ANN ARBOR, FAR WEST SIDE. My inside source says that the Plum Market will be opening on February 7. What a fine birthday present! The signs just went up in the last couple days. They look great; it's a terrific new look for Maple Village. Not real happy about the blinding parking lot lights, though. I'm surprised the city let them put up so many lights - it's well over the line from safety into light pollution. Pretty sucky. But looking forward to a grocery store being close. Ahmo's also looks like it's on the verge of opening. There are menus up on the wall, chairs and so on in place, and there was a big Sysco truck delivering ...

Twitter goes down just as Stevenote starts. Jaiku also afflicted. Fanboys everywhere are sad, sad, sad. ++++++++++++ More thoughts on this. Some people have talked about the usefulness of Twitter in real time crises where information needs to be disseminated quickly. On a small scale, I'm sure it would work. By small scale, I mean a couple hundred users in a small city like, say, Ann Arbor. But the fact that it completely choked today - albeit in a major stress test of users across the country - does not bode well for it functioning as a back-channel in emergent situations of a larger scale. (Earthquake in a major city, or something like that?)

As of yesterday, I've been married to Keith for 4 years. We celebrated last night with big martinis at the bar at Cafe Felix (him Picasso, me Martini Felix) and then over to Miki for sushi. We told the cute little server that it was our anniversary and told her the amount we wanted to spend and just had the chefs make up something for us. It was wonderful - she brought out this huge boat (it really was shaped like a boat!) full of sashimi and an auxiliary tray of nigiri. It was out of this ...