I am currently in the middle of Freakonomics, and Soccer in Sun and Shadow.

I am wrapping up The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana and Love in the Time of Cholera.

I just finished How Soccer Explains the World, Among the Thugs and The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup (about two years too late on that one).

Last night, Matt and I went to see the Black Keys play the Warfield. I was surprised at how many people showed up. Not because the Keys don't deserve every fan they have, but because I didn't suspect that many people in the Bay Area knew about them. We were about 40 feet from the stage (and 20 feet from the bar), which made for excellent viewing and listening (and drinking).

For me, there's something very satisfying about the Keys' music. Dan on guitar and vocals, Patrick on drums. That's pretty much it. But they have a signature sound that comes across much thicker and more textured than you might expect from just guitar and drums.

As with any performer, the litmus test that determines whether or not you become one of my elite favorites depends on whether or not you can deliver live. Tool can do it. Rage can do it. The Black Keys can definitely do it. On stage (see blurry iPhone snap above) the Keys were able to translate all the songs I'd hoped to hear, but better because they were live, and 10x louder than I can ever get to them to go on my car stereo.

It was the best live show I've seen in years. Maybe ever.

Jesse James Garrett delivered the opening keynote. He talked about problems and issues we all (as UX folks) deal with... and he presented his information in a way that only a real communications expert can. Nice job. I got a chance to talk to him once he finished up his speech, and again when he passed by our table on his way out of the hall. Nice guy, too.

Molly Holzschlag is talking about broswers and HTML 5 (among other things). Concerning our interaction with and use of browsers, Molly reminded the whole room that we control our own destiny and the future of the browsers we design for, "... we are the big powerful giants."

Dan Cederholm is a presentation guru. His great slides complimented and enormously entertaining and informative presentation. He even had a decapus*.

Quote of the day belongs to Jeff Veen, "The day you launch is the beginning of the race, not the end of the race." Also, thanks to Jeff for blocking the spotlight from my eyes while we talked. Not only is he amazingly talented, and very nice... but he's tall.

All the presentations were terrific. More details and kudos to come later.

* Decapus: ten armed octopus in Cederholm's preso.

Concerning the visual design, however, there's been little to no talk at all about what a dramatic change the site has undergone. Part of me thinks this is a good thing. "Good" in the sense that the site's interface should be somewhat invisible to the end-user. But without the right kind of feedback, it is hard to qualify (or even prove) improvement to the overall user experience.

"Big deal," you say. Yes, big deal.

From a marketing and brand recognition perspective, moving from dot net to dot com is a no-brainer. Name one successful website that has, or is doing well with a dot net address. I defy you. Yahoo.net? Google.net? I just doesn't sound right.

The crown jewel is to own "your name dot com." Dot net is sort of like the Shemp of domain names. It ain't Curley, and it ain't dot com.

Fine. So now we have dot com. What does that mean for topix?

Well, thats the rub. See, at topix more than half our traffic comes to us via search engine queries. Rich and the gang spent their first few years optimizing topix.net so that it would always show up as one of the top results for "anything" news people might be searching for on Yahoo or Google (or Ask, or whatever...).

Britney Spears news? George Bush news? Yeah, that's us up at the top. For those and thousands more. Try "Your-Hometown news", or "Your-Zip-Code news." I bet if we're not number one, we're pretty close.

However, all that fine tuning was for topix.net. Dot net. At this point its easier for me, and better for you as a reader, to point you to this article just published on wallstreetjournal.com. It's an interview with Rich explaining the perils we face in making the domain switch. We stand to lose some of our SEO mojo and potentially take a pretty heavy hit to our traffic. But we're ready to weather that storm.

In a few weeks we're launching a redesigned, rebranded topix.com. Our goal is to redefine what topix is to everyone... not just Google's algorithms. Stay tuned.

The tags people use on del.icio.us say a lot about what people "think" of a certain site or page. Moreover, people add "user notes" to their bookmarks that give you even more insight. Here are a few of my favorites from the folks that have bookmarked Topix on del.icio.us:

"Topix.net provides an intuitive, easy way to find the targeted news that is relevant to you."

"Good news collection source. Looks cleaner than Google News"

"Every PR person and news junkie on the planet should be using Topix."

"Topix.net, possibly the most feature rich news search engine online already, has relaunched and looks very cool. The Topix index of 50,000 news sources is 10 times larger than the Google News index and 7 times as large as Yahoo! News."

Big up to Skrenta for sending this along via email.

"You can also use Topix to search 5,500 public company and industry verticals, 48,000 celebrities and musicians, 1,500 sports teams and personalities. You used to have to pay big money to do a Lexis-Nexis search to get info like this or pay a clipping service like Burrelles. Now anyone can do it for free. Something tells me this is going to be a very big deal."

Full story here.

Since they originally appeared in 10 minute shorts at the end of Mr. Show on HBO.
Since Jerri and I lived in an apartment on Ocean Drive in Corpus Christi.
Since I worked on a Mac 6500.. when that was a brand new machine.
Long before they had a web site.

Am I complaining about a couple of bruises and sore legs from a flag football game with a bunch of my 30-something pals? Um, no. Not in this house. Jerri ran in a 5K yesterday morning in downtown San Jose. Then she came home and made Thanksgiving dinner, at the same time helping me cheer the Cowboys to a win over Tampa Bay. AND I got a homemade buttermilk pie.

No complaints here, my man.

We miss our families, and this was the first year (in a long while) we've celebrated without them, or friends, around the table. That said, it still turned out to be a very, very good day.