Raku weekend is upon us. I've been fretting about glazing and pit firing and generally, fear of the unknown. Spent about three hours with Nathan from Springfield Pottery yesterday. He made glazes and I asked novice questions. Best thing about Nathan is that he keeps people thinking, but not too much. His advice: keep your designs and glazes simple. He's going to have sample tiles on site to help us understand what some of the glazes do.

Most of all, raku is random be design. You never *quite* know what you are going to get.

[stomach twisting in knots]

Read this review of Harry Potter and it's power over adults. I first read about it here on the BoingBoing blog. Subscribe if you don't already; it's a hoot.

I posted this in comments on Don Park's weblog:

Here's the Steve Kirks plan:

Buy Userland. Keep everyone on the payroll and harness the Dave-force for good, for Apple and Userland of course. Immediately begin to optimize the code for X.3 and integrate with the rest of the products (tie to Radio to local Apache install to serve desktop web and iSync to match content–example only) Manilla carries on as a school product, save the corp stuff for about a year down the road when it runs great on X.3

Frontier and Userland were way ahead of their times. Web page publishing using a database backend, varibles and scripting is something (Apache, MySQL, PHP) we take for granted now. Apple could easily modify the Userland intellectual property to parallel Apple's needs and feed the developer community a new and unique tool that's *cross platform*, too.

I did some googling for John Robb last night and came up with very little. I saw a cache of his Sunday posts, but now that's gone. In those few posts that appeared, he was discussing starting a weblog preferred service with expert opinions like about.com, but using weblogs.

His odd departure and the subsequent removal of his weblog discredits him more than it helps him. Dave's entry on Scripting News sounds positive, but out of respect, what else would you say here?

Was John Robb sacked?