Category: Personal

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.

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.

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.

A problem when using empty titles has been fixed in the NewsGator posting plug-in for Radio Userland. The updated version is available for download at http://www.newsgator.com/plugins.
[NewsGator News and Updates]

 

Matrix Reloaded — the abridged script.

Whether you liked Matrix Reloaded or not, this version of the script is a must-read. Watch out for the best part of it close to the end, when Neo meets “The Explainer”. Hilarious.

[d2r]

Parody is the sincerest form of flattery? A nice find from Diego Doval of d2r

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.

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]

qotd june 11. Paul Beatty: “If all the world’s a stage, I want to operate the trap door.” [Adam Curry: Adam Curry’s Weblog]

This is the kind of twisted mind that appeals to me. My other favorite along these lines came from a t-shirt long since gone. It read:

“If all the world’s a stage, I want better lighting.”

Fill Life

A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, wordlessly, he picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls. He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was.

So the professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls. He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.

The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else. He asked once more if the jar was full. The students responded with a unanimous “yes.”

The professor then produced two cans of beer from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar, effectively filling the empty space between the sand. The students laughed.

“Now,” said the professor, as the laughter subsided, “I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life. The golf balls are the important things your family, your health, your children, your job, your friends, your favorite passions things that if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full. The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house, your car. The sand is everything else the small stuff.”

“If you put the sand into the jar first,” he continued, “there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls. “The same goes for life. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are important to you. Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Play with your children. Take time to get medical checkups. Take your partner out to dinner. Play another 18. There will always be time to clean the house, and fix the disposal. Take care of the golf balls first, the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand.”

One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the beer represented. The professor smiled and replied, “I’m glad you asked. It just goes to show you that no matter how full your life may seem, there’s always room for a couple of beers.”

[Escapable Logic]

I’ve heard this one before, but that doesn’t make it any less pertinent