Author: clock

Chad Dickerson shares a Treo tip, which I appreciate. I haven’t been inconvenienced by a Treo 650 restart yet, but they are happening occasionally. But it’s a bit scary that Chad “rebuilt” his Treo, meaning (I expect) that he reinstalled all the software from the ground up. Progress is two steps forward, one step back if we’ve brought that complexity from the desktop to the mobile device.

Just lost a medium-length post which will take a few minutes to re-create. Damn. And one of the recent posts I was reading was Tim Bray on blogging clients, where he hit the nail on the head:

Unfortunately, at the moment, writing stuff in the browser mostly sucks. It’s primitive, it’s clumsy, and (mostly) doesn’t auto-save, so it’s real easy to lose your work. Seriously, if you’re writing something big and serious that you care about, consider doing it offline in your favorite word processor or text-editor, saving often, then using cut-and-paste to transfer it into the browser.

Safari doesn’t usually freak out on me like this, but ouch.

Hardly a straight-through read, America (The Book) is worth flipping through for a laugh. Video is a better format for Jon Stewart and crew.

I put in a mile and a half in the pool yesterday, both because I needed to get some exercise in and because I wanted to prove to myself that I’ll be fine with the Alcatraz distance. OK on both counts, though I’ll still be happy to reach the shore and start racing then. But I just find the pool mind-numbing, and not in a pleasant “escape from your troubles” way. It’s all I can do to count the laps. Two college roommates and friends are swimmers… I’ll have to find out what kept them focused and engaged through their years in the pool.

In contrast, I love spinning the miles away on a road bicycle, as I did today. 54 miles of road today, more than I’ve done in four years. The climb from Stinson thrashed me, but until then, smooth spinning on a beautiful day.

Sharpe gets to drown his enemy in Sharpe’s Battle, a retelling of the battle of Fuentes de Onoro, on the Spain-Portugal border, in May, 1811. Maybe I read too many in a row, but this one was nothing special. I’ll have to wait for the library to find the next three, but I need a break from Sharpe anyway. I suppose I could clean out all the interesting items in my bookmarks, but that will have to wait.

Sharpe’s Escape simply gives Bernhard Cornwell a chance to write about the battle of Bussaco. There is a more personal vendetta, of course, which gives Sharpe a chance to mimic the Tim Robbins escape through a sewer from Shawshank Redemption. Sharpe is fortunate enough to have company, including a beautiful naked woman, but it’s still foul. Actually, since this novel was written in 2004, I wonder if the Robbins “passage” wasn’t a direct inspiration for this part of the book. A bit of web-sleuthing did me no good in seeing if there has been other speculation or confirmation, since searching for books just brings up booksellers, most of the time. However, the search did turn up an unexpected tidbit: Boston Globe interview with Cornwell from 2004.

Got out for a mid-week movie to see Sideways. After all the hype, we felt like we were the last people to see the film, especially in San Francisco. Since there were three other people in the theater, I guess we weren’t the only slackers. Result? Mild enjoyment, but felt like a female buddy movie where the lead buddies were male… and gender was the only twist. Yes, it was a film made only for adults, with no pandering to a crossover audience of teenage boys or anything else — but it wasn’t surprising. The characters filled their roles, but too many of the lines felt like they should have stayed in the book, especially the rhapsodizing about how wine is like life, etc. Still, a movie that didn’t depress. After House of Sand and Fog, that was welcome.

House of Sand and Fog compels attention, but there’s no solace in this movie. Don’t watch it if you’re in the mood for a light-hearted escape. That which can go wrong, does. There are no winners here. Still, I might want to read the book from which the movie was made. The movie avoided simplicity, but I wonder what other depths (positive and negative) are in the written words. This DVD wasn’t on my Netflix list last weekend.

Although Sharpe’s Gold is the ninth book, chronologically, in the series, it was only the second Bernhard Cornwell wrote. Aside from demonstrating the cruelty of the guerrilla war pursued by the Portugese partisans, Sharpe’s Gold gives Cornwell an excuse to have Sharpe blow up the fortress at Almeida… while the British and Portuguese are occupying it. In the historical note at the end of the novel, Cornwell acknowledges that the actual cause of Almeida’s destruction remains a mystery. Also, the Gold of the title is stolen from the Spanish to pay for the construction of the Lines of Torres Vedras, a great defensive work north of Lisbon. Nice to use historical fiction to tie up some loose ends. This was a lightning read last weekend.

I’ll interrupt my exciting rundown of my reading habits to let people know that CNET Networks is hiring. Personally, I wanted to call attention to the one of the senior software engineer positions. If you read CNET News.com and love delivering tech news first — and tech news in different ways, this is a great place to show your stuff. Everything from RSS to blogs to personalized aggregation to editorial aggregation to individual alerts to what readers like to mobile to whatever comes next. There is lots to do, and a growing company to do it in.

The position isn’t limited, necessarily, to News.com, though that’s a focus. Also, there are plenty of other positions available, and not just for engineers. And not just in San Francisco, although that’s the majority of them, I think.

Note: I’m selfishly interested in getting great people, but not financially interested. Unlike the dot-boom days, where a single referral earned me a one-in-thirteen shot at a Porsche Boxster (didn’t win), now it’s a bit more, well, realistic. Regarding the Boxster…ahhh… Snap.com, where are you now? Oh yeah, Bill Gross salvaged the domain from the scrap heap and is running a transparent search engine. Best of luck with that.