Category: Personal

Space Camp

One of the reasons posting has been light this week is that I’ve been catching up from last weekend’s adventure. My younger son and I spent the weekend at Space Camp in Huntsville, AL. As you can see, we managed to enjoy ourselves. I’ll leave it to you to imagine a similar picture with Dad in it.

My secret hope for blogs

The last few days in my aggregator have been discouraging. Today’s nonsense was this from Gizmodo:

Airlines on the look out for gadgets. In light of the recent discovery a whole panoply of gadgets in al Qaeda hideouts that had been converted into weapons or bombs (like camera flashes that turned into stun guns), the Department of Homeland Security is issuing a warning to airports to be pay extra close attention to passengers with computer equipment and consumer electronics. So maybe bringing two laptops, a digital camera, a Pocket PC, and a WiFi detector with us on our current trip to California wasn’t such a good idea after all. [Gizmodo]

Boing Boing is full of similar distressing items ranging from:

TSA adds “sarcasm” to list of aviation risks

A kid who put a note telling TSA snoops to stay out of his luggage was busted on trumped-up “bomb-threat” charges for penning the following and putting it in his bag:

”[Expletive] you. Stay the [expletive] out of my bag you [expletive] sucker. Have you found a [expletive] bomb yet? No, just clothes. Am I right? Yea, so [expletive] you.”

Boy, good thing the eagle-eyed, sticky-fingered underwear fetishists on search-detail were on their toes, otherwise, this kid might have been able to board an airplane with a deadly sarcastic note in his checked luggage.

to John Gilmore’s recent experiences as a “suspected terrorist.”

As I read these and other tidbits offered up through my aggregator and through news channels, I fear we are a civilization that has abandoned the capacity for rational thought.

Fortunately, my aggregator also brings me gems such as Seb’s recent post on the late Edsger Dijkstra’s efforts at what I’ve described before as thinking in public (plus parts 2, 3, and 4). The whole post is well worth the effort, but let me focus on the last section of it.

The end of the article offers a great quote from Dijkstra on the struggle to accurately observe and steer one’s own thinking:

“The need to get some sort of verbal grip on your own pondering will by sheer necessity present your ponderings as something in which, as time progresses, patterns will become distinguishable. Once you have established a language in which to do your own pondering, in which to plan and to supervise your reasoning, you have presented a tool that your students could use as well, for the planning and supervision of their reasoning.”

I completely agree with Chalmers who writes about that quote:

Geek that I am, I find this passage incredibly touching. It’s the combination of Dijkstra’s searing integrity and his humility and willingness to make a complete ass of himself, by actually standing up and pondering aloud in front of his students, for their sake, that gets me every time. I wonder if the success of the scientific method does not depend on exactly this combination of integrity and humility? Dijkstra doesn’t just advocate it. He models it.

Here, for me, is the secret promise of blogs. They lower the barriers and make the practice of writing widely accessible. Which increases the chances we will begin to start thinking again.

Writing is the fundamental tool of reasoned argument and what we need as individuals, organizations, and civilization is as much reasoned argument as we can get. In the blogosphere you get to watch good writers at work as they develop ideas. Thanks to aggregators those ideas appear in a form that makes them natural raw material to kindle your own thinking. The combination of blog technical features (public distribution, short posts, chronological ordering, permalinks) with social practices (personal identification, generous linking, blogrolls) highlight the development of ideas as a social phenomenon over time.

Here’s a Gedanken experiment. How would activities at the TSA change if they published a daily weblog with real stories of the best and worst of what they had encountered that day? Not likely to happen, but worth thinking about.

Buzz narrowly escapes his 15 minutes of fame

Today’s NY Times story on back channels at conferences has provoked lots of interesting commentary around the web today. One tidbit to pass along. The story includes the archetypal conference blogging story of the impact of Doc Searls and Dan Gillmor sharing a link from Both “forwarded by a reader in Florida.” If you want the story behind the story, go check out Buzz Bruggeman’s blog buzzmodo. Buzz was that “reader in Florida” and he describes his near 15 minutes of fame.

Project Management and Horses

Project Management and Horses.

Spotted this gem on Anders site:

The tribal wisdoms of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that ‘when you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount’. However, in many companies as well as in the UN and NGO community a range of far more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:

1. Changing riders

2. Appointing a committee to study the horse …

It just gets better from there.

[High Context]

It does.

Dial-up isn’t so bad when the alternative is no dialtone

My computing life centers around my laptop computer. And I usually grumble when I have to fall back to dial-up connectivity. That was until Monday when we got to our summer place to discover that no dialtone is significantly more difficult to live with than slow dial-up.

Just when I had finally gotten the backlog of items in my news aggregator down to zero, I end up with three days of no connectivity whatsoever. At least everything was there for me to scan through (all 800 some odd items). I’ve got the backlog down to about sixty items that I want to spend some time thinking about and reacting to. something to keep me occupied over the weekend.

I’ll respect it when it ships

Smug Canadian, long rant about Dave and RSS: “This is the path to failure.”

[The Scobleizer Weblog]

Scoble finds a wonderful piece that offers new insight into what’s been going on in the recent RSS debate and in Dave Winer’s decision today to pull Scripting News offline (hopefully not for long – it’s now back).

One insight from Smug Canadian’s post:

Every debate about software always comes down to the same thing, and I find it fascinating that it mimics every fight I’ve ever seen in a meeting room between two or more programmers over a piece of software. You have programmers who have been around a while, who created something that works, who have seen users use software and who have seen failures. And you have the programmer across the table who has no “baggage” from having created that success and who thinks they can instantly improve on the whole deal, nearly always by starting over, and nearly always in a way they suggest.

And a bit further on,

It seems to me that if you want to be a success with XML, and more importantly with one of the few established XML standards in RSS, you need to ignore these people that keep trying to kneecap XML and RSS. The whole point of a “lingua franca” is not what that lingua looks like, it’s whether it works at all and whether anyone has used it. You gain advantage in an open webserver world by building on top of what is established, not by showing up a few years late and saying “it’s nice, but we can make it better.” You can’t, just like you can’t go back to 1992 and make HTML better.

“Lingua franca” triggerred it for me. Courtesy of GuruNet I grabbed the following definition:

lingua franca (l ng‘gw fr ng‘k ) , an auxiliary language, generally of a hybrid and partially developed nature, that is employed over an extensive area by people speaking different and mutually unintelligible tongues in order to communicate with one another. Such a language frequently is used primarily for commercial purposes.

In other words, a language focused on the need to get stuff done now. A language that gets learned in the streets not in the classroom or the academy.

I studied Latin, Greek, and French for years. Sadly, I studied them all inside classrooms. Not a big deal for Latin and Greek, but a truly missed opportunity with French. The few times I tried to use my schoolboy French in the real world, I was absolutely crippled by the notion that I needed to say everything perfectly. One reason that kids learn languages so readily is that they really, really want that cookie up on the counter and they have yet to learn the strange idea that mistakes are bad. Success or failure is about whether they manage to get the cookie.

The tools I use all have warts. I don’t have the time or talent to build them myself. I’m old enough now that I no longer believe in the perfect tool, especially one that is coming Real Soon Now. But I will invest time in learning how to use tools that do exist. And I am willing to cope with the inevitable breakage. RSS and the blogging tools built over the last few years lowered barriers for me to the point where I could get useful stuff done with them, partly because I abandoned the myths perpetuated by software marketers about intuitive interfaces and other fairy tales.

I would hate to lose that and I am anxious. I fear that while engineers debate “edge cases” and argue over whose ego or IQ is bigger than another’s, I will see a hugely powerful set of ideas embodied in tools that work get gobbled up, watered down, and built into the products marketed by the BigCos. For an example of that process, compare the power of outlining tools such as ThinkTank and Grandview with what Microsoft calls an outliner as built into Microsoft Word. For an economy that depends on the quality of its thinking, that’s a dumbing down of ideas we can’t afford no matter how appealing it might appear from a marketing perspective.

The most pernicious thing about this process is how easy it is to suck engineers into this debate trap. FUD is a term that long predates the birth of Microsoft. It’s a strategy that’s been perfected by those with market leads to defend. Their interests are rarely my interests.

Navigating among all the conflicting demands of getting a design that works, converting it to code that ships, and having the patience to bootstrap a user base is hard. It deserves respect.

Must ‘clueful politician’ be an oxymoron?

Lots of commentary and reactions to Orrin Hatch’s recent less than clueful remarks. Laughter and ridicule seem to be the most appropriate response so I appreciated this effort from Terry Frazier. Twitting the other recent nonsense about someone trying to lay claim to the term clue-by-four seems like a nice bonus.

I’m surprised that Hatch didn’t also endorse the “No Mental Theft Act“

Hatch to Endorse Snipers for Cubs ‘Rooftop Viewers’. AP News (www.aggravatedpress.com) is reporting this morning that Sen. Orrin “Hatchetman” Hatch, R-Utah, spoke at a DC-area Lions Club dinner Wednesday evening on the critical problem of copyright theft.

[…] Referring to the lawsuit filed by the Chicago Cubs baseball team to stop local building owners from watching games without paying a fee Hatch said “I’m all for peaceful settlements in cases like this, but there is no excuse for breaking copyright laws. These people have been warned. If the Cubs want to hire some snipers and pick these thieves off the rooftops I’m all for it. And they shouldn’t be held liable. A few dozen sniper shootings and people will think twice about watching baseball games without a ticket.” Hatch — best known as a deeply religious folk music artist, a technophobe, and a fan of long underwear — also serves in the US Senate when he’s not out advocating corporate attacks on private American citizens. […] Hatch, whose patriotic folk hit, America United includes the line “Those who would divide us could not realize, that from the smoke and ashes America would rise…United…United” received a standing ovation from the Lions Club crowd. “Copyright terrorists are evil-doers, striking at the heart of this country. They have no idea how far we’ll go to stand against them. These baseball thieves are just the beginning. Soon we’ll be destroying computers, cleaning up the Internet, and saving our children and future generations by any means necessary!” As the crowd filed out of the crumbling auditorium to the parking lot they were met by throngs of teenagers — all waiting to drive their aging grandparents home. Dozens of cliques had formed around users with Apple iPods and they were eagerly trading their favorite re-mixes and singles, as the beats of pirated tunes boomed from car stereo speakers. “Look at these fine young Americans,” said a clueless Hatch. “All waiting here to help their elders. These are the young people we care about, the ones we need to protect from the evil-doers. Yes sir. These young people are the future of our country.” […] [AP News]

Author’s note: The above story is satire. In keeping with the spirit and antics of our political leaders it is puerile, mean-spirited, even borderline moronic. But I feel better. Copyright laws in this country are no joke. Artists and creators deserve protection, but the paying public has rights as well. Congress has forgotten this and has allowed a tiny handful of mega-corporations to lock away our culture and our heritage. We deserve better. Now go out and convince the good people of Utah to hit Senator Hatch with an electoral clue-by-four™. [b.cognosco]

What teachers make

what do teachers make?. Via Loren Webster, this wonderful poem by Taylor Mali:

What Teachers Make, or
You can always go to law school if things don t work out

He says the problem with teachers is, What s a kid going to learn
from someone who decided his best option in life was to become a teacher?
He reminds the other dinner guests that it s true what they say about
teachers:
Those who can, do; those who can t, teach.

I decide to bite my tongue instead of his
and resist the temptation to remind the dinner guests
that it s also true what they say about lawyers….

[mamamusings]

Go read the rest of it. Something to think about as our kids turn to summer vacation. I’ve done and I’ve taught. If you take it seriously, teaching is harder work.