Month: January 2007

Excellent Life-Blogging segment on NPR “On the Media”

While driving to the airport this morning at dark o’clock I listened to a rerun of a show I heard Friday night while driving home from the airport. It was a profile of Gordon Bell, senior researcher at Microsoft (and the man behind the VAX architecture at DEC as VP of R&D) and his efforts to log his life using a unique camera which hangs around his neck and snaps a shot of whatever he is looking at every minute. He calls the project MyLifeBits.

Here’s a link to his presentation on the subject.

Bell is working on software to help organize every photo, every conversation, every image from his life. This is more than blogging taken to an extreme, it has significant ramifications for Alzheimer’s victims and people who suffer from memory issues.

The big question is how to store and protect a life’s worth of digital artifacts. I grow more and more paranoid as I move my life into Flickr, my unstable WordPress blog, and other online assets and storage bins. Time to start looking at a broader scale backup plan.

I like On The Media very much.

Arrington on Bubble economics

Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Bubble, Bubble, Bubble

Good observation by Mike Arrington on the state of affairs in the web indy these days, what with a dead IPO market, and a lot of money chasing very few good ideas.

I particularly like his point that Web 2.0 principles (whatever they may be I leave to your imagination) can conspire to bash down barriers to entry for copycats and competitors. I  assume he is positing open standards, data portability, etc.

But even in this new reality, we’re seeing what looks like way too much money chasing too few good ideas. And when someone does have a good idea, all of the principles of Web 2.0 work to destroy competitive barriers companies try to put in place to protect their business (See Todd Dagres of Spark Capital make this argument recently in the Wall Street Journal).

So when we see a few companies fall, people run for the hills.

But I disagree that Web 2.0 companies cannot become sustainable businesses. The Network Effect is still the most powerful force driving Internet success today. People don’t, for example, go to Digg because it has great software. The original Digg, as launched, cost Kevin Rose less than $2,000 to create. Anyone can create a Digg clone, and many have. The reason Digg is, and will continue to be, successful is because of the community it has created. People go to Digg because everyone else goes to Digg, and every new user who submits stories and/or votes occasionally adds value to the whole network. The Network Effect is also driving Facebook’s success, and YouTube’s. None of these companies have interesting software. All of them have an incredibly valuable community. All of these companies have to work hard to keep their lead, but it is nearly impossible for new entrants to catch up.

Weather alarm

I discovered a great new blog last month, Walking the Berkshires, by Tim Abbott, a conservationist writing from the northwestern corner of Connecticut in Litchfield County. He’s a great, elegaic writer, and I found him while googling on an invasive seaweek species called codium, aka “deadman’s fingers.”

Abbott captures in a post the sense of alarm I have this sunny January afternoon with temperatures more suited to the middle of May than the beginning of winter. He notes:

“Yesterday the temperatures in the Litchfield Hills hovered around 60 with a warm, soaking rain. Last night might have kicked off the spring amphibian migration. Today the sun is warm and the temperature on the shady side of my house is 66 degrees. These would be welcome signs of spring in late February, but this is the first week of January. Something is terribly wrong.

There are daffodils pushing up new growth in frost-free ground. These are not the new bulbs I planted last fall that shot up in November and have failed to die back. They are well established, and are responding to the unusual warmth and moisture in the soil as if Spring were just around the corner and not 11 weeks away. There are soft green buds on the lilacs. We have not had more than a brief dusting of snow all season.

Most ominously, the sugar maple in our back yard is weeping sap from the drill holes of a woodpecker and ants swarm at the openings. The sap is rising on 12th night. Last year the first run came unusually early in late January. This was my post at that time on what I feared was a sign of things to come. My fears seem to have been justified. This is no January thaw. In very significant ways, we have simply bypassed winter.”

While walking with my wife yesterday, I expressed my concern that the June-like weather would cause some specific issues. Like the spring amphibian migration — the spring peepers that are a harbinger of more clement weather, could, in theory, come out and start their songs only to get hit very hard by what inevitably will be a return to solid sub-freezing temperatures. My lilacs are budding. Snapdragons left in the flower beds are thriving. Sweet peas are climbing the trellis, and sure, while it is nice to sit in the kitchen on a January night with friends with the windows open, it is still very odd to step outside in shirt sleeves and look up at Orion’s Belt and feel something disconcerting — that constellation is usually viewed while bundled to the max with a cloud of breath fogging the night air.

I’m not going to wade into the global warming issue. I believe it is real, I get perturbed by those who dispute it, and I worry about the size of my “carbon footprint.” And as more and more people say, “If this is global warming, then I’m all for it,” I can’t help but agree and not miss 48″ blizzards, $600 a month heating oil bills, and clenching my teeth as I drive to the market for a bottle of milk while slipping on black ice.

Check out Abbott’s blog. I like his stuff.

Whereabouts 1.7-1.15

Today: 1.7, Cotuit for some R&R and catchup on some projects. Spring-like weather makes outdoors the draw today

Monday 1.8: up at 3 am to make a 6 am flight to RTP via JFK. Meetings in and around RTP

Tuesday 1.9-1.11: RTP, meetings, meetings, meetings

Thursday 1.11: return to Cotuit

Friday 1.12: working from home

Saturday-Sunday 1.13-14: Cotuit

GTD – Inbox hygeine

Doubtlessly a lot of people are entering the New Year with some vow to do a better job managing their inbox. I know some very meticulous people who refuse to end the day with an email lingering in their inbox,  I know some people who use their inbox as a historical archive of everything from spam to hot action items.

I work for an organization that caps inbox capacity and sends warnings to disable functions if my mail file isn’t cleared out below a half-gig limit. There are various Lotus Notes utilities for archiving and saving attachments, but the entire inbox management thing is stressful, the source of a lot of corrosive anxiety on my part about mails unanswered and space limits exceeded.

One habit I have been using for the past few months is to declare flying time the period when I go in and manage my inbox. I have attempted to use subfolders to sort mails, have wrestled with various organization rules to automate that sorting, but in the end I just go through a process of quickly previewing old mails, and making a quick David Allen – Getting Things Done decision to delete, reply or delegate as opposed to sort and store.
I set Notes on “Island” or disconnected mode and start weeding through the file, replying to mails that need replys, forwarding others to delegate, and deleting the rest.  When I land, I make my connection, switch to online mode, replicate, and voila, have a “clean” inbox.

Yet it never feels clean.

I have yet to get the courage that I once heard Guy Kawasaki claim when he told me that deleted his whole inbox every now and then with a simple block select and delete combo. His feeling was if there was something truly important or life threatening in the past, it would come back to haunt him.

I wish I had that courage as I get close to today’s date. Even in weeding down from 1000 to 300, I see that a ton are still sitting there, records of important stuff that I need to transfer out of Notes into a better archive. I have been blocksaving out of Notes into OneNote, but that doesn’t feel right either.

What’s your trick? How do you cope? Are you an inbox slob or an inbox anal-retentive?

Merlin Mann at 43 Folders has written the FAQ on what he calls “Inbox Zero” 

Valleywag’s Second Life takedown continues

AVATARS IN THE NEWS: A guide to Anshe Chung – Valleywag

Denton has brought Valleywag back from near death by making it one of the best, most caustic, and piercing critiques of the stupidity that reigns online. From their latest in their incessant coverage of Second Life hype, is this wonderful line:

“And marketing consultants, in their constant search for empty novelty, and easy press coverage, have talked their more credulous clients into substantial expenditure on in-world campaigns.”

Those consultants are the ones I addressed back in November. Go away. I don’t do “new” for the sake of newness.

I wish the world had a del.icio.us account

I live in del.icio.us. I tag with the tool like a compulsive maniac, I want to use it to share stuff, anyway I can, with everyone I know.

But not everyone is there yet.
If you want to share links — I am “dchurbuck” — please join my “network.”
If you want me to share them with you, please get an account.

Here’s the official FAQ:

“del.icio.us is a collection of favorites – yours and everyone else’s. You can use del.icio.us to:

  • Keep links to your favorite articles, blogs, music, reviews, recipes, and more, and access them from any computer on the web.
  • Share favorites with friends, family, coworkers, and the del.icio.us community.
  • Discover new things. Everything on del.icio.us is someone’s favorite — they’ve already done the work of finding it. So del.icio.us is full of bookmarks about technology, entertainment, useful information, and more. Explore and enjoy.

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website — the primary use of del.icio.us is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere, too. On del.icio.us, you can use tags to organize and remember your bookmarks, which is a much more flexible system than folders.

You can also use del.icio.us to see the interesting links that your friends and other people bookmark, and share links with them in return. You can even browse and search del.icio.us to discover the cool and useful bookmarks that everyone else has saved — which is made easy with tags.

All you need is a browser and an internet connection. Sound good? Here’s how to get started. If you’d like to find out more, keep reading.”

Translation services

I’m blogging from a meeting where global translation services are being discussed. I’ll get into some depth on the topic in a future post. But for now, I want to grab the projector cable and show this classic to my colleagues on the perils of bad translations.

Engrish

Fool me once …

Last summer I was leaving RTP for the flight home to the Cape and did my obligatory 3:30 pm quick stop at the Shell station on the corner of Rte 54 and Miami Blvd. to top off the tank and spare myself the $9 per gallon gouging the rental car agencies hit the clueless with when they return with less than a brimming tank.

I popped into the mini-mart for a bottle of water. On my return to the car a nice looking lady towing a forlorn looking six-year old came up to me and told me a roadside story of woe.

“I hate to bother you but my son and I are traveling to Fayetteville to see my husband who is home on leave and our car has broken down and AAA would only tow us as far as this gas station and we need money to get the alternator replaced but Traveler’s Aid won’t give anything but a reference to a battered woman’s shelter….”

She started crying. Honest to sadness tears of frustration and heat. She totally convinced me. Nailed me. Me, the man who knows how to repel Manhattan bums with Churbuckian mind bullets. A guy who tells panhandlers on the subway: McDonalds is Hiring.

I gave her a twenty. Her face lit up. She was happy. I was happy. I’ve never parted with more than buck in the past, but a twenty? I drove away thinking: “Dude, you just got taken down.” But I felt Christian and all eelemosynary and Mr. Pay-It-Forward-Like. It felt good. I felt special.
Tonight, same Shell Station. Get out of the car. See a van that looks like rolling squalor. Think immediately of last summer’s charitable act and think, “Nah. Not twice. No way.”

Get a bottle of water, pay, come out. Dawdle a little bit in opening the water, swallow an Advil, tempting the fates to bring out the Ambrose Bierce that runs deep within us all.

I’m standing right next to the van of squalor and nothing happens. I unlock the door. Get it, start up, turn around to back out and …

There she stood. Same kid. Same face. Only this time the window between was closed and was going to stay closed.

I flipped her the bird, let her read my lips, and drove away. She didn’t bat an eye, just moved onto the next mark, knowing she had hit the same well twice.
And I was twenty dollars poorer none the same and vowing to launder my charitable contributions through the United Way from now on.