Although I have lived in California now for longer than I have lived anywhere else, I am not originally from here. Earthquakes still seem like magic to me. Like an amusement park ride or some other thing where what you feel is interesting but without consequences. When some of the East Coast portions of my family first started going West, my maternal grandmother was certain every New Yorker who defected to California was going to fall into a crevasse and die. Eight feet of snow, she felt safe in. But earthquakes seemed horrific beyond all measure.

Native Californian Forrest Black tells me that a 6.0 earthquake is when buildings start falling down. The earthquake I just experienced was, at most recent estimate, a 5.8 in Chino Hills. That places the epicenter at around twenty some odd miles from where I am in Hollywood. This quake was so strong that, according to my twitter friends and my pals on the internet professional forums, the shaking was felt as far away as Las Vegas.

My mother was stationed in Israel during the Lebanon War. Then too, I had Stateside friends and family who thought it must be terrifying and dangerous to live in a warring part of the world. At the time, my only awareness that anything unusual was going on was that I had to set bric-a-brac away from the edge of countertops or it could be knocked off by the sonic booms of war planes flying overhead. I never saw an injured person or an explosion.

In much the same way, I have never seen the earth in California open up and start swallowing humans or their homes. I have never seen anything more than a crack in plaster, items fallen off a shelf, or a rolling mini tidal wave in a swimming pool. And it is not like earthquakes happen weekly in Los Angeles. So I don’t usually even think about avoiding placing things near the edge of counters.

This earthquake was a bit of a reminder that there really are serious fault lines on the West Coast. There are now piles of documents all mixed up together all over my office. Stacks of flyers are hopelessly jumbled. Photographic backdrops came halfway down. Anything lightweight like a CD or DVD went flying off the shelves. Pictures came off the walls. This included an original Cherry Poptart illustration by Larry Welz where he drew Cherry in a leather jacket specifically as a gift for Blue Blood. I am very relieved that the glass on the frame did not break on that.

And the iced latte on my desk fell off and soaked my chair. I’ll trade coffee butt for safe original artwork any day though. Nice to have a considerate earthquake. The quivering ground still seems fictional to me and, in the midst of a quake, I can never remember if you are supposed to get in the door frame or avoid the door frame.

Adobe pretty much owns the digital photo processing market and they are out to conquer the market for applications to code for the web. Adobe started along this path when they acquired MacroMedia, but they are continually upping the ante. Adobe Integrated Runtime or AIR was designed to facilitate putting cool internet stuff on your desktop. The system makes it easier for developers to utilize HTML, CSS, Ajax, Flash, and PDF technology and more to essentially extend Web 2.0 to your desktop, without the end user having to learn a whole lot of new skills. Adobe’s concept is that they are helping to extend rich internet applications or RIA’s to the desktop. Why we need the RIA acronym instead of just calling the subject at hand “rich internet applications” is anybody’s guess. My theory is that something about the web causes humans to want to acronymize things.

In order to spur interest in their new development tool, Adobe held a much-touted competition. Edward Finkler or Funkatron, as he is known on the Blue Blood boards, won the recent Adobe AIR Developer Derby prize for Best HTML Community Application. He won for creating the Spaz desktop client for Twitter. On winning the award, Ed says, “I submitted Spaz as something of an afterthought, to be honest. I had received some good feedback on it from a couple people at Adobe, but I didn’t think it was all that, so to speak. Throughout the development process I avoided looking at what other developers were doing, especially other Twitter devs, because I was sure it would send me into a tailspin of despair at the bush league-ness of my own kung fu. After all, Spaz is the first “Rich Internet Application” I’ve written. I hadn’t even written an AJAX call in any code up until Spaz. So, receiving this award is a great surprise to me, and very encouraging.” He is humble, but he really is that good. I’m thinking Adobe is not exactly bush league in their ability to judge code development.

Among the many extremely cool prizes Ed got from Adobe for his display of brilliance, he was invited to the recent sold out Adobe Max 2007 show where Adobe and partners attempt to decide the future of software and the internet. When interviewed about Spaz for the Adobe Max 2007 site, Ed was rocking a shirt for Blue Blood’s SpookyCash, which is the B2B (check out my acronym usage!) program where people who run high traffic sites can get paid for sending members to Blue Blood and Blue Blood-related pay sites. Represent! Whoever was operating the camera was into the Blue Blood T-shirt too, because they came in for a long close-up. You can also see the goofy picture of myself I used for my Twitter icon because of course I am on both Spaz and Ed’s Twitter following and followers lists. You can keep up with Spaz developments at Funkatron.com where Blue Blood is linked under Allies with the description of “Non-retarded goth/punk subculture.” Thanks, Ed.

I perused TuckerMax.com upon my return from Austin, to see if there was any vital news I should include in my article about Tucker Max and his writing and his SXSW panel. There was nothing which really jumped out as necessary for an introduction piece. But, what the heck, I’ll give you all the lowdown on what he has coming up.

He is currently working on a series for Comedy Central. He envisions the show as being a 100% scripted half hour comedy with no laugh track. Something like The Office or Entourage or Tucker suggests one “picture a Sex and the City for guys, done in the vein of my stories.” I’ve never seen Sex and the City, so this doesn’t evoke much for me, but maybe it will for other folks. At any rate, a fictional comedy half hour with the feel of a Tucker Max adventure sounds entertaining to me, so I’ll be putting the key phrase “Tucker Max” in my TiVo for whenever the heck the long-ass cycle of television production produces an actual show. I just used the word heck twice in the same article. Don’t get me wrong, I like the word heck, but I think this means I am jet-lagged.

A fun factoid is that apparently one of the producers of the upcoming Tucker Max show is former ABC president Jamie Tarses, the first female entertainment chief in the industry, who is reportedly the inspiration for the character of fictional sensitive-but-tough network president Jordan McDeere on the Aaron Sorkin-written, Thomas Schlamme-directed, star-studded, and shockingly disapppointing NBC show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

The Tucker blog announces his SXSW appearance and mentions that the show might be a bit pricey just to hear him speak, but caveats: “If you are a hot girl in or around Austin, well, you don’t need to pay to hear me speak. Just send me an email and we’ll get drinks. Or just we can just skip the pleasantries and you can come over to my hotel and fuck, whichever you prefer.”

The most recent entry in Tucker Max’s blog announces that he is going to be co-writing a book with Paul Wall. I told Forrest Black this and his first response was to ask if it was going to be called Stuff in Your Mouth. He then immediately posted this thought to his Twitter account. Twitter, although you can use it in your browser or instant messenger client, is essentially like short attention span LiveJournal for your Blackberry or Treo, and it was this year’s hot site to, err, twitter about at the 2007 SXSW Interactive conference. If you are feeling digitally trendy, you can find my Twitter account at http://twitter.com/AmeliaG and the still kinda undeveloped Blue Blood Twitter account at http://twitter.com/BlueBlood. Ya know, I just popped over to Twitter, preparatory to making this post and the two most recent posts were Forrest saying “Coffee is a good thing” and Halcyon saying, “trying to find a balance between SXSW inspiration and despair.” There may be a certain sort of odd haiku quality to Twitter.