Month: July 2005

Since I knew I would finish Calculating God on the flight, I bought Tom Clancy’s latest paperback, The Teeth of the Tiger. I think I’m caught up now with the Ryan novels, at least to date. This one, though, includes Jack Ryan, Jr., instead of his father. Guess it’s hard to do much with a character after he’s been President of the United States. Ask Bill Clinton about post-Presidency life… even non-fictional characters can find the aftermath less compelling. Jimmy Carter has gone on to do more with his life (impressively so), but my imperfect view of history tells me that’s rare. But I digress… this is normal Clancy. Nothing special, but perfect airplane fare, and full of wishful thinking — a successful, secret non-governmental agency, privately funded, with Presidential authority (hidden and private) to be proactive in taking out terrorists. Riggghhhhttt.

Flying back to San Francisco alone a week ago gave me plenty of reading time, so I finished off Calculating God, by Robert J. Sawyer. Thanks, Mom… I’ll definitely have to pick up some more Sawyer, since it’s clearly intelligent, approachable science fiction. And I appreciate an author forward thinking enough to use sfwriter.com as their personal/professional domain.

Skip Codex by Lev Grossman. It was another silly vacation read maybe a fortnight ago.

Young investment banker looks for ancient book, assisted by slightly frantic graduate student, both of them caught up in some odd royal family power struggle. Even for a “beach read,” pretty dismal. I read it, so you don’t have to. It was sitting on a shelf, and the jacket promised another historical manuscript mystery, of a sort, and I’m clearly a sucker for those right about now.

By the way, I almost always finish the books I start, even if they are not worth the hours. Probably not the only place I waste valuable time, but one habit ingrained in my soul. I know others who find it hard to finish books they start, and I alternately envy and pity their different style.

A couple of weeks ago, while on vacation, I whipped through Angels & Demons, an earlier novel by Dan Brown, author of The DaVinci Code. This historical/religious/pulp thriller even pulls in the Illuminati. A quick summer read, but you can skip this one. Way back in high school, I think, I read The Illuminatus Trilogy, though I remember little.

I found one web oddity with the official book site. If you do some walking of the paths, you get to www.danbrown.com/novels/angels_demons, which shows you all the files in the directory rather than loading the index page. Oops. That lets you look at different versions of pages that are left over on the web server, like this versus this, where the content is the same but the headers are different. Here is the final version of the “interview” page. The difference appears to be the real one states loud and clear that this is “the official website of bestselling author Dan Brown,” which tells me only that various people have tried to earn a few pennies via mock sites which lead to book sites with their own affiliate codes instead of those of the publisher. Ah, the money to be made in the margins while preying on the unaware, though that kind of scam is one of the least offensive kinds. Sad.

This post is for the many friends and colleagues who — unlike the rest of the country and the world — thought of me (however briefly) when the President announced his choice to replace Sandra Day O’Connor. Walking through Times Square on Friday night, I saw my name (yes, it’s my name, too) on one of the monstrously large news crawls. I better get used to it.

The addition of one more John Roberts to the breathless mix of online news was not welcome news here at clock. I’m sure many, many people pay attention to middle initials (right….) and have noticed that the Supreme Court nominee has the middle initial G, whereas your author has the middle initial B. Unfortunately, Google and every other search engine out there demonstrates quite clearly that first and last names are the common term. clock is sliding in the rankings, and until I do something equally noteworthy, I suppose I’ll just have to live with the demotion. Oh, and the chances of me doing something equally noteworthy? About nil.

Of course, if Mr. Roberts get nominated, he could get as much press as Justice Breyer. Who? Exactly.

The natural air conditioning of San Francisco welcomes me home… wonder how long it will be before I miss the warm evening and heat/humidity of New York City? Probably a while.

Much to catch up on, but not tonight.

It will be quiet for a bit around here. Enjoying some time.

I expect others have been keeping score on this topic, but I wonder how much longer print newspapers will continue to include stock tables? Yesterday, the flagship financial publication in the United States, the Wall Street Journal, announced “Changes Today in Our Financial Tables.” The changes?

The Wall Street Journal is streamlining its financial listings starting with today’s edition as more readers access stock, mutual-fund and other quotations on Internet financial sites, including The Wall Street Journal Online at WSJ.com.

Hmmm… streamlining is a good euphemism for cutting down. I also wonder how many of the people who “access” quotations on “Internet financial sites” are actually doing that “accessing” on WSJ.com. Probably not as many as Dow Jones would hope.

Skeptical reading aside, there is no stopping the digital train here. No newspaper has a choice when it comes to paper for this information. I think it will be another decade here in the United States before the tables disappear from the print edition of the Journal (note: this already happened in Europe and Asia). For volatile information, this is a no-brainer. The follow-on question is… which information is next? Sports scores?

A long, sunny holiday weekend was well misspent. No broadband connectivity, so no temptation to keep up with the online world. Because my current non-fiction read is lengthy, I took a one-day breather with The Da Vinci Code. Yes, I’m a bit late to this mega-best-selling party. The pages turned, and I got what I wanted. Felt like Umberto Eco dumbed down, which is both a wonderful thing and a (mild) disappointment. Historical mysteries are grand, especially with the scavenger hunt aspect thrown in. But where Eco built up the possibilities, and wove a tale that bound me and then cast me aside as it continued to ever-more-ethereal diversions, Dan Brown didn’t lose his story. Everything gets tidied up, perhaps a bit too smoothly. But for a summer beach read, spot on. Eco taunted me with Foucault’s Pendulum because the first third or so was one of the best stories I’ve ever read. Yet, somewhere in the middle, the story dropped from view so Eco could deliver magisterial asides. These snippets are interesting, as long as they are snippets. But they took over the tale in that novel. Anyway, next time I have a few hours to kill, I won’t mind picking up Dan Brown once again, even if he doesn’t live up to the standard set here.

I threw out a link on Wednesday evening, but the RSS promo from work late Thursday afternoon actually drew attention to the News.com tag cloud. Only found two links via Technorati. Several more came up via Feedster. Bloglines citations, too, did pretty well. Here’s the filtered, mixed list of those I could read in English:

• Jim Muttram wants a different sort… one of the available choices gives him what he wants, so UI must work harder to make that more obvious.
• George Scriban wonders if the topics are ad-hoc or pre-defined. The latter.
• Marc Canter throws the credit the wrong way.
• Chen Luyi includes the page in his Saturday links.
• Mercury News notes the page in their Friday round-up.
• Barry Reicherter thinks the page was copied from 43Things. Nope. Not original, of course, but not that single site. I mentioned the mullet.
• Jeff Lundberg wonders, as do we, whether this is useful, or just visually interesting.
• Steve Rubel is paying attention, but thinks the tagging is new. Not quite. Editors have been tagging for years, and the topics have been visible on stories for most of that period. This is just a new visualization of existing information. With luck, the dynamic picture unlocks something of value. Otherwise, it’s just fun to look at… which isn’t a bad thing.
• Garrett French wonders why he would use a tag cloud to navigate CNET News.com rather than existing alternatives. There’s no reason you have to. The page is an experiment. There are also some default options that need to be changed, clearly, because few seem to play with the alternatives much. I vastly prefer the alphabetical view myself.
• Mark Tosczak noted the page’s debut.

Hmmmm…