I asked a question on the Globe "Ask Amalie" section today. For your reading enjoyment, here it is below. Post your answers in the comments!

Great column this week. I'm interested in hearing more about the spirit of the team and the mood in the clubhouse. So my question is: When it comes to getting a team 'fired up' and getting good chemistry between players, who do you think holds the majority of the responsibility? Can the manager and coaching staff help? The owner/GM? The fans? Do our local baseball writers and broadcasters (NESN/WEEI/WRKO) have a role to play? Is it up to the veterans to show patience and give guidance? Should the rookies be wacky, wild, and hungry to succeed?

On a related note: Do you think that keeping the sellout streak alive at Fenway is a testament to the effort that the fans are putting in, or can we do more?

Thanks!

This is an application on Android, and it's the reason I love my phone. While others are play sudoku or browsing the web, I'm on this thing creating sick beats and weird synth lines. It's amazingly fun, but the only problem is that they render the sounds on the server so you need a phone/internet connection in order to effectively use the software.

But it's amazing how using a sequencer every day has gotten me into the habit of being able to....auralize the sounds I want to make before I even start programming them.

So enjoy my songs and check out the fun at uloops.net.

In other news, would anyone like some http://lambsandwich.es?

I've had my HTC Hero for about 2 weeks now. Has it changed my life? No. I mean it's saved me some time with Google Maps/GPS; time which I would have had to spend on the computer before I left. And yes, I'm writing this post on my phone, but it's hardly easy--even if it is convenient.

And that about sums up my 3g, touch phone experience. I have the feeling that I can do anything I want, if only I could bear to thumb it out.

Mostly, having a phone like this has made me feel lonely. These phones are at their best when you're making plans, on the go, staying in touch. I simply don't have enough friends, and the new phone calls that into relief

So I decided that there was no point in learning Django just to do the same "entry.comments.first" and "comment.created_on" kind of stuff that I'm doing in Rails anyway. The framework doesn't seem sufficiently unique to warrant learning for the sake of learning. If I saw a major upside where I could use it at work or there was a big freelance market, that would be a different story.

I decided instead that my site just needs a visual refresh, but I am completely at a loss for what that refresh looks like. I tried something with a header and a footer that mixed around my color scheme, but my mom said it looked awful and bland (which are not generally descriptors you go for in design....).

So I'm back were I started, I guess. I vaguely feel like I want something new, something interesting...but I just can't figure out how to make it work. I wish I could meet up with a designer and do some bartering, coding for design.

Eric Mill over at Mill Industries has some interesting things to say about Google Buzz. Mostly it seems that he's not counting it out yet, despite the rampant privacy concerns and general sense that Google has intruded on people's sacred inbox space. The reason is because of comments by DeWitt Clinton, a Google developer.

I'll let you read now....

...

Back? Okay so basically DeWitt talks about this Internet Utopia where the whole web is one big social network and you can follow a friend/twitter like feed from any application that supports it. Turning friend feeds into email. Google Buzz has already decided that if your friend feed is as federated and easy as email, why not show it next to your email? For many people that should have been the final step, but if Google's coercion got more people on the playground then I don't really care.

But I do have a few questions. Like if someone leaves a comment on something in my Google Buzz, how do I see it in my Yahoo! Hum? I supposed the sites would have to be 'connected', which basically means that my Hum would have to subscribe to the pubsubhubbub feed of my Google Buzz.

But as far as the comment goes, we can't just import the names of the people, "Joey Shoad" and the like. Then we'd be facing the same supposed 'privacy concerns' as were created by the launch of Buzz. Actually, I totally think we should just show the guy's full name because he should have known that he was posting a public comment in a public form on a public post. But Joey could get mad about this. So as a compromise, I guess you'd have to md5 his email and get 'HanZ972oF0F...@GoogleBuzz' which could be shown to the user as "Travis' Friend", with each friend in a different color to help with threaded comments. Then, if you're subscribed to my Yahoo! Hum and you also know Joey by email, you'll see his full name.

Are there going to be pubsubhubbub nodes out there that represent groups and interests? If so, I think we should drop the word 'subscribe' and allow users to 'follow' these nodes. It's simply a less scary word...though I could see using 'connect' to, and treating the node as a site. But that would muddy the metaphor that sites you connect with share YOUR data. Anyways, would public nodes have options for joining? Twitter simply becomes the biggest friend feed pubhubsubbub aggregator. Of course, it's going to be up to the application to filter out redundant messages. Do Buzz posts have UUIDs?

Yeah, I'm not going to wrap this post up. Cheers!