On the Radar

Play "Come As You Are"
by Caetano Veloso

Last week was crushing — most definitely a low point in a year of many radical changes.

When you hit bottom, the best way to go is up. And the best way to do that, I've found, is to stay busy.

• The geek in me has been thinking about upgrading this site to MT4, but first, I think I'll finish "Transcending CSS."

• I began reading "Proust was a Neuroscientist," but it was very dry, so I turned to "An Alphabetical Life," by Wendy Werris, who lives and works in L.A. as a literary escort and seems to have had a very fine life in books.

Sometimes it makes me think I missed my calling. When I was little, I spent lots of happy hours in the library devouring books, and to this day, I've wondered what a great thing it would be to be a publisher.

Of course, in order to know what I was doing, I'd have to learn the ropes. What better place than New York?

But as many old-hand editors will tell you, the book business ain't what it used to be. For one example, read the wonderful, "The Forest for the Trees," by Betsy Lerner. If that doesn't make you fall in love with writing, editing and the literary life — and make you lament the state of the book industry today — you've a heart of stone, my friend.

• The Where to Eat map is in need of a redesign as well. I've got a head full of ideas, a pocketful of notes and a handful of software tools, including amMap, Yahoo Pipes and of course, the Google Maps API. Now, I just need my hosting service to stop going down.

• I'm doing a taste test to see if there's any different between the Naked an Odwalla versions of strawberry-banana-C smoothies. Naked calls theirs strawberry-banana-C. Odwalla gives theirs the far more fun-sounding name Strawberry C-Monster.

Why the sudden interest in C? There's a very bad cold going around that's been dropping people like rocks. They say the important stage of killing a cold is the first few days, before it sets in.

So far, Naked seems the way to go.