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The library “books you should read” table got me again. No complaints about this one, though.

John Le Carre is a known entity, but not to me. Smiley’s People is my first Le Carré read, though I did catch a recent movie.

Despite missing the first two books of the trilogy, I fell in with Smiley’s return to old territory and previous fights. For such an inward-looking book, Smiley keeps his distance. While we’re privy to his thoughts, Smiley is always “he” not “I’ — we just happened to be privileged to secret information. Not all, and not enough, but closer to the veil than others. The action picks up throughout the story, and Smiley does move about notably for an old spy (supposedly retired by this time). Still, it’s Smiley’s memories which slow him down the most.

I didn’t lean in at first, but I was eager to finish the book over the Thanksgiving break, so the tale clearly grew on me. I’ll have to decide whether to delve in at the beginning.

The post-Thanksgiving tradition continues. I ran the 5K in the Run Wild event this morning. A month ago, I was targeting the 10K, but a few weeks out of commission due to a back strain left me less confident of my fitness, so I stayed with the familiar.

I finished in 18:46 officially, 29th place overall out of 1,715 runners and walkers. Seventh place among the M30-39 age group, with a 6:03 minutes per mile pace. My hand-timed finish was two seconds faster, but what you gonna do? 😉

First mile out Golden Gate Park and east along the north side of the Panhandle, 5:50. Second mile, all along the Panhandle, including the turn back west, 5:55. For the final 1.1 miles, mostly in the Park, and finishing right in front of the De Young Museum, across the street from the new California Academy of Sciences, 6:58 (which equates to ~6:20 pace).

This extremely local race, on a weekend we rarely travel anymore, is part of the routine.

• 2006: 18:57 (same course, same finishing 1.1 miles, but I held my pace better in the 2nd mile this year)
• 2005: 18:53 (can’t remember course)
• 2004: 19:33 (can’t remember course)
• 2003: 29:55 for 5K, ran with my sister, pushing the boy in the jogging stroller (blog started in March 2003)
• 2002: 39:05 for 10K
• 2001: 39:24 for 10K

I have a lot to be thankful for. I’d like to add a clean inbox to the list, so time for a link smorgasbord.

Randy Pausch’s video lecture is old news, but I haven’t set aside 90 minutes to watch it. Everyone who has says it was worth it.

California is still the #1 state where people want to live, according to a Harris Poll published in early October. San Francisco trails NYC, San Diego, and Seattle as cities people want to live in. San Diego? It’s a neat place, but I wouldn’t have put it so high as a city.

Anil Dash provided some history on interactive platforms, reviewing everything from AOL’s RAINMAN to Microsoft’s Blackbird in the context of Facebook’s surge of applications. Since I started on AOL in 1993 and almost contributed to eWorld, happily missing Interchange and other doomed “online services,” this history is part of my history, too.

Scott Karp shared his thoughts on media consolidation in a world changed by online creation and consumption.

Nothing too new in this interview with the two leaders of Craigslist, but always helpful to be reminded that utility can win.

Seven rules of social media is from Chris Willis of Hypergene. There’s a PDF there I haven’t looked at, but the blog post is a useful abstract.

Links to two videos about information. Or direct to A Vision of Students Today and Information R/evolution.

(My son just asked me what I’m doing. I told him I’m blogging. He said, “What’s blogging?” I told him it was writing a journal that’s shared online. He’s laughing as he watches me type this. Moving on…)

I’ve done some of these steps towards keeping track of all financial accounts, but not all.

The upgrade to Leopard is still in the future, but a detailed history of Mail.app and its email precursors on the Mac is interesting. I won’t make time for the exhaustive review of Leopard.

Via Slashdot, this 40th anniversary remembrance of LOGO caught my eye several weeks ago. I had a similar experience in elementary school, and also learned BASIC, but never fully embraced programming. I’m still intrigued, though. Looks like Scratch is a similar introduction to combining logic and rules in an interactive manner. Not sure when it’s appropriate to try these things with the kids…they’ll spend plenty of time with computers no matter what.

Anil Dash (again) points to a tasty tidbit: Getting Real: Reflecting on the New Look of National Park Service Maps. Sure, it’s five years old, but I missed it the first time around.

I’ve never cared about Dopplr, but neat thinking all the same.

Nine minutes of financial humor, via pmarca.

I wonder about the Associated Press (AP). The CEO of the AP , and his speech was annotated by Henry Blodget.

Slashdot is 10 years old, and the same folks are involved, so they’ve shared a bit of the history. Here’s part 4.

Point systems in communities can work wonders, or disasters. Ben Brown of Consumating shares his experiences with “I Love My Chicken Wire Mommy.” That’s one post in an ongoing series.

I never do anything with image tools, but glad to see people are still creating new ones, and spending abnormal amounts of time reviewing them. (No, I didn’t read this whole thing. DrawIt was the recommended choice of the three reviewed here.)

Content management systems for publications that cross media (which is, by the way, almost all media now) still consider print first. Someone thinking about college newspapers discusses this problem, and some ideas. I’ve run into this in the past. Beyond workflow, the problem also lies in not atomizing your content enough to help translation to a new display be workable. Sure, the elusive separation of content from presentation rarely happens…but it helps when you think in the smallest elements possible. It takes more than a new CMS to do that; it takes a new kind of thinking about how you write and create. But a CMS can shape the outcome.

I don’t read the Dilbert Blog often, but there is an economic question here:

For some reason this reminds me of one of the great mysteries of life: Why do attractive women pay for massages? For most of us, there’s a good reason we pay another human to rub us for an hour. If we didn’t offer money, or reciprocate with some rubbing of our own, no one would take the job. But if you are a hot woman, lots of people would volunteer to spend an hour rubbing your nearly naked body for free. So in a sense, an attractive woman isn’t paying for the same thing everyone else is. For her, the massage is always free, and she’s paying someone to pretend it isn’t.

I was linked to this from an economics blog. Really.

Enter this video in the category “I’ll never do, but fun to watch.”

Sure, it’s a tough time in the residential real estate market, but there’s still room for innovation: WalkScore.com. We almost hit the high end of the scale.

I didn’t know Steven Berlin Johnson was involved with Outside.in (which I’ve heard about, but not used). When I think to the fire on McAlister in January, his ruminations on The Pothole Paradox make a lot of sense. Not impressive, though, that when I load the site, I get told I’m in Oakland. Better not to guess than guess wrong, even when it’s easy to switch.

I’ve already bookmarked Frenzic as an iPhone game.

Neat infographics of baseball pitches will further your fan education.

I choose to spend less time posting my wit and wisdom (?) here at clock. But some themes of interest remain constant.

For instance…

I had a lot to say about TimesSelect when it was introduced in September 2005. Two years later, when the wall came down, my first inkling came from this blog post. The only place I’d really bumped into the pay wall regularly was on the mobile version of the Times, which is wonderful on the iPhone, even at EDGE speeds. The Wall Street Journal will drop its pay-wall, too, in the near future, according to Rupert Murdoch, its incoming owner. Long live advertising revenue… right?! (Note to CNET News.com — stop separating your search results for news items and blogs, especially since your blog items have surged in volume in recent months.)

RadioShift and the radio SHARK 2 combine to make me consider pulling my original radio SHARK out of the drawer. When the device finally arrived in September 2004, I was disappointed by the lack of a workable, integrated guide. Just a few months later, I noted that I had abandoned the Shark because of that gap. Since I started using the iPhone’s iPod capabilities, I actually have a renewed interest. Maybe RadioShift is the answer.

More inbox cleaning to come…

Fifteen years after the author signed it, I finally finished The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley (1874-1958); An Epic of Urban Politics and Irish America. Read a little on Google Books if the topic interests you.

The author, Jack Beatty, was a senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly during my time there. This was his first book. Every employee got a copy, and Jack was kind enough to sign it, even though I was then a part-timer, working on special advertising sections. For that note of kindness, I’ve kept this book on my “to read” pile for much longer than any dim interest in Boston’s political history would have done.

Still, the biography is a good one, about topics I knew very little about: Boston’s political history, the rise of the Irish politician, and Curley himself. Five times Mayor of Boston, once Governor of Massachusetts, and even a US Congressman, Curley abused the system. But his personal charisma, energy and exploitation of politics which can only be called tribal were enough to make him larger than life. I haven’t read or seen The Last Hurrah, which in its re-telling of Curley’s tale made his flaws and triumphs legendary. Curley did cross paths with every notable politician from Roosevelt to Kennedy, though being indicted twice never really helped his aspirations to rise beyond Massachusetts. 😉

I’m always impressed when a well-done magazine excerpt sharpens my anticipation of a book, rather than removing the need to read the full-length work.

I first read about Michael Oher in Sports Illustrated (Sep 25, 2006). Michael Lewis’s full book The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game goes deeper and broader, to great effect.

The game is American football. The blind side is the quarterback’s vulnerable side, the left side for the right-handed quarterback. Lewis traces how Lawrence Taylor and Bill Walsh, from different angles, raised the value of the offensive lineman most responsible for protecting the blind side, the left tackle.

Michael Oher is, quite literally, a very large example of the trend. As a high school kid, he was huge and agile, and those two attributes in combination changed his life for the better. The story of that change is remarkable.

While I enjoyed Moneyball and other Lewis accounts, The Blind Side made me care a lot more. Without preaching — but with a clear point of view — Lewis demonstrates how capricious American life can be. Lewis only learned about Michael Oher because he happened to go to elementary school with Michael’s adoptive father, and rightly points out how many Michael Ohers are lost to the disadvantages placed in front of them.

Lewis contributed a related piece to the New York Times last week, Serfs of the Turf, advocating that colleges pay their football players. His research into and continuing interest in the story of Michael Oher informs this viewpoint (not a new one).

Looking for a bit of light fun on a Friday evening, our thoughts turned to The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Great call. After enjoying Steve Carell in Dan in Real Life recently, and laughing endlessly at Knocked Up this summer, it was a blessing to not have seen this Apatow film yet. Just moved Superbad to the top of the Netflix queue… DVD is available in December.

So much of this humor is crude, in a “I can’t believe they just said that” way, but so spot on all the same. And, it’s real in a “I wish I could come up with a line that funny, even if I wouldn’t say it out loud” way.

Maybe it won’t stand out over time, but it’s a cultural fit right now. And there are some time-tested themes, so Metacritic’s 73 feels a few points low.

No Country for Old Men is bleached with violence. But the menace remains, so the gore doesn’t deaden you to the story. I haven’t read Cormac McCarthy’s book, but the Coen brothers certainly know how to make a movie which doesn’t feel like anything you’ve seen before.

The Texas countryside is beautiful, but blasted by sun and wind. The characters continue on set paths, with no deviation or options. Still, your interest in the pursuit remains, even if you know how it will all end. The only disappointment was the final five or ten minutes, where Tommy Lee Jones demonstrates how he’s lost his way, retiring from the sheriff job which has been his whole life. The film drifts off, too. It’s very deliberate, but I glanced at my watch during this sequence. Overall, though, there’s no looking away from a powerful, interesting movie.

Jones is, by the way, perfect for the role. At times, you wonder if he’s acting, or just doing a riff on local history, since he was born in Texas, and lives there now.

Metacritic delivers an expected high score: 91.

Last week, we saw Dan in Real Life, with Steve Carell and Juliette Binoche. Metacritic only cites a 65 — but I enjoyed this film. Family story, with humor coming from small realities and inter-family dynamics that really never change once they get set early on. People grow up, but that doesn’t mean they change. I’m not doing justice to the humor, though. See this movie. Doesn’t have to be on the big screen, though.

Two side notes. First, the relatively short length was appreciated. Second, the music fit. From scanning the soundtrack, seems like most of it was written expressly for the film. I didn’t love every note, but enjoyed the marriage of picture and sound.

We went to see Michael Clayton a few weeks ago. George Clooney does a good job. The plot is more of a foil for a character study, though. Clooney’s struggles with his role as a frustrated lawyer in a “fixer” role, and his less-than-simple family life, pluck more interest than the case at the heart of the film. (Synopsis: big agro/chem firm covering up a dangerous product. Think Constant Gardener without Africa.) An 82 is a strong Metacritic score… a touch too strong for me.