Month: March 2008

I bought Deep Storm by Lincoln Child in the airport for the airplane, but never got to it until riding the bus to work last week. Took me maybe three bus rides to finish. Pure cotton candy: tastes OK while you’re eating it, but nothing there. It was my recovery book after Fisk.

Boring, but happy it’s done.

About time I moved from version 2.0.3 of WordPress. Last post before I do so…

Jim Fallows reminds us that The Atlantic’s efforts to be timeless rather than timely often result in scarily accurate predictions.

I wish 2005’s Countdown to a Meltdown were less accurate. 🙁

Just one of the many points, written as a memo to the incoming president of 2016:

For politicians every aspect of this cycle was a problem: the job losses, the gasoline lines, the bankruptcies, the hard-luck stories of lifetime savings vanishing as the stock market headed down. But nothing matched the nightmare of foreclosures. For years regulators and financiers had worried about the “over-leveraging” of the American housing market. As housing prices soared in coastal cities, people behaved the way they had during the stock-market run-up of the 1920s: they paid higher and higher prices; they covered more and more of the purchase price with debt; more and more of that debt was on “floating rate” terms—and everything was fine as long as prices stayed high and interest rates stayed low.

Read the whole thing. And remember it was written 3 years ago.

Note: It’s good to aim for “timeless” when Monthly used to be in your publication’s name, the print edition is now only 10x/year and you’re still publishing in 2008, where Twitter/IM/RSS/email mean nothing important stays unknown if you’re online for an hour!

Cleaning out the personal inbox, I find…

• Long profile of Marissa Meyer at Google, from San Francisco magazine, strays from the tech, deliberately.
• An interesting application for a tablet PC, where physics acts on 2D objects line-drawn with a “crayon.”
• A mapping application for Facebook, which I haven’t installed.
• Worry about how to back up a blog on WordPress.com from David Strom. Backing up your own hosted WP blog is easy; I would think WordPress.com is similarly easy, but haven’t checked.
• A reminder why I think Amazon is a good medium-term investment. Not just because of the now-boring SmugMug example, but AWS is a real advantage for the company.
• The rants of Calacanis and Cuban about how to run startups. Not that I agree or disagree necessarily, but… nothing new here.
• A New Zealand travelogue to make you wish you were there, with similar time to spare.
• Bug reports as SDK feedback… a different approach. I prefer Idea Bank, but as long as the feedback is given, it’s worth listening to. Not following it is OK, as long as it’s a conscious decision, preferably explained.
• Impressed that Tim Bray finds Tolkien a good bedtime story for an 8-year-old. I admit to being thrilled the boy can read on his own, but if you’re going to spend time reading aloud to a young reader, might as well go for the best.
• I’m living the adoption-led market, though the term is new to me. Makes a lot of sense…and it’s a fundamentally different relationship with your customer. I prefer the connection and the interdependence that’s built in to this model.
• Three links where design intersects with technology.
• My D&D days are long behind me, but Gary Gygax inspired so many.

The name Robert Fisk was new to me when my friend Chris dropped this weighty-in-every-sense book on me many weeks ago. A reporter for the UK newspaper The Independent for several decades, Fisk has his own unofficial website. This is an advocacy site, though not affiliated with Fisk himself. Why does a reporter who lives in the Middle East and has covered its conflicts for three decades inspire people to come to his defense? Because he also knows how to rile people up, by speaking truth (as he sees it) to power.

The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East is a well-edited collection of his reports from every battlefield and conflict in the Middle East (and extending to Algeria) since the early 1980s. It’s a devastating, depressing view of how history repeats itself, and extraordinarily well written. Otherwise, plowing through 1,286 pages of death, hypocrisy, torture and other happy stories would have really been hard. As it was, I am both more educated and ever more depressed about the foundation the last 100 years — and especially the most recent 40 — have created for fundamental and violent disagreement in this crucible.

Much of the broad sweep of his reporting is known if you’ve been paying attention, but the details and the anecdotes matter. And the perspective matters. Fisk was shredded for this September 12, 2001 article, where he connected the dots between America’s role in the Middle East and the 9/11 attacks. With the raw emotion of that day now in the past, the brief article is remarkable for its perception and understanding of the root causes. Fisk does not defend the actions; he does attempt to describe the sequence of events from a point of view that’s hard to achieve in the West. And he laid the attacks at Osama bin Laden’s door earlier than most anyone, as far as I know.

I don’t know if Fisk is always right, but he’s certainly made me think. The repeated stumbles of our entry into Iraq in 2003 and ongoing occupation (5 years!) make me wish more people were forced into thought. I’m curious whether James Fallows and Robert Fisk have spoken. At least when it comes to Iraq, they’ve often taken the same close look at the reality of the situation. Fallows, though, has reviewed the American (especially Washington DC) perspective, where Fisk is capturing the raw reality in Baghdad.

I try to remain optimistic as a general rule. On these topics, though, realism carries more weight. Fisk’s volume is more than a dose of reality: it’s a scouring flood, leaving me wondering what’s next.

Fisk has his own section in the Independent and his own RSS feed. Subscribed.

One reason I keep this journal, however infrequently, is to avoid re-reading. However, sometimes the act is deliberate.

The boy poured through the three volumes of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, and returns to them often. So, to keep up, I re-read The Golden Compass. Now when quizzed about my favorite parts or characters, I’ll have one less excuse for a faulty memory. I don’t have the free time of a seven-year-old, but this story never drags, and the interesting language never loses the reader. I do wonder how the boy interprets all the religious (and anti-religion) themes. From what he’s said before, he skipped it. Fine by me.

The dark comedy In Bruges brightened my mood a few weeks ago. Previews highlighted comedy and Colin Farrell as a foul-mouthed lout of a gunman. Both are true, but the comedy is balanced with a sad strain that was unexpected. The balance helped the story.

Regarding the language: I was more bothered by the moments when I couldn’t understand the English language in all its (ahem) variety of accent and phrasing. Never descends to the incomprehensibility of Trainspotting, but I missed a few lines.

Metacritic: 67 is at least 5 points too low. You can wait for the DVD, but In Bruges is a satisfying movie.

A note on the title: while it’s quite possible that Bruges as metaphor for too-cute tourist town is common in Europe, those references felt forced to this American.