Month: March 2003

The VPN at work is down. I rarely connect from home, since I can get my email in mobile fashion (thank you, RIM), but the people I work with need to get to the servers to make changes, and tonight, that connection just crapped out. Pointed reminder that despite thinking the network is Shirky’s permanet, at least here in the heart of San Francisco, working for an internet company… Internet Protocol (IP) isn’t a full utility yet.

I finished my mental candy last night, so it’s time to get some intellectual fiber again. I’ll see how a biography of Patrick O’Brian turns out. Author is Dean King, which means nothing to me now. I haven’t read all of the Aubrey and Maturin novels, but I’ve read enough to know they are masterpieces. O’Brian was notorious for avoiding publicity, so a tough one for the biographer. Maybe he wasn’t as invisible as Joseph Heller, but not exactly David Eggers, either.

I was drawn into O’Brian’s novels because I’d devoured (repeatedly) the Hornblower novels by C.S. Forester. I even wrote one of my college essays about Mr. Midshipman Hornblower! What does that say about me? Too late.

I received a notice that my current primary care physician (PCP… what a lovely acronym given the context) is moving to a new city, and therefore I’ll have to choose another doctor within my HMO. I’ve only seen my doctor three times in four years, so I don’t have a deep attachment here, but I realize I don’t have a good idea about how to find a new doctor. Why can I get dozens of reviews for a new digital camera but I cannot get any ratings (that I know of) for the services of a good doctor? Which decision is more important? For which do I have more information? Certainly not a new observation, but I feel like there is lot more to say over time. If this a problem that is worth solving as a business? Anyway, for now, any good doctors in San Francisco looking for healthy (knock on wood) patients? Yes, I’ll ask friends for recommendations… but few good doctors have spots available, especially if you are on an HMO plan.

What you read says a lot about you, so I’ve decided to emulate the ‘currently reading’ idea I’ve seen on several other sites. Of course, I’m not yet willing to set it up nicely, so I’ll just start by noting what I’m reading as normal posts, rather than anything more dramatic.

I’m (re)reading The Lost World by Michael Crichton. I needed some mental candy, and a movie screenplay in the form of a book was just the ticket. I couldn’t remember whether I’d read it or not when I was at the library, but I figured it wouldn’t take long either way. Crichton usually puts together a reasonably good story, and only sometimes does the writing get in the way of racing through to the (obvious) conclusion. Most noticeable glitch for me is all the “explanation by dialogue” he includes, but I keep reading.

A co-worker told me Friday afternoon that a weatherman had promised ‘the best weekend of the year.’ A different co-worker (a surfer) took a look at his favorite weather maps and seemed to agree. After enjoying the sun, blue sky, and very light winds of the last two days, I think the forecast was spot on. Wow. We may have nine months to go in the year, but hard to imagine that a San Francisco summer will offer such promise again. I wasn’t outside the whole time, but enough to think it was hot. At 75 degrees, I’m clearly Northern California soft now.

After burning his hand last week in Arizona, the boy continues to demonstrate the importance of infant healing powers. With the bonk above his eye, the scrape on his elbow, the pinched skin on his stomach, and assorted scratches, he’s altogether too much the little boy right now.

I’ve waited 25 minutes, listening to him ‘read’ to himself and give instructions to various of his stuffed animals… but I think it’s time to go get the boy out of his crib.

OK, I never thought I was. But Brent Simmons and I share a birthday. Not that we’ve met, but I’m a happy user of NetNewsWire (Lite, for now).

I’m oversimplifying the point of Steven Johnson’s article about what blogging could become, but I found this gem of a quote:

“The beautiful thing about most information captured by the bloggers is that it has an extensive shelf life. The problem is that it’s being featured on a rotating shelf.”

Substitute ‘news sites’ for bloggers in the above sentence, and you understand the challenge for all internet media: there is no obvious sense of the depth of material available. Online, every book is judged by its cover, or its thousands of individual covers (pages, posts, etc.). This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it stands out in contrast to the clear volume (physical and otherwise) of, say, a magazine. How do you know what is important?

On a different note, Johnson goes on to suggest that we “Think of [bloggers] as less like a newspaper substitute and more a kind of guardian angel, hovering over your shoulder as you surf.” In the not-too-distant past, I worked at a company which could have implemented ‘search communities’ — you are like this person (based on your search queries, and choices within the results, all anonymous), so your results are weighted in a similar manner. The marketing idea (mine, at least) which never got any traction was to pitch it as celebrity search: “Get results like Tom Brokaw” or “Search sports with Michael Jordan”. The gap between the idea and the reality never closed, and the company went out of business long before fully exploring the concept. But there is something there, and various people appear to be working towards similar concepts, explicitly or otherwise. I hope someone gets it right.

I hope the article survives, in whatever form.

I spent a little over 30 minutes at work talking to two different people about blogging software. The conversations reminded me that web publishing is getting easier, but it’s still not automatic. I know the most about Radio Userland, since that’s what I’ve chosen to use, but I quickly realized that there are plenty of things I don’t know how to do yet… and Radio requires less knowledge about servers, etc., than most. (I know there are plenty of other choices, and Blogcomp, the comparative tool certainly offers a nice rundown. I wish Radio had search built-in, for instance.) We’re a few years in, and the economy’s fall hasn’t lowered the boom on the explosion of voices, but it’s still not as easy as it might be.

On a similar note, I find iPhoto to be aggravating. Like most parents — especially those with family far away — I keep a website with photos of my child. Is photo sharing what brings people online the most, after email? A thought for another time. But iPhoto assumes a lot about how you want to publish your photos, and it’s complicated my process enough that I haven’t overcome my general inertia/laziness/procrastination to post photos for months. Part of this is the gentle (?) push towards .Mac for publishing your photos, but another part is the storage mechanism: all your photos live within iPhoto, so breaking them out requires some thought. I’m actually not being fair to the program, but… and this is the main point… it’s not as easy as it should be.