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May. 17th, 2008
01:57 am - I wonder how you're feeling. There's ringing in my ears, and no one to relate to 'cept the sea.
I was 18 when I read this:
The amount of audio-visual material that Duncan had stored under MISC was remarkable, even for an inquisitive ten-year-old. It was not that he lacked organizing ability--that was the most celebrated of all the Makenzie talents--but he was interested in more things than he knew how to index. He had now begun to discover, the hard way, that information not properly classified can be irretrievably lost.
I mention this because I've started to post some of the twenty thousand Costume-Con 26 photos taken by 35 different photographers on
pix.cc26.info for all to see. I'm taking it slowly because I want it to be as complete an archive as we can create. Regular visitors to
Hazel's Picture Gallery know that I like to get your name in the caption when I take your picture, so that's what I'm doing here.
Many thanks to
Tom Tonthat and Jack Krolak, Danny Low, Pat Larson, and the other photographers on the team who went to the extra effort to take pictures of badges at the same time as they took pictures of people.
From time to time I'll post photos on
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif)
costume_con looking for names -- I just put half a dozen there, and got names for more than half of them within a few hours. Watch that LJ if you'd like to help, or go to pix.cc26.info and Search for the word
need to find the holes I have so far.
I've been posting a smattering of Friday pictures from the collection, and I'm up to the 6 o'clock hour. Just starting to get Victorian Underwear Party pictures up there, starting with the ones I can see badges for. Work progresses! I expect to to do as much as I can on the Friday photos before I move onto Saturday.
Oh and when I'm done I'll have more to say about how to do a project like this better "next time." But that's a topic for a later post.
(Reminder to my friends going to San Jose next week: have fun,
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
library_lynn,
missmea and I will be at
wiscon instead.)
The quote, for those who didn't recognize it, is from Imperial Earth by Arthur C. Clarke, from page 3 of my copy.Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/classic/smile.gif)
chipper
Current Music: Peter Frampton - "Show Me The Way"
09:20 am - Celtic Dreams: Progress, Day 7 (early)
Actually, this is really the second half of progress from Day 6; I just wanted to take photos in the morning when the light is better. I have joined the garment to do the long and probably frustrating (because it is so long) body in the round, which involved casting on 34 stitches between each piece, bringing the total number of garment stitches up to 272. And, I forgot how heavy a jumper in the round is! I'm already having to support the garment on my lap or on a table so my wrists don't start to ache.
Today, I'm working at the English Folk Dance and Song Society's May Fete, so I expect to have a lot of time for knitting, as I'll be sitting behind a table selling books that probably nobody is going to buy. ;-)
( Three detailed photographs and technical notes below the cut tag. )
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/bitospud/courier/black/accomplished.gif)
accomplished
01:42 am - God Bless America Southbound
As it says on the Anna Maria trolleybus...
Once we got our iced coffee and fruit cones and our compact car turned into a mini-van and we worked out how to take off the parking brake, we set off across Florida towards Tampa and Sarasota and the Gulf of Mexico, mocking the Mickey Mouse power plant with mouse-ear pylons. Swimming - well floating and swimming with my arms and soaking in the hot tub and use the massage pads with ibuprofen gel overnight - loosened my back up enough that I could start to feel human again. I cracked my first joke in days, we stopped at Anna Maria beach for fish lunch and paddling, we drove up and down Anna Maria island looking for somewhere to stay with a pool with shallow steps so I could walk into the pool rather than climb in, we paddled on the beach opposite (waist deep, so the water takes some of the weight off my hips which lets me move them more), then I floated and swam in the pool at the motel. With all that, I was actually able to walk a little without the stick on the beach and sit up from my nap almost normally... improvement at last.
Dinner at the Sun House, which calls itself Floribbean. I think the connection is that the cruise ships go back and forth... Different and very nice; straws of beef, crab cakes with pineapple in the mashed potatoes, blackberry piglet shanks for Simon, a mango ice eclair...
The sea is blue turning green at each wave. The beach is fine white sand, like salt or flour...
12:29 am - 27 Dresses
daisy_knotwise and I watched 27 Dresses tonight. It's pretty thoroughly formulaic, which is pretty much what I want to see in a romantic comedy. I get really annoyed at romantic comedies where girl does not get boy, girl gets killed tragically, boy gets killed tragically, etc. I rather prefer happy endings.
(Yeah, I know. The Grim Roper. Who'da thunk it?)
But I watch romantic comedies not so much for the plot as for the journey and the acting. Katherine Heigl does a fine job with the part and watching her I conclude that there's some serious danger that she's going to get all the parts that Diane Keaton used to get, which is a pretty good career path, all things considered. James Marsden demonstrates that he doesn't have to play a stick, unlike in the X-Men movies. And Malin Akerman (who IMDB tells me is about to be in the new Watchmen film) could be stealing Cameron Diaz's parts shortly.
So it's a pretty happy little ensemble. And the movie isn't laugh out loud funny, but it's fun to watch.
That'll do nicely.
10:20 pm - ...and Misty_Morning_Dew
Yes, I definitely seem to have fallen into a modern-day version of The
Programmer and the Elves...
...still a lowly programmer -- and is now stuck for the foreseeable future
maintaining this horrid crock of a Fortran program, written by elves!
After all, nobody else can understand how it works. It has variables named
Shamrock and Rainbow and Misty_Morning_Dew, and some of the most ferocious
assembly language subroutines to be found outside the jungles of Borneo.
And the moral of the story is: Never do the impossible. People will expect
you to do it forever after.
Well, maybe not quite that bad. But it's a horrid crock of a
form and workflow system built on top of a beta version of Java that are
both 10 years out of date... Somebody upgraded Java, and it broke.
So I commented out the one place where it was using the old, incompatible
KeyStore class, and it's back to crashing a lot instead of every damned
time. That's an improvement. Of course, now it's only
pretending to create and verify DSA signatures. But since you
can't fill in a form without logging in to the server with your Unix
password, there was never any real reason for the digital signatures in
the first place.
This still leaves the uncomfortable question of why a horrid crock of a
research experiment written by two people a full decade ago is still
better for our lab's workflow than anything we've been able to turn up in
the open source world. Suggestions?
Or is there still some research left in that topic? Hmm.
12:54 am - Dusky Sunset
Sunset over the Gulf of Mexico
Anna Maria Island, Florida
May 2008
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/neko/kaokitty/touched.gif)
touched
12:48 am - Drawing the line
WES this year was, as always, excellent. We got access to many of the people we wanted to talk to, including sessions with the co-CEOs of RIM, talking about the future of Blackberry and the role of the smartphone in a connected contextual world. It's left me with a lot to think about and the inklings of a thesis I want to explore in articles and blog entries over the next few months.
WES, also, was self-contained, and we didn't leave the air-conditioned halls of the combined hotel and conference centre from the moment we arrived (escaping the dodgy taxi driver who stiffed us $30 while accusing us of under-paying) to the point nearly four days later where I had to go ask the folk at the rental car agency just how to release the parking brake on the mini-van they'd just upgraded us to (there's a lever above the foot pedal for the parking brake that releases it)...
So we drove west, across the narrow peninsula, to one of my favourite coastlines, the white soft beaches and azure seas of the sand keys of Florida's Gulf Coast.
Currently we're on Anna Maria Island, where I spent a pleasant sunset chatting to a local photographer and twitcher about the various sea birds that made their way along the beaches. Coal-black frigate birds drifted effortlessly overhead on long thin wings, while brown pelicans bobbed their way up and down, alternately skimming the waves and soaring.
The stars of the show were the skimmers, with their strange asymmetric beaks - the lower portion much longer than the upper - and their striking black and white plumage. It was when the beaks hit the water that you could see why they were shaped the way they were. Open-mouthed the skimmers shot across the surface of the waves, leaving a wake as they aimed to catch fish swimming just below the surface.
Alone they were impressive, in formation they were amazing. Banking sharply they wove around each other, all the while skimming the waves.
If you're ever in Florida, this part of the Gulf Coast is well worth the two hour drive from the tourist hotspots of Orlando.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/neko/kaokitty/tired.gif)
tired
11:45 pm - Looking
Have you considered running your own business (part-time or full-time)?
Do you happen to be fluent in Spanish or bilingual?
The Pampered Chef is looking for bilingual consultants to meet a demand from guests and hosts.
If this is something that may be of interest to you, please let me know, and I can get you more information.
Comments will be screened, or send me email at glasserkitchen at gmail dot com.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/neko/kaokitty/hopeful.gif)
hopeful
12:15 am - Still ouch
Too much walking and standing and working has kept my back sore, but I didn't want to miss the conference. Ice is good, also ibuprofen gel with menthol. We finished up with afternoon of rest, writing and pool time tomorrow, to make up for three days of walking miles round the conference.
Non-work highlights; huge dragonflies, easily the size of a London mouse. The excellent lunch on Tuesday: Marriot World Resort does the best conference food bar none. John Mayer playing 'free falling' and 'message in a battle' (the accent!), which I parsed as 'I'll send an SMS to the world' and saying he prefers BlackBerry to Pampers...
11:04 pm - I guess I should try to catch up
Long time, no posts other than the business stuff (that's friends-locked - let me know if you'd like to see it).
Things have been a bit busy for the last couple of months. IIRC, the last time I posted was just before Passover. We took the train from Chicago to Rochester, and David thoroughly enjoyed the trip. He got to sleep on the train, wake up on the train, eat breakfast on the train, go for a walk on the train, say goodbye to the train as it left the station in Rochester, say hello to the train when we got back on it ... I think you get the idea. He REALLY enjoyed the trip. We got a nice (if brief) visit in on both ends of the train trip with the Ropers.
Since then, we've been rather busy:
( We've got landscaping )
( the kids are growing like weeds )
Current Mood: tired
08:47 pm - Ow!
Oh, and that bit about bicycling around in the noonday sun looking for my lost security badge ... while wearing a tank top for one of the first times in the season? ( Not such a good idea. )
08:45 pm - Apipiyalotl's journal
My girlfriend, apipiyalotl, has started her own journal—I just reviewed the first post. She will be writing about her upcoming travels in México, mostly, or at least that's what she says. She's an interesting writer and she has interesting things to write about; drop by & welcome her, if you feel so inclined.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/classic/tired.gif)
tired
08:42 pm
madrona and smitty_de_smith and I sorta came up with this draft over dinner tonight
ttto: "The Farmers and the Cowboys" from OKLAHOMA!
CHORUS:
O the Shadows and the Vorlons should be friends!
O the Shadows and the Vorlons should be friends!
One side just wants evolution
The other side wants revolution
But that's no reason why they can't be friends!
I'd like to say a word for the Vorlon--
He eschews both extremes and takes the middle.
He eschews EVERYTHING but navel gazing,
And bugs us with the most annoying riddles!
Now, I would like to speak up for the Shadows--
They keep the dull times off us pretty often.
They sure made life exciting for my Home World,
Who's population's mostly now in coffins!
We should be feeling sorry for the Vorlons.
Their encounter suits ain't got no bathroom zipper.
They ride light years on end, with some few tortured souls for friends!
I sure feel sorry--for poor Jack the Ripper!
O the Shadows and the Vorlons should be friends... (KICK! POW!)
O the Shadows and the Vorlons should be friends...(ZAP! RAWR!), etc....
Anyone wanna add some verses?
Current Music: Lord bless JMS, the man who invented Vir!
08:27 pm - here we go again
The Little Guy is back in the hospital again, we did the "from doctor's office via ambulance on Basic Life Support (i.e. oxygen)" drill again, only I was the PIC this time; jenkitty was home trying to get some rest - she's come down with the Little Guy's cold.
So he's back in the same room we had on Tuesday, at Swedish First Hill, and once again I'm pleased with the quality of care we're getting through these folks ... but I really want our Little Guy to be hydrated and able to eat and sassy and breathing well on his own without need for supplemental oxygen or nebulizer treatments.
All good energy, wishes, prayers, etc gratefully accepted.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/twotone/hamsters/worried_hammy.gif)
worried
May. 16th, 2008
09:50 pm - Writer's Block: Three dishes I could live on
- filet mignon grilled/broiled by
sammyd- broccoli / cauliflower steamed with feta cheese & pani puri
- paal payasam / kheer
... wait. mu shu made with daylily, can't live without that. and, hey, Waldorf salad made with pears instead of celery and pecans instead of walnuts and cherries / cranberries instead of raisins. and never again tasting a really good matzoh ball soup or tom kha soup or rijstaafel satay?! Eep!
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/growf/dwaggins/smile.gif)
amused
06:58 pm - non-con hotels?
I assume the baycon hotel is totally sold out. The non-con "make a reservation" page says it's sold out, the baycon "make a reservation" page seems to be broken, at least for me; it's not loading properly.
Where would you stay, were you not staying there, and wanted easy post-party access, perhaps some other con goers around, and decent prices?
Woot.
They took my reservation.
See you there. :)
08:01 pm - Burmese translation of Sahana complete!
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/oreilly/radar/atom/~3/291998213/burmese-translation-of-sahana-complete.html
Eduardo Jezierski and the team at InSTEDD have been leading an incredible effort to translate and localize the Sahana humanitarian aid system to Burmese. They were nearly complete when they took the stage this week at Where2.0 (video soon), and it looks like they have finished the last line.
Ed explained the effort on the InSTEDD blog:
Juan was instrumental in getting the Debian virtualized image running well on our Red Hat host OS, thank you! The compressed Sahana VM is about 300mb, which will allow a quick re-deployment of a hardened configuration in Myanmar as necessary. I think this VM would be a good asset to keep around, allowing anyone running Windows or Linux to bring up a running Sahana server with little to no effort.
[...]Translation is hard - especially for the fonts and encodings to work together. See the awesome burglish site to see what I mean... the translated docs end up having strings like tcef;u¾rsm; which is really encoded Wwin_burmese, which would look like this with Padauk 
Burglish project
One of the main issues with the localization is that it isn't just about translating strings- there is also a need to accept input in the right format. This isn't trivial with all combinations of fonts and input methods people use, and especially not trivial on a web page that has to work in multiple browsers!
This was an incredible effort by an amazing team. Good work, and thank you!
09:34 pm - Geek question: Microsoft Office Genuine Validation ActiveX Control
MS Word wasn't starting on my XP Pro laptop. Before rebooting I gave it the three-finger salute and saw that there were two instances of Word running. When I shut them down, Windows said that Word was refusing to shut down, and it was trying to force it to do so. Then it started Internet Exploder and connected to an MS page that said I should download a cumulative update.
Then I saw this:
The Microsoft Office Genuine Validation ActiveX Control has failed to install. To try installing again, click Retry. To continue to use the site without the control, click Continue.
I said NO for now. Is this
- useful
- useless
- a PITA
- none of the above
- some of the above
06:39 pm - Voice Post
 | VoicePost 
48K 0:15
| “Yeah so I'm testing and seen how this works. Noise cancelling here is best. Radios running in the background. I'm doing about 65. So a pretty good amount of wind noise. Yeah this work out stuff included.”
Auto-Transcribed Voice Post |
05:30 pm - I HAVE SHINYS.
So yes, I’m really going to be handing out ribbons at Baycon, because I just picked up the order from the factory. Here are the shots of the five ribbons I’m carrying. (The fifth one is mostly covered due to the top secret nature.)
Here they are:
They are shiny. Also, any ribbons not given out at Baycon will come with me to the 2008 Worldcon. (Well, okay, except the Press Button. Receive Baycon one, as that’s specifically for this con.)
Anyway, yes, I have shinys. Woohoo and w00t!
Originally published at retstak.org. You can comment here or there.
05:14 pm - All the cool kids are doing it
My 9/80 work week in theory is supposed to help reduce pollution by eliminating one commuting day out of two weeks, but I live so close to work that I usually wind up burning more gas on my Friday off, running around on errands. Today I got quite a bit done, starting with signing up for the summer Introduction to Glass Blowing class at the MAC. That should be a fun new experience; 8 weeks long and since I'm taking the Monday session that means I'll only miss one class because of Pondfilk.
07:55 pm - Cyber Security Initiative, a Trojan horse?
http://mcgath.blogspot.com/2008/05/cyber-security-initiative-trojan-horse.html
Suspicion is growing around Bush's National Cyber Security Initiative. The Senate Armed Services Committee has raised some questions about the secrecy surrounding not just the details, but the fundamental purposes of the initiative.
A chief concern is that virtually everything about the initiative is highly classified, and most of the information that is not classified is categorized as `For
04:45 pm - The Problem with History
The problem with so much of what is presented as alleged history its total crap. It's a good story, a lot of the time, but has nothing to do with what actually happened. The role of the historian *should be* to excavate back to find the most likely interpretation of what actually happened, but often, then just come up with more crap. The moment something has happened, the stories start appearing. Often, they've disappeared into the haze of romance before even a decade has gone past. Out of living memory, they become mythology.
I am writing fiction, dammit, but I like to do good research if I'm doing historical fiction. I have a debt to history. A lot of authors don't feel that responsibility. I can't write about anything unless I can live and breath it, even if it's a parallel history. I get back to who people really were, read primary accounts, as close to source documentation as possible. It's a combination of research in original sources and detective work. And my background in living history makes things really, really different. But all the time, I find things presented as history that are more mythos and fiction than what I'm writing as alternative history.
Today, I found a big piece of crap about Ann Hockley, whom I have become intrigued with, as I keep finding bits and pieces of her life that are far different from what I expect from a woman of the 1770's. She was married to one of the characters in the book I am working on.
Well, I found something from a book on women of the Revolution. Oh please. It had a mention of her eloquent letter to Congress, but then it came up with a piece of complete romance novel hokum that purported to be from the Philadelphia Register. Ooh, we meet Captain Conyngham when her ship is taken by The Revenge, and she meets this dashing young privateer. It was enough to fuel a bad historical romance, and we shall spare the details. Big problem. Conyngham didn't even captain the Revenge until 1778, and they were married in Pennsylvania in 1773, and had two children by the timeframe set for their first meeting. Let's just say that the inaccuracies of this romantic account were...high and deep.
One of the nice things about working on this book is I am given the opportunity to tell the real stories of some remarkable people, or at least a lot closer to the truth, having excavated them out of mythology. Fireball MacNamara, most of whose life has been mythologized, is another one. He was remarkable enough in his real incarnation, but he has been turned into an amalgam character by history, and his real accomplishments have been forgotten.
I constantly find myself knowing the history no one knows. I mention the serial killing at a historic site I'm reenacting at, and find none of the docents have ever heard of it, though it was notorious in the annals of Early California. Likewise, at some sites, people don't even know who the nearest neighbors of the inhabitants were. I can produce names and often photos, not just of them, but of their houses. I know what they did in their spare time, even. Maybe I'm just strange, thinking all this matters.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/niaha/kitty/ankangryg.gif)
nit-picky
06:17 pm - Tired, happy
So, this nice LJ place led me to finding out, a few scant weeks ago, that there will be a Sword & Sorceress 23 anthology, and that it would be accepting submissions for a brief time. Ending today. And I had this story idea that seemed to fit, that I'd even written an opening scene for a while back...and I've been wanting to write something where I'd planned the whole thing, and I had a paragraph-length narrative for the plot, so I determined to find my notes and the opening scene.
But then, one of the cats had fleas, and....well, life happens, you know. Teen-ferrying and grocery shopping and all that.
Well, I found my notes, but not the story fragment. So finally, I gave up, and made a new start, and pushed through very quickly to the planned end of the story. And then slept on it, and decided it wasn't quite the end, a denouement was needed because of details that I'd added--details that I liked, mind you. Oh, and the most exciting part was all in the wrong order, at a point where the character's understanding of what was going on was changing, so I couldn't just cut and paste paragraphs, I had to keep some of the phrases where they were, but apply them to different events. Arrgh! So I shuffled, carefully, and rewrote, and sought comments from my sister, whose job as an attorney was keeping her insanely busy, so I didn't get them. So I reread and rewrote it, and slept on it and started reading it before going to pick up my kid from a ball game, and almost got so caught up in it I didn't leave when I needed to--a good sign, I thought. So, last night I again polished it, and a friend who broke up with his girlfriend offered to read it, tho he gave me minimal comments (but they were positive ones, despite the story being far less dark than the stuff he usually reads), and I read it aloud, all the way through (nothing like that to help you catch where your edits added extra extra words or out necessary ones!) and liked it ,so, I sent it off today. Well, OK, I changed a few words today too. But now it's officially done, at least until I get a response from S&S.
Just under 5000 words. Rewrites and all. In less than two weeks, squeezed into the rest of my schedule. Wheeeeee!
...
Gosh, I hope I still like what I wrote when the story in my mind has faded, leaving me with only the words on the page.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/moonsis/stars/purple/singing_sp.gif)
elated
Current Music: Gathering by Gaia Consort
04:10 pm - Worthy of a toothy grin
Sparc Ultra-1: slightly more than pocket change
OpenBSD 4.3: free
CD-R: $1 (or thereabouts)
Accessory hardware: Either free or already owned.
Firewall that can say "bring it, pop tart" to every skript kiddie on the block and swat them like flies?
Priceless
( cut for those whose eyes glaze at geekery )
OK, all you cats enjoy the gorgeous weather, I gotta blow this pop stand and go help a brand new mangler celebrate her chains... :)
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/growf/pengies/bouncy.gif)
bouncy
Current Music: Thirteen - Vixy and Tony
06:23 pm - Miserable should be a four letter word!!!
I recently picked up what I thought were severe allergies, it being of course that time of year for them. What I ended up with according to the doctor is an upper respiratory infection.
It seems like I get something like this just about this time every year.
I'm on meds for a while to get rid of the infection. Funny how the meds are huge and hard to swallow with a swollen and sore throat.
I SICK = B L A R G H ! ! !
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/ford/sydnicons/Sad.gif)
sick
05:52 pm - Ready For the Weekend
It's been a long day at work, as I got pulled off of the project that I've been working on to port fixes to other releases and to check out some stuff that hasn't actually shipped yet. Given the sheer joy of living at this end of the bad ClearCase connection, there's nothing quite so much fun as working on three different projects in one day.
On the other hand, now I get to go home for the weekend, which should be much more fun. :)
06:17 pm - need 48 hr days
There is too much fun stuff to do along with all the other stuff there is to do.
Facebook, for example, is fun. Wish I had more than a few minutes a week to play there!
If you're expecting me there, honestly, I'm not neglecting you on purpose ... between family stuff and house stuff and dog stuff and church stuff and work stuff and medical stuff and professional stuff there isn't a lot of time left ...
It's gonna get worse. At PMI meeting last night (professional stuff), before the meeting our past prez asked me not whether but which of the board positions opening up later this year I'd like to be ... and on the way out our VP of professional development said "So, you'll be running our September Saturday Seminar." (He neither phrased nor intoned it as a question.) ... Ack!
Now, I have to go sort through some boxes (house/church stuff). During which, I will watch a couple of Torchwood episodes (fun stuff). If it weren't for multitasking ...
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/growf/dwaggins/working.gif)
busy
06:27 pm - Around The House
My gardening vacation got off to a good start today with about 3.5 hours of outside work, mostly digging vegetable beds. To say that this isn't the kind of exercise my body is used to is a grand understatement. Things like bending or turning suddenly (from the hips) are not on my immediate "to do" list. But it was a good start and counts for maybe 30% of the heavier chores that I have planned.
The vandals we hired to work on the glassed-in room at the back of the house finally finished yesterday. This being the cats' favorite summer place, they spent some time investigating the changes. Willow seems to have accepted it. Ashton was OK until he saw me come in from the yard, at which point he stood, meowed at me a few times, and ran away. The outside door has been moved and apparently it was just wrong for me to be walking through a different part of the wall.
06:16 pm - What should an open protocol look like?
Since this conversation has gone kinda dead (and even the wiki, supposedly the center of attention, hasn't been updated recently), let's see about trying to foment some useful, if slightly tangential, conversation.
As I've previously said, I'm the loyal opposition here. I'm not doing Elsejournal per se -- that is, I'm not trying to build an alternate/distributed version of LJ. Rather, I'm building CommYou, which is a new service that is rather similar to LJ, but with more focus on the conversations rather than just the posts themselves. It's not currently open-source, and it's not likely to become so: it's a serious commercial venture, not a hobby thing.
That said, I do think open protocols are a genuinely good thing for everyone, and it's in my interest to try to help them come into being. I don't intend CommYou to be a walled garden -- my users *should* be able to get at their own conversation data from outside, and I should be able to import from other sources. Indeed, I think even LJ, despite being open-source, does a pretty crappy job of this: even backing up your journal is far more work than it should be, and god forbid you want to actually *read* your journal through other means. I want CommYou, at least in the long run, to do *much* better, with open APIs and open protocols -- a major piece, but only a piece, of a true conversation ecology.
So here's the question: what should a putative open protocol for such sites look like? What are the authentication requirements? What kind of data gets pushed around, and how does that happen? (Pushing? Polling? Both?) I think that's the first and most important question we have to answer if we're going to have sharing between conversation sites, whether they are micro-blogging/distributed style like Elsejournal or monolithic like CommYou or LJ. If we can figure out how we're sharing the conversations, we have a crucial first step towards figuring out how our sites work.
(Yes, this is a very technical question. But at least half the question is simply what should be shared, by whom, when, with what proofs -- much more about the high-level intents and designs, not just the nuts and bolts.)
03:05 pm - Inadvertant double-ride
So my default lunchtime bike ride is about 6 miles out along the bay shore and back. Lately my extended ride is more like 9-10 miles, along the shore and out the very tip of the Emeryville Marina and back. Today, somewhere along that extended ride, my security ID badge detached itself from its neck lanyard. I discovered this when I got back to the security gate and it wasn't there to flash at the guard. Due diligence required that I retrace the entire route and look for it. Given that I failed to find it, this meant retracing the whole 9-10 mile route. My route is mostly along park paths that are well-traveled at lunch time by fellow corporate types, so there's probably a 50% chance that somebody spotted it and picked it up ... and if it was picked up, there's probably a 50% chance that it'll get turned in, most likely by post-box drop. In the mean time I wear a Generic ID Badge of Shame. Oh, and I'm out the $5 bill that I keep tucked inside the badge holder for emergencies (said emergencies generally involving the cafeteria). And I spent about an hour and a half on the fruitless search (because I had to ride slower than usual while looking). If it weren't such a gorgeous day out there, I might even be peeved.
05:23 pm - Changing Chords
I wrote a song last month and have been resisting playing it because something about the sound of the music was bothering me. I think the melody is OK, but the main chords I was using were D-Gmaj7-Bm-F#m. The problem with these is that the most common shapes on guitar all put an F# note on the highest-pitched string. After about eight bars, all I can hear is that one note, sitting there like a constant ringing in my ears. The solution seems to be a liberal application of the G-chord, in some cases replacing Bm. But mostly as a replacement for Gmaj7...so what if I have trouble singing notes that I don't hear in the chord I'm playing; it's time to get over that.
Funny thing: I've got used to the idea of listening for bass patterns in the chords I use because I often play those notes individually. This is the first time a treble "progression" (or lack thereof) has ever jumped out at me. This is becoming scarily suggestive of people who play two or three independent parts at the same time. I don't think my brain should start channeling Chet Atkins...'cause my fingers sure aren't going to.
04:57 pm - Evolution of Dance
This one is for rhiannon76. :-)
04:44 pm - Bond
algoroth sent me a link to this Bond Video back in October. I just now found it buried in my inbox and watched it.
Who knows? At this rate I might actually finlly respond to the nudge braider sent me to review her band's CD. It is an excellent CD, by the way. I gave several as gifts this past Christmas.
04:09 pm - Reality Check
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080516_004925.html
I have this notion to write a series of columns from time to time under the title "Reality Check" -- columns intended to explain how the world of Information Technology actually functions. Because like any other entrenched, complex, and often closeted industry, things in IT don't really work the way many people think they do. I'm guessing the Vatican is a bit like that, too. So I'll be looking at various IT players and their roles and trying to put them into perspective, much as I did recently with a column or two about the role of computer consultants. This week the topic is Gartner Inc., or rather all the Gartner-like operations that give advice about technology to America's largest businesses: what do these guys actually DO?
Not much of real value I'm afraid -- at least of value in my view.
While Gartner is the biggest of these outfits, I need to say that my comments apply equally to Gartner's main competitors, Forrester Research, International Data Corp. (IDC), and the Yankee Group.
Here's what Gartner says it does, straight from their website:
"Gartner offers the combined brainpower of 1,200 research analysts and consultants who advise executives in 75 countries every day. We publish tens of thousands of pages of original research annually and answer 200,000 client questions every year. We can help you make smarter and faster decisions. Our years of relevant experience and institutional knowledge prevent costly and avoidable errors. Be confident that with Gartner, your decisions are the right decisions."
So Gartner and, by association, Gartner's competitors help customers make better IT decisions. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. But why do governments and big companies NEED help making IT decisions? Don't most companies hire IT professionals to make those decisions in the first place? Do they really need to spend more than $2 billion per year between these consulting companies just to make better IT decisions?
The truth is that there is no IT "profession." Most of what IT managers know about IT they learn from vendors, consultants, and folks like Gartner. Because they feel isolated, and because the IT vendor/consultant/media system encourages them to worry about such things, IT managers tend to feel they must have their important decisions validated and Gartner is the most popular place to find validation. Yes they wield a lot of power, but it is often the power of discovering the obvious.
It's all about churn. If customers aren't buying stuff they won't worry about buying decisions, so they are always encouraged to buy. If customers don't change their IT infrastructure (or change it too slowly) they might become confident in their own ability to make the right choices, which would threaten the consultant relationship.
How often do these consultants tell their customers that everything is fine and no action is required? Almost never. In fact I'm tempted to say "absolutely never" simply because I haven't heard of such an instance, but I'm playing it safe here.
After all, I'm attacking the very temple of IT.
There are themes at Gartner and its competitors -- ideas that are presented on an almost seasonal basis like adding fins to change a 1956 Chrysler New Yorker into a 1957 Chrysler New Yorker. Two such themes that are popular with such consultants right now are offshoring/outsourcing and getting rid of legacy applications to gain agility, whatever that is.
I've written columns and columns about offshoring and outsourcing and the success of both policies is decidedly mixed, unless perhaps you are outsourcing down the street and offshoring Lake Michigan.
Outsourcing, while a very popular recommendation to improve IT, is treating the symptom and not the problem. The problem is IT applications require lots of ongoing maintenance and that costs labor, meaning REAL MONEY. Rather than make applications more reliable and reduce problems, IT managers seem to prefer shopping for cheaper labor. The problems are still there. It is cheaper to fix them with offshoring and outsourcing, true, but it often takes longer. If the end users -- the people who actually make MONEY for the company (IT doesn't, Lord knows) -- are unable to work from time to time, this is okay because IT is spending less money.
Yeah, right.
Much of this comes down to the decided lack of professionalism in IT, which is after all a very new job classification. There is a huge difference, for example, between someone with an engineering degree and someone in IT who calls himself an engineer. Real engineers are often valued employees. Their opinions matter and they have real responsibilities. Good companies know engineers are important to their business and treat them accordingly. But IT workers are a commodity and are treated as such. Many IT workers are clueless about the technologies they are working with. They aspire to be project managers and are often not very good at that either.
Into this knowledge vacuum come the vendors, who want to sell stuff, and the consultants like Gartner, Forrester, IDC, and the Yankee Group, who need IT managers to feel uncertain about every decision except the decision to buy something, anything. Then look at the number of "research reports" that are commissioned by vendors. Uh-oh.
The five P's of IT are Pride, Prejudice, Politics, Price, and Performance, with the last two being by far the least important. Consultants like Gartner are very useful for minding the pride and politics, their real function being to provide $2 billion worth of IT management CYA per year.
Now that I have alienated an entire industry, let's turn to this week's deal for Hewlett-Packard to buy Electronic Data Systems for more than $12 billion in cash. I'm not here to say this is the worst idea in the history of bad ideas, but I wouldn't do it.
The goal here seems to be size for the sake of size, because it sure isn't size for the sake of profitability. This is a business segment, remember, that IBM has been carefully and quietly leaving for more than a year now only to have HP jump in with both feet by purchasing a competitor less profitable at this stuff than IBM. The result will be a bigger business for HP that returns lower profit margins, which makes no sense to me.
I wonder what would happen to an outfit like HP Services if the company just decided to forget about acquisitions and simply invest $12+ billion in their current operation? Heck, half the people working right now in HP Services probably worked at some point in their careers for EDS (or IBM). What DNA is HP acquiring here that they don't have already?
None.
It just looks better to Wall Street, which loves acquisitions with their associated investment banking fees but doesn't seem to understand in the least the idea of boldly investing in an existing business.
Bill Hewlett would shake his head.
02:36 pm - twitter anyone?
http://twitter.com/toddashi
Twitter seems kind of cool, designed only for very short entries. Too bad Tmobile to go won't let me update it via SMS (or text Google for that matter... need to switch when I'm employed again).
02:12 pm - Superhero Quiz!
Ah, but we ALWAYS look good... :)
04:55 pm
Check out David Snyder speaking on Persuasion and Influence at Hypnoticon, the fun and interesting Hypnosis Convention..
Current Mood: accomplished
04:35 pm - Pro Valore
New Canadian Victoria Cross unveiled
I'm pleased to see they're going to be using the bronze from the Russian cannon captured during the Crimean war, mixed with Canadian metals, to make these. Hopefully not many will be awarded, or need to be awarded.
02:50 pm - Shiny!
We save the day about 5% of the time. That means this is a really dark comic or a really light one.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/happy.gif)
amused
03:07 pm - Hey y'all! Watch this!
Man dies in spitting contest
...the 29-year-old man took a run-up from inside the room so he could spit further, but lost his balance and plummeted 6.4m to the street below.
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