Month: May 2004

Charles Stross’s Singularity Sky – 50 book challenge

Singularity Sky
Stross, Charles
Singularity Sky is one of the nominees for this year’s Hugo Award for best science fiction novel. While it was a good read, I don’t think it is quite up to that caliber. Definitely worth your time if you are a science fiction fan. It explores a couple of different themes in interesting ways, although they don’t quite all hang together. On one hand, it’s a story of the collision between stagnant culture and a post-Singularity information culture. That sets up a bunch of neat ideas worth thinking about. On the other hand, there’s also a sort of love-story between two agents behind enemy lines thing going on. These two major threads connect loosely, but not as well as you’d like. Overall, Stross is a very inventive mind and I’ll be looking for his other work as it comes to market. In the meantime, I’ve started reading his blog, Charlie’s Diary, which is equally stimulating

Elizabeth Moon’s Trading in Danger – 50 Book Challenge

Trading in Danger
Moon, Elizabeth
I’m a fan of Elizabeth Moon’s writing for no logical reason I can discern. Trading in Danger is an interesting mix of military and mercantile science fiction. It moves along at a good clip, although the heroine tends to be obtusely stupid at various points to string out her troubles. It does have some good passages on stepping into new leadership positions. Not one of Moon’s better efforts.

Drowning in a Sea of Surety

Wise words from Burningbird.

Drowning in a Sea of Surety. I think that we should designate one day per week to be Humility Day. Or perhaps Day of Doubt or Insecurity Day. Each weblog we visit, the owner–myself included–pontificates on all the wrongs and evils of the day. Expressing opinions is a good thing, but lately it seems that even the most thoughtful weblog writers are screaming their words out, pages covered with the spit of their emotional outbursts, saturated with surety. Not just in politics: I’m finding the same level of surety in technology and tool usage, even which operating system we use. It’s as if none of us can tolerate even the slightest possibility of doubt in our choices. We can’t just talk about how nice our TiBooks are–we … [Burningbird]

High school, sex, the student press, and CNN

This was adjacent to the Dali quote item I just posted in my aggregator. Is it a job prerequisite that school administrators have no sense of humor?

High school, sex, the student press, and CNN. A longtime close friend, Mike Mahoney (we were both editors at the Sacramento Bee), penned an opinion piece in today’s Bee. Mike is now a high school English teacher and student paper adviser. Turns out Mike’s paper was at the… [JD’s New Media Musings]

Dali quote for the open copyright folks

It does make you wonder whether those most eager to wrap protections around ideas lear that they don’t have enough ideas. Reminds me of Linus Pauling’s observation that “the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.”

Dali quote for the open copyright folks.

In London, i went to the Dali exhibit. At the entrance, they had hundreds of “wacky” quotes by Dali about sex, his philosophy (and his belief that philosophy doesn’t exist), art and everything you could imagine. I came across one that made me immediately think of a few of the copyright crusaders that i know, so i thought i’d share:

Ideas are made to be copied. I have enough ideas to sell them on. I prefer that they are stolen so that i don’t have to actually use them myself.

It’s from an interview where he’s being asked about his art, copies and the public.

[apophenia]

More on OneNote and OPML

If you’re willing to install the preview service pack for OneNote, you can do this now. I’ve been running the preview SP1 for a week or so now with no problems, so I’ll be pusihing this higher on the priority list.

Say what you will about Winer, but from this user’s perspective he shows deep wisdom on the long term competitive value of supporting a small number of formats that are simple and that work. It’s so easy to fall into the lazy trap of trying to build your strategy on creating proprietary formats and trying to “lock in” your customers. If you want to understand why that’s a dumb idea, track down and watch the recent Michael Porter interview on Charlie Rose. Then think about what Porter is saying.

A picture named opml.gifWow, this is cool. The next release of Microsoft’s OneNote will import OPML outlines. Very good. Of course it should export them too. The old Microsoft would never have done this, in fact there’s an old Microsoft guy running around the syndication community, he’s one of the biggest advocates of reinventing everything just for the sake of revinvention. It takes a lot for a big company like Microsoft to adopt a format developed outside, esp one not developed at another BigCo. Thanks for setting a great example. Google, please pay attention to this. You lose nothing by keeping the number of formats small, by building on other people’s work instead of undermining it, by not being evil. You already knew that, at the top, but perhaps some of the new guys don’t understand what it means. It’s in the company prospectus. So I hope you won’t mind if we hold you to a higher standard. I assume that’s why it’s there. [Scripting News]

OneNote and outlining

More good stuff on connecting OneNote and other outlining tools and concepts.

Filling the outliner gap on Windows.

I was recently reminded of the gap on the Windows platform in really good outlining tools. I am a long-time OmniOutliner user on my Mac, and haven t really found a good, cheap, lightweight tool for managing structured outlines on Windows. According to this thread on Outliners.com, the leading candidates are probably Inspiration and NoteMap. NoteMap knows about hoisting, and Inspiration allows for some unstructured brainstorming in addition to pure outlining. But it s not apparent that either has one of the elegant simple features I would need: the ability to convert an outline into a structured to-do list (which is desperately needed for our house projects).

Enter OneNote. I ve had this app installed since I got Office 2003 but hadn t really played with it until the last few days. It uses a notebook metaphor, automatically saves notes, allows for placement of multiple text and graphics blocks on the page, and has some really good outline features, including quick and intuitive numbering mechanisms and the ability to set to-do checkboxes. No hoisting and no ability to create columns on outline items, but otherwise pretty nice.

Miscellaneous links: Andrew May has a draft MSDN article about new import features in OneNote 1.1; Josh Allen wrote an OPML importer that works with the preview of OneNote 1.1; Omar Shahine writes an RSS to OneNote PowerToy that basically allows you to easily copy items from RSS feeds to an outline for later reading.

[Jarrett House North]

Expanding the ActiveWords community

Marjolein continues to do great work with her new ActiveWords blog, AWesome. She’s started a webring for those of us who are fans of that productivity tool.

Two-fold Boost. The WebRing and my self-esteem got a boost today. Three experienced ActiveWords users were added to the WebRing. Please take the time to join too. Soliciting and organizing all this does take quite a bit of my time (my cute… [AWesome]

Michael Porter on Charlie Rose

Added to my TIVO to do list for Monday night. A great opportunity to see a first-rate thinker at work.

Way back when I was getting my MBA, Porter’s strategy course was the second year elective of choice. This was when Competitive Strategy was being written. Those of us fortunate enough to get into the class got to read it a chapter at a time. I was also fortunate enough to do a field study with a team of fellow second years under his supervision.

I learned a ton during those two courses. My fundamental reservation about Porter’s approach to strategy is that it is too focused on static equilibrium and doesn’t pay enough attention to technology innovation. Mix in Clay Christensen’s work on innovation however, and you have a powerful set of lenses to apply.

Michael Porter on Charlie Rose. Michael Porter on Charlie Rose — Missed it Friday night, but Harvard Professor and strategic management thinker and author Michael Porter was apparently a full-hour guest on Charlie Rose on PBS. By Porter:

Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Amalyzing Industries and Competitors
Competitive Advantage : Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance
Michael Porter on Competition

Fortunately, in New York, the show is repeated the next day (Monday May 3 in this case) at 1:30 PM. I’m setting my DVR for it. You might want to check your “local listings.” [Frank Patrick’s Focused Performance Blog]