Author: clock

That phrase in its entirety isn’t worth repeating, but the sentiment lives on. Except that you can replace the word “opinions” with “social bookmarking services” and continue on your merry way.

While reading What’s Wrong with Commas, Anyway?, I learned about another one, Simpy.com. Of course, I already know about Spurl, Furl, del.icio.us, del.irio.us, connotea, and dozens more if I actually wanted to find them. (Linking is left as an exercise for the reader.) Only one I’m using is del.icio.us, despite its RSI-inducing URL. Yikes. I hope most of these are just hobby sites… otherwise, one might imagine that it’s 1999 all over again, and we’re watching features pretend to be businesses. Somewhere amidst all the tech hype that’s simmering, but not yet boiling over, is there more substance? Or am I just (foolishly) captive to my dozen years of building online services in thinking that earning some time and attention from a meaningful number of people is a bit harder than copying someone else’s idea?

I’m not against copying. The great ones go one step further, after all. It’s just harder to tell a story if it’s not your own. At least, it is for me… maybe I need to get over that. I’ve been thinking a bit more about what a product or service’s story must be to stand out in a crowd. Blame Seth Godin. I need story-telling help.

I rarely listen to music, but Dave Brubeck just makes me smile. I have only a few albums, and only one ripped to iTunes, The Great Concerts. Maybe it’s lowest common denominator jazz, but sure sounds like the highest form of sound to me.

It’s been so long since I read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that I felt little concern about seeing the movie this evening. I wasn’t worried that it “wouldn’t be true to the book” or anything purist like that because I could remember only the barest outline of events… and, having seen the movie, even that outline was sketchy. That said, if you hadn’t read the books at all, I would have to imagine that this is one of the oddest movies ever. Vaguely Python-esque, but not so obviously funny. The movie does make me want to re-read the book, though, to try and grasp why Douglas Adams captured the imagination of so many. I know I enjoyed reading it, and I did continue on to finish at least one or two more of the series.

The animations in the “Guide” in the film are faithfully reproduced on the website. Now that I think of it, I wonder if the ones used in the movie were created in Flash first.

Last week we enjoyed a mid-week night out to see The Interpreter. I really liked this film. I won’t try and put too much into that, but there you are. One ridiculous point, from the film’s website (Flash, everyone’s favorite):

The Interpreter is the first movie to be granted the honor of being able to film within the United Nations’ Headquarters, marking yet another significant moment in the U.N.’s unique history. [emphasis added]

Ummmm… folks? When they write the history of the U.N., the first movie isn’t going to make more than the footnotes, and it shouldn’t even make those. Still worth a watch, though nothing that can’t wait for DVD in the subject matter.

Bernard Cornwell notes that the action Sharpe’s Enemy is entirely fictional. Not bad. I don’t mind a bit of license taken in the name of entertainment when it comes off well. My only lingering quibble is that Obadiah Hakeswill dies his second death in this book. I preferred the death by snake from Sharpe’s Fortress to the firing squad funeral in this book, written 15 years before Fortress.

One fun typographical note broke through to make me laugh and share it. On page 88 of the library copy I read, Cornwell’s original sentence: “Sharpe was placatory, yet all of them knew that less men deserted from the Rifles than from other Regiments.” Do you see the error? An earlier reader did, and jotted (in pencil) the word “fewer” above “less.” Must have irked the reader quite a bit, because he or she did it at least once more.

Now for another break from Sharpe before I finish the headlong rush to Waterloo.

Sharpe’s Sword gives our hero the chance to cuckold a Spaniard married to a French spy. Oh, and Wellington wins the battle of Salamanca in 1812.

I realized why these novels are reading faster and faster. Bernard Cornwell uses stock paragraphs (pages?) to describe certain things in each book. Of course, there is little reason to come up with new ways to describe the same gun or military manuever or the like. Cornwell clearly assumes nothing, which is disappointing only because this is the thirteenth book in the series, chronologically, and the third in order of writing. If you’ve gotten this far, you know all about the seven-barrelled gun that Sergeant Harper carries. I know I gloss over those words without a thought in my head. And yet I still enjoy these books. Onwards!

Scoble ranks types of RSS feeds by what they include, but he misses a few points along the line. Headline-only feeds with ads are his worst. I would ask… worse than no feeds at all? As fast as things are changing, the lack of a feed or feeds is still an issue for many, many information resources of all sorts (not just news).

There are various resources where I do not want full-text, with or without ads. Scanning is almost as important as reading… and reading takes longer! No matter how many feeds you subscribe to, you don’t read every word of every feed. I suppose you could, but why would you want to? My point: I appreciate some full-text feeds, but where Scoble ranks partial text feeds without ads as “barely passable,” I find that type a competitor for the most valuable offering. Some variation on full-text is undoubtably attractive for the right content, but only for that content where (to stretch Scoble’s analogy) I’ve moved beyond dating into a long-term relationship. I don’t think an initial subscription to a feed is a deep commitment. Part of the attraction of feeds is that you control the connection, and anything that’s one way isn’t much of a relationship, even if ideas still spread wonderfully that way.

Getting back to the spectrum… I haven’t seen statistics on this, and haven’t scoured our own data to catalog feeds this way, but I would have to guess that the vast majority of current feeds are partial text without ads. I think the feed world is a heck of a lot better than “barely passable,” even if there is still a long, long way to go (Phil Collins alert ;-).

Returning to the “worst case” … in many cases, a linked headline is enough. Either I learned what I wanted to know, or I learned that I don’t care at a deeper level than the 6-12 words provided. Athletics beat Red Sox, 13-6 — a fun game this afternoon, by the way — is enough 98% of the time.

Side note: of course, my example falls through, because the San Francisco Chronicle used a more interesting headline than my fake example. Long before RSS came around, newspapers learned the value of writing great headlines. Some publications still have folks who specialize in this ever-more-important skill.

Ads will bring these choices into clearer focus, and the spectrum of feeds will evolve further. I can’t wait.

I’m not politically active, and I rarely share my opinions in a public forum, though I vote every time. But I do find the occasional issue which rouses me. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, please join me (and many others) in opposing a pedestrian/bicyclist tax on the Golden Gate Bridge. The link is to the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition’s advocacy page, with background, details, and steps you can take to politely share your opinions with the legislative bodies that are contemplating this short-sighted manuever. Be polite, but be firm. Vehicle tolls to cross the bridges around New York City are significantly higher than here in the Bay Area, but the Brooklyn Bridge is a recognized city treasure because of its pedestrian and bicycle access. The Golden Gate Bridge is the same, yet more so in a city which doesn’t have as much competition in the landmark department. I don’t know whether this tactic has been attempted in the past, but I do know I’d like to avoid this failure of imagination here.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Brooklyn Bridge and other NYC bridges have undergone similar threats in the past — the smell of money passing into city coffers can do strange things — but I don’t know of any current pedestrian/bicycle tolls. Correct me if I’m wrong.

I also have a long-term hope that I might one day ride my bicycle from San Francisco to Oakland. Those hopes get longer-term every time I read the paper. If we (the Bay Area, the State of California, etc.) cannot agree on how to finish a new eastern span of the Bay Bridge, how much longer will it take to get a pedestrian/bicycle lane/extension added to the western span? Maybe in my lifetime… or maybe my children’s? I won’t hold my breath, but I’ll do my small part to keep supporting those efforts, too.

Time to jump back into some fun reading, so I polished off Sharpe’s Company in a couple of days. These Sharpe novels from Bernard Cornwell are so straightforward, with few surprises, but I still enjoy them. I turn pages almost as fast as I would with a Dick Francis novel (the gold standard, in many ways) and I get to pretend I’m learning something. Can hardly ask for more in mental recreation.

Jon Krakauer‘s Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith sat on the to-read pile for quite some time. Then, once started, it lingered a while as I tried (in vain) to keep up with the daily flow of blogs and newspapers as well as the weekly/monthly flow of magazines. (Yes, for all my online time, I haven’t given up on print.) Yesterday, I finished this inquiry into the Mormons, seen through the lens of a vicious murder in 1984. The crime itself really isn’t the point, although until you get into the book, that’s hardly obvious. Krakauer is more interested in:

I was irresistibly drawn to write about Latter-Day Saints not only because I already knew something about their theology, and admired much about their culture, but also because of the utterly unique circumstances in which their religion was born: the Mormon Church was founded a mere 173 years ago [at time of the Author’s Remarks in 2003], in a literate society, in the age of the printing press. As a consequence, the creation of what became a worldwide faith was abundantly documented in firsthand accounts. Thanks to the Mormons, we have been given an unprecedented opportunity to appreciate — in astonishing detail — how an important religion came to be.

Not a bad thing to try and understand, even today, even (especially?) for the non-religious.

I’ve read Krakauer in Outside magazine for many years (though not recently), and — like so many — devoured Into Thin Air, the book that made him famous. This book intrigued me, but I think I’d rather start with Wallace Stegner’s history of the Mormons or another more historical survey than this weave of a present-day religious fundamentalism gone wrong with the broad history of the Church of Latter-Day Saints. That said, I learned quite a bit, and I recoil at the blatant censorship efforts practiced by the LDS, both against this title and more broadly. Information may or may not want to be free, but ideas in contrast undermine fanaticism — and that’s a good thing.