This is what happens when I’m left alone in hotel rooms. I mess around making videos of myself getting slammed in the head by doors.

While I was waiting for my ride at the Las Vegas airport, I settled into some music and a good book. Some old ladies came and sat down by me and wondered what I was reading. I showed them the cover of the book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. One of the ladies stared at it while making some unintelligible sounds. She finally said (clearly confused), “Oh, is that another language?”.

There was silent hilarity in my brain.

I met up with Matt Haughey the other day and we had a nice chat. Matt runs the suite of metafilter.com sites as well as PVRblog.com and his personal blog. We filmed in the conference room of the Coffee Cottage in Newberg–a little too much echo for my taste, but the interview turned out good enough.

Running time: 6 minutes, 34 seconds

I had a great time speaking with Gary Buhler about his Blue Trout Gallery, Newberg’s “First Friday” art walk, his painting and artistic influences. The Blue Trout Gallery is in Newberg at 111 S. College St., or you can call the Gallery at 503-538-5533.

Running time: 5 minutes, 44 seconds

Check this out: a little js from del.icio.us and a link to one of the mashups from Best of Bootie 2006 and you can listen to one of my favorites right on this page:

Disfunctional DJ – You’re The One That I Want In The Next Episode (Olivia Newton-John & John Travolta vs. Dr. Dre & Snoop Dogg)

Click the little arrow to listen. (If you’re reading this via RSS, you might not see the arrow, so you’ll have to visit the page…)

Nice list of tips from the Cool Tools newsletter:

To track whether the dishes in your washer are clean, use a wet erase marker to write “Dirty” or make a fancy “D” on the inside door of your dishwasher when loading dirty dishes. When you run the dishwasher the mark washes away, so you’ll know they are clean.

— Carl DeCesare

I’m feeling like I’ve got some resolution. Not the “new year’s” kind, though. During the holiday break I’d been thinking a lot about Slacker Manager and the (still dragging along) book deal. I’ve been dissatisfied with the switch to the blog network–hasn’t really worked out as I’d hoped. Also, I’ve recently spoken with the agent who I’ve been working with on the book deal and he planted some new seeds in my brain about the format of the book. Until then I’d been more inclined to let that opportunity pass, mainly for lack of time. But I was still feeling torn about the book opportunity and really trying to examine my motives for wanting to write a book.

Tonight I’m feeling like I’ve got some resolution on both fronts. I wrote to the folks at the blog network and described my dissatisfaction, and spoke of my inclination to take Slacker Manager back to an indie blog. That felt good to get off my back. Then I wrote a post on Slacker Manager that started me thinking about the book deal and how it might actually work. Plus it gets the SM readers involved a bit, which I think is super cool. I’m still not holding my breath on the book deal, but the proposed revised format feels like a breath of fresh air and it feels like something I could have fun doing. We’ll see how it goes.

Also, for those interested, I’m soon to launch yet another blog effort: Yamhill.TV. I won’t try to describe it here. Rather I’ll let you see if it makes sense to you from what’s written there. Note that as of now there’s no content up there, but here’s a sneak preview of the first episode.