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The girl, at 10 months, climbed the stairs on her own twice today. First time she’s gone all the way up. Of course, she doesn’t know how to come down, but so far, she hasn’t tried much, which is probably a good thing.

She’s also standing on her own a lot now, for 20-30 seconds at a time.

Not fascinating stuff to a broad audience, but since I don’t take notes anywhere else…

Not quite Office Space, but workplace humor all the same. All hail the mighty PPT. I read about ClickToAddTitle.com from Anil Dash, who’s more fixated on Excel’s opportunities. Too bad the PPT stakes stopped after three rounds. Maybe the new attention will renew the competition? (My favorite remains the Gettysburg Address.)

Salon has a wide-ranging interview with author Neal Stephenson. The emphasis is on his most recent work, The Baroque Cycle. I’m reading The Confusion, the second volume in the trilogy (my notes on Quicksilver, the first volume). A few quotes from the interview.

On the 17th century version of establishing authorship in the science realm:

Hooke, for example, when he figured out how arches work, published it as an anagram. He condensed the idea into this pithy statement: “The ideal form of an arch is the form of a chain hanging, flipped upside down.” Then he scrambled the letters to make an anagram and published it. That way, he wasn’t giving away the secret, but if somebody came along a few years later and claimed that they’d invented it, he could just unscramble what he’d published. He was establishing precedence.

On 17th century medical issues:

People get kidney stones still, but they don’t seem to get bladder stones anymore. I asked a couple of people why, and you get a vague answer like “changes in diet” or what have you. I think they rarely drank water. They were just drinking alcoholic beverages all the time. Nobody in the world drank water, except maybe Indians and people who lived in really pristine places. That’s kind of my pet theory: Every culture can be kind of defined by what they drink in order to avoid dying of diarrhea. In China it’s tea. In Africa it’s milk or animal blood. In Europe it was wine and beer.

On the overlap of science fiction and history:

There was a review of “Cryptonomicon” with a line in it that struck me as interesting. The guy said, “This is a book for geeks and the history buffs that they turn into.” I’m turning into one. I’m in this history book club, which is not all geeks but it’s definitely got some serious geeks in it. It’s been going for four or five years maybe. We’re all consistently dumbfounded by how interesting history is when you read it yourself compared to how dull it was when they made you study it in school. We can’t figure out why there’s that gap. I think they try to cover too broad a sweep at once so you never get down to the individual people and their stories. It’s all generalities.

On his writing process:

I was amazed to discover that you wrote these three 1,000-page books by hand, but some writers do say that writing by hand puts them in better touch with that kind of intuition.
I do it all on paper. I started that with the “Baroque Cycle.” “Cryptonomicon” is the last book I wrote typing it into a computer. I use a fountain pen. The entire thing is in longhand.

I’ve linked to the print/single-page version of the lengthy back-and-forth. I printed it. Also, requires either Salon subscription or sitting through one of the long ads. Worth the wait. Now I have to get back to The Confusion.

So, new RSS reader called PulpFiction is coming soon (May 15). And that post prompted Brent to detail some of what’s coming in the next release of NetNewsWire. No date promised yet, but sounds imminent.

I love that the developer of Shrook posted in the comments of the PulpFiction post. Lots of talk… it’s early yet, and even though I’m a NNW user and fan, I think web sites are going to challenge all this client software. We’ll see, won’t we?

Unlike the previous book, Free Flight, by Jim Fallows, is a joy to read. Instead of two months of staggered, sporadic efforts, I started and finished this book about the possibilities for general aviaton in a day. As a partial coincidence, I had enough time to read this book yesterday because I was flying home from Phoenix, on a commercial flight (the antithesis of general aviation). Total travel time was nearly five hours, including drives to and from the airport, and the waiting. Total time in the air was about 100 minutes.

Free Flight tells of two new airplane companies and their attempt to re-make flying, with support from NASA and a host of folks interested in bringing flight into the technological age. Cirrus Design and Eclipse Aviation are the focus, though not the only companies mentioned. This entrepreneurial pair jointly fill the role of Data General from The Soul of a New Machine (company struggles to get revolutionary product out the door). Fallows spends most of the book using these two companies to explain why flight has stalled, so to speak, and needs restarting. He also comes at the problem with an eye honed by years of looking at technological disruption, so my Tracy Kidder reference probably has more truth than I know. I’m not much of a flying buff, but I’m eager to see if the hub-and-spoke gets disrupted in my lifetime. One can only hope.

Disclaimer/FYI: I know Fallows a little bit from my time at The Atlantic.

Why not?

Empires in the Sun: The Rise of the American West by Robert Gottlieb and Peter Booth Wiley is a clunker. I borrowed the book two months ago from my father-in-law, who warned me it wasn’t perfect. It was worse than that limited recommendation. The idea of looking at Western history through the politics of water is solid. The six cities — San Francisco, Denver, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Los Angeles — certainly should make for an interesting history, especially focused on the 20th century. Oh well. Read Cadillac Desert instead. Less urban history, but the kind of synthesis you can only hope to come across a few times a decade. I only finished Empires in the Sun because we returned to Phoenix, so it was my chance to return the book, and I hate leaving a book unfinished, even if it’s not necessarily worth the time.

I often wake up before my kids. Sometimes, I get out of bed, come downstairs, sift through accumulated news and email, and type here. At every moment, I’m listening, wondering when either kid — or both — will be fully awake and no longer content to mumble away quietly. They cross the threshold of wakefulness at slightly different times most days, so as I type this, I don’t know whether I have two more minutes or twenty.

I like routines, but the minor uncertainty of this one is probably good for me. Life isn’t under my control, as much I like to believe that is so.

In 2001, the folks at Hypergene created a delightful thought piece, Amazoning the news. The presentation demonstrated the potential power in delivering the news with the same interactive threads that Amazon has woven throughout its commerce platform (and it is a platform). I read this piece three years ago, and I still harken back to it occasionally, trying to determine which ideas are most relevant today. (Answer: many of them.) Information presentation as practiced on news sites is shifting and improving, but fits and starts are still the rule.

Yesterday, Amazon introduced A9, its foray into search. Those of us in the interactive content business are still pushing our way through old paradigms. Amazon continues to avoid limiting itself, taking risks in spaces that are not obviously part of their core business of selling things. While they are using Google for some of the search results, I think the more interesting overall picture has Google and Amazon as two true internet platform companies. Operating systems, if you will.

Amazon going into search doesn’t seem that far-fetched, in some ways. They want to fulfill demand… how better to gauge demand than to watch the search traffic, even the supposedly non-commercial traffic. The data flow alone might be worth the expense. While their own site search probably served as a hard-fought proving ground, Amazon hired a search guru nearly 18 months ago, perhaps with this extension in mind.

The real question: will “Amazoning the news” come from… Amazon? Steve Yelvington reminds media companies to pay attention.

Is Amazon a media site or a retailer? The answer is “both.”

Earlier today, Mark Pilgrim took CNET to task for presuming to create YAML (Yet Another Markup Language). That was decidely not the case, but there was cause for confusion.

The culprit? An old feed, not RSS, which was mistakenly listed on the CNET Download.com RSS page and presented as if it were RSS, like the other feeds on the page. (Note: CNET Networks has many, many RSS feeds… start there and you should be able to find them all.)

Mark’s post and Tim Bray’s short note and Dave Winer’s post quickly drew attention from various folks. I asked someone to pull the links to the differently-formatted feeds and post a brief explanation while emailing Tim, Mark, and Dave. Thanks to Tim for acknowledging the correction, publicly and privately, and to Mark for pointing to Tim’s update.

This is the price to be paid for making mistakes in public. I guess I’m glad someone is paying close enough attention to call us on our mistakes. I’m sure we’ll make more! (Tangent: Bush couldn’t think of one mistake he’s made during the press conference last night? Not one?)

I must ask one thing, though… don’t you believe this “small pieces, loosely joined” world would spread even faster if the format(s) were named Hot RSS? (grin)
Mark’s faux badge is one step:
I’d go further, like the FeedBurner team: