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Patrick O’Brian’s The Commodore handles one of the more challenging steps in Aubrey’s career: promotion. Simply put, if the author removes one of his main characters from the sea, it’s hard to imagine the result. Promotion in the Royal Navy eventually removes a captain from commanding a ship. First, the rising officer commands a small group of ships, but is master of none. Further advancement can mean the officer now commands from port. The Dilbert principle states: “The most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage — management.” In the early 19th century, a related process was at work: the better you ar at one job, the faster you are promoted out of that position. Of course, we’ve all seen evidence that this phenomenon is not limited to the past.

I’m going on at length about this career move because in C.S. Forester’s Hornblower novels, I found that the later books were less interesting because the protagonist, Horatio Hornblower, is one step removed from the direct action due to his high rank. The later novels are not bad, but they pale after the rip-roaring adventures of the young Hornblower. As Aubrey and Maturin age — and there’s three more volumes to cover — I want them still in the thick of daily sea life.

Note: if you want a plot summary, click that first link to the official site.

I’m driving to the Albany, New York airport on Sunday morning. As I enter the Northway (US 87) at Exit 30, my tenuous link to North Country Radio, the regional NPR group of stations, finally fades into static. So, I start the Seek experience. And I find eBay on the radio.

WOKO, 98.9 on your FM dial, offers The Sunday Morning Radio Flea Market from 7-11 each Sunday morning. I’ve learned since returning home that WOKO, out of Burlington, Vermont, is a country station, but I heard no music that morning. I listened to Lee Bodette (scroll to the bottom of the DJs page) answer the phone, listen to people rattle off their offer, and then move on to the next.

“Hi, I’m Christy from Keene. I’ve got a 1986 Thunderbird with 130,000 miles on it. New tires and nicely tuned by my father. $900 or best offer. My phone number is 555-1212.”

Lee repeats “Caller number 104, 1986 Thunderbird, phone number 555-1212.”

And on it goes.

Lee’s bio says: “I’ve been hosting the North Counrty’s [sic] largest Radio Flea Market for about ten years.” So, this has been going on for a decade, probably more. Decades? I’m not a big radio listener, but never heard the like before. And, possibly more interesting… are there others? Lee claims his is the North Country’s largest… are there smaller ones? I would think the network effect would make it the only one. There’s a reason eBay’s marketplace size hampers competitors. No reason same rules wouldn’t apply here.

The whole experience made me smile, and wonder what else I’m missing in the world. It also brought to mind William Gibson’s epigram about the future; how it’s already here, just not evenly distributed. I now have proof.

If so, read on. As I try and keep up with my reading, and blogging my reading, I got pretty excited by Booxter. A Mac OS X application for cataloging your book collections, Booxter seems to be a smart, focused, network aware application that does one thing — record your book collection — very well. I write “seems” because I just learned about it this morning and I don’t have time to experiment just yet… but I’m intrigued. Besides smart application of the online infrastructure that has sprung up around books, Booxter employs the iSight as a ‘scanner’ for ISBN #s. That’s just one of the many, many ways it offers to make a difficult, potentially dreary, task as painless as possible. The feature list offers export to a text file, which opens up a way to get the information onto a website… say, like a blog. I would think that tying an application that is already so network-aware to a website would be very compelling. In a similar vein, take a look at Guzzlefish.com for a collection management site for movies and music.

Seth Godin hardly needs an introduction if you’ve been paying attention to online marketing for the past decade, so I won’t bother. One of the books a colleague at work keeps in her “lending library” is Purple Cow, his penultimate book. Subtitled “Transform your business by being remarkable,” Purple Cow is in style a magazine article stretched into a book. (Here’s the free magazine excerpt.) A few basic points, repeated and illuminated, fill less than 150 small pages. Since I don’t need an O’Brian novel or a Clancy brick every time I start reading — who does? — the length is not a negative. Godin gets his point across and then finishes up with a bunch of Brainstorms, paragraph-length discussion starters. Godin is his own Purple Cow, which is actually pretty remarkable. Side note: has anyone since Telly Savalas made being bald a signature item like Godin?

I’m looking forward to being part of BlogOn on Thursday, as a member of the opening panel. I’m doing some thinking on the term “social media.” It’s not a term I’ve heard before this conference was put together, despite my general interest over the last several years in blogs and (more recently) Wikis. Am I missing something, or is this a recent coinage? We’ll all know more after Thursday and Friday’s conversations.

Maybe three more people will read this after following the link in my bio on the conference web page.

Another one gone.

The first book I picked up in late June on returning to San Francisco was The Wine-Dark Sea, number 16 in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series. I can see the end of the line, and that’s not a happy forecast. I should have written my senior thesis comparing the Hornblower novels to the Aubrey-Maturin novels. Not that I want to go back and do it again after all this time. Anyway, just a few more sea voyages with these old friends left.

Perhaps I’m the last man over the age of 20 never to have seen The Godfather. At least now I can say I’ve read the book. A good read… the story really moves along.

I keep meaning to see the movies but find that I’m not ready to sit down for several hours at a time to do so. DVDs and TiVo offer the possibility of stop/start, but I still prefer to see a movie in one sitting. Uninterrupted hours are a luxury, even during a week with the kids away. But now that I know the story, and not just the anecdotes that popular culture has passed along, I’ll have to add at least the first film to the Netflix queue.

Note: It’s just a coincidence that Brando passed away shortly after I read the book in June, right?

This housecleaning is endless.

• abecedarian was the Word of the Day on May 20. The boy fit the bill at the time, but he’s got it nailed by now.
• Jakob’s book list contains few I haven’t read, but I want to get to those few.
• Bad Hair? As Mice Attest, It’s Probably Not Your Shampoo is a NYT article which explains the whorl in my hair. The boy got it, too. We’ll see about the girl.
• Seth Godin on The Curse of Great Expectations includes “Who wants to know that they will never again be able to beat their personal best rowing time?” (Answer = not me.)
• Another tale of moving from MT to WP.
• A commencement address that appears to be real.

Bundles of links I’ve been collecting… but they’re not doing me much good in Safari, so here they are for all to peruse.

• ACM Queue on Enterprise Search, from April 2004. Collection of articles on the topic.
• Why 1998 Was The Turning Point For Newspapers is Vin Crosbie’s selection of the disintegration of New Century Network as the pivotal moment when newspapers started to diminish in importance.
• Jeffrey Zelmand on Production for Use, a reminder that function should drive form.
• Sad Adieu to College, and to Good Old .edu is a June 17 article from NYT about giving up your e-mail address when you leave school. With two teachers in the family leaving their schools this spring, I thought this article missed talking about more than students. Opportunity for GMail to break ground, even if Hotmail and Yahoo are way, way ahead.
• Putting e-mail in its place is a reminder that unplugging can help you get things done. True enough, but what if you keep your email as your To Do list and information archive? And putting everything in your blog doesn’t solve the problem, either.
• Website usability quiz, and I can’t believe I got only 8 out of 10 right. I blame Canada. 😉
• 101 ways to improve your news site should be turned into a quiz, and then used to grade current news sites. Of course, not every idea is applicable, but a feast of possibilities.
• maproom.org lives up to the name. Fas connection required beyond the home page.
• Rick Shaut works for the MacBU within Microsoft. ‘Nuff said.
• The History of San Francisco Bay Area Freeway Development includes plans from the 1940s and 1950s. Fortunately, many were not built. I guess SF didn’t have its own Robert Moses.
• Round 2 of Gurus vs. Bloggersover at Design By Fire.
• Jay Small posts his e-mail exchange with Staci Kramer concerning RSS: Values and limitations of RSS. I was quoted in the same article, but it was a mix of email and phone conversation, and while I might have emphasized different things, I’m fine with the end result.
• Blog software breakdown (chart), and here’s the explanation by the creator of the chart.
• . Or you can review Barry Parr’s choice of Top 10 free and cheap content management systems. Both were done in May, although unclear if they are still actively updated.
• A BlackBerry Throbs, and a Wonk Has a Date from the NYT in late May 2004. I have one, and I still believe it fits the initial description in the article: “an accessory with all the sex appeal of a pocket protector.” But I’m married with two kids, so what do I know?
• Separation: The Web Designer’s Dilemma on A List Apart. A bit abstract-like, but ALA is usually worth a read.
• In-depth blog review of the architecture of the new Seattle library. With the title“Brutal” Architecture, you might guess that it’s not complimentary.
• Transcript of the Syndication Nation panel at Supernova, courtesy of Heath Row of Fast Company.
• Anil Dash’s proposal on learning from experience. As someone who once tried to create a site called iventing.com as a ‘business,’ I’m all for constructive methods for criticizing and then improving the world. Note: site is all gone but for a few lingering T-shirts. True dot-bomb, but at least it was never more than an evening hobby, pre-kids.
• Tim O’Reilly on The Open Source Paradigm Shift. I think I’ve read previous versions of this, since he notes he’s given this talk maybe 20 times in the last year or so. But good to have an ‘authorative’ copy.
• Engadgeter = a fan application. Better than fan e-mail, even!
• More reports of bloggers switching to Word Press.
• Google “proof” for the hypothesis that “men have baggage, women have issues.”
• Inside SSH, Part 2 would probably be more helpful if I read Part 1 first.
• Nothing like aiming high. Dan Bricklin on Software The Lasts 200 Years. We can only hope.

Note: I can’t imagine setting up a separate linkblog, even as much as I love the idea of everything in a database.

Nearly a month ago, I took advantage of a train commute to read The Rule of Four.

There have been plenty of references in describing (read: hyping) this book to Umberto Eco’s novels, but those are only true in genre. While this tale is also a present-day mystery centered around a historical document/investigation, The Rule of Four has none of the enticing (and maddening) depth of Eco’s The Name of the Rose or Foucault’s Pendulum.

I found Pendulum to be one of the best and most frustrating books I’ve ever read. It builds in richness through the first half of the book, mixing story-telling and inventive use of history… but then the rest of the book drove me nuts, because the story dribbled out. The Rule of Four is much more about the story, which is why it’s a quick read. The historical sleuthing that goes on is inventive, but at times it seems too easy, despite the backstory of years of work that is sketched in. I liked the book, but pick it up as a fun mystery read, not an Eco-like exercise of the mind.

I did love one line, though.

The delicious futility of impossible tasks is the catnip of overachievers.

Almost too epigrammatic, but still a fun phrasing and idea.

Note that the website has more than the usual material… they’ve created a game centered on historical sleuthing, via the web, intended to mimic some of the brainteasers and linguistic code-breaking described in the book. I haven’t tried it, but I’m intrigued.