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Jay's Blog Things that drift by on the net and f2f Monday, September 17, 2001
time for a break...
A man walks into a supermarket and buys the following: The guy smiles sheepishly and replies, "How'd you guess?" She says, "Because you're ugly."
The World Is a Beautiful Place
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti The world is a beautiful place The world is a beautiful place Oh the world is a beautiful place and its various segregations Yes the world is the best place of all mortician
Dave Winer is raising some provocative trial balloons.
Don't be linear This is totally a male thing. We get an answer, maybe just a preliminary one, and attach to it and never let it go. We're very modal beasts. We need to get less linear, be more dubious, think more strategically. While we're confused and emotional, new laws are being passed, that make some pretty terrible things legal. The next thing is to make some pretty sacred things illegal. Don't look at a general or a president as your pal or your uncle, that would be naive. They've got agendas too, and beliefs that they'd like to put into action. Clearly defined goals Like all wars we're getting ready to fight the last one again. Probably the Gulf War. But, if you recall the takeaway of the military from Vietnam was they would never again fight a war without clearly defined goals. Has that changed? It's too weird. Afghanistan was the Soviets' Vietnam. Round and round. Only this time the provocation wasn't in the Tonkin Gulf. And instead of following the French, we're following the Soviets. I bet even Saddam Hussein will help us get this war started. I can't believe we're taking the bait. Too linear to be real. If we get back to peace If we manage to get the war off the front-burner, there are some things we should do right away. The first thing to do is to solidify our friendships. Let's ask our allies what we can do better, and really listen and respond. As an economy and a culture, not just as a government and military. Are you sure we can win? None of the ideas I've heard about going to war are scenarios we can win. Now in retrospect, did we win the Gulf War? Think about it. How many casualties did we suffer? The Bushes are still in Washington, and Hussein is still in Iraq. Is this a different war or the same one? Are we prepared to lose?
connections
words are sometimes a clutzy way to communicate. words force us to play an internal game of telephone, the mind messes with the message some educators tell stories others turn to multiple media.
posted by jay cross on 11:19:57 AM | link
wise words from a letter to Salon
The key to victory on all these fronts lies in allying ourselves with the non-fundamentalist Muslims who are of course the vast majority. We must strengthen ties with the Islamic world and make friends with as many powerful and influential Muslims as we can. We must fight Islamophobia in our backyard. Practically all of the world's Muslims, even outside the West, see Osama bin Laden as evil, but many also see the United States as a frightening global tyrant. We must use the awesome power of our media to show them that they are right about the former and wrong about the latter. When Arabs are fully integrated into Western society, some of them will certainly wind up signing up for military duty or intelligence service duty. When we no longer fear each other, the enemy's strategy will be defeated. When Arab nations see the U.S. as an ally, the enemy will lose their potential allies. When the CIA and FBI have undercover agents of Arabian descent, we will be in a position for the first time to attack their armies and win. If the U.S. government is serious about treating this matter as a war, they are going to have to start paying attention to real military strategy: the kind that wins wars. Not the kind that sells weapons. -- Jonathan Moriarity
According to a poll of Americans reported in the New York Times/CBS, "Eighty-five percent said the United States should take military action against whoever is responsible for the attacks. Seventy-five percent of those people said the action should be mounted even if innocent people were killed. Almost all of them said they would favor going to war with a nation that was harboring those responsible for the attacks."
posted by jay cross on 5:59:29 PM | link
posted by jay cross on 10:11:50 PM | link
posted by jay cross on 10:17:39 AM | link
posted by jay cross on 10:35:14 AM | link
Jay,
Place this on your web site. I came from a TM teacher I know and dear friend. It is so sad here Glad to know you're okay. Yesterday will take a long time to sort out. I was in Soho, startled out of meditation by the plane flying so low and then the impact. I went up to the roof where we had a 75% unobstructed view of the towers. They were torn open and an enormous cloud of dense sulfurous smoke was obliterating the sky. It seemed like a A malevolent force had put a spell on us and "Reality" no longer existed. Sorry, no reality today. So, as if in a collective trance, people just set about the process of getting out of there, one step at a time. That was enough to focus on. Today you're in the movie "Escape from New York" the "Evil City" that the world loves to hate. Lets take those pushy New Yorkers down a peg or two. But now, cast in the glow of violence, suddenly human, ephemeral, mutely vulnerable, so full of inconceivable pain, and courage. I waited for Toni, who lives on Duane St.(6 blocks closer to the epicenter), her beautiful loft filed with computers and cutting edge imaging devices was inches deep in white soot and debris. In denial, she spent hours trying to vacuum up, thinking she could stay. Finally when she couldn't breathe, and the electricity went out, she put her cats on a suitcase cart and struggled north to my doorstep. Then the two of us dragged our bags towards Houston St., past little clouds of bewildered people, perennial street persons, a tourist couple come to Soho to shop, a rollerblader, and one or two fasionistas (it was Fashion Week in N.Y.C.) starring mesmerized at the vacant horizon engulfed by the enormous cloud which was beginning to shift in our direction. A bewildered Japanese businessman in a 3000$ suit was looking for a cab, on Prince St. despite the fact that the streets were cordoned off, so I gave him directions to the 6 train. He had never used the subway before. We showed identification to the police at the barriers. Houston street was lined end to end, army formation with dump trucks and anonymous official vehicles and an army of police. The river Styx. Ambulances would tear by randomly. We finally made our way across and through other barriers into the village to my ancient jeep and fled like Bosnian refugees. The streets were deserted, so I was able to makeit back to R.I. by midnight. Speaking of children... in meditation this morning I thought about all those children who have lost one or both parents. I would like do something to help them. Adopt, start an orphanage, volunteer. If you have any suggestions let me know. I don't think life will look the same ever again.
Hey, now you can spy on your family! Bring back memories of Stasi, KGB, and Savak.
Excerpts from today's SPAM:
Spouse, or Employees Are Doing On Your Computer While You're Away ! Undetectable & So Easy To Use, a Child Could Install It! Be set up and running 30 minutes from now ! Take hundreds of snapshots Install this software on your computer We even have an add-on that will let Learn the contents of Every Email, Every Chat Room, Capture & Record every word typed into Our software is Totally Undetectable & Yes we said Totally Undetectable ! It will not show up in the programs menu. It will not show up if you hit Control Alt Delete This incredible new software records Computer It records All applications loaded, All web It's like standing over their shoulder while they You See What They See!! Top 10 Reasons People Use Our Software: 1.Monitor & Record what their kids are 2.Record their kids chat sessions. 3.Help Protect their kids from Internet 4.Monitor & Record their employees PC 5.Save & Protect their computer projects 6.Find Out if their spouse is having an 7.Determine who uses their computer while 8.Keep a Record of their own PC and 9.Train other users on new applications. 10.Record activity for technical support
Corporate Design Foundation
@issue Alan Webber on why he and BIll started Fast Company: the Web and the Internet were on the verge of re-routing conversations and information so that an individual with a Web connection, a Rolodex and a good idea could literally change the course of an industry. Rather than highly structured, hierarchical organizations, we were seeing places where people mattered most. Work had become more than a way for people to put bread on the table – it was who they were. They felt they could bring their own ideas, energy and sense of purpose into their work and find ways to do things that were fun, fulfilling, and profitable at the same time. And here's some reinforcement for my concept of marketing design: While editing Harvard Business Review, I interviewed Nike's head designer. The way he described how Nike came up with designs was transferable to imagining a new kind of magazine where the mythology of the shoe design came from looking at how actual people run and the kinds of situations that they find themselves in. Bill and I began to talk about the magazine in those terms – the kind of energy on the page, the touch of the paper. The design, look, feel, touch, typography, printing quality, all of those attributes help to communicate the magazine's values, mission and purpose, and we wanted them to be right from the start. The Web is so overloaded with clutter and information, brand becomes an important differentiator. Who do you trust? Why go there? What do they deliver – not just the first time, but the second, third, fourth time? The Web has so much to choose from that in order to use it productively, you only want to visit the sites that keep their promises. That's what a brand is. A brand is a promise to the user that gets kept consistently. The companies that perform in ways that respect your time, intelligence and the limits of your technology are sites you're going to want to see again. @issue: The Journal of Business & Design is a print publication specifically for business leaders and business school students to communicate examples of how and why design contributes to business success. The articles from each edition are available on this site.
Taking the hard drive down to bare metal....
My SONY Desktop, a "Digital Studio," has been getting flakier and flakier. I couldn't separate out the effects of SONY glitches, Windows ME stunts, or the effects of unruly applications. I suspect a marriage of all three was at work. In a day of work, I'd crash at least four or five times, usually freezing the system so the only way to reboot was to unplug it from its power source. SONY machines look cool but the designer was so arrogant as to leave out a reboot button.
Win ME is 58% of the way through a total reinstall. (That means taking the hard disk back to stem-cell stage and reloading everything from scratch.) Now I'm wondering how much crud I want on the SONY. Also, how often to back up. Starting with a clean hard drive is like approaching a blank canvas. Hmmmm. Minimalist computing.
Atlantic Unbound | August 29, 2001
fallows@large | Dialogues with James Fallows Michael Lewis, responding to James Fallows: "When the boom went bust—with no discernable effect on the price of skilled labor in Northern California—the first pile of material quickly went stale. It took only a few months before all sorts of people suddenly knew all along that every commercial venture associated with the Internet was an act of folly. People who lacked the nerve to question the boom while it was happening were newly emboldened. It was as if the whole crowd was shouting in unison at the emperor that he had no clothes."
Software needs to take the clutter-clearing lesson
The Rising Costs of Software Complexity According to a Standish Group research study (http://www.standishgroup.com/ visitor/chaos.htm), only about 16 percent of software projects are completed on time and on budget. The Software Productivity Research consulting firm (http://www.spr.com/Resources/ resources.htm) finds that an average programmer only works about 47 days a year on new development; the other 150 days are spent testing, debugging, or working on projects that get canceled. One oft-quoted statistic holds that users only work with about 10 percent of the features available in most software. The Failure of ERP "In an ERP implementation project, the ratio of money spent on consulting services to money spent on software is between 5-to-1 and 10-to-1," reported Josh McHugh in an article for eCompany Now (http://www .ecompany.com/articles/mag/0,1640,6580,00.html). Many companies could never get the software to work at all. Just before Halloween 1999, Hershey Food Corp. announced that because of problems with its ERP software, the company was unable to fill orders and get its candy onto shelves. The company reported a 19 percent drop in earnings that quarter. Subsequently, other companies — including Whirlpool and Allied Waste — revealed that they were also facing delays in shipping caused by their new ERP systems. One drug distribution company went bankrupt and filed a lawsuit blaming SAP. The makers of Gore-Tex filed a lawsuit against another ERP vendor (see "News & Views," DDJ, February 2000).
I'm back online after a long weekend with no net connection. This is getting downright silly. After installing a new modem here, Pac Bell forgot to reconfigure things in the Central Office, so we were out for another four or five days. Several days later, someone "turned the port off" in the Central Office.
posted by jay cross on 12:38:32 AM | link
 This would be more compelling if I could make out what it says on the spheres. As it is, this opening graphic doesn't inspire my confidence in what's to come.posted by jay cross on 2:55:27 PM | link
  Back from Hope and Bill's funeral. 400 people attended, a community's homage to a fallen leader. End of an era I searched for the quaint, old-time South but found it had been replaced with Wal*Mart and auto parts stores. Across the street from "Clinton's birth home" stands a discount cigarette shop, one of three within several blocks. The Interstate has brought fast food and motels but little else. Before departing midday Wednesday, I chowed down at Catfish King. My desktop computer is down. Really down. Perhaps down for the count. Before I left, I was trying to install "Popup Killer," but the install aborted and left me with a machine that doesn't do much aside from displaying the Windows ME opening screen. I reloaded Win ME; nada. I nosed around the win.ini, system.ini, etc., but couldn't find anything suspicious. If I could figure out how to liberate my mail and photo files, I'd give up the rest. In fact, I may do that anyway. For now, I've hooked the laptop to the printer, monitor, CD drive, and wireless mouse & keyboard. This is less than ideal but workable.
I am looking at a page that features live webcams from around the world. The Kremlin, Zacopane, Riga, Budapest, Prague, Lubijana, Belgrade, a panorama of the Reichstag, Sylt, Oberammergau, Geneva, Zurich, Elba, the Koln catherdral, the Tour Eifel, Big Ben, Ibiza, Montserrat, Fifth Avenue, DisneyWorld, Yosemite, the Golden Gate, Kauai, Tahiti... Wow. Our tiny world.
posted by jay cross on 11:36:25 PM | link
Yesterday my uncle Bill died. Or maybe it was the day before. Bill was a duck hunter, farmer, community leader, and all-around good guy. Many people of BIll's generation, and since, have fled Hope, but Bill stayed behind and did his part. Tomorrow I fly back to Hope, Arkansas for the funeral. This will be the second funeral I've attended in my life.
posted by jay cross on 10:58:22 PM | link
Yeah, sure
Disclaimer:
And I guess this is not a pipe, eh? Preview of the Fall TV Lineup Geraldo interview with Gary Condit Excerpts Bah-bah Wah-wah: "Gary, did you stick your tongue in her mouf?" Larry King: I haven't been married 34 years, Gary, but I married 34 women. Howard Stern: "And Gary, can you tell us about Chandra's boobs? Was she bi?" Dr. Ruth: "Did Chandra have orgasms? Was she ashamed to have sex with you?" Gary Condit: "Tell us about the cigar, Mr. President." On 60 Minutes, Barbara Tripp reveals tapes of phone conversations with Condit about he and Kathleen Wooley at wild party in Monica's apartment with the Argentine Firecracker.
Simplicity is my watchword. At Marcia's suggestion, I reread Elaine St. James's original on the subject. I'm a third of the way into Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui by Karen Kingston. And I'm trying to simplify a few of the needlessly complex areas of my life. Which is all prelude to my telling you about supper this evening.
Uta was out with the girls. Austin has moved to an apartment in San Francisco, starting life as a college boy. It's just me and the dachshunds here in Berkeley. And they've already eaten. So I could devour whatever moved me. And I chose:
The recipe: Preheat oven to 450. I soaked the clams. Yuck. Several times, until the water was clear. Poured rock salt on a baking pan to support them, and placed the clams and the tomato, halved, on the bed of salt. Cut the squash in half, scooped out the seeds, poured a liberal amount of maple syrup from my recent trip to Vermont into each squash canoe, covered the squash (on a small plate) with Saran wrap, and set the microwave to nuke it for 8 minutes. Poured glass of wine. Messed around on the web for 30 minutes. Slid the pan with the clams and tomato into the oven. Punched the microwave button. Poured another glass of wine. Buzz. The squash was done but the clams needed another three minutes. Set the table, including the butcher block the clam would rest on. Removed the baking pan. Every clam was open! Bravo! Pigged out on a zero-fat feast. Life is good. Roasting clams in their own juice intensifies their flavor. Yum. However, clams are a luxury compared to mussels. Today clams go for $6.99 a pound, mussels for $3.99. However, mussel shells are thin, compared to clams, so I imagine clams are three or four times more expensive per chewable ounce. Most of the time, I'll stick with the mussels. Finished things off with a few glops of Mochi ice cream. Mochi? It's the sweet, chewy, pounded rice of Japan. Mochi is the covering for strawberry ice cream we buy at Cosco. Which reminds me of the time I was buying a few slabs of cinnamon-raisin mochi, the solid stuff, not the ice cream, at the Berkeley Bowl, and the woman behind me in line, asked what it was and I explained that mochi is the result of the traditional rice-pounding ceremony that the Japanese perform to welcome the new year and which is something of a problem because the elderly eat it to celebrate and it sticks to their throats and they suffocate and die. She said, "Oh. I think I'll pass." Whew. At least a few things aren't destined to become commonplace. (But if you ever see mochi in the supermarket, shrink-wrapped in a package about 6" x 8", try it out. Score it with a sharp knife, break it into chunks about 1 1/3" by 2", bake it 10 minutes at 450 on a nonstick pan, and wow. It bubbles up to twice its original size and is a dynamite healthy snack. It's sticky but tastes wonderful.) That passes for simple in these parts.
Eureka!
I once again have DSL. The entire sordid story is at my personal website. We've had three months of nightmares. I don't think I'd be running today had I not started posting my DSL status (and ASI's responses) on my web site. Did I say this somewhere else? The web lifestyle that BillG used to tout is a real bummer when one's denied access to the web. We are blessed with wonderful neighbors to the east of us on Poppy Lane. Sensitive people, he a teacher and she an artist, they've lived here since graduating from Cal in the sixties. They are, or I should say were, very attached to their white Jack Russell terrier, Mave. Mave was the most energetic dog I've ever met. Always pumping adrenalin. Continually in a frenzy. Mave would jump several times her height just to greet you. Bill is into serious kayaking. Each summer he takes off to kayak with one of his kids in the northwest for a solid week. They paddle all day, camping out and eating the fish they catch. Mave rides, er, rode, on the front of the Bill's kayak. Day before yesterday, they pulled ashore to make camp. Mave set about exploring the shoreline. Bill heard one yelp...and then silence. He searched all over. No Mave. He searched for several days. Some local Indians told him about a cougar in the area that had eaten several of their dogs. Bill later found white fur and dog's teeth in some cougar excrement on the trail. Nature's harsh.
Continuing my thoughts on leadership. I'd proposed earlier that the big change in leadership is the new roles and attitudes of followers. The new HBSP course on leadership appears to focus on relationships with others (and with the outside environment in general) as a leadership success variable.
HBS: From the eLearning program “What Is a Leader?” from Harvard Business On-Line Heifetz and Laurie point out that identifying what needs to change (called “an adaptive challenge”) is a fundamental principle of leadership. The process of identifying what needs to change involves a number of elements: • Listening to the concerns of people inside and outside the organization
Blogs are great, but problems do arise. Today I called my ISP, Interland, to ask why I could no longer FTP into my account. The rep didn't know. She and I went both able to ftp to my upload area with our browsers. But CuteFTP, which I've been using for more than a year, won't work on InternetTime.com. (It works for my other Interland sites same as always.
The tech follows what must be rule 1 or 2 in the new-hire's how-to manual. "I'll reset your password." CuteFTP still does not work. Oh, well, that's all I can do, said the tech. I just changed the password on seven Blogger accounts. Now I'll go shopping for another FTP program. Keep your fingers crossed.
Continuing my thoughts on leadership
From Business 2.0, August/September 2001, "Go back five years," says Halsey Minor, founder of CNET and CEO of 12 Entrepreneuring in San Francisco. "Every CEO in America laughed about how he couldn't use a computer." Computing, like stenography, was a tool for lesser people. Leaders led. The information economy demands of its leaders more than just a grasp of the digital tool set. It also requires a strategic instinct that is deeper and far suppler than what previous generations of bosses needed. (Technology is always changing the rules now.) Andy Grove says, "Leaders have to act with more amplitude and more quickly today. The pressure to act that comes from employees, shareholders, and directors come much faster than 5 to 10 years ago, because information is available in a much shorter time. The means to respond have also increased. You can reach more employees and in a much more telegraphic fashion, as opposed to the former, more deliberative manner. You do that both because you have to and because you can." Mary Boone notes that "The leader now is someone who connects, informs, and engages people."
Continuing my thoughts on leadership
Not a joke: Reagan on Leadership: Executive Lessons from the Great Communicator I flashed on a time my boss was really looking for guidance from "Leadership Secrets of Attilla the Hun" As Drucker says, the prerequisite for leadership is follows. If a leader fell in the forest, and he was all alone, would he hurt his knee? No, without followers, he's no leader. Followers is where the big changes have occurred. The Cluetrain has stopped for them. No
Thank you, Mr. Net
Nosotros
At lunch, ideas zinged back and forth across the table, building upon one another as if to demonstrate that everything is connected to everything else. A great session. Caryn and I talked of the Dark Ages (she’ll roll the Poison Apple across the conference table to jolt people out of our modern life-is-good paradigm). Here’s an image: When the plague set it, the rich would hire a peasant to live in their quarters while they sojourned elsewhere. The peasant girl was the canary in the coalmine, living amid luxury but courting death to do so. I rolled out my budding theory about the disconnect between where people are now and where they’ll be in the future. We fool ourselves into thinking that we have a good handle on the future impact of current actions. It’s logical…. When we stop to think about it, we discover that most of the middle ground from now to then is illusory. We assume there’s a logical connection and will invent it when called upon, much as our minds make up stories to tie together fragments of dreams. This helps explain self-destructive behavior: the failure to connect present and future. Hence, the alcoholic keeps on drinking, denying that alcoholism is a fatal disease. Later in the conversation, when Jim was talking of the dot-com-ing of his company, and of the B-School ethos of focusing on equity to the detriment of the underlying business, my mind hopped back to the now/future conundrum. Ba, humbug. "Ba" is Japanese for place, sort of, and it's the energy that inhabits knowledge to make it useful. Similar to the lifeforce prana. Here's a great synopsis.
Prasad talked about identifying the DNA of companies, specifically some recent sessions with Cisco managers about VOIP phones. They couldn’t conceptualize the product until they considered and identified with familiar things. “If you were a phone, what model would you be? What color? What would you do?” I think further development of Prasad’s concepts on this might warrant investment by the Advanced Technologies Program at NIST; applications for the coming year are due next month. Contact info: Dr. Harris L. Liebergot Also see Harris' presentation to eLearning Forum. Marcello told us about co-counseling, sort of a buddy system where each partner takes time playing Carl Rodgers. He's found it useful for more than a decade! Caryn shared another technique for unloading one's mental baggage: draw up a T account of likes and dislikes in a relationship, then assess what each item says about you. Better than simply writing one's problems on a piece of paper you then rip up. Watching Bill in his element, I wondered whether he shouldn’t start www.billslist.org, a craigslist.org personal networking service akin to Craig’s List in San Francisco but centered on the Valley. For my upcoming story in LiNEzine, I asked how leaders differ today from those of five years ago.
Gracias, Nosotros.
David Weinberger: What is postmodern knowledge management?
Kevin Werbach: Knowledge management has traditionally suffered from the hubris of modernism: the belief that we can discover ultimate truths and organize the world according to rational principles using clever code. The idea was that we should capture and organize bits of "knowledge" in central databases. The people involved were relevant only as donors to the common ontology or as empty vessels into which knowledge could be poured. Life — and business — doesn't work that way. It's messy, complex and subjective. Real workers have the disturbing habit of being human, so they refuse to change their behavior or to contribute metadata into a shared pool. And universal taxonomies are worthless if divorced from the subjective experience of those who use or generate that information. Enter postmodern knowledge management. Postmodernism holds that our concept of reality is always warped by the lenses of individual subjectivity and group power dynamics. Therefore, postmodern KM can't be about management at all, because management implies external control of some definable resource. Its goal is simpler yet deeper: leveraging people. Postmodern KM operates within and on the basis of existing behavior patterns, mining conversation streams and relationships automatically to incorporate structure and context into the information human users already manipulate. It fosters human intelligence and interaction rather than trying to replace them. Concretely, that means things like automatically parsing email messages and other internal content to draw out useful context and associations (an approach being pursued by Lotus and a bevy of startups including Tacit Knowledge Systems, Abridge, EcoCap, Krypteian and Neomeo); mining discussion content and user feedback on intranets (Newknow); adding workflow directly into email messages (Zaplet); and building on Weblogs as a powerful Web-native tool for knowledge sharing (Onclave and Slashdot derivatives). In other words, tools to help knowledge manage itself.
from the New York Times:
Cosmic Laws Like Speed of Light Might Be Changing, a Study Finds By JAMES GLANZ and DENNIS OVERBYE An international team of astrophysicists has discovered that the basic laws of nature as understood today may be changing slightly as the universe ages, a surprising finding that could rewrite physics textbooks and challenge fundamental assumptions about the workings of the cosmos. If confirmed, the finding could mean that other constants regarded as immutable, like the speed of light, might also have changed over the history of the cosmos. Describing the implications of what his team observed, Dr. Webb said, "It's possible that there is a time evolution of the laws of physics." Nothing, but nothing, seems rock solid any more. Everything is relative. Our minds are tricksters that cannot be trusted. The entire world is rocking to a higher beta -- more variations, faster cycles, greater extremes. You need a Plan C and a Plan D as well as your B. Leadership used to be a matter of "Follow Me." Now it's more who do you trust. Leaders must comfort followers by making meaning, by simplifying worklife, by providing the foundation that seems to be eroding all around us.
Around 8:00 this evening, the dogs and I trekked up the hill to the seminary. A deer appeared about 50 feet ahead but the dogs didn't notice it until it started hopping over shrubbery and out of sight. Coming back down Marin Avenue, we saw more deer, a doe and two tiny fawns running through the intersection of Marin and Grizzly Peak. Wow. I stopped to nibble a few ripe blackberries growing by the side of the road. Walking down the hill, in the final stretch of our little hike, I was confronted by a beautiful sunset sky, bright orange dabs of cloud floating over a sea of fog, something Turner might have painted. God I'm glad I live here.
posted by jay cross on 11:00:10 PM | link
For several years I've used Gator as an automatic form filler. It spit out address & phone number, user name and password, and credit card number and expiration date whenever needed. Yesterday the first item in Anchor Desk raled against Gator for being deceptive, invasive, and generally bad mojo. I'd thought the trouble with Gator was incessant pop-up ads, and I could live with those. No, for me the gloomy spot was the tracking these guys do, recording my every more on the net and every purchase I make. Whoa. Sounds like Microsoft Passport.
Happily, there's an alternative. AI RoboForm. Privacy-conscious. I just downloaded and installed it. Free.
Slashcode. The code that runs Slashdot is available open source.
Hmmm... A free BBS+.
Why we need a Plan B for progress
BY DAN GILLMOR Mercury News It seems like we need a Plan B for just about everything these days. Progress is colliding with government screwups, corporate malfeasance and other factors to create a world where we can't rely on much of anything. From telecommunications to transportation, we're wise to prepare for the worst. And even with services we once considered inviolate parts of the basic infrastructure, such as electricity, we're discovering to our dismay that we need backups. These cost money and time, and create a drag on our lives and the economy. Plan B's, and the reasons they're necessary, vary by product and service. But they all seem to have at least one common thread -- our rising expectations, fueled by our sometimes naive trust that big institutions are competent and honorable.
Richard Thieme's Islands in the Clickstram which follows echoes a riff that's been running through my head.
What we experience is an illusion, a dream our minds create to fool us each into thinking the world's logical and we're in control. One persistent illusion is that we're aware of the continuum of time from now until the future. And yet people don't optimize their longterm benefit. They sacrifice today for tomorrow. So instead of the way we think we think: past..........now..........what's ahead..........future, in reality these are independent pieces, strung together by our pattern-seeking minds. This deconstruction of time let's me eat ice cream while saying I want to lose weight. It keeps the smoker smoking in spite of the fact that there's lung cancer and emphysema up ahead. My calculus is so weak that I can't remember if it's derivative or integrals I'm looking for with this next idea. The equities market rewards its best guess at a companies competitive advantage over time. Wouldn't it make more sense, if you expected to be invested for, say, two years, to bet on the company you expect to have that competitive advantage two years from now? It's not as if the world's going to stand still for two years. Or is that already discounted into the market price somehow?
Islands in the Clickstream
Who we believe ourselves to be determines what we think That's also why the only way to deny another person their Our model of reality matters. Our model of reality Our model of reality determines our identity. And Humanity is a Ideas want to be free because it is their essence to be Individuality is an illusion, a convenient illusion,
Updated the Berkeley Pathwanders' site. When my new camera arrives, I may do a photo inventory of the paths.
posted by jay cross on 11:23:22 AM | link
Do Bubbles in a Glass of Guinness Go Down?
Two rules for life: 1. Don’t tell people everything you know. 2. ...
Cameron Barrett's take on weblogs from Blogdex: "Weblogs" are a relatively new method of distributing personal news, essentially an individual's log of activities, news, and thoughts presented in a public manner on the web. As a publishing medium, weblogs are ultimately democratic, often as timely as traditional news sources, and have a potential distribution much greater than print media. One problem with these personal information sources is the inability to find an audience. Blogdex is a system built to harness the power of personal news, amalgamating and organizing personal news content into one navigable source, moving democratic media to the masses.
THIS MONTH IN RELEASE 1.0
In Search of Broadband: To the Last Mile and Beyond By Kevin Werbach Of all the Internet revolutions yet to come, none tantalizes us We don't know when broadband access will be universal, but we do The magnificent, open, competitive, dynamic Internet encircles the This issue covers companies that are putting into place the Well, maybe. As they say, it's only a matter of time. My saga with DSL over the last three months (see Adventures with My Monopoly ISP) tells me broadband to the home is a bit further in the future than most people realize. So long as one company controls that "last mile," the carriers don't have incentive to improve service. SBC Communications, the largest provider of home DSL, has proven inept at even keeping their service up. posted by jay cross on 9:05:59 AM | link
Managing Your Personal EnergySeventeen Ways to Avoid Burnout
Supper
1 1/2 lbs. PEI mussels, rinsed Pour rock salt on a baking pan and shake it around 'til evenly distributed over the surface. Place the mussels and taters on the salt. Grind black pepper over the entire pan, salt & oregano over the taters. Pop the pan in a 450 degree oven. Roast five minutes (or until all the mussels have opened).
Zero fat. Great taste. Costs $6 total. Prep time = 1/4 hour. I appropriated this recipe from Zibbibo in Palo Alto which took it from the shelf of its parent, Lulu's in San Francisco. The unadorned mussel flavor is great.
I've been reflecting on the Mirror Project.
posted by jay cross on 9:24:59 AM | link
A guy goes to the psychiatrist and tells him that he thinks he is a dog. The shrink says, “Hm… very interesting. Please lie on the coutch so we can further explore this problem” The guy replies "I'm not allowed on the couch".
posted by jay cross on 1:08:48 PM | link
My DSL fiasco continues. Service has been off more than on for three months now. More than a dozen technicians have come to my house. The only change is that SBC is making it more difficult to reach ASI to make complaints -- a virtual firewall of voicemail-fu which ends up with a recording that "wait times exceed ten minutes." This morning I intend to prowl around SBI's financial statements for names of officers with clout I can send demands for action to. Maybe the FCC? After waiting on hold for 45 minutes, SBC picked up the phone and told me that ASI had until close of business Monday to get back in touch with me. Oh, and that they're experiencing "Network events." This appears to be their euphemism for "It's our problem." Sort of like the old days when lost orders were blamed on the computer, as if a Hal 9000 in the back office were destroying inccoming orders at random.
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Time Groupboosts profits through learning and collaboration |
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eLearning
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visualization
all of which makes one wonder why 
A week ago the system crashed while I was installing "Pop Up Killer." God those intrusions tick me off. Major corporations showing they have no more finesse than some rag-tag porno site. Giving it juice, it would display the Windows ME splash screen but go no further. Austin and I tried many hours of kludges trying to get it to respond. Luckily, I'd copied off most of my current files to CD only a few days earlier. And I had the encouragement of the book I recently read about letting go of old things to make room for the new. 
Yesterday I received my new Olympus D-510 camera in the mail. I held off opening the package for five hours while completing a proposal. Then I opened the box, put in the batteries, inserted the SmartMedia card, slid open the lense cover, and...zilch. Nada. No power. Damn. So I went to the supermarket and bought four AA alkalines and put them in the camera. Still nothing. So I searched the web for "Olympus D-510 defective" and similar terms. Google brought me to a bulletin board discussion of the D-510. I posted my problem. This morning an answer appeared. I wasn't sliding the cover sufficiently far to the right. BIngo. It works. Thank you, net. Sort of restores my faith at a time when most of my systems seem down.
Each of us is prey or predator. Prasad brought up the motivators, aspiration and desperation, stating that desperation has more oomph to it. Is desperation the response of the prey and aspiration that of predator? Doesn’t aspiration lead to progress? Maybe one can amp up aspiration by imposing an artificial deadline. (See Stephen Levine’s 
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