Blog

I haven’t had a chance to return my father’s phone call from yesterday because I’m getting home too late to call him. He’s on the East Coast, 3 hours ahead of San Francisco. I grew up on the East Coast, so ET is still internally in my head at (seemingly) all times, even though I’ve been in SF for seven years now. Given the dominance of East Coast prime time in setting network TV schedules, I wonder if it matters where you grew up — do most Americans have a sense of ET all the time? Do they always know their offset from ET? I watched a fair bit of TV as a kid, so maybe if you didn’t, you weren’t caught up in this mental time zone. And I imagine that as TV becomes more scattered (and, in some instances, less dominant), both in channels and timing, thanks to TiVo and other PVRs, this sense of what time it is other than where you are will diminish. Or maybe it’s just me. I dearly love that NFL football games are on at a reasonable hour out here; how does anyone on the East Coast stay up for Monday Night Football?

Rajesh Jain writes about his mental mode of an ‘open source company’. I find myself fascinated by the idea of a truly transparent company. I find myself enjoying reading work weblogs even more than personal weblogs in part because for many of them it humanizes the company whether it’s a company of 55,000 like Microsoft or a company of 2 like Ranchero. Of course, I don’t kid myself that one person’s view is reality… but it’s more than I would know otherwise. I have not read much of David Brin’s work on transparency, but I know he was speaking more broadly than just about the corporate world. Still, transparency has other meanings/intents… think about the growing (temporary?) push towards transparency in accounting, given the latest wave of scandals. Can you effectively run a small company out in the open? Yes. A medium-size company? Hmmm… A large company? No one has had time to even attempt it yet.

A gazetteer with many fun links, courtesy of David Galbraith, who found the link via Research Buzz.

I don’t, publicly. Just an internal blog. If I did want to blog at work, I’d follow the links from this page and see if I’ve missed anything.

I read part of this NYTimes review of digital learning devices, like the LeapPad, which the boy has and enjoys from time to time. Other alternatives mentioned here, although from a quick scan, sounds like the LeapPad is still leading the pack.

…of the study for a few nights, as we try and get the girl over her cold and prepared to sleep in the crib in the same room as the boy. I’ll use that as my excuse for lack of postings. The ratcheting up of my workload at the office plays an indirect role, too. It’s a short stretch to the bigger holidays, but it’s going to be a busy period.

I forgot to mention that we got the iChat AV working wonderfully with the iSight and our Canon DV camera on two different computers in the same household. Good incentive to upgrade to Panther, so now we’ll see how long it takes my sister to upgrade her computer in Brooklyn.

Also, once I found the right setting, the VPN software in Panther just works. That is so nice. I don’t know if I’ll ever undock the ThinkPad at work again, thanks to Remote Desktop Connection client for MacOS X. Maybe it’s time to ask for a cheap desktop with more power, since I swear I can hear the 3+ year old ThinkPad CPU heating up now and again.

Cousins were over for casual pizza dinner tonight, and I sent the boy into the living room to ask his uncle whether he would like a Sam Adams or a Hefeweizen. He got the whole question out wonderfully, and returned to me in the kitchen with a coherent answer (the latter). I handed him the correct bottle, and he delivered it with aplomb (two hands, no running). Is this why you have children? One of the reasons. ;-p

On Wednesday, I went to see Master and Commander, The Far Side of the World (warning: this website brought my computer to its knees… is Flash the culprit?), the first movie made using the Aubrey-Maturin characters from Patrick O’Brian. I read Master and Commander long before I started writing here; here are my notes on The Far Side of the World. Since the title derives from the first and the tenth in the 20-volume series, I was curious to see how the melange would come to life.

The movie’s plot pulls more from the tenth book, although I felt like various incidents were plucked from the intervening novels (but too hard for me to check). Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are clearly well acquainted in the film, and the naturalist instincts of Dr. Maturin are a known quantity amongst all HMS Surprise’s crew. I found the movie well done, but not compelling. With O’Brian, so often the anticipation of action or discussion of strategy demands more attention than any battle ever does. In that way, the books feel true to the pace of life. The movie did not ignore that in-between time, to the director’s credit. There are various interludes which, taken as a whole, probably fill the movie more than the three encounters with the French privateer which ostensibly drive the plot. The action, however bloody and true-to-life, is just more bang and crash. And bang and crash in this day and age is a losing measure… what does the 18th century have to counter Terminator, et al? That said, the personal details (an amputation of a young teen officer’s arm, the sewing of sailcloth around corpses, and the like) did bring the brutish nature of the time and the Royal Navy more to life than anything else.

I hope the movie does well at the box office, enough so that another installment is forthcoming. The ending left all possibilities open, of course. I didn’t love the movie, but I’m glad someone is trying.

Rajesh Jain at Emergic cites a NYTimes article about the sudden interest in Friendster and other community sites (yes, we’ve been down this road before… anyone remember SixDegrees and TheGlobe?). From the article:

When two people greet each other on the street, neither can see (nor hope to grasp) the range of the other’s social network. For that matter, no individual can see information about his or her own social network: who knows whom, and how. Friendster offers a mix of architecture-changing tools and technologies: e-mail, a profile (which offers a persistent presentation of self) and a coarse representation of a social network.

Jain doesn’t call it out here, but I think the elusive chimera here is how to represent and display depth. For a news website (say, News.com), you view one story at a time, but there are tens of thousands of articles from 1996 through 2003. How, from that one story, do you get a sense of the authority that depth of coverage can convey? (Hint: the NYTimes has the same problem, which explains why brands do matter.) A millisecond glance at a book tells you how deeply it attempts to cover a subject, but a website is worse even than a newspaper or magazine in its difficulty in expressing its place in the tapestry of information. Friendster and LinkedIn and these other social networking sites are trying to draw the (ever-shifting) map of ‘alliances’ between and among people. This depth is false and illusory, but that the space is even being mined is fascinating. Still not a business (despite the influx of funds), but fascinating.