Month: February 2004

A few weeks ago, I finished the third volume of Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Four months ago, I noted that I had never heard of this author or the books, despite their presence in the final 21 books in the BBC’s Big Read. Turns out Lord of the Rings ended up #1, but His Dark Materials ended up third, right behind Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. And, if I’m reading the copyright correctly, the series wasn’t even finished until 2000. Maybe Pullman benefited from being fresh in people’s minds, rather than overshadowed by history?

Anyway, knock one more off the life list, with umpteen millions left to go. My mother was kind enough to give me the boxed set for Christmas. I read all three in January: The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass.

The biggest surprise to me, who knew nothing of author or novels, was that these are books written for young adults. The heroes are adolescents, and the mix of fantasy and science and coming-of-age moments opens up in vivid, clear terms intended for young eyes. For all that, these are very good reads even for an adult. I preferred the first two volumes to the third, but I was turning pages late at night even for the last book. These are written for young adults in the same way that the Narnia series or Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles… which means that while they may resonate more fully with an adolescent, everyone can find something to latch on to in the story.

I don’t know if the first book, The Golden Compass, was the best read because it was the best story or because it’s the introduction to most of the characters who will carry us through the trilogy. I just know that thinking back through all three, I was most captivated by this one. Iorek Byrnison, one of the armored bears of Svalbard, is certainly my favorite soul spinning through these tales, and he’s most prominent in this first volume. Yes, I did write armored bear. That’s hardly the oddest visual in these books, but one that I enjoyed the most.

Note: throughout the books, there is a lot of talk about daemons, an incarnation, it seems, of the soul/conscience/inner voice we all have. In the books, the soul often has an animal shape: that’s your daemon. However, every time I saw that word, all I could think of was the computer science definition, which is certainly not the intended reference. If you read a list of definitions, you’ll find “One’s genius; a tutelary spirit or internal voice” somewhere in the list, and you’ll see that this is commonly a British spelling of demon. Being American, though, I was distracted by the odd use of a Unix term in the middle of a novel not written by Neal Stephenson.

Back to the to-be-read pile for what’s next…

OK, terrible Dora the Explorer reference there, but… well, I have a three year old boy. Anyway, the map in question is the ACME Mapper. I grew up here. I now live here. You do the math.

Many geeks (and I mean that term as a compliment) are focused on the burgeoning world of RSS, aggregration, blogs, and the swirling flux in the center of these phenomena. The question I have — and I really want to answer this — is whether the geeks are right to focus so much on this intersection. Will all of this interest, attention, and energy spread to a more general audience, beyond the parties involved? Beyond those who not only know what a newsreader is, but have a favorite? I’m in the niche. I want to know if/when/how this clustering of interests and technology will break through to an audience that does not subscribe to 71 feeds in a dedicated client. An audience that doesn’t feel obsessed with keeping up with the flow of information, an impossible task. I think the search for another name for RSS misses the point. It’s not about the format, it’s about the data. Yes, I’m paraphrasing Willison, who was borrowing from Ruby while commenting on Zawodny’s mention that My Yahoo support Atom right alongside RSS (“it took 30 minutes”).

Readers care about reading. Publishers care about reaching those readers. The technical linkage between publishers and readers should be invisible to the readers, at the least — and most publishers don’t care to spend much time on the mechanics, either. So what does all the technical blather boil down to? That’s what matters… and I think we’re still waiting for the dust to settle.

Don’t connect to the VPN at the same time as publishing a blog entry. It doesn’t work. Eventually had to restart Radio to get these two most recent tiny posts live.

OK, now News.com Alerts are really something visible. At least, I think that a header link on every single page on the site might be seen by a few readers. We’ll see. http://alerts.news.com/

Hacking TiVo to display RSS feeds on your TV. Andrew Grumet did it. Why? A question I can’t answer.

Last night we ambled around the northeast quadrant of San Francisco for the Chinese New Year Treasure Hunt. An “urban sleuthing adventure,” the treasure hunt is a great excuse to get out and see the city, at ground level. Maybe ‘level’ isn’t the right word in San Francisco — we traipsed up and down various hills searching for the answers to certain clues, with mixed success. Held on the same night as the Chinese New Year Parade (Happy Year of the Monkey to you all), the treasure hunt helps add to the chaos, confusion, and glee going on in downtown San Francisco on this February evening.

What was telling to me is how rare it is that people fill the streets downtown after working hours. Maybe most downtowns in the 21st century empty after work, but if the energy of a city keeps pulsing after dark, well, then it’s a city in more than just name. I’m hardly one to comment with authority on the nightlife, but part of choosing to live in a city is the knowledge and expectation that there is always something going on. San Francisco does fit that description most of the time, but for all its geographic compactness (the famous 7×7 miles), the city breaks up into distinct zones very dramatically, and you have to actively seek entertainment in areas distinct from where most people live. That’s not unexpected, nor all bad — few of us want to try and sleep next door to a nightclub. However, it does feel like a bit of waste to have so many people flow in, and then out, of the downtown each workday. Without events like last night’s festivities, the downtown is a beach at low tide most evenings.

For those that haven’t tried the Treasure Hunt… give it a shot. The clues, even at the beginner level, are no slam dunk (see example below). But the combination of shared brainpower (this is a team event), a brisk walk (there is a time limit), and studied nonchalance (when you find the answer, you try not to give it away to other teams lingering nearby) energizes everyone. That energy carried us through 3+ hours of criss-crossing the city, before a fun dinner to recharge our batteries. (Note: Steps of Rome Trattoria, in the heart of North Beach, was lively, but the food is nothing special.)

Actual clue from last night:

You are a Saint, my amigo, and then some. I would follow you to the very end, where I will find a house that is not for squares, and will face five choices for parallel thinking. But I must get past them, and though I seem to be “off track,” I am merely between them. For I seek love and an evening meal, though I must look down and watch my “belt line.”
How many miles did they cover?

This was the second clue we tried to solve. And we failed. I’m looking forward to the answer being posted online, so we can learn what we did wrong. For those whom this seems impossibly cryptic, the conventions are that the clue will lead you to a location in the city, and then you will find the answer at the location. The answer we need was the last underlined bit. I’m pretty sure we started at the right general area (where Sansome meets Market Street), but zeroing in from there proved too difficult in the time we allotted.

There were 16 clues, and we found 7 answers… I hope we got all of those right. 😉

I’ve submitted my blog to a few of these resources, but not all. Looks like RSS is starting to gain attention in the way search-engine optimization grew a few years ago.

Vin Crosbie gives us an update on his progress on the 21st-century business plan for newspaper publishing. Curious to see how it reads for those of us without print editions, too. Stay tuned, I guess.

How often do you get a first-hand take on recent history? The Fog of War, which we saw two nights ago, is a fantastic film. Robert McNamara has a story to tell and it’s fascinating to listen to a significant participant in some of the most tumultuous moments of the 1960s. I don’t kow what his motives are for telling that story now, and why he agreed to sit down with Errol Morris, but I’m glad he did. I’ve read a little bit about Vietnam, and seen a lot of the multi-part PBS series on the war (and its precursors) while in high school, so I felt mildly informed. But this first person narrative, combined with various clips from the era being discussed, was great. Non-fiction is powerful stuff when it’s so vivid.

I can only believe the parallels between the McNamara as Secretary of Defense and Rumsfeld in that same role are coincidental. Morris doesn’t make any obvious connections, and I’m not clear about the timing of these interviews, and whether current events played a role in the creation of this film. I don’t think so. But the common shared perceptions of intelligence and arrogance are obvious, and while Iraq is not (yet?) Vietnam, it’s clearly going to be a part of the American story internationally for years (decades?) to come.

I have not seen Morris’s other films, like the much-acclaimed The Thin Blue Line. But I’m adding that one to Netflix right now.