November 17, 2007
Chumby for Chanukah
Dave's convinced me. I'm going to ask for my family to contribute toward buying me a Chumby for Chanukah. Using it simply as a (rather small) digital picture frame practically justifies the price by itself. Add in its openness and general coolness, and I want one!
Posted by self at 09:54 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
November 16, 2007
MacArthur grants Berkman $4M
The Berkman Center has received a $4 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (for four million, we spell out the entire name) to support the Center's tenth anniversary and beyond.
This is fantastic news. The Berkman Center is part of Harvard Law but relies on the kindness of others for financial support. From the Berkman posting about the MacArthur grant:
Over the past decade, through a series of grants, as well as substantive involvement in the center's work, MacArthur has been instrumental in the success of numerous Berkman efforts, such as: OpenNet Initiative, the Digital Media Exchange, Digital Natives, Global Voices, and the study of citizen media. These have led to numerous policy changes, two books, and two spin-off organizations -- one non-profit, the other for-profit.
Thank you, John D. and Catherine T.!
Posted by self at 11:10 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
November 09, 2007
Item: Fish have three-second memories
Good. If I were a fish, I wouldn't want more than three seconds of memory.
Posted by self at 05:14 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
Item: Fish have three-second memories
Good. If I were a fish, I wouldn't want more than three seconds of memory.
Posted by self at 05:14 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
November 04, 2007
Dr. Bechtel?
Is AKMA's rumor mongering well-founded? Is it now Dr. Trevor Bechtel? If so, there's a rumor I'm giving Trevor a hearty congratulations!
Posted by self at 09:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 03, 2007
Vint Cerf by Joi Ito
Click on this photo of Vint Cerf by Joi Ito to see it in more of its glory.
Joi also has a comic book comment on the appointment of a new chairman of ICANN... [Tags: vint_cerg joi_ito]
Posted by self at 07:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 02, 2007
From forms to comedy
Docstoc.com is a free site to "find and share professional documents." Here's what the About page says:
Find a vast quantity of high quality legal, business, technology, educational, and creative documents for free. docstoc allows users to upload their documents for all the world to share.
In addition, users can store their documents in their own personal online folders for anytime, anywhere access.
My guess when I got the site was that they were aiming at letting people share useful forms and templates. And there are lots of them there. But it also has bunches of people using it as a self-publishing site. For example, click on the comedy category. Since there is a Comedy category, my initial assumption was wrong. In any case, since the site leaves itself wide open for how people want to use it, and provides a good set of tools for community filtering and organizing, it'll become whatever we want it to become. Who knows, maybe it'll become the go-to site for comedy forms.
Or, of course, it may never take on a particular use, in which case it's unlikely to succeed. Is it intending to be the YouTube of documents? In any case, for its openness, Creative Commons-ness, and folksonomosity, I wish it well.
PS: The FAQ notes that for now, there's no limit on how much space users can have for private storage of their own documents. How long before the first greedy person ruins it for the rest of us?
Posted by self at 08:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 26, 2007
This week at the Berkman Center
Every week, Patrick McKiernan at the Berkman Center puts together a brief sampler of what various Fellows 'n' friends have been writing. Just to give you a taste, here's this week's list:
*Rebecca MacKinnon critiques the proposed Global Online Freedom Act of 2007.
*Wendy Seltzer argues for privacy in registering domain names.
*Doc Searls considers Facebook the latest in a string of online "walled gardens."
*Dan Gillmor praises The New York Times for opening up to outside researchers.
*Citizen Media Law Project: ONI Releases Bulletin on Internet Shutdown in Burma.
*Weekly Global Voice: Costa Rica: Free-Trade Agreement Passes.
You can sign up for the weekly listing of "Berkman Buzz" here.
[Tags: berkman]
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October 19, 2007
I won an award
There's no nice way to put this. Last night I won the "Mover and Shaker" of the year award from the Mass Technology Leadership Council. Apparently, my three summers at Macarena camp have paid off.
But seriously, thank you, MTLC! [Tags: mtlc ]
Posted by self at 04:16 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
September 19, 2007
Keynote animation weirdness
Keynote's ability to animate objects has gotten much better in the new version (Keynote '08, v 4), but it's still not up to PowerPoint. The biggest gap at this point is it's inability to loop actions. This may be because Keynote apparently doesn't let users interrupt animations, so a loop would loop forever, making for an especially ineffective but oddly hypnotic presentation. Also, and less important, Keynote is surprisingly sparse with the graphic shapes it provides, and those shapes aren't as manipulable as PowerPoint's. E.g., PPT gives control points for block arrows so you can adjust the head, provides "smart" workflow connectors, etc.
Way more important to me: Keynote doesn't always let you say two effects should run at the same time. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I was finding this frustratingly unpredictable until I realized that in some cases it would allow simultaneous actions that were in slide sets I imported from PowerPoint. (Keynote's import and export facilities are awesome.) As soon as I altered the action in Keynote, the "do action with" option went away, leaving only the "do action after" choice. If I've diagnosed this correctly (and, really, what are the chances?), then Keynote can display behaviors it doesn't allow users to create.
Weird. But it does leave the possibility of exporting the deck to PowerPoint, doing the animation work, and importing back into Keynote...except you'll lose Keynote's over-the-top eye candy, especially for slide transitions.
(I'm not a Keyspan expert, although I'm pretty good at PowerPoint. If I'm wrong about any or all of this, please set me straight. Thanks.)
Posted by self at 10:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 08, 2007
Collaborative band name exchange
When you're tempted to borrow the Dave Barry trope of adding "And, by the way, that would make an excellent name for a band," you can share the name at NowFormABand, a site created by Aanand Prasad. Recent names include: Foxy Morons, Clot, CornSquat and Eat More Chemicals.
None of the names I saw match the pure, godawful ridiculousness of my band's name in high school: Wheel and the Spokesmen. Even today I can play a truly awful rendition of "This Diamond Ring"...
(Link via Yesh Omrim.)
Posted by self at 07:45 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
September 02, 2007
Joho the Newsletter
I've posted a new issue of my newsletter. You can read it here. You can subscribe for free here.
|
The
Privacy
Non-Principle:
Privacy is too squirrely for principles. We need to keep it difficult. |
Posted by self at 08:27 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
August 24, 2007
Things that happen to your body when you're not looking
I think I "run" faster when listening to my iPod because I have it cranked it up so loud — I have middle-aged hearing loss, also known as "Why do today's youth mumble? It's a sign of disrespect!" disease — that it masks the sound of my panting. That can't be a good thing.
In only vaguely related news, I find fascinating the explanatory hypothesis of why we have out of body experiences. If I understand it (and there is no chance that I do), the idea is that the brain constructs the sense of having a persistent body by synthesizing the various streams of internal and external sensations. When those streams fall out of synch, the brain, which would rather be wrong than confused, synthesizes a body standing slightly outside of the one it's actually in. Ah brains! Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em!
Posted by self at 10:23 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
August 11, 2007
60 gmail scripts
Here are 60 tools that may make your gMail experience better... (Thanks to Henk Nouwens for the link, via Twitter.)
Posted by self at 11:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 27, 2007
Doc the Elder
It's Doc Searls' 60th birthday in a few days.
Sixty is old. But it wouldn't be fitting to call Doc an old man. He's not. Durn, he's spry for his age!
No, Doc isn't an old man, but he is about to become an elder. He didn't get there just by watching the years go by. He got there by working tirelessly for the public good of the Web.
Doc thus will be entitled to the perqs given to elders:
When he talks, you look up from your damn laptop.
When in an Internet cafe, Doc's packets get sent first. You can just wait in line, sonny boy.
Before your press the "post" button on your blog, you will now spend a few seconds thinking to yourself, "What would Doc say about this?" You will then obey your inner Doc.
If Doc gets crotchety on your ass, you have to sit there and take it. (Not to worry, though. Doc is one of the least crotchety people ever.)
I don't care if Doc keeps linking to the same YouTube video. You'll laugh at the end as if it were the first time.
Doc is now entitled to not reply to up to six emails a day. And he doesn't have to let us know which ones they are.
Happy birthday in a few days, and much love now, Doc!
[Tags: doc_searls village elders ]
Posted by self at 12:38 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
July 23, 2007
Why I'm becoming a Mac person
I've used each of the Apple machines pretty much when they came out. I've owned several, most recently a Powerbook. Yet the Mac has never stuck with me. Now, my black MacBook is bringing me joy. I use my big honking Windows desktop machine only when I have to.
What happened?
I've had what I think of as legitimate reasons to find the Mac unpleasant. I don't think of Apple as a user-friendly company. The Mac's insistence on sticking with interface idiocies like shipping with a one-button mouse and only allowing drag-sizing from the bottom right-hand corner, strike me as explicable only as arrogance. I prefer Microsoft's willingness to run Windows on machines manufactured in an open market, although it does result in the chaos of drivers that is the bane of Windows' existence. The lack of software for the Mac is an issue. And then there are my idiosyncratic reasons for sticking with Windows, including the tons of utilities programs I've written for myself and my need to run a version of Powerpoint that has full path animation, which Mac Powerpoint lacks.
Likewise, I've been unpersuaded by the Mac's case against Windows. Windows XP (Microsoft's failed to give me to a good reason to switch to Vista) is quite robust and stable. Even when a program crashes, it doesn't pull down the entire operating system. If you know what you're doing, you don't get viruses. The registry is an overly-complex solution to the complexity of modern software, but it rarely gets in your way, and being able to edit it (after making a back up, of course) actually gives you some additional control over your machine. The problems Mac users rag on Windows users about generally don't hold against sufficiently sophisticated users. I have become a sufficiently sophisticated at Windows use. I've had to.
So, what's changed my mind?
Some of it has nothing to do with the Mac. In particular, I'm coming off of a Thinkpad X40, an admirably light and small laptop, which has me enjoying the MB's larger and wider screen. That's helping a lot.
The open source movement has now created great software in enough categories that I don't feel like I'm downgrading. Open Office (I'm using the NeoOffice flavor of it, which uses more of the Mac's UI and skips X11, or at least makes it invisible) now feels as good as Word; the upgrade to the spell checker, for example, has helped. Thunderbird and Firefox work just fine on the MB. The utility programs, like the text editors and FTP programs, are great, and even tend to be prettier than their Windows' counterparts. So, even though there is far less software available for the Mac, for me there's enough, and enough is all I need. And, the same is true for the non-open source stuff. The one category that matters to me that the Mac loses at is games. But I still have my honking Windows desktop for that.
The ability to run Windows on the same MB is comforting, especially during the transition. I have a 10gb partition for Windows, leaving about 140gb for Mac. I find I'm only using the Windows partition for working in Powerpoint and for retrieving items I forgot to port over. And, Parallels, which lets you run Windows in a window on your Mac desktop, may not be rock solid, but it is way cool.
I do like knowing Unix is under the hood. It enables a range of tinkering that would require far deeper knowledge in Windows. (Windows API anyone?) Of course, tinkering is how people like me get in trouble.
OS X absolutely handles some core user functions better than Windows does. When I close the lid on my Thinkpad, I can never be entirely sure what state I'm going to find the machine in when I come back. It's supposed to go into sleep mode, but it on occasion goes into either hibernation or total shutdown. And it takes way too long to come back, no matter what state it's in. This is one of those things you'd think Microsoft and hardware manufacturers would have figured out by now. On the other hand, I can close my MB and be confident that when I open it, it's going to blink its eyes once or twice and be fully awake. Likewise, my MB latches on to the strongest, open-est wifi signal without asking me to salute and sign some papers. Also, the Mac seems to be doing a better job of power management, although I'm not competent to judge this. (Hint: Turn on Parallels and watch your power drain, presumably as the Core 2 cpu #2 kicks in.)
Put it all together, and the MacBook feels great. It's solid, it's fast, the display is beautiful. Oh, I've had program crashes, and there's UI stuff that seems thick-headed (how about letting me use just one finger to delete forward? Jeez!), but, well, it's just a computer. And I'm enjoying it more than any computer since my original KayPro II.
Of course, it helped that I got it just before going on a working vacation when I could devote some serious relationship-bonding time with it. Employers ought to grant leaves of absence to users making the switch. The first couple of weeks are such an important bonding time. We ought to respect that. I hear the French give 14 days of paid leave.
Posted by self at 11:44 AM | Comments (19) | TrackBack
July 13, 2007
Lazy phishing
Among the phishing spams I got today was one addressing me as a Mid America Bank FSB customer (which I am not). Apparently there's been a little mixup with my records, and they need me to submit all of my personal information, passwords, and embarrassing photos.
These scammers are so lazy that the URL to which I'm supposed to respond doesn't even attempt to make it look like it's a bank address. In fact, the domain is:
http://svindler.dk
Well, I guess you;d have no one to blame but yourself if you fell for this one.
Posted by self at 07:53 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
July 08, 2007
Older than Lennon
As I write this, it is my mother in law's 80th birthday. I love her, I like her, and I enjoy being with her.
As far as arbitrary markers go, an 80th is a big deal. We've marked it by gathering the entire family, as well as the four couples known collectively as The Wine Group who have known her since high school. They are only slightly reduced by age: One couple is now a single, they are all shorter than they used to be, one of the men runs down conversational paths a little too long. Still and all, when I was a lad, eighty year olds were by and large dead, and for the survivors we had words like "dotage" and, if they were lucky, "spry." I don't know if being 56 enables me to see past the wrinkles and pates or whether we're just aging remarkably better than our grandparents did — if we are lucky enough to get to old age, a contingency that, as ever, comes without merit or mercy.
So, this morning I went for a run. Of course, if you saw me, you wouldn't say, "Oh, there's a man running!" You would have said, "Oh my god, should we get that staggering man some help?" Nevertheless, to me it feels like running. It was the first time I've run wearing my new iPod, which came basically free with my new MacBook. Yes, I am now Apple Man, right down to my iSkivvies. So, here's a Note to Self: Do not exercise while listening to John Lennon songs because it's hard to keep up one's breath while weeping.
By December 8, 1980, nothing had gone wrong in my life. My parents were middle middle class, although growing up I thought we were wealthy. None of my desires were frustrated (well, except for prom night, but that's a different story). An aunt and an uncle had died young, but I'd managed to make that feel like someone else's loss. I had convinced my draft board to make me a conscientious objector — a first for them, I was told — and even then, my lottery number didn't come up so I didn't even have to spend two years doing alternative service. I'd gone through philosophy graduate school having been warned for six years that there were very few teaching jobs available, yet in 1980 I was an assistant professor in a philosophy department. I'd married well and truly.
We were sitting in our little apartment in Portland, Oregon, when the radio announced that John Lennon had been killed.
The Beatles' story was my story, our story. It wasn't just music, although I'm ever more impressed by their talent and daring. It's hard to explain my — our — sense of identification with the Beatles. I didn't think I could have been a Beatle if only I had been in the right spot. I didn't identify with their rise from humble origins. I didn't envy their lifestyle of concerts and groupies. They were more important to my self-understanding than that. They exposed my — our — possibilities. Everything was up for reinvention, or so we thought, never dreaming that when our generation took over it'd be in the form of Bill Clinton and George Bush. The Beatles in their music, but also in their way with celebrity, said we could take the old, bust it up, make fun of it and delight in it, and build something new. Love and youth could refashion the world.
Until they shoot you.
Had any of the other Beatles been killed, it would have been sad and horrible, but it wouldn't have marked the end of my own youth. John was special.
John was doing to himself what the Beatles did to music and culture. He became a father and househusband, and started writing songs as naked as his photo on the "Two Virgins" album. I didn't like many of the songs. Some were embarrassing. And that often was the point. In fact, many of his most personal were sung at the highest reaches of his voice, as if to say, "I love you so much that I'm willing to sing badly for you." (Not that Lennon ever sang badly. I will have none of that!)
So, I was running this morning, listening to "Instant Karma," the 2-disk collection of Lennon songs sung by others, with profits going to Darfur via Amnesty International. There are performancs, particularly on the second disk, I like a lot. Green Day's "Working Class Hero," Jack Johnson's "Imagine," Ben Harper's "Beautiful Boy," Jaguares' (or Jakob Dylan's?) "Gimme Some Truth," The Postal Service's "Grow Old with Me." I'm sorry to say that I didn't like the under-represented women's tracks as much: Avril Lavigne's "Imagine" and Christina Aguilera's "Mother" both sing songs that came more directly from Lennon's voice.
The compilation makes it clear that Lennon was inconsistent. In "Imagine," he singles out religion a couple of times as a force that stands in our way. Later, he thanks God for Yoko. So he likes God but not organized religion. But then he bashes God. Oh my! What a great blogger he would have been, so eager to be imperfect in public.
I admired the perfection of Beverly Sills' singing, but I could never get past wondering how she did that with her voice, which is also my reaction to ventriloquists. I know her singing touched many, but it wasn't for me. The imperfection of Lennon's voice, his insistence on being human right in the midst of our insistence that he be John Lennon, is what got to me. Gets to me.
Mark David Chapman thought he was protecting John Lennon by killing the evil Lennon-impersonating robot outside the Dakota that December evening. Bang. Lennon isn't given the chance to be patient with his children, to tell them how beautiful they are, to grow old in their eyes.
So, here I am at 56. Our children are 25, 22, and 16. I've made it past the point where they'd be too young to remember me clearly if I died tomorrow. I find comfort in that, although I'm enough of a rationalist to find it also silly.
But, like many heading into old age, I don't feel old. I still dress as if I'm going to summer camp. Yet I remind myself — biting down on a painful tooth — that I'll be sixty soon. Fifty you can pretend is the new forty, but sixty is just freaking old. I've always avoided mirrors, but now I find myself examining my baldness to try to fix in my mind how old I look to others. Likewise, when talking with young people (a symptom of my denial about my age: It feels weird to call them "young people"), I force myself to dredge up an external image of this old man talking with the kids.
This isn't a pity thing. I think I know more than thirty years ago, and, thanks to the Net, I'm part of many networks, each of which is smarter than I am. I have more love in my life than when I could take three of flights of stairs, skipping every other step, while whistling. ("Octopus' Garden" for many years was my stairs-climbing song, even though I never liked it very much.)
But something has gone wrong. I know what the path to old age is supposed to be: You're young, you marry, you work, you retire, you become small, cute, and certain, and you die. But, here I am hanging out with 80 year olds who don't feel all that old to me. And here I am, hanging out on the Internet where no one knows you're an old dog, and where the pace on the treadmill has been turned up from cane-assisted to massively multiplayer intellectual marathon. The simple journey we're supposed to take, one of ascent and descent, has been disrupted. Only the end remains fixed.
The truth is that I don't feel myself on a path. The truth is that I don't know how old I am.
[Tags: john_lennon instant_karma beatles aging death ]
Posted by self at 11:32 AM | Comments (16) | TrackBack
June 30, 2007
Working on vacation works!
Faced with the prospect of not having any children in the house for most of July, my wife and I decided to go someplace fun in a twosome fashion. But we both feel the burden of having a good time, so we took the pressure off by deciding to work on vacation.
That means we loaded up the car with books and have headed off to my family's summer cottage, having checked with my siblings to make sure we have it to ourselves for a few days. So, I'm sitting here reading, and writing some stuff I've meant to write. At night we'll eat food we like, and see some plays at Shakespeare & Co. It is exceedingly pleasant.
On the other hand, for the next few days, I'm on dialup. (It also means that I'm using AOL. If you have a better way for me to use dialup very occasionally, let me know.) Thank goodness there are usually parking spaces outside the public library within reach of its wifi signal early in the morning when I go into town to buy groceries, newspapers, and the best sourdough bread in the country.
And now I must get back to work!
Posted by self at 09:15 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
June 23, 2007
Berkman Center on the move...literally!
Sfphil has posted photos of the old Berkman Center house being picked up and moved. (We've been in a newer building this entire academic year.) [Tags: berkman]
Posted by self at 04:03 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
June 03, 2007
The future is now, or, um, well, later
There's a video of a cool gesture-based system over at Perceptive Pixel. And there's even an electronic music soundtrack that's like annoying music from the future.
Jeff Han apparently demoed this at TED last year. Now he's got the video of the demo up on his site, with zero further info. It looks very cool, but, of course, cool UI's are not necessarily usable UI's.
So, we'll see. Sometime. I hope.
[Tags: user_interface perceptive_pixel gestures coolness]
Posted by self at 04:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 31, 2007
Yochai Benkler to join the Berkman Center
Yale's Yochai Benkler , whose The Wealth of Networks is the seminal work on the new economics of collaboration, is joining Harvard and the Berkman Center.
This is fantastic news. What an addition to our community! And not just because Yochai is brilliant. He is also kind in discussion, and that matters a lot.
[Tags: yochai_benkler berkman]
Posted by self at 11:45 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 19, 2007
Congratulations to the Knight winners
The Knight Foundation News Challenge has spoken to the tune of $12M in grants, and two — count 'em, two — projects sponsored by the Berkman Center are among the winners. Global Voices got a $244,000 two year grant to support its outreach program, and the Citizen Media Law Project got funded to help citizens do better journalism. Ethan's got some excellent bloggage about all this, as does Doc.
Hearty congratulations to all the winners. Lots of good projects now will be able to advance. [Tags: knight globalvoices gv berkman citizen_media journalism dan_gillmor]
Posted by self at 12:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 12, 2007
Light blogging
I've been blogging lightly - and even missed a day — because the book tour I'm on has been overwhelming. Not only is my schedule packed, but the events have been over stimulating. So many great questions. I get back to the hotel, my head a-swirl...and then I fall asleep.
I come home this weekend for our daughter's graduation, and then turn around right again and come back to SF.
Posted by self at 01:24 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
I've entered the Senior Zone
Last night the cashier at the movie theater asked me if I wanted the senior discount. That starts at 60. I'm 56, so it's a reasonable question, but it means that the gap between how old I look and how old I think I look is widening faster than I'm aging. [Tags: aging seniors self_delusion damn_boomers]
Posted by self at 10:47 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
May 04, 2007
The Freerange Librarian reviews Everything is Miscellaneous
Karen Schneider, who was one of my favorite librarians even before she reviewed Everything Is Miscellaneous, has posted her review at the American Library Association's techie site. She says the book is "dangerous." That's not an adjective I often (ever?) hear applied to anything I do — I installed a seat-belt on our LazyBoy chair — so I'm just tickled pink. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous karen_schneider ]
Posted by self at 10:31 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Ethanz's review
Ethan Zuckerman has posted a review of Everything is Miscellaneous. He thinks reading it is like drinking a mojito: Towards the bottom you always end up with leaves in your teeth. Ok, so maybe that wasn't the point of his metaphor, but Ethan does a great job explaining what the book is about. [Tags: ethan_zuckerman reviews]
Posted by self at 10:31 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Peter Morville's review
Peter Morville, author of the excellent and enjoyable Ambient Findability, reviews Everything is Miscellaneous. He likes it, but thinks I don't recognize that "third order," digital organizational systems are often built on top of "second order" systems. I'm sure he's right that I over-emphasize the new and scant the existing systems. I do, however, believe in mixed modes and hybrid systems that take advantage of every way of organizing information. Since we no longer have to settle on one, we should have lots. [Tags: peter_morville everything_is_miscellaneous reviews]
Posted by self at 10:31 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
February 27, 2007
John Palfrey's awesome outlining software
I believe the software John Palfrey used at the BeyondBroadcast conference is MindMap. It combines outlining with superslick presentation quality. There's an open source outliner that some compare with it called FreeMind, but on a quick look, it doesn't seem to be nearly as slick...but it's free and open source. [Tags: outliners john_palfrey everything_is_miscellaneous]
Posted by self at 04:10 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Implicit Braille
They ought to put Braille bumps on keyboards so that after a couple of years of typing, we will all have learned Braille. Maybe. [Tags: braille blind]
Posted by self at 12:36 PM | Comments (26) | TrackBack
January 19, 2007
How to be cheap: Laptop mice
I've been going through laptop mice like a cat goes through mice. The cords fray where they join the USB plug. But my latest cheap laptop mouse has lasted for months because I applied some preemptive Goop — the viscous glue you can use to fill in a worn sneaker sole — at the join. Works like a charm. Plus, it makes it look like you just sneezed on your mouse, useful for keeping the person next to you on the plane curled up in the far side of his seat. [Tags: tips goop mice]
Posted by self at 02:36 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
January 10, 2007
Joho just got easier to remember
I've owned the www.JohoTheBlog.com domain for years, and for years I've had a redirect that sends you to www.hyperorg.com/blogger/index.html. Now, my friendly and helpful host has made an alias so www.JohoTheBlog.com goes directly to the right page, with no redirect hiccup. Go ahead, give it a try: www.JohoTheBlog.com. See, you're back where you started. What will they think of next?
If you already have a link here, first: Thanks! And there's no need to change a thing. In fact, you're pointing at the honest-to-TBL, unaliased address. But, from now I'll be telling people the link to my blog is www.JohoTheBlog.com.
Posted by self at 12:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 06, 2007
Hi-resolution Boston
Here's an amazingly high res photographic image (a series of tiles, actually) of Boston. [Tags: boston]
Posted by self at 09:34 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 04, 2007
Fever-based OCD
I spent all last night obsessively composing (or was I dreaming that I was composing?) this blog post that explains that I spent all last night trying to get my body into exactly the right configuration so I could fall asleep. If a single fold of blanket were wrong, I had to fix it, but in so doing, I would knock some other element out of kilter. But the obsessive micromanagement of my bedware was only part of the obsession. The rest of it was the focus on writing this post. (And, no, this is not exactly the post I composed while obsessing. For one thing, it's more meta than that.)
I honestly don't know if I fussed all night or if I only dreamed that I did.
Less fever today. I'm actually going to tackle my email this morning, before my extended fasting (yes, I'm drinking water) makes me loopier than I already am.
Our son came down with it last night. He seems to be about six hours behind me. He does not moan. [Tags: illness fever tmi]
Posted by self at 11:07 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 03, 2007
Son of Frank: Meteor Farmer
Frank Paynter's son, Ben, has a story about meteor farmingin the Jan. issue of Wired that's been turned into a segment of the premiere of PBS's Wired Science. The show is being streamed here. [Tags: ben_paynter frank_paynter meteors pbs video]
Posted by self at 02:17 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
December 18, 2006
Blog Tag. I'm it.
Oy. Glenn Fleishman has tagged me in a game of blog tag. The rules say that I now have to post five things most people don't know about me. I then get to tag five other bloggers.
Five things:
1. I hate fish so much that even before I was a vegetarian, I'd sometimes lie that I have an allergy to them. (I like feeding fish, however.) I will leave the table (without making a fuss) if seated across from someone reverse engineering a lobster or crab.
2. I am afflicted with a malady that requires me to tap along to any beat, including directional signals.
3. I've played almost every first person shooter there is. My player name is "Target," which gives you an idea how good I am.
4. I am a closet hobbyist programmer. But because I have difficulty with indirect relationships such as pointers, I couldn't get from C to C++. To my great embarrassment, I currently program mainly in Visual Basic.
5. I was on the student-faculty committee at Bucknell U. that came up with the idea of letting students design their own major, and I was in the first graduating class that could take advantage of this opportunity. And that, ladies and gentlemen, explains why I graduated Bucknell as a Meaning major.
I tag Euan Semple, Denise Howell, Chris "RageBoy" Locke, Jeneane Sessum and Susan Crawford... [Tags: blogtag]
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December 02, 2006
My brother's honor, and takin' the midnight train
I'm in NJ tonight for my brother's award ceremony. He's Rheumatologist of the Year, an award he earned by caring about his patients and not processing them like flounder. He's also the most ethical person I've met and damn smart, too. He's getting an honor he richly deserves. (Yay, Andy!)
Then I take the 3:20am train from Newark to DC for Day 2 of the RootsCamp unconference. If you're there, I'll be easy to find: I'll be the incredibly cranky old man in the corner. [Tags: andrew_weinberger rootscamp]
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November 28, 2006
One Laptop Per Child
SJ Klein is giving us a quick overview of the One Laptop Per Child project.
They have deals with five countries: Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria and Thailand. Each will be getting 1,000 laptops.
The monitor can run in ultra-low-power mode, reflecting ambient light. "The display technology is the most remarkable technology in the laptop." The display "IP" is co-owned with the screen producers.The OLPC is working to make it reusable in 3 years wrt patents.
It weighs 3lbs. A pound of that is plastic. The plastic is 2mil instead of the 0.7mil of a typical laptop, e.g., a Thinkpad.
It comes with Squeak, JavaScript and Python as programming languages. And MediaWiki. (And more.)
Q: What is it missing? What will the critics say, "It's fine, but it's missing a ____"?
A: It's not a normal desktop computer. It has a 512MB flash disk and 128Mb of RAM. It can run lots of apps simultaneously, but not typical office apps.
It has an integrated browser.
Q: Does it run Flash?
A: Yes. There's a lot out there in Flash. But it's not an open format.
Ethan points out that the bulk of the machine is behind the screen, so there isn't a lot passing through the hinge; the hinge is the most common point of failure in laptops.
SJ says that the battery runs about 2 hours if you're running flat out. But for reading, he hopes and thinks kids will get about 8 hours. The best recharging technique is a pull thingy that's sort of like a lawn mower starter. The battery is nickel metal hydride.
It's designed to last six years.
Q: (Me) The social software?
A: WikiMedia. Drawing/chat program that lets you see everyone that's there is part of the operating environment (= Sugar). Etc. [Sounds like an opportunity. What social software might work in these environments and cultures?]
Ethan worries about students wanting to use them to the max while the teachers want to confine the usage to class-focused activities. Ethan doesn't want the laptops to assume that education has to be entirely webby and non-traditional.
The OS is a modified version of Fedora. The file system is different because it's compact flash. E.g., you can't use swap and they've had to write low-level stuff to keep Linux from writing to the first sectors of memory until it burns out.
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November 14, 2006
Note to the three guys in suits at the table behind me
Talk loud. Be foul-mouthed. But please not both.
Neither would be ok, too.
Posted by self at 10:12 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
November 09, 2006
Tab catalog for Firefox
I've been using Tab Catalog for a while, but it seems to have gotten better. I'm not sure if that's because the Firefox 2.0 version was upgraded or because somehow my preferences got switched, but I'm enjoying it a lot in either case.
Tab Catalog shows thumbnails of the pages in your tab bar. So rather than having to rely on the truncated names in the tabs, you can go for the gestalt. Since I often have twenty or thirty tabs, being able to see the pages themselves is very helpful. Very cool. And free, of course.
Thank you, Shimoda Hiroshi. [Tags: tab_catalog firefox utilities tabs]
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November 04, 2006
Zotero research tool
Zotero (zo-TAIR-oh) is a Firefox 2.0 extension that captures Web pages (and files and PDFs), finds the citation info on those pages and puts them into standard bibliographicv form, lets you take notes, and lets you search. In future versions, it plans on letting you publish your collection and will integrate with Microsoft Word and others. It's free and it's Open Source.
I haven't tried it yet, but I'm liking the sound of it a lot. (Here are the specs for my dream system, which I once called Notetella, but which I suppose now I'd have to call note.licio.us because, well, that's the law.) (Thanks to Luis Villa for the link.) [Tags: zotero research bibliographic ]
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October 30, 2006
Rosenberg interviews Johnson
Scott Rosenberg has a great interview with Steve Johnson about Steve's new book, The Ghost Map. It's one smart writer interviewing another smart writer. Plus, Scott and Steve are both really nice, a virtue often under appreciated, especially when it shows up in folks whose egos could justifiably be way bigger than they are.
Scott closes with a question about Steve's new site, Outside.in that aggregates stuff by zip code. [Tags: steve_johnson ghost_map scott_rosenberg books]
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October 24, 2006
The world's most boring man
Yesterday I flew from Boston to Chicago in the window seat of a three-across row. The person next to me, who seemed to be a vigorous man of around seventy, talked non-stop the entire way. Non-stop. He's done a lot of traveling, he has a lot of opinions.
I saw what was coming and ducked out quickly, donning a head set and pretending to work and listen to music. But I felt terrible for the woman in the aisle seat who absorbed the blunt force of the man's self-absorbed river of spews. I wondered if I should make up an excuse for her or engage him in "conversation" so she could have a break. But I lacked the fortitude. Besides, she's a grownup — maybe in her late forties — and should know how to break it off politely.
So, here's the twist ending. It's not exactly O. Henry, but...
About two hours in, the man went to the bathroom. I leaned over and asked the woman if she was ok.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"He hasn't stopped talking. Omigod!"
"I'm enjoying it."
Maybe I would have thought so if I had been willing to listen. Maybe I missed an opportunity.
On the other hand, as we were leaving the plane, the man skipped ahead. "You're a nice person," I said to the woman. And the woman directly behind her said, "And how!" [Tags: misc]
Posted by self at 11:11 AM | Comments (21) | TrackBack
October 19, 2006
A nice moment on line
Coming back to the US from Toronto, you clear customs and immigration in the Toronto airport. Tonight, all the US passport holders were all standing in one line — maybe 20 of us — when an Immigration person told us to split into two parallel lines to take advantage of the two open desks. The guy who was seventh in line now became the first in the new line, taking the next 7 or 8 people behind him. But, because our new leader was a fair and wise leader, he let the next six people on the original line go ahead of us. Only when the woman who had been ahead of him had been served did he go through Immigration.
I thought this was so cool it was practically Canadian! [Tags: politeness americans canada toronto line_integrity]
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October 18, 2006
How to tell you're in a summer resort in October
Today in the lovely summer resort of Chatham, as I went for a run between 7:10 and 7:43am, all the vehicles that passed me on the road were pickup trucks. [Tags: chatham]
Posted by self at 04:34 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
October 16, 2006
I see dead people
My sister took me to the Body Worlds 2 exhibit at the Museum of Science in Boston. That's the one where dead bodies have been plasticized (plastinated, technically), dissected and posed. I found it interesting, impressive, awesome, creepy, creepy, and obscene.
Interesting because you get to see how we're put together.
Impressive because the craft requires such meticulous work.
Awesome because some of the exhibits make us seem so improbable. In particular, one exhibits shows nothing but the feathery lattice of the head's blood circuitry.
Creepy because they're dead people. Or, possibly, they are dead people whose bodies have been entirely displaced by plastic, in which case the exhibits aren't so creepy but the process of creating them is.
Creepy because the creator, Gunther von Hagens, has spent a few decades dissolving corpses in acid baths for profit. Oh, and for education. (The exhibit tickets are $24 and the marketing is slick.)
Obscene because seeing a dissected person teaches you something, but seeing a whole, skinned dead person posed as a ballerina or as someone kicking a soccer ball treats a dead person like a meat mannikin.
The Wikipedia article on Body Worlds is very interesting, particularly the part about how the creator has asserted that his cadavers' poses are copyrighted.
[Tags: body_worlds a href="http://www.technorati.com/tags/copyright" rel="tag"> copyright anatomy exhibits ]
Posted by self at 10:15 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
October 11, 2006
Timo Hannay of Nature to talk at Berkman
I'm looking forward to Timo Hannay's upcoming Tuesday lunch talk at the Berkman Center. Timo is Director of Web Publishing at Nature magazine and has been involved in some of Nature's forward-looking projects. He's going to talk about what the Web means to science. This should nicely complement Dan Burk's talk on open science, which was more concerned with legal issues about patent and copyright than Timo's is likely to be. If you want to attend, you should rsvp at rsvp@cyber.law.harvard.edu. The talk will be on Oct. 17, 12:30-1:45, at the Berkman offices at 23 Everett Street in Cambridge. Sessions are also Web cast and Second Lifed. [Tags: berkman science timo_hannay nature_magazine]
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