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Vacation led me to take up Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series once more. I left off with Desolation Island, so next up was The Fortune of War, where Jack and Stephen start in England, lose their ship to fire east of Brazil, and are taken prisoners of war by the Americans (yes, it’s ~1812). Much of the tale is in Boston, a city struggling between some lingering loyalties to England and umbrage at the impressment of American sailors by the Royal Navy (one of the various reasons for the conflict). Trade and commerce have ground to a halt, which also adds to the ambivalence of the Bostonians. Aubrey and Maturin are, sequentially considered as spies, in part through the intervention of the French. Maturin, of course, is a spy, and after various urban actions, our heroes make their escape to a British ship blockading the harbor, with the aid of an American merchant. Not coincidentally, they bring out Diana Villiers, the long-time, capricious love of Stephen’s life. Villiers is one of the few female characters to get any true color in this series. She’s a bit of a high-flyer, and is not wholly sympathetic, which is all the more interesting. The book ends with a most honorable sea battle, where the British ship (amusingly named the Shannon) finally atones for the previous three losses to the American navy. This would be a harder book to pick up without foreknowledge of the characters, but most enjoyable to those already drawn in.

I would prefer to be sleeping, but instead I’m typing because I couldn’t fall asleep. Can I bore myself enough to put myself to sleep? An interesting philosophical discussion for another time. Right now, I’ll just try and catch up on 500-odd posts in NNW. Argh.

Don’t answer that. I missed posting, honestly. I even wrote a few book notes, which I’ll post this weekend, but since the desktop was sleeping, the email-to-blog feature of Radio which I’ve used successfully before was not effective. Good to be home again, even after two great weeks of leave/vacation.

Going to be quiet for a bit. And I have to return to (shudder) dial-up. Do you still have a modem?

Nothing like squeezing 50+ hours into four days of work to get you ready for vacation. I left things as tidy as possible at the office, and I found out about one of the coolest things I’ve seen: Remote Desktop Connection. I was recently upgraded to WindowsXP Professional on my office laptop. Now, after some quick assistance from a colleague, I have Remote Desktop Connection set up on my PowerBook. Fully functional control of my office desktop from my MacOS X machine (also available for other Windows machines, of course) means I only have to bring one computer with me… and it’s the one I prefer to use. At a later point, I’ll have to look into whether similar software exists to control my OS X desktop at home.

How to recognize blog software by its URL and, separately, deconstructing article URLs. Enjoyable reading for me. Scary, isn’t it?

How do you do it? I’ve got my rotating set of 4-5 passwords, one or two of which I try to use only in secure places, but it does get complicated when you need to remember one months later. We’re all still human.

For over two years, I’ve managed — first indirectly, then directly — CNET News.com Investor and a corresponding private-label financial website (and print) business, known internally as “Private Wires.” After several months of work, I’m pleased that our new arrangement has been publicly announced. CNET sold the private label business to Financial Content. In a very related move, FC will power CNET News.com Investor. My official quote on the latter development, from the release:

“We are committed to providing our readers late-breaking technology news and editorial coverage,” said John Roberts, Associate Vice President of Product Development, CNET News.com. “By partnering with FinancialContent, we extend our commitment to improve the user experience by providing integrated financial coverage of technology stocks.”

All true. It’s a better product for CNET, and for the customers who are migrating to FC… and I can now focus more on what’s important to me and the company: tech news.

Long review on a recent Nielsen/Norman Group report. I’m going to read this now. I already know I would love to read/hear Jakob’s response.

I don’t know if it is coincidental or not, but Tim Bray decided to write about metadata just days after Christopher Lydon’s interview with David Sifry, in which Sifry, too, spoke eloquently about the power of metadata. Bray hits a few notes I know from bitter experience, too.

Historically, the difficulty of collecting metadata at source has been generally large enough to outweigh the (potentially huge) benefits from collecting it.

(snip)

If you collect metadata by hand the most important lesson I’ve learned, is: Don’t try to collect too much.

Amen.