some environmentalists, and how important it is for the very label “environmentalist” not to be ceded to socialists and authoritarians who simply want to impose their will and deny individual freedom. I stand by all that.

But I do still find it very creepy the way that so many people have adopted environmentalist doctrines as a new religion, right down to failing to employ critical thinking about what they are evangelizing. More often than not, I smile and nod and don’t challenge people on their more barking assumptions - anything for a quiet life - but the more I see how hellbent such individuals are on regulating away my ability to choose, the more I think it’s gloves-off time.

I suspect that, having relocated to the Bay Area, I will have AMPLE opportunity to see how gently but effectively I can push back against the fundamentalists…

Drew’s choice for bread when shopping: “that looks sort of cute”

-@BlakeFox (yes, Cincinnati’s own Blake Fox!) on grocery shopping with his boyfriend @dreworama, who is really quite the aesthete and a man after my own heart. Why not buy bread based on cuteness?

Just say something you mean, and enjoy the short thoughts, inspirations and mundane details of the people you decide to follow- searching for bloggers and writers you enjoy reading in a bigger format is the way to start. Follow people saying real stuff, not the ones who are just advertising.

How do you find those people? Look for the Twitter widget in the sidebar of their blogs, or go to twitter.com and search for people. (Everyone from Jim “Mad Money” Cramer to Henry Rollins and MC Hammer is twittering.) Even better, join and follow some people you already know, and let them lead you to other interesting people - just as with this sort of blogging, really.

And, just as with this sort of blogging, you can also lurk and never say a thing yourself. But you’ll get much more out of it if you do.