Category: Uncategorized

Being compared to TiVo is just about the best praise you can ask for in the technology space right now. While I don’t think TiVo the company will thrive in the long-term, they’ve elevated the expectations of consumers everywhere, and not just within TV. Whether they succeed commercially or not, they’ve changed the world. That’s not too shabby.

Via the Scripting News RSS feed just now, I saw this Feedster analogy:

Think of RSS as “Tivo for the Web”.

As someone who flipped through both NFL playoff games today via TiVo, in about one-third the time, and someone who was pre-ordered a product (RadioShark, from Griffin Technology… end of February, according to those manning Macworld booth) which promises to deliver a TiVo-like experience for radio, I’m a sucker for this analogy. But it doesn’t hold water. The difference with RSS is delivery, as that Feedster page makes clear if you read more than the quote. TiVo is not about delivery. It’s about taking control of time, taking it back from the content producers. The web has never forced you to adapt to the content producers’ time constraints. Both technically and otherwise, the web is stateless in most of its applications — you choose when to interact, even if that interaction is passive reading. So, the analogy misses, but it sounds cool all the same, and I’ll bet it gets picked up far and wide, even though it’s wrong… which is not necessarily a bad thing for RSS, which needs something to bring it out of the early adopter technologist world and into more general use/understanding.

No happy ending. That’s my lingering thought about Cold Mountain, which we saw eight days ago. I write that happily. I thought the movie was solid, and worth seeing in theaters, even if I hadn’t had free babysitting! I just didn’t want a sad tale to be misconstrued. This story, when read, leaves the reader both eager to turn the pages and dreading the moment when things finally, inevitably, go wrong. The director teases with the film… you almost think he ‘sold out’ for a happy ending. But the tale rings true to its tragic roots.

I read the Charles Frazier novel several years ago, so as I watched the movie, I had a basic sense of the plot and a strong sense of the mood. The details were hazy in my mind, so I don’t have a strong sense of the movie’s fidelity to Frazier’s tale — but I’m not sure it matters since the feeling was spot on.

In retrospect, this movie followed The English Patient in its ability to conjure a mood, and carry it through consistently. I didn’t enjoy Cold Mountain (the movie) as much I as enjoyed The English Patient (the movie); the latter is one of my favorites, and we own the DVD. But both movies did a terrific job of evoking the mood of the books. Note: for reading, I preferred Cold Mountain.

I just checked the website, and realized that the same man, Anthony Minghella, directed both movies. I didn’t know that when I wrote the above paragraph. So I feel redeemed and foolish at the same time.

Two contrary points. I’ve rarely seen a movie so graphic/realistic in its presentation of blood, mud, wounds, and the like. Even the quick ‘brothel’ sex scene is almost animal-like, more carnal and impersonal than anything I’ve seen on screen — although given the context (wartime carpe diem, where the sex is but a lure, it seemed appropriate. Yet, at the same time as the film assaults you with this viscousness, Nicole Kidman’s hands and face are rarely dirty. She endures predictable rigors moving from society daughter to (effectively) a farm hand. But the realism of the movie’s opening Civil War battle scene doesn’t extend to the ravages of wartime life on a beautiful young woman. Oh well.

One more thing: rumor from a friend who was involved with the making of the movie, in Romania (the closest to the Civil War south to be found, apparently), is that Jude Law, our male hero, isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, despite being a “pretty thing.” Can’t win them all! 😉

I’m not switching from NetNewsWire, but always curious to see what others are coming up with. Here’s one I came across via Macintouch: NewsFan. This program appears to be developed in Japan, per the address at the bottom of the home page, and there are just enough oddities in the English language descriptions to underline that a non-native English speaker wrote the words.

FUN – EASE – SPEED – USEFUL
Now the browser feature integrated!

Of course, I know nothing of Japanese, so I’m not throwing stones here, just noting that making yourself understood in another language and being idiomatically fluent are not one and the same. I have real experience, because I speak, read, and (terribly) write broken French… more broken with every year that passes! I hope my children are, at a minimum, bi-lingual — but that will be somewhat challenging since we haven’t provided any support in that area, to date.

In any event, I’ll be interested to see how Brent Simmons maintains his leadership position in the MacOS X newsreader space, and whether features or usability will be the determining factor in 2004. Beyond 2004, I expect RSS/feed integration to be so widespread that it will be only be info-junkies (like me) that still use a separate newsreader. Most folks, I expect, will find basic integration of a few sources more than enough. Time will tell.

If you’ve been reading the Patrick O’Brian Aubrey-Maturin novels, as I have (but not recently), then you’ve come across a full-on litany of sailing terms that make more or less sense depending on your literary experience and the context. Should you feel the need to actually understand each piece of early 19th century jargon, read away. Or, better yet, bowse away.

This is just one of the nautical dictionaries provided by a Harvard teaching fellow, Christopher Morrison. Better he than I in transcribing and copying!

Not as interactive as the zip-code map I posted two nights ago, but here is a useful area code map, from the comprehensive site LincMad, run by a telecommunications consultant here in San Francisco. Nice to be an expert in something. Seriously, I’m impressed (if mildly frightened) by the way this person’s vocation and avocation come together to create a truly useful collection of information… and the web lets him share it, demonstrating his expertise. [via ongoing]

Rajesh Jain shared why he reads. One quote:

There is something magical about a book, which can never be replicated by any of the other media — be it magazines, the Web or television. A book does not let us do multi-tasking. It demands undivided attention — there are no micro-moments. A book consumes our most precious resource — time. When we read a book, we are committing a significant chunk of mental time and attention that is the hardest to find in today’s multiplexed lives.

Amen. I know some people can read and listen to the radio or watch TV or otherwise do more than one thing at a time while (ostensibly?) reading. I’m not one of them. Time with a book is undivided. It’s time for me. It’s private, not public. It’s one of the truly selfish pleasures that I still make time for as a working adult and parent. Reading doesn’t take much mental or physical energy, which is good after a busy day. I do find that consuming, rather than producing (even light blogging, like this), occasionally feels like a shortcut, since it’s easier to read than to write. But public creation feeds a different part of my self. Reading smooths out my rough mental edges.

A tangent: while I think writing well takes much more than just reading, I believe that incessant reading builds a personal measuring tape of just what is good writing. At one point I thought I wanted to be a journalist. I did the usual routine (school paper) in high school and even in college for a bit. But after college, working at The Atlantic Monthly, I realized more than ever what it took to write well for a living. It wasn’t a fit. I do work with those who have made the commitment to public writing. I enable their efforts, and I admire their work, but I limit my own visible words to this space.

Since I want to keep those calendar days linked (i.e., post at least once every day I can), here are two links I found today which you might enjoy.

1. Elegant zip code map in a Java applet. Slightly buggy, it seems, but wonderful narrowing of the focus as you provide more numbers in the zip code.
2. I found link #1 via The Map Room, a blog about maps (although link #1 was originally cited on MetaFilter)

I’ll never be a cartographer, but doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy maps.

I always appreciated a T-shirt popular amongst college athletes when I was in college that announced: “It’s not how you get hit, it’s how you recover.” This mantra was appropriate for rowing, with its obsessive training regimen and emphasis on peak fitness as a baseline for all else. I always recovered fairly well, although it wasn’t easy when I was making weight (~155 pounds / 70kg is the average for lightweight men).

Today, in a non-physical manner, I got hit with an unwelcome surprise. It’s now time to recover. It’s also time to get back to work, after more than a fortnight of vacation wrapped around the end-of-year holidays. Wish me luck.

Two movies — Cold Mountain and Big Fish — in the first three nights of the year, thanks to mother-in-law babysitting (thank you!). No way we’ll keep that average up, but both good movies, in wildly different ways. More later…

A friend gave me a copy of The Corrections, a novel by Jonathan Franzen which garnered many heaps of praise when it was published in 2001. A significant reason this long-awaited literary novel became a bestseller and bubbled up out of the literary world is because Franzen refused Oprah’s invitation to have his novel as part of her book club. This surprising refusal — Oprah’s blessing is worth $$$$$ — moved the book from anticipated by the literati to eagerly anticipated by a wider public… and maybe even means more people read the book. The obvious speculation, that this contrarian reaction was expected, and therefore provoked, doesn’t take into account Franzen’s reputation (obsessive is part of the story).

With all that said, I often wish I could read a book like this without knowing anything about it other than a friend enjoyed it and suggested I would, too. The cover of this paperback edition is filled with more than the usual awards, alongside plenty of the usual puff quotes from recognizable sources. The sum total of my pre-knowledge, therefore, was (a) this book has received a lot of attention (b) it’s author is a fussbudget, putting it politely and (c) a good friend enjoyed it. That last, at least, was enough to get me reading, although I admit that the first two left me predisposed to move this one to the top of my pile.

I liked the book.

OK, lukewarm words, and I suppose I should be stronger, or at least more precise, in my economiums. I thought the story was compelling, even as the individual family members are more or less so. The entire tale follows two parents and three adult children, all playing their family roles, with true personal change only coming as a form of post-script.

I felt like I was reading David Foster Wallace with an editor: that’s a compliment. I found Infinite Jest a crazy, exciting read — but I longed for some reining in of the words and ideas that spilled into pages of footnotes and slowed the story down. Wallace’s story was fun, almost despite his obstructions. Franzen, by contrast, keeps to a tighter focus, while still finding some places to ‘flex’ his verbal flair. None of these authors would be compared to the conciseness of Hemingway. But Franzen tied his tone and verbal confections to the character whose voice or inner mind he was channeling, which I didn’t realize until just now when I was flipping through for an appropriate quote. I won’t find any single quote that represents the novel, but here’s one example of the careful injection of humor along the way.

As a global player, Lithuania has been fading since the death of Vytautus the Great in 1430. For six hundred years the country was passed around among Poland, Prussia, and Russia like a much-recycled wedding present (the leatherette ice bucket; the salad tongs).

To me, that phrase is along the lines of Vizzini [The Princess Bride] saying: “You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The first is never get involved in a land war in Asia. ….” It’s not as funny as Vizzini, but it’s in the same direction: jokes for adults. (I expect I’ve lost everyone with this comparison, but do see The Princess Bride if you haven’t already.)

Let me end this ramble by adding a personal amusing note. On page 435 of the paperback edition, Franzen drops a reference to nbci.com, the unlamented, long-gone site which I spent 3+ years building from 1997-2000 (originally snap.com). Chip, one of the adult children, is leading a team of Lithuanian ‘webheads’ in perpetuating a fraud on American investors, and Chip wants his foreign team to understand what Americans would think of as reliable and cool. “He made [the Webheads] study American sites like nbci.com and Oracle.” NBCi.com died as an independent would-be Yahoo about the same time this book was initially published and NBCi.com was, in many ways, a fraud on investors, too. I and many others were working as hard as we could to make it a service that deserved to be mentioned with Yahoo and the other portals (remember that word in that context?), but the irony is all the tastier to this ex-employee.

Oh yeah… read the book.