Blog

Matt Haughey encourages everyone with All Hail Bluetooth, a description of his recent phone upgrade. I have the same 12″ PowerBook, and this desktop Mac, but my cellphone is very 1999 (if that). I’m not in a hurry to switch, but I can see (more of) the appeal.

Jon Udell writes about the lack of margins in electronic documents. His blog post doesn’t add much, which is unusual… he often explores a theme or a tangent more fully there, which I appreciate.

Margins offer room for shared experience and interpretation. We’ve started using a Wiki as our shared project list and organic documentation tool. While it’s not a digital analog to the “scribblings” that Udell calls to mind, the informality — like email — seems to lower the mental barriers to participation. People jump in, with less concern over who “owns” a document. I enjoy the distributed, disjointed conversations that I follow, and sometimes participate in, via blogs and RSS feeds. However, teams need a more organic, less idiosyncratic medium for collaboration. So far, the Wiki feels right… and it gives us a bit of that extra shared space for passing along knowledge, small and large, that prompted Udell’s column.

Rare enough, but got a really good picture of the boy and I from a few weeks ago.

I’ve got both a blog and a Wiki going now at work, so maybe these rules will be useful. Skimming them, I see they are rules for externally-focused blogs and Wikis, but some things still apply inside the intranet.

Think I have it now.

Yup… now I just need to get things live.

I implemented monthly archive links quite easily yesterday, thanks to this Radio macro for monthly archive links. Thanks, Tweezerman.

…about the Macro errors. Hope to resolve them soon.

Tuesday morning: trying to fix Macro error.

Well, not quite, but at least the site finally updated again.

Do I know why? No.

Am I tempting fate by making some changes (adding Trackback, removing some badges, adding monthly archive links)? Yes.

Well, updates are still going through, and I like monthly links, but the Trackback addition is still problematic. The ping went out fine to at least one site, but for anyone who reads the site, rather than the RSS feed, there is a weird Macro error showing on the page. Turning Trackback on and off in the Radio prefs hasn’t changed anything in the display. I’ll dig a bit more, and then back to bed.

Posted to the Discussion group. We’ll see.

OK, so I saw the meme from Caterina on Michael Sippey’s site, so I’ll jump in.

The instructions:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

OK… nearest book is Curious George rides a bike. It does have more than 23 pages, fortunately (46). But there is only one sentence on the page, so counting sentences on successive pages, we find the following on page 25: He wished he had listened to his friend and kept close to the house.

Not bad as a summation of the plotline.

The next closest book was Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat’s Great Big Flap Book. Hmmm…

Go see Touching the Void. This documentary about a 1985 climbing expedition to Peru made me squirm in my seat. Since this is non-fiction, everyone in the theater must know the basic story. Basically, things go horribly wrong after the pair of Brits reach the summit of a never-before climbed ridge. Everyone survives, but only after enduring… well, too much.

For one of the pair, Joe, “too much” would include:

• breaking your right leg so badly the lower leg bones drive through the knee joint
• then being lowered down several thousand feet, 300 feet at a time, banging the broken leg repeatedly
• then hanging helplessly in the air after being lowered off a too-steep incline
• then falling 80-100 feet into a crevasse when your partner, Simon, cuts the rope (a desparate attempt to save his own life, which Joe has, for 20 years, defended)
• then lowering yourself further into a crevasse in the hope there’s an outlet
• then climbing out of the bottom of the crevasse (remember the leg? hard to forget)
• then spending three (!) more days sliding, crawling, dragging yourself down the mountain, glacier, and moraine
• then yearning for water to quench your thirst, but unable to eat enough snow to avoid being dangerously dehydrated
• then losing 1/3 of your body weight during the ordeal
• then making it back to the base camp and being hustled onto a donkey for a two-day ride back to the road, and a doctor

Sounds like a blast.

For the audience’s sake, the donkey ride isn’t in the movie. But everything else is, and while it was re-created, it sure felt real. Every time Joe falls during his final stumble/roll down the moraine, you cringe. And that’s without really having any conception of just how painful it must have been. How do you empathize with a near-death experience? I couldn’t… but I still squirmed.

A lot of the power of the film comes from the present-day, first-person accounts from Simon, Joe, and a third traveller who happens to stay at base camp for them. Joe obviously has the most to share, but Simon’s journey wasn’t easy, and he had to deal with the death of his friend. When the pair returned to England, other climbers pilloried Simon for cutting the rope to save his own life, but Joe defended the decision. The movie shows that Simon’s decision to lower Joe down the mountain in the first place was courageous.

The interview technique reminds me a bit of The Fog of War. All close-ups, straight on to the camera. Sometimes the voices and descriptions carried over the images, sometimes you watched their faces. It’s been 20 years, and the telling of it is quite matter of fact (“we were stuffed” seems to be a favorite expression). But the relatively quiet tone just underlines what a frozen, jarring hell it must have been, for Joe especially.

Now I have to decide whether to read the book from which the movie was made and try once more to understand and appreciate the extreme.