Month: July 2007

(Oldest item in the email inbox) Way back on June 6th, I noted JobVent Takes Dirt Dishing To a Broader Audience and earlier this week, TechCrunch returned to the genre with New Forum Site To Gossip About Work. I’m not that interested in this class of sites except for the name JobVent. My one early foray into starting my own site back in the late 1990s with a friend was dubbed iVenting, now nicely squatted on by DomainSpade, per DomainTools. Unfortunately, archive.org never caught our short-lived live efforts in 1998 or 1999. Oh well. Our efforts were not focused on jobs or the workplace…just complaining. No surprise, a half-assed effort went nowhere. Lesson: part-time effort isn’t enough.

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Gallery of standards-compliant website designs. I liked this one, although nothing particularly relevant to current needs. Breeze is attractive. And their service might even be useful in the future.

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Back on July 3rd, CNET News.com reported that AT&T offers DSL subscribers free Wi-Fi, but the story didn’t include the critical link to the details. I’m a customer, although my DSL started back in 1998, with PacBell. Through the transition to SBC and then on to AT&T, I’ve stayed under the radar because (a) I didn’t want the Yahoo stuff forced on me (I use it directly, where appropriate) and (b) I got a static IP address way back when. If I start asking questions about new services, I suspect my account will be ‘reviewed’ and that might not be progress. However, I would like more speed and it burned me to pay for Wi-Fi in an airport the other day (T-Mobile). We’ll see.

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Anil Dash pointed out that “Bottled Water Is Still A Scam,” in reaction to the Fast Company story in the July issue. San Francisco’s water supply may be fragile, but it is tasty. Good reminder.

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Steve Yelvington alerted me to another crowdsourcing effort, aimed at astronomy. Reminded me of PhishTank.

If you design a system that accepts the fact that some people will make mistakes, and others may be vandals, but you allow the larger number to define the outcome, then you accommodate the realities of human nature.

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Marc Andreessen delivers the truth in The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 5: The Moby Dick theory of big companies. Nice literary/business mashup, in an enjoyable essay. I’ve been Ahab at least once.

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I haven’t played Tilt SCREAM Pong on my MacBook yet, but I certainly need to download it and try. Via Tim Bray, who also points to a visual definition of The Elephant in the Room. Nice!

Last night, I caught up to the rest of the family and saw Ratatouille. Pixar fun, with a nice short to lead off the film per usual. Metacritic score of 96 is stratospheric. I enjoyed it, but wouldn’t put it up on that pedestal. A G movie that works for children but never talks down to adults. For foodies (not me), even more enjoyable.

I had a lot of fun seeing Live Free or Die Hard two weeks ago. Metacritic score of 69 is a touch low. Aside from the poor riff on True Lies (the jet scene), suspending disbelief and just going with the flow is fun. Not sure why Bruce Willis defines sardonic humor, but it’s a nice touch for an “action hero.” As much as The Sixth Sense was brilliant, the Die Hard franchise feels like Willis’s home.

Jarhead is a book I wouldn’t have picked up without seeing the movie. Subtitled “A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles,” Anthony Swofford’s memoir makes me wonder again that my father was in the Marine Corps reserves. Just doesn’t feel like my father’s kind of organization, but then I didn’t know my father as a young man. I never considered how much the military (especially the Marines?) still live up to the reputation of sex, drinking and general hell-raising…even (especially) at overseas postings. Tough to be an ambassador when you’re under 21, loaded, and horny. Hmmm.

The book isn’t political. It’s personal…which makes the observations stronger. All of America is aware (now) that the restraint of Gulf War 1 was smart, not weak, however disorienting and disappointing it was for Swofford and his mates at the time. The lack of combat is maddening, though, to both author and reader.
Side note: reading Swofford on their crappy gas masks (fortunately never required), it’s disappointing to see that the military couldn’t improve much in the 70-odd years since World War I.

Now that I’ve read the book, it’s even more surprising this was made into a movie. But I’m glad it raised my awareness enough to pick Jarhead off the library shelves.

Such an airplane book… The Book of Fate by Brad Meltzer… if it hadn’t been sitting in a pile, I wouldn’t have remembered reading it. And it took the jacket blurb to clue me in to the story again. And that’s maybe three weeks after reading the book. Enough said.

In past years, I’ve watched several days of the Tour de France in the early morning, or catching the repeat on OLN (now Versus) in the evenings. Some of my fonder moments a few years ago were getting up early with the boy and teaching him who Lance Armstrong was, as we ate breakfast in front of the Alps or Pyrenees. Like most Americans, some of my interest diminished when Lance retired, and Landis’s breakthrough rise and fall last year was maddening. I can’t help but join those who wonder about Lance, too. When everyone from Basso to Ullrich and beyond was caught or implicitly acknowledged “mistakes” in the last few years, and the Tour finds itself with a much diminished field each year… how could it have been so different during Lance’s seven years?

Still, I watched a few hours here and there, mostly last week. Liggett and Sherwin are marvelous commentators. Makes me want to go out and ride up (shorter, less steep) hills. Bike racing is much better on TV. And so much worse in person, unfortunately, if you actually want to see anything.

Then Rasmussen, the surprise leader, gets tossed. Argh. I’m still going to watch part of the final time trial tomorrow. Yet it feels like watching Barry Bonds chase the home run record. No matter how much you’d like to get caught up in the moment, how can you commit the psychic energy of fandom to any of these athletes?

Simon Winchester published A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 less than a year ago, in October 2006. Since April 18, 1906 was the earthquake of the title, he just made the centennial — hardly a coincidence.

After my other recent earthquake book, I’m now fully aware of the dangers of my hometown. So be it. The first half of this book was education and explanation for those who need an introduction to plate tectonics. Not me. So I was annoyed for a while, and then amused by Winchester’s efforts to stretch this momentous incident into a hinge for the new American century. Hmmmm.

Certainly, the transfer of the economic center of California from Northern California to Los Angeles and its environs was made possible by the quake (among other factors). But Winchester’s tale loses momentum after he describes the quake and the first few days. From the title, fair enough — but he hinted at broader goals, and then lost them in the fire which consumed the city and his story. For a history of the quake itself and the reconstruction, I’ll have to look elsewhere.

I read Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman a few years ago. That quirky double biography with its deep love of words enchanted me. A Crack in the Edge of the World educated me a bit, engaged me at times, but never grabbed me.

I returned Mad Dogs by James O’Grady to the library a few weeks ago. I liked the flashbacks in this thriller, which made the reading slightly more than just brain candy. The characters are more memorable than the ending, at least these few weeks later. I’ve heard of Six Days of the Condor, but never read the book nor seen the movie. Funny to read that six days was too long for a movie, so they shortened it to Three Days of the Condor. I know you have to abbreviate a novel into a movie, but that’s…blunt.

Yesterday’s 4.2 magnitude earthquake was reported in today’s Chronicle this way: Quake rattles East Bay. The sub-hed? Magnitude 4.2 temblor causes little damage but may be foreshock

Since every earthquake is seen as a possible precursor to the “big one,” the foreshock reference feels like a bit of dramatic license. But I did read A Dangerous Place: California’s Unsettling Fate by Marc Reisner a few weeks ago. In this short, posthumously published book, Reisner quickly scans the history of the growth of California cities, especially San Francisco and the rest of the Bay Area.

Not surprisingly for the author of the justly famous Cadillac Desert (subtitled “The American West and Its Disappearing Water”), Reisner harps on the fragility of the water supplies of both Northern and Southern California. The aquaducts were not news to me. The novel danger to me was the levees in the Central Valley.

If the levees fail, at least two things happen.

First, of course, many people and even more farms are flooded, as the Delta’s salt water pushes up into the now-settled farmland several feet below the top of the levees.

Second, the water supply to Southern California is disrupted mightily, since the pipeline bringing water from Northern California to Souther California are shut off if the intakes are now brackish.

Technology exists in other places, but the farmland and food distribution infrastructure of the Central Valley has few parallels around the world. California’s economy — and therefore the United States economy — would suffer mightily.

After this introduction to all the possible dangers, Reisner creates a “what if” scenario in the last half of the book, “documenting” what happens when (not if) a magnitude 7 quake hits. This is scary, in a matter-of-fact way, though not as interesting as the first half of the book.

If you’re going to read Reisner, start with Cadillac Desert instead. But for a quick, fact-based scare about the earthquake risk we all ignore to live here, read A Dangerous Place.

The book was published in 2003, but was written by Reisner before his death in 2000, so he put the date of 2005 out there for his scenario. Reading the alternate (future?) history two years after the fact doesn’t change anything: the risk remains, and it always will.

However, it is possible that the replacement of the eastern span of the Bay Bridge might be done before a big quake hits… but it’s telling that Reisner in 2000 envisioned the bridge being replaced by 2007, not in time for his imagined 2005 quake.

The currest estimate? 2013. (source)

I woke up to an earthquake this morning.

My eyes didn’t snap open, but I woke up, clock says 4:43am, and things kept shaking for maybe 10 seconds more. I could hear things shaking, but nothing fell or was out of order when I got out of bed. I tried to go back to sleep, but given two of the last three books I’ve read (but not yet blogged) are about earthquakes…not so much.

Intellectually, I know we’re living in denial about the potential impact of an earthquake, bracing and bolting notwithstanding. But reading these books breaks through the background clutter. The two books: A Dangerous Place by Marc Reisner (of Cadillac Desert fame) and A Crack on the Edge of the World by Simon Winchester. I like living here, despite the red zone. I am a bit more conscious of this choice these last few weeks. Especially this morning.

The USGS has details about this 4.2 magnitude event, which officially took place in Oakland at 4:42am. I reported my experience, which you’re invited to do, and here’s the aggregated map and report of observers.