Congratulations to my good friend “Crazy Uncle Joe” Utsler on the birth of his new daughter, Zöe Alexis Utsler. Welcome to the world, kid!

I followed a link from Boing Boing this morning to this Tripod-hosted Disney website, but was instead prompted with an error: “The Tripod page you are trying to reach has exceeded its hourly bandwidth limit. The site will be available again in 1 hour!”

The site’s owner can then pay Tripod for bandwidth upgrades. But why can’t the end user volunteer to pay the upgrade fees, so they can get to the information they want? Similarly, readers of Blogspot-hosted weblogs can’t volunteer to “gift upgrade” their favorite websites to Blogspot Plus accounts; only the site’s owner can upgrade.

Is there a good reason for limiting their revenue like this? Is there some sort of privacy issue I’m not aware of? It seems like a huge oversight.

As discussed in Rob Malda’s journal, Slashdot is considering allowing early access to pending Slashdot stories for premium subscribers. But who cares about seeing one or two stories an hour, 10 minutes before it goes live?

A much better idea would be to allow paid access to the massive Slashdot submission queue, a business model made popular by Fark and FuckedCompany. This would allow eager newshounds and journalists to access a real-time feed of unedited story ideas and breaking news items, updated hundreds of times an hour.

I promised myself last year that I’d never go again, but the tentative lineup for this year’s Coachella Festival in Palm Springs is too tempting. How can I pass up seeing Badly Drawn Boy, Ben Folds, Ben Kweller, Cat Power, Gomez, the White Stripes, Ladytron, Tortoise, Sonic Youth, Polyphonic Spree, Soundtrack of Our Lives, Mouse on Mars, RJD2, El P, Amon Tobin and Stereo Total at a single event? Even at $140 for a two-day pass, it’s a deal.

Update: Goldenvoice posted the official set list. Looks like Cat Power was removed. (It’s probably for the best, since Chan Marshall has difficulty enough playing small clubs.)

For insightful commentary regarding the Google/Pyra buyout, look no further than the Yahoo Message Boards thread.

Yahoo Message Boards continues to be one of the strangest web-based communities ever. I’d love to see someone break down their user base to see if there are regular contributors, or if it’s completely composed of transient users clicking on news items.