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The French Lieutenant’s Woman, by John Fowles, doesn’t fit my usual genres. Yes, the novel falls in the category of historical fiction, which I do enjoy. But I rarely appreciate author-to-reader discourses. Fowles’ postmodern flourishes distract from a decent tale of love and class in Victorian England, with a dollop of Darwin.

I grabbed this one off the shelf at the library because it was on one of those “you should read these books before you die” lists being promoted that day. Whoops. I had to renew it twice to finish it, and I’m glad to put it behind me.

Another one from a few weeks ago, Frederick Forsyth’s The Afghan is practically forgotten already. If you’re going to read Forsyth, it’s The Day of the Jackal or nothing. Slight exaggeration, perhaps, as there are other thrillers he’s penned worth your airplane ride… just not this one.

Almost a month has passed, but I don’t want to forget to mention Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Jared Diamond is unafraid to tackle the big topics. His blend of personal experience and lots of secondary research tells a persuasive story of how the environment underpins cultural success…and failure. This is the flip side of Gun, Germs, and Steel, where he explained why certain cultures “won” over others.

Collapse is more pessimistic. Still, he points out the “Red Queen” hasn’t run her race yet. There are warning signs in environments all over the world. Yet, there is also a rapid change in thinking and action on the environmental front going on in many parts of the world.

Whether progress can arrest (or even reverse) the damaging effects of the past decades and centuries is yet to be seen.

Metacritic gave this documentary a 61. I enjoyed Word Wars more than that. (IMDB link)

I’m not a Scrabble fanatic, but I’m a fan. This film following the competitive world of Scrabble through four players preparing for and competing in the National Championship isn’t a well-done as Word Play, or Spellbound, but if you liked either of those films, this is worth watching. It’s also not terribly long, which was part of the appeal last night.

Confirmation of the rumors started with typical Dick Costolo panache: “Unlike the rumor that FeedBurner is nearly code-complete on a multiplayer Wii edition, the blog posts, phone calls and conjecture about our future as part of the Google family tree are now officially true.”

What a great team and a great product. I first met Dick via Spyonit at a conference at the W Hotel in San Francisco back in 1999 (?). When the “fantastic four” (Dick, Steve, Eric, and Matt) re-emerged from their post-Spyonit-acquisition-induced-purgatory with FeedBurner, I was interested. I’m ashamed all we worked out for CNET was the Mobile Feed Reader (now gone), but so it goes. First blog post for FeedBurner: February 23, 2004. I’m not sure when the FB team would start the clock, but that’s 1194 days from first blog post to acquisition announcement (or 3 years, 3 months, 9 days).

Google looks pretty smart here, whatever the price. Congrats to all of FeedBurner.

Clearing out the inbox of various links, as part of a Saturday night cleanup. No promised connection beyond the simple fact these caught my eye and were “worth” more than a del.icio.us link.

• British history timeline, via Infosthetics.
• There are so many things I want to improve about this blog. First and foremost would be actually posting to it! But other cleanup items might include stats via a simple plug-in, or applying a new theme.
• Netflix guilt was sent by the wife. Northfork is only the most recent example of the problem.
• When I read that “Only Five Percent of Innovative Web Users Access Internet on Mobile Device” (study reported on back in late March), I feel so…innovative. Actually, I just am reminded that I’m a geek. My internet use on my Treo 650 is still mostly just filling time.
  

  Users perform an average of 3.3 online activities on their mobile device versus 13.4 activities on their laptop/desktop, reinforcing the fact that online activities have yet to migrate into the pockets of broadband users.

  Also, I pay a flat fee for Internet access, but I pay extra for SMS, so I lean towards email and the web for economic reasons, too.

• A more recent report tells us that “Americans Spend Half of Their Spare Time Online.” That calculation is based on this sad fact: “broadband users spend an hour and 40 minutes (48% of their spare time) online in a typical weekday.” Yes, there are just over 3 hours of spare time per weekday. (Is that with or without kids?) I wonder how much sleep is allowed for in that typical weekday? Here’s the source, but the report is not a free product, so no more details.
• I’m not really convinced here, but I enjoyed reading Platform Architect as a Network-centric Strategy all the same.
• Via Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools, I learned about Sheldon Brown’s Online Cycling Encyclopedia. I don’t do much of my own real work on my bicycles, but if I found time and inclination, good to have the resource. Do I need a computer in the garage, though? 😉
• Jeff Jarvis throws some ideas about the web “after the page,” where he really means home page. Maybe the Guardian column, edited down, was more cohesive. Otherwise, I didn’t hear anything new here. But I suppose it takes repetition for the message to sink in.
• A Washington Post article about How the Pentagon Got Its Shape is an excerpt from a book coming soon. I found the article on Slashdot; I don’t think I need the book. But the article outlines the way things moved quickly in a Washington on the edge of a formal commitment to World War II. (Nice Jungle Book allusion, too.)
• Via Virtual Economics, a reminder that demographics are destiny, in Herb Meyer’s speech “A Global Intelligence Briefing For CEOs,” given in February, 2006. Meyer is unknown to me, but the speech transcript credits him thusly: “Herb Meyer served during the Reagan administration as special assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council.” Regardless, short statements like this remind me of an Atlantic article.
  

  In Japan, the birthrate is 1.3. As a result, Japan will lose up to 60 million people over the next 30 years. Because Japan has a very different society than Europe, they refuse to import workers. Instead, they are just shutting down. Japan has already closed 2000 schools, and is closing them down at the rate of 300 per year.

  300 per year!
  While the general tenor of the article leans towards ominous, there is this tidbit near the end.

  There is no better place in the world to be in business and raise children. The U. S. is by far the best place to have an idea, form a business and put it into the marketplace. We take it for granted, but it isn’t as available in other countries of the world.

  Hmmm…life is pretty good here, despite the anxiety over how fast change occurs, and how little we seem able to predict. The whole speech is worth reading. The themes aren’t new, but the joint impact causes thinking. And that’s not bad.

• Paul Vixie on DNS Complexity leaves me wondering…what’s the point? We’re told it’s a problem, but not a problem. There are no prescriptions, just descriptions, at different levels of granularity. I’m interested in DNS now, even if I’m not an engineer… and I just didn’t understand what I was supposed to learn or think after reading this. Frustrating.
• Scott Karp shares that “CNN and Wall Street Journal Embrace Aggregation Of Third-Party Content” and I say… so? It’s not playing offense, it’s playing defense. I have experience leading these efforts at CNET in the past: July, 2004 or February, 2005. They were well-intentioned efforts, but never broke through for lack of commitment. Media organizations which operate on the (admirable) principle that their own content (thinking/reporting/writing/opinion) is worth other people’s time and money are not committed (business-wise or personally) to other people’s content. Yes, technology has made complementing your own content with other sources even easier (read: cheaper) in the last year or two. But it’s not a sea-change; it’s a few more fingers in the dike.

I got two emails on Tuesday from Google. Seems like Jeff Barr, whom I know a little bit got similar recruiting emails. Coincidence that all of this happened on Tuesday?

Unlike Jeff, now at Amazon, I’ve never spoken to Google about working there, so there was less dissonance, just surprise. Although I have several good friends at the company (and appreciate the referral) and a lot of respect for many of Google’s products and services, I’m captivated by my current job…and that was my reply.

I’m just thrilled to be in Jeff Barr’s class. 😉

The Lives of Others is the best movie I’ve seen since Amadeus. I won’t attempt to summarize, but I will share my comment regarding a story that starts in 1984: “It wasn’t that long ago.” See the film, and you’ll understand. Wow.

Metacritic score of 89, 54th on the all-time list. Admittedly, all-time doesn’t go back through the entire history of film, but still an interesting list.

Unbelievably, it’s been two weeks since this event. But so it goes.

A fortnight ago, the wife brought me to see Will Shortz over at Berkeley, as part of the Cal Performances series. The NYTimes crossword puzzle editor and enigmatologist extraordinaire just walked on stage, talked about the history of crossword puzzles, answered questions, and led the entire ~2,000 seat auditorium through a series of verbal puzzles. Nothing terribly hard, but his “Beat the Champ” game divided the entire audience into two ad-hoc “teams,” in an effective, polite, competitive game.

Maybe American culture is on the decline, but getting a collection of people together to simply enjoy verbal gymnastics makes me think we’re not all done yet.

Two days later, I soaked up the sun in the left-field bleachers at SBC / Pac Bell / AT&T Park watching the visiting Mets edge out the Giants in an afternoon game. Yes, I skipped out before the 9th to head back to work, but a pleasant afternoon. And I’ve been here long enough that this Yankees fan doesn’t think twice about rooting mildly for the now hometown Giants.

Still, if I had to choose, I’d go with Shortz and the rest of the word geeks again. 😉

The only really tough question is… what would my mother choose: watching her Mets win or quietly enjoying matching wits with the former Games editor, whose various puzzles have tickled her mind for at least two decades now? Mom?

Spider Robinson wrote a very solid Robert Heinlein book in Variable Star. I didn’t realize it was so new (Sept, 2006) when I picked it up at the library a few weeks ago. I’m rarely so up to date. 😉

Variable Star weaves in some faithful sci-fi themes: space colonies, not-so-friendly aliens, faster-than-light travel, and telepathy as the answer to faster-than-light communication. What was new to me was the label “Fermi’s Paradox” for the lack of intelligent life we’ve observed so far around the universe. “Where is everybody?” is the apocryphal question. This book, in the background, points out that you may not want to know the answer to the question.

These teasers aren’t doing it justice. It’s not a great book, but it was fun to read.