clock

Watching time, the only true currency // A journal from John B. Roberts

  • Movie: Control Room

    At home last weekend, thanks to my wife’s juggling of the DVD queue, we watched Control Room. An eighty-minute documentary about Al Jazeera in the build-up to the Gulf War (2003 version), Control Room did show me things I knew little about, but it wasn’t riveting. Or maybe I was just too tired to keep…

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  • Movie: After the Sunset

    Saw the movie After the Sunset a few weeks ago. Wait for the video. This film feels like a re-make of The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), which itself was a re-make of a 1968 movie by the same name. After the Sunset has Salma Hayek going for it, but otherwise it’s not as crisp or…

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  • Power outage this morning in San Francisco

    I woke up early (5:30am) this morning, and noticed the clock was dark. After a moment’s dullness, I realized the power must be out. Short story shorter… the power came back on about 15 minutes ago (~6:30am). I’m curious how widespread this was in San Francisco, but nothing at SFGate and nothing at PG&E. If…

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  • The problem with Christmas

    I love Christmas. I’m part of a large family, so all through my childhood, the chaos and excitement compounded. It’s hard to repeat that vibrant experience as you get older, but having kids of your own gets you back in the mood quite quickly. The boy is overdoing it with Feliz Navidad and O Tanenbaum…

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  • Book: The System of the World

    When it takes me a few weeks to write up a book I’ve read, there’s little chance I’m going to do more than the minimum when it comes time to note thoughts here. Neal Stephenson’s The System of the World is the third and final volume in The Baroque Cycle. I pity those who wade…

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  • Making linking more enjoyable

    Randy Charles Morin on The RSS Blog notes: “I’ve noticed that I enjoy linking more to people w/ trackbacks enabled than those who do not have trackbacks enabled.” (We’ll see if my TrackBack link to Randy’s post succeeds.) That was certainly a part of supportingTrackBack on CNET News.com. Since posting about the public introduction, I’ve…

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  • Is everything content?

    MacMerc, a site I loosely follow via their feed, pointed me to the Content Management Comparison Tool at CMS Matrix. And then I see Richard point to a comparison of hosted blogging platforms. Content management (what a phrase) in the air. The hard part remains creation, regardless of the tool or platform. But it’s true…

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  • Between prototype and shipping

    Talking with a colleague today about when GPS-enabled digital cameras will be the norm (did someone say metadata?), and he said something to the effect of they are beyond prototypes, but not quite shipping here in the U.S. He couldn’t find the words for that state of the production process. I said: Japan. Those new…

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  • Parsing isn’t the hard part

    David Berlind wrote “What’s wrong with RSS is also what’s right with it for his ZDNet commentary this morning. He takes the time to skip past the tumultuous (to developers) history, without papering over the differences. Well done. More important, though, he doesn’t get caught in that rat-hole of an argument. The most interesting part,…

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  • There is a home for weblogs

    Toto, we’re home. That’s the weblogs category in the main Yahoo directory, courtesy of Jeremy Zawodny. He’s right… I didn’t know that existed and I’m obviously too lazy to check before posting. I don’t mind the differences Jeremy points out between the My Yahoo mini-directory and the main directory, as I expect that if it…

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