Category: Uncategorized

Reading Anil Dash’s post on Rules to the Game brought back similar conversations with coworkers. If you don’t have constraints, you’re just messing around. So it’s useful to know what the boundaries are, even if they are self-imposed? Is the limit time? Is the limit money? Is the limit the competition? Is the limit the organization/the people? Usually, in the workplace, the boundaries arise from some combination of the above.

My analogy: if you want to build something tall to see over the horizon, like a tower, you have to start by putting up walls. Those walls need to go up, not just spread horizontally, going only as high as you can reach without exerting yourself. You must choose the shape and size of your walls, and get out a ladder to keep building up. Once you’ve gotten out the ladder, you’re committed to that spot, and you’ve forsworn other choices. So make the best of your selection, be comforted that you know some of the physical limits now incumbent upon you, and keep going up. If you didn’t pick the best spot for a tower, at least you made a choice, and you committed to finishing the task in place. Rather than feeling limited, feel freed to continue. That’s my intent, if not always my action.

You can’t write down every funny line in Bill Cosby: Himself. And, out of context, I don’t know if the title of this post stands out as the funniest line of the show. But it stuck for me. The entire show is familiar, in a comfortable, old slipper kind of way. I’ve seen the show before, and heard it before, and Bill Cosby’s routines are legendary. Even better, now that I’m a parent, I know the truth which supports the humor.

After girding ourselves, we put in A.I. Artificial Intelligence this evening. I wanted to see it, but it’s always hard to start a movie that’s nearly two and a half hours long, especially when it’s a movie you figured was worth waiting to see at home. I should have kept waiting. The movie is too long, and searches for an ending. The tale almost pulls you in, and I found parts compelling, but the premise spins off into nothing. The last 20 minutes or so are especially nutty. I guess I understand why Warner Brothers let the movie website lapse already, only four years later. Once again, not worth even trying to sell the DVD. If you want more, skim the info at IMDB. But don’t give up 146 minutes of your life to watch the film.

Alex Barnett demonstrates RSS 101 with a nifty screencast (via Steve Rubel). Anything that makes this process easier is good.

If both Udell and Barnett are using Camtasia Studio ($299.00), it’s clearly a solid tool for the job. Mild concern for me is that it’s Windows-only. I’m a satisfied user of SnagIt (also from TechSmith) on that platform, but… what’s the Mac equivalent, I wonder? Well, Screenography ($40.00) doesn’t seem to accept voiceover directly. Udell mentions Snapz Pro X ($70.00), but that program, too, lacks voiceover. Not that I have a microphone, but maybe I could my iSight as a microphone for this process. Love to hear any suggestions.

I didn’t think I would get too far tonight on the task of converting my old blog entries to an importable form for WordPress, but it was time to start. I’ve been boring all dozen of you with my intentions for several months now, and the Radio Userland exipiration date is three weeks away. So, tonight, I decided to re-read the Radio Userland import instructions once more. Radio does keep nice archives, both in XML and in rendered HTML, for every post, but this sentence didn’t quite ring true for me.

The first thing to note is that Radio keeps per-monthly archive of postings in the backups/posts directory. I think this is enabled in the ‘Archives’ section of your Radio preferences.

At least on my Mac, the folder structure is Radio Userland > backups > weblogArchive > posts. The XML archives are not monthly and not in RSS format. Text manipulation isn’t my thing, so I’ll have to find another way to convert the existing XML to RSS, or get some help otherwise.

I should really set up a blog category so most of you can ignore this topic. Whenever it’s complete, I’ll make sure I update the instructions on the WordPress wiki with whatever tidbits I pick up along the way.

You know with Will Ferrell you’re going to get silliness, and I mean that in the best way. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy delivered… but I wish there was something in between the 5 minutes of a Saturday Night Live skit and the 90 minutes of a throwaway movie like this one. (I write that not having watched SNL in several years.) Actually, there is… it’s called The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Back to the point: I won’t go looking for Old School or the other Ferrell films. I smiled, but didn’t laugh out loud.

Thanks to Anil Dash, I got to enjoy Michal Levy’s visual imagination of John Coltrane’s Giant Steps (high bandwidth, Flash). You should, too.

The last of my trio of recuperation reads two weekends ago was Sharpe’s Havoc, set in the spring of 1809. I loved the calm before the storm of battle. Sharpe’s band of Rifles, about a score of men, are left on the wrong side of a river in Portugal as the British are retreating, and make their way to a rendezvous point off the beaten path. Through an improbable (but interesting) set of events, Sharpe and his troops are left alone on a large estate while French troops occupy the surrounding countryside and fight off the British and Portugese troops at other river crossings. In that incredible lull, Sharpe keeps his men busy reinforcing a hilltop as a haven in case of retreat. Of course, all their work is not in vain, and bravery is matched by foresight. And, later, revenge is well served when Sharpe pursues a traitor almost to the point of folly, in part to retrieve his prized telescope, a gift from Wellesley years ago in India. As always, parts of the tale verge on formulaic, but it’s a formula I enjoy like ice cream.

Time to ping the San Francisco Public Library for the next round.

Despite my intent, I read Sharpe’s Eagle out of chronological order. To keep the months and year marching along, I should have read Sharpe’s Havoc first. Oops.

Eagle was the first Sharpe book written, back in 1981, though it’s set in July, 1809. With this rip-roaring start, I understand why Cornwell kept writing about his rough-and-ready army officer for a score of books.

The Peninsular War is opaque to me, so I’m getting my history via my fiction. The one part which seems improbable — though I suppose it’s true — is how the French attacked at Talavera in massive columns of infantry, exposing themselves to withering musket and rifle fire without being able to properly bring to bear their own numerical advantage. The French did lose at Talavera, so I expect the basic facts are accurate, but I am curious to see if/when the French learned more effective tactics against the British army’s drill, and line fire. I’ve always considered that the French lost the Continent because (a) Napoleon burned his army out in Russia and (b) the economic/industrial might of Britain won through, just as the North defeated the South in the Civil War here in the United States. Without any real military knowledge, I didn’t consider that training and tactics could overcome numbers, if supplies and information were roughly equivalent. In all these books, castles and other fortifications of even recent vintage were no match for the artillery so integral to all these armies. Nothing like a game of leapfrog in the technology of war.

The only positive part about being sick two weeks ago was lots of reading time. I visited the library, picked up a trio of novels on reserve, and sank into the couch or bed the rest of the weekend.

Sharpe’s Rifles moved faster as a book than a television movie. Set in Spain in 1809, the strong, attractive female Spanish patriot from the television program didn’t completely match the young English woman from the book, who is slightly more than a sideshow. Surprise. The author, Bernard Cornwell, even notes that “This is the first of the TV programmes – and all the books that follow, except Sharpe’s Devil, are available on video or DVD.” By this point, though, I’m just glad to have Sharpe back in the thick of battle, even as I wonder what happened to the two years between the previous book and this one. I picked up a real history of Wellington at the library at the same time as the three novels, so I’ll have to dig a bit into the 1807-1809 timeframe.