The coldest winter I ever spent
Archive for February 2005
I am in the DNA Lounge in San Francisco.
Hey Trav, I was in The Crucible earlier tonight checking out a presentation about a monster fridge and teched-out sailboat and who walked by but Geo! I know 5 people in San Francisco and bump into 1 by accident! How about that?
This is just a little ping to say that I’m doing well. I’ve visited Berkely and Oakland with S.H. Very good vibe. She asked me why I was going to Grass Valley. “Because 3 friends have told me that it’s a place to check out if I want that “hippier” feel.” She wasn’t sure but doubted that ascertion so we walked into a bookstore and I had to pick up 4 CA travel guides before I found even a mention of Grass Valley. And that was more of a blurb than a listing. Aparently, Grass Valley’s claim to fame is some woman who (if I remember correctly from Fodor’s guide) entertained the gold miners in 1850 with her Spider Dance. She wasn’t a particularly good dancer, but she was very well known. Fodors listed 2 places to eat and one place to visit. At that, S.H. and I simultaneously, in harmony, said, “What the hell were they thinking?”
I’m in Santa Cruz right now and I keep reading in the papers how the whole area gets wiped off the map every couple decades… and they’re pretty much due for another disaster soon.
MetroSantaCruz, Feb 23rd, 2005
Naturally, because the odds are against us. The sexy strip of land we call downtown is part of the natural floodplain of the San Lorenzo River–witness that this is the 50th anniversary of the 1955 flood that devastated downtown. The soil here is subject to liquefaction in an earthquake, and if there ever was a major tsunami on the West Coast (soothing experts say it’s is extremely unlikely), well, the downtown is right in the tsunami run-up area. If we were golfers, we’d call the spot where downtown Santa Cruz landed a bad lie.
“I keep looking over my shoulder for the locusts,” says John Lisher, owner of Artisan’s Gallery. Lisher was one of the many merchants who owned businesses on Pacific Avenue when the Loma Prieta earthquake destroyed the downtown on Oct. 17, 1989.
Good Times weekly (speaking about Santa Cruz…)
…That’s the typical California cycle – flood, drought, wildfire, and flood with landslides…
It’s very pretty here, but doesn’t have the peppy vibe I’m looking for.
I’m liking Berkeley and Oakland.
More later.
I told a bunch of people that I was leaving at 3:30 for my 5:30 flight… I didn’t think too much of it… nobody said anything… I’ve done it lots of times before….. right? Hey, what’s all this fog doing in my brain?
Tuesday Feb 22nd – Arrive SFO at 8:40pm
Tues – Oakland with S.H.
Wed – Meet T in San Jose, continue w/ to Boulder Creek
Thurs – check out Santa Cruz, San Jose
Fri – Check out Grass Valley. Unstructured.
Sat – Check out Grass Valley. Unstructured.
Sun – Oakland with B.
Mon – Pacifica with G.
Tues – Berkeley with J.?
Wednesday March 2nd – Leave SFO at 11:15am. Arrive EWR at 7:40pm
Is it a vacation?
Is it trying to run away?
Is it dumb?
Is it a violation of family trust?
Tough. I’m going.
I do, you know.
(though it would still be nice if some friends chimed in occationally)
I used “I Blog For Me” as the title of my blog for the past few weeks.
Long ago I used to trust Roger Ebert’s movie reviews. I’ve Tivo’ed Ebert and Siskel and then Ebert and Roeper for as long as I’ve had a Tivo. Well, with his review of Spiderman 2, I’m done. The Jacuzzi he got for saying what he did about the movie had better be worth it.
From EBERT AND ROEPER’S TOP TEN OF 2004
Here’s some exurpts from his review (this is an audio clip from the TV show)
The number 4 film on my list is Spider-Man 2… I’m as amazed as you are that spidey made my top 10 list. This was a really good film. The best super hero movie ever made…
Come on! VC and I watched it and and we’ve got different movie tastes but had the same problems with the movie. Comments like:
Ok, enough with the critisisms… you get the idea. The important thing here is that this was not, by any stretch of the imagination “the best super hero movie ever made.” A legitimate review would have been something like, “A fun ride. Peter is shown to be a real hero with real-life problems. Social elements are stressed over super-powers. Fairly true to the comic, though a lot of details are skipped over for brevity. Very nice effects, ok story, mediocre execution, somehow, it dragged a bit.”
I’m taking Ebert and Roeper off my Tivo Season Pass.
If I put a number and then an apostrophe in the body of my blog, it breaks the RSS and Atom feed but not the RSS2 feed.
1′ breaks the feed
2′ breaks the feed
a’ doesn’t break the feed.
(you might notice that my RSS and Atom feeds are currently showing an “Error: XML Parse Error” error. That’s because of this post.)
WP 1.5 just came out this week so I won’t bug the developers about it. In a month or three (after they’ve worked the bugs out of it… there are always bugs) I’ll probably install it.
Peercast sits out there quitely. Some day in the not too distant future, people are going to start going crazy for it and products like it. It’s a good idea.
What is PeerCast?
PeerCast is a new, free way to listen to radio and watch video on the Internet. It uses P2P technology to let anyone become a broadcaster without the costs of traditional streaming. This means you get to hear and watch stations not normally found on commercially funded sites.
…
PeerCast offers considerable savings for broadcasters because they do not have to provide bandwidth for all of their listeners. A single 56K modem can be used to broadcast a radio station to the entire network.
(I have anarchistic visions of there being a few relay points in tropical desert privacy-haven countries really messing things up for the RIAA)
This got me really mad and really sad. I think I’ll go steal some music off the internet and then send the bands I actually listen to donations in small, unmarked bills.
Here’s an exurpt, just to get you in a pissy mood.
You have to pay them [ASCAP and BMI] even if you only play music by non-RIAA artists. This because SoundExchange (the non-incorporated subsidiary of the RIAA who collect the fees) is authorized to collect on behalf of all copyright holders, even non-RIAA members. If you want to avoid these fees, you’ll need a waiver from every artist/publisher you play (in other words, it’s impossible.)
Since the first time I heard the word “groupware” in…. I think it was ’91, referring to Lotus Notes, I have wondered what it was supposed to be. Like, in an ideal world where opening up a Notes database didn’t take 2 minutes. Recall that in Notes, each email you received was stored in “The Database”, so just the act of opening 5 emails would take 10 minutes. It sucked.
In a couple of the companies I’ve worked at, I was asked if I could help design a groupware infrastructure to, in pre-dot-bombeze, “optimize knowledge-flow”. My answer every time, partially in response to some careful review, but more out of visceral instinct, was to stay as far away from those slow, poorly written, hard to maintain, poorly supported, unscalable, unchangeable, non-interoperable, did I mention slow, proprietary “high concept” systems as possible. Good old POP3, SMTP, FTP, HTTP, SMB and maybe that new-fangled IMAP were, in my mind the only systems that worked reliably enough to trust a business’ information to. Exchange? Notes? Domino? Expensive poopie-ka-ka in my experience.
(To be fair, my last review was in 2001. Groupware might have changed since then… might have.)
Why am I telling you this? Because JWZ has written a blog entry that talks a lot about groupware that hits the nail right on the head! Thank you JWZ!
(the entry is below the cut for posterity)
Continue reading ‘Groupware BAD’ »