Scripting News

Four movies and other follow-ups

Fri, 26 Dec 2008 18:34:53 GMT

Yesterday was the NakedJen Film Festival in Salt Lake City and Berkeley; it was also Christmas Day around the world.

The festival is for movie lovers wanting to indulge in a massive amounts of movies on a day when many of the best movies of the year are released.

In Berkeley, we went to four movies: 1. Gran Torino, 2. Doubt, 3. Time Crimes and 4. Cadillac Records. By far, my favorite of the four was Doubt. Wonderful acting from Meryl Streep and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Very subtle plot and fantastic writing.

I totally didn't care for the last two, almost no substance to the story of Cadillac Records, it felt to me a lot like W., very shallow, almost no character development, at times I had no idea what to think about the characters, and it's not as if they were all strangers to me, I was a blues fan growing up and saw Muddy Waters play a number of times, and Chuck Berry is a hero of mine. I don't know why people liked this movie, I was hoping for something of the caliber of Walk The Line, that did enough character development so I actually cared about the cast. I didn't like Dreamgirls or the Ray Charles biopic either, though they were well-reviewed.

The Clint Eastwood movie, Gran Tornino, was nice, had a few memorable moments and lines, and followed the general pattern of one of Eastwood's earlier movies. I called it The Man With No Name at the Retirement Village (even though he was living in an old Detroit neighborhood that was becoming an Asian ghetto). I wanted one more of the old style Eastwood movies, a Dirty Harry for the ages, a bloodbath of righteous vengeance. I really loved the old Eastwood, the new kind, compassionate and thoughtful, well, not so much.

All the movies we went to were highly reviewed, including Time Crimes, which has a fairly predictable science fiction time travel plot up to a point, and then it goes a bit further, and has a few small surprises, but nothing that makes up for the extreme low-budgetness of it, and amateurish acting, and the fact that it's in Spanish with sub-titles. I was bored from beginning to end. Our other choice for this time slot in the festivale, Synecdoche, New York, a Charlie Kaufman film, probably would have been more entertaining, even though Kaufman movies generally leave me unimpressed and weary of his self-obsession.

I should also mention that I saw and loved Slumdog Millionaire, outside the context of yesterday's festivities; even though it was sort of spoiled by a negative review on Fresh Air by New York film critic David Edelstein, who thought (ridiculously) that the movie was ruined by the Bollywood dance sequence under the titles at the end of the movie. I give Edelestein a lousy review as a reviewer. The movie was lovely and disturbing. What's wrong with that? And it was great entertainment.

I still have to see Benjamin Button, Marley & Me, Bolt, Despereaux, Rebecca's Wedding, Body of Lies, and what else? What a year for pictures!!

One other bit of housekeeping -- a lot of people didn't understand my $249 pre-Christmas gadget quest piece, and thought I was asking instead for a condescending lecture on charitable giving. Actually I wanted to know your dreams for modestly priced electronic luxuries, not a big ticket purchase like a 60-inch flatscreen or a new MacBook, but perhaps something like a hard drive, iPod, but off the beaten path, something a guy like myself might not have. I consider the piece a roaring success. The most popular suggestion was to get a Flip camera, which I'm still considering, even though I really like my Canon camera and can't get too excited about another picture-taker.

One thing was striking about the list was that there was almost nothing on it from Apple. Such a bad omen. I must have bought 10 or 15 Apple products in 2007. I can't think of a single Apple purchase I made this year. These days I can walk by an Apple store without going in. What happened? Why have they stopped creating products that a guy like me lusts for? In the last twelve months they haven't created anything in the Must Have category or even Nice To Have. That honor goes to Asus, I've bought two netbooks, and find I'm open to buying almost anything they offer.

Anyway, I did find a gadget that I don't have that I wanted, that I'm looking forward to getting! More on it when it arrives.

Blogger of the Year

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 18:54:16 GMT

I guess Christmas Eve is the day to announce the Blogger of the Year. It's only the second time I've done it, and I did it last year on this day, and it seems like a good day to do it. That's what being a real blogger is like. It's like just feeling like doing something and then doing it.

I hope that makes sense.

Anyway...

In my teaser I said that this year's BOTY is a smoker, but when I told him he was the guy, he said he stopped smoking four years ago. That's very good. More blogging for the rest of us.

So who is it?

Well, it's Jay Rosen.

Now I'll tell you why.

Jay is one of those guys who has spent 20 or 30 years really studying something, really understanding it. He developed a theory about his subject of study, but instead of stopping there, Jay is always learning, asking questions, considering whether his understanding of the world actually reflects what's happening. And he does all this out in the open, on a blog, and most recently, very deliberately and systematically, on Twitter.

This is the future of news.

That's what Jay studies, but as it always is, you teach what you most need to learn, so Jay's study of news, ironically (or maybe not so ironically) is a demonstration of how news will work in the future. We will still need domain experts, people who spend 20 or 30 years studying something, learning and challenging their assumptions -- so that when something happens in their field of study we have someone with a historic perspective who can tell us What It All Means.

Of course we can't get by with just one person in each domain, we need many. And that's where people like Jay are so valuable -- they don't just have their own theories, they also tell you about theories other people have, and he points you to them.

Does this sound familiar?

12/12/05: "People come back to places that send them away."

That's what blogging, when it applies to serious study, is all about. And Jay is the best example I can think of, so that's why I chose him as my Blogger of the Year for 2008.

There are others who perfectly exemplify this principle. I'm thinking of Doc Searls when it comes to fires in Santa Barbara. When I hear there's a fire down there, I know where to go. Doc takes it very seriously, and I'm not kidding about that. I don't have a special interest in Santa Barbara, but I do have an interest in examples of the way news will work in the future.

And there's Paul Krugman at the NY Times. I'm very pleased to honor a blogger at the Times, to show that it doesn't matter where you hang your hat -- real blogging can happen anywhere at any time. The thing that makes Krugman such a fantastic example is the same thing I like about Jay's blogging and Doc's -- he sends where you need to go to find out what you need. It's the same principle of the web, applied over and over again. When it works, it works because they trust you to come back after sending you away.

Next year's BOTY, knock wood, praise Murphy, etc -- will share this quality, with these fine people and NakedJen. When they write it's not a business model, it's their passion for knowledge, both of self and the rest of existence.

$249 to burn

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 03:10:22 GMT

With Christmas coming up, I wanted to buy something cool and electronic and gadgety, fun and impulsive, under $249 on Amazon. But I couldn't find anything I don't already have. When I was a kid the world was filled with toys I lusted for but couldn't have. Today, I have the opposite problem -- I want to want something, but I already have everything I want.

So I turned to Twitter.

I got back a bunch of suggestions, and promised to blog them, for others who might be inspired to buy themselves a gift, in this the standard gift-giving season. Alas, so far, there's been nothing I wanted enough to buy. There were some that seemed promising, though, and I totally appreciate the thought that went into the suggestions.

ltrosien asks if I have a Slingbox. I do and love it. It's mission-critical. A week ago I watched Meet The Press on an American Airlines flight from NY to SF. When you think of the path the show took to get to me, it's pretty amazing. Downloaded from a satellite via DirecTV, out through the Slingbox to the net, to the Gogo gateway in Dallas (if I remember correctly) then to the proper cell tower and to the airplane and to my laptop, and it all worked -- no fuss no muss. Amazing.

mike1mb suggests an Asus souped up router with built in hard drive, a BitTorrent client, USB port, the kitchen sink and more. Man this one was tempting. It increases the range of your wifi 3 times. Wow. And I love everything that Asus makes. But... It would arrive, I would install it, marvel at the possibilities and then be bored. I can't use any of its capabilities. I already have way more storage than I use. The whole house is covered by two Airport Extreme routers. I have BitTorrent mastered, and it's nice that it works when your computers are turned off, but there are several computers in my house that are always on. Further, the one reviewer on Amazon said the fancy extras didn't really work. It's been out since 2006 and I've never heard of it till today, so that doesn't bode well. So even though it was tempting, I passed.

moneyries says: "Pimp out your game collection. Get Gears of War 2, Left 4 Dead, Dead Space, Call of Duty: World at War, etc. Add Netflix." I only play casual games, no time for all those other games I've never had time for, and I have Netflix, thinking of cancelling it cause I've watched everything I care about. Sighh. When you're bored you're bored, I guess!

CathleenRitt suggests a Take Anyware personal pocket safe. Hmmm, that's interesting.

deepikaur and dberlind suggest a Flip Video camcorder. Okay that's a maybe. I don't have one, but my Canon PowerShot SD1100 takes fine movies and I have it with me all the time. Do I really need another small device for taking movies? I don't think so, but I'm prepared to be talked into it. I've given Flips as presents, and they've always been well-received.

DinkyShop suggests a $5 rechargeable powered USB 4-port hub for a laptop from Woot.

The NakedJen Film Festival

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 20:59:54 GMT

Read up on the NJFF here.

We're going to be doing one in Berkeley too, on Christmas Day. Gotta start planning it.

Basic plot.

1. Three movies that open Christmas Day. One of them must be Benjamin Button. Probably Valkyrie. What else?

2. Three movie theaters, within walking distance of each other. Either downtown Berkeley or at the Bay Street mall in Emeryville (advantages to both). Probably downtown, more traditional.

3. A snack between each pair of movies to discuss.

4. Dinner after the third movie.

5. Everyone has a great time.

Obama's bone-headedness, day 2

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 08:00:00 GMT

There's an epic discussion taking place under yesterday's piece about Rick Warren and the Obama inaugural. Really something to behold. Lots of intelligent discourse about something that's very emotional. That's a huge milestone. And people say blogging is dead. Feh. We're just getting started.

A few notes.

1. People who say this is a brilliant political stroke by our incoming President are wrong. It's bone-headed. As in he is only using the bone in his head, not the gray matter. In the days after the election there was a huge cry of angst from the gay community about Prop 8 in California. I didn't support the outcry, because basically I don't think that highly of marriage, and I'm sure not going to fight for the supposed right of gays to get married. Equal protection under the law, that I'll fight for. Obama makes gay marriage the issue by honoring the loutish bigot Warren. It was quieting down, now it's totally re-stoked.

2. I was wrong about Obama and Rev Wright. I always wondered if it was political expediency or true belief. Obviously it wasn't true belief.

3. Gay marriage is now on track to becoming Obama's Don't Ask Don't Tell, a morass that newly installed President Clinton had to deal with in his first days in office. What an unfortunate detour for our country when we have a financial crisis, unemployment, a depression, two wars, and god knows what else looming in front of us.

4. It may be too generous to call it bone-headed, it might be Rove-headed. This is a total wedge issue. Thanks so much Obama for uniting us (not).

5. There are few things I'm totally ideological about without a hint of pragmatism and that's the equal protection of the Constitution to minorities, like blacks, Jews and homosexuals. If you don't like one of us, that's fine -- you're entitled to your opinion, but you won't get the government's support. It's illegal for the government to do it. And if the inauguration is anything it's an act of government. Ooops. Bing! I rest my case.

6. One more time. I am not a liberal, I am not "the left" -- I could be a total card-carrying Conservative and I'd still be opposed to singling out one minority for exclusion. Find someone more suited to inaugurating your Presidency, Mr. Obama.

7. This column in the Washington Post perfectly sums up my point of view. No party on January 20. As long as Warren is the moral leader of Obama's presidency, then fuck you Obama.

Update #1: Unfortunately today the comments are not so nice and people are getting personal That's okay of course. You can express your opinions about me on your own blog. I've closed comments on the two Rick Warren threads. Have a happy!

Update #2: Then I started getting some comments via email that I think belong on the blog, so let's try to weather the flamers and see what happens. I turned on moderation after re-opening the comments, so if you post a personal attack against me or another commenter, it just won't go through, so don't bother.

Rick Warren is over the top

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 00:15:54 GMT

Thanks to David Weinberger for offering a foil for me to argue with on the case of Rick Warren giving the invocation at the Obama inaugural. I posted a rough version of this in a comment on Doc Searls' blog, in response to a piece Weinberger wrote on the NPR site. I just did a little editing and reposted here.

I've been preaching the stuff that Weinberger is saying for a long time, but...

I think he's wrong, and Obama is wrong, and the people who say this is over the line are right. This isn't a conference at the White House we're talking about, this is the inaugural.

Weinberger doesn't say where his limit is. Who or what would be unacceptable for giving the inaugural invocation? Suppose Warren was a white supremicist who said that Negroes are property. He's entitled to his opinion I suppose. But should that be on stage when we inaugurate the first black President?

Is Obama actually that open minded? I've read his book and I honestly don't know the answer, the book doesn't give me enough info.

What if we were talking about a Neo-Nazi who said all Jews should be deported? Obviously, we can't have that, right Dave? That would be about you and me, and we've been there before or more accurately our parents have. I don't want to stand alone and explain why we can't let Jews be singled out that way.

Warren has some very bad ideas about gays. Do they really have to stand alone Dave and say no this is too much?

Obama makes a big point about not being an ideologue, about being a pragmatist, and I'm with him, up to a point. The United States is an ideology, not just pragmatics. We've been too pragmatic the last eight years, we've turned the other way while the rule of law was trampled along with the Constitution. Enough. I heard Obama say that in Denver, and it was right on. Enough. Warren is too much. I think the only correct answer is to boycott the inaugural. Sorry, no party. This is outrageous Dave.

This isn't just Obama's homecoming, it's our country's. If we don't stand against this, we're going to get four more years of pragmatics. We won't survive that. At the end you won't recognize the United States. We've got to come back from the last eight years. Putting Warren on stage is not coming home, not when it leaves the gays so out there. But I won't let them be out there alone, just as I wouldn't expect for Jews to be out there alone if we were the ones being singled out. Or blacks.

I'm also horrified that you used left-right tactics to argue your case. Very bad. I don't happen to be a liberal Dave. But I am an American and I believe in equal protection. How do you explain where you come from, and I don't care if you drive a Volvo or a Prius. Honestly, I think any American with any pride, especially blacks and Jews and gays, must stand against this.

Update: Melissa Etheridge is a Rick Warren fan and is going to the inauguration (she's gay).

Update: Barney Frank, a Congressman from Massachusetts, explains precisely why it is wrong for Warren to be given the honor of delivering the inaugural invocation. (Frank is gay.)

Update: Rick Warren pulled the anti-gay language from his site.

Posterous

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 16:55:36 GMT

I've noticed that Mike Arrington tends to use Posterous for pictures he posts while traveling, pics of his dog Laguna, random stuff. I wondered why he used it instead of Flickr, which is what I generally use for pictures and small movies, and today he wrote a review and explained -- it's because it takes absolutely nothing to set up. You just send an email to post\@posterouscom add an enclosure if you like, and it automatically creates a blog if it doesn't know you (you're identified by your email address) and then creates a post to hold the enclosure and text. This is the way we like our software, easy to get started with, and with instant rewards. Good work!

I tried it out, enclosing a copy of the MP4 video of Singin In The Rain from 1929, with a bit of text scarfed from scripting.com, sent as an email to Posterous, and sure enough a moment later, it sends back a pointer to a blog with a long weird name, and I click on the link, and there's the text and the movie.

After that I went back and read the email, it said they were happy to meet me, and I could sign up for an account and my Posterous blog would then have a nicer name. Seemed like a good deal. It suggested \"dave\" -- but it turned out to already have been taken. I then tried "d" -- that was too short, then "dw" which it approved, and now I've got yet another presence on the www.

Now come the questions.

1. Does it have an API? If not, then it's fairly useless as a blogging tool. It should, at a minimum support the MetaWeblog API, so that tools written for WordPress, Blogger, TypePad and all the blogging tools I''ve written (Radio, Manila, lots of one-offs) are compatible. It should also support the weblogs.com ping protocol, which will let it integrate with virtually every service of the "live web" (and as far as I know they do support it).

2. I reviewed their RSS feed for my site, and it's pretty good! They don't fuss around with multiple versions of the feed, and their RSS is mostly plain vanilla, i.e. really simple, the kind that every RSS processor will understand. Now a few things they could do to simplify even more.

a. They declare three namespaces at the top of the feed, but only use one. The other two should be removed.

b. ~~There's no version number on the <rss> element. Since they use namespaces, it must be 2.0, because RSS didn't get namespace support until 2.0.~~ Dan MacTough notes that the version element is there, in the midst of the unused namespace declarations. My bad! :-(

c. It does no harm to use a CDATA on the <description> element, but it isn't necessary since all the characters are properly encoded.

d. I don't like that the permalink is encoded in the <description>. Unfortunately this has become common practice in RSS, but the information is already in the <guid> element, which is good. They're presumably replicating it because some reader doesn't display the permalink from the <guid>. I say deal with the problem where it's located, get the reader to display the permalink. Because of this extraneousness, in software that behaves well, the permalink will be displayed twice, unnecessarily. Yuck!

e. Same with the link to the comments. RSS 2.0 has a <comments> element. I wish people would use it.

f. Finally, they use Yahoo's Media RSS namespace to convey the information about the MP4 movie I enclosed. I guess some software they want to work with isn't looking for the base <enclosure> element that was designed for exactly this use. In cases like this, I support both, because it should be possible to write a podcatcher or, in this case, a movie-catcher, that conformed to the original spec and knew nothing about Media RSS, which came later and is an optional extension. The way Posterous has coded it, such a catcher app will completely miss the movie. This is the way breakage creeps into a community, and breakage is, of course, bad.

But on the whole, they did a very nice job, otherwise I wouldn't bother with the feedback.

Bailout hall of shame

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 21:26:04 GMT

Measuring the worth of a blogger

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 21:57:19 GMT

It occurred to me that one way to measure the worth of a blogger is how much intelligence do they add or subtract to or from the universe.

Sometimes it seems some bloggers just subtract, that when they post, others must negate the damage they do. One of their blog posts is an environmental disaster, like an oil spill or a nuclear accident.

Of course our presence in the vastness of the universe is infinitesmal, both in time and space, so either way it doesn't make much of a difference. But it's something to consider at the end of a year. How much value did you add to the intellect of the universe in the last 12 months -- and here's best wishes to doing even better next year.

Web 2.0 gas prices, revisited

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 21:30:35 GMT

On June 29, I took a picture of the prices at a local gas station, thinking they were worth documenting for two reasons:

1. The prices were so shockingly high.

2. I thought they'd continue to go up.

In a blog post, I compared them to prices recorded by Google Maps street view of the same station.

Yesterday, returning from a lunch in Sausalito, I stopped at the same intersection and took another picture. Instead of going up dramatically, the price of gas had gone down, dramatically.

Just goes to show, try to predict the future, the future fcuks with you.

Update: One of the cool things about the rise in gas prices earlier this year is that it got a bunch of people to buy these small cars that you see all over Europe. Not just in Berkeley, I saw a bunch of them in NY too. Maybe we should make a deal with Ford and GM and the American people, we'll swap one for one, an old gas guzzling SUV for a modern new high-tech Smart. Could be one of the public works projects of the new New Deal.

CTO of the Year

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 19:36:41 GMT

Tis the season for X Of The Year awards.

Time has Person Of The Year, I have Blogger Of The Year, and InformationWeek has CTO Of The Year, who they just announced is Werner Vogels of Amazon. I heartily endorse this choice.

Vogels has led us into the age of cloud computing, a buzzword for sure, but also a kind of software development that holds great promise. For me, it's the next step on a path that began with CompuServe in 1980, when I begged them to let me run software on their server, so I could do great things with their CB Radio environment. Of course they wouldn't. Now, Amazon not only lets me run software in their cloud, but the environment I run it is exactly the same environment that runs on my 7-inch netbook computer. That makes my inner software architect very very happy. You just need to write the app for one platform and voila, it's available at 40,000 feet on a jet flying at 600MPH from NY to SF, and who-knows-where (geographically) in Amazon's cloud. I actually logged onto my server from the jet using Remote Desktop Connection. I knew it would work, but I just had to try it to say I'd done it. It did work.

Now Werner had the vision to do all this, and more -- and to somehow get the huge organization that Amazon is to ship it with the vision intact. That's what CTOs do, their work is more prosaic than ideological, although ideology is important. The main thing the CTO does is get the organization to do important things. I don't know how he does it, it's a skill I don't have, but I'm in awe of it.

There's another thing to commend Vogels, he reads this blog. No joke, to me that's important, because we have a basis for communication. We've only met once, but he was instantly familiar because of the email exchanges we've had.

Now from time to time I shoot an idea over his way, something I'd like to see Amazon do in their cloud, and he never says one way or the other if they're going to do it, but sometimes the ideas do come out. Whether I was an impetus or not doesn't matter -- I'm happy when I get what I wanted.

A few months ago I suggested they implement the back-end of a Twitter-like service as part of the Amazon cloud. This was back when Twitter was having huge trouble keeping the service up. Now they're not having that problem, Twitter is much more reliable, but I think it's still a good idea, and I wonder if we even need Amazon to do it. It might be possible to build what I want using the services they already provide.

Let's give it a go. Viewed from the cloud perspective, my Twitter stream, the one I read, is a sequence of 140-character bits of text with several attributes. Easy to represent in SimpleDB or S3. Then the question is who has the right to insert something into that sequence? The answer is the people I follow. So there must be a way to represent that, again SimpleDB would have no trouble doing that. That list is publicly readable but only I can write to it. Now that's something I have to look into. Does SimpleDB offer permissions like that? I know S3 does. So maybe my follow list should just be stored in S3. It's very much like an RSS subscription list, and we have many years of experience working with those and a fairly consistently implemented standard. Obviously there's a user interface to Twitter, many of them, but that's not something I would ever expect Amazon to do, that's the province of the developers.

This is just an exercise. Not sure if it goes anywhere, but it may be something to get a conversation started.

I've also suggested to Evan at Laconi.ca that he offer an AMI on Amazon for an instant microblogging server.

But I guess my point, at the end of this rambler, is congrats and thanks to Werner and his team at Amazon for pushing the market in this direction. They're doing good work.

Blogger of the Year 2008

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 03:47:24 GMT

Last year, after giving it much thought, I decided to give out an award that I called, unoriginally, Blogger of the Year. I felt entitled to do so because I am a blogger, like millions of other people.

Why should I, of all the people who blog, give an award once a year to someone who, imho, exemplifies what's great about blogging? Because I can. And of course so can you. That's the point of blogging. Nothing makes my blog better than any else's. It's what I put here, my ideas, my beliefs, my desires, my foibles and foils -- oh never mind. The point is you can give out an award too.

But this is my Blogger of the Year award.

I'm not ready to announce who it is this year, but I've more or less made my decision. I called last year's BOTY to see if she approved my choice, and she did. Not that that's a requirement, it isn't, but I would have been surprised if she had disagreed. And while both people exemplify what makes blogging tick, what makes it worthwhile, the people couldn't be more different.

Last year's BOTY is a woman, this year's is a man.

Last year's BOTY is a tiny little person who eats vegan and spreads the joy of body acceptance. This year's BOTY is not small, and eats greasy food (as do I) and smokes!

Last year's BOTY is cute, this year's BOTY well, I don't think anyone thinks he's cute, except perhaps his wife, and even there I wonder.

Last year's BOTY often goes naked in public as a form of social, artistic and political expression. As far as I know this year's BOTY is always fully clothed in public.

Both people rub others the wrong way, get people to say "Who does he or she think he or she is?" I have a funny feeling all BOTYs will have this property.

Another thing both BOTYs have in common is they were both at BloggerCon I. Haha. Now there's a good clue.

I don't know when I'm going to announce the choice, but I love a good tease, so you gotta figure I'm going to stretch this one out, play it for all its worth. Sorry!!

"curly"

Where are snowcams?

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 08:00:00 GMT

They're calling it #snowmageddon on Twitter.

And on Flickr too.

I know it's snowing a lot back east cause it's raining a lot here on the California coast. And now it's raining some more. More rain here, more snow there. Pretty simple.

I just posted a twit saying "People in the eastern U.S.-- more snow headed your way. Hugs, California"

We're all in it together. Just some of us are more in it than the rest.

I miss the snow, so here's what I want to do.

Where are snowcams? I want webcams in American and Canadian cities that show the snow? I'd like to accumulate a list here.

Here's a cam on West Dayton St in Madison. It's a live feed. You can see the snow blowing and cars going down the street. Wish there were audio too. The Comp Sci building is on West Dayton if I remember correctly. This building is quite close.

Funny how Madison looks the same 30 years later.

Here are some other Madison-area webcams.

Post a comment if you know of one!

Goodbye to an icon

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 22:30:21 GMT

Doc Searls writes that Out Of Town News on Harvard Sq in Cambridge is going out of business on January 1.

There are efforts to revive it as a print-on-demand business, but come on, that's not going to work.

I think at some point you have to take a picture, have a ceremony, put up a plaque and let it go.

When I was a student in New Orleans in the 70s, I used to take the streetcar down to the Quarter every Tuesday to get the Sunday NY Times and sit by the river if the weather was good and catch up on the news from the world outside the bayou.

I imagine that's the function this news stand used to play for students in Cambridge of the same period. The stuff of stories, but it clearly not part of anyone's future.

Is a netbook a cheap laptop?

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 15:16:27 GMT

Two people I respect enormously, John Gruber and Michael Gartenberg, both joined in the discussion of what netbooks are with the same theory.

"What is the difference between a 'netbook' and a 'really cheap laptop that runs something other than Vista?' -- asks Gruber.

On Twitter, Gartenberg asks the question, and answers it. "Are netbooks a new category of device or just small, cheap laptops? I think the latter."

Not so fast!!

First, I agree that a netbook is a cheap laptop, although of course I'd prefer "inexpensive," but let's not quibble. It's that, and it's a new market category. As usual I have a story to go with my opinion.

Back in 2004 I was living in Seattle and one day I was hanging out at Microsoft, and Jeff Sandquist showed me a computer that changed my life, a small netbook-size Sony Vaio. It was an instantly charming computer, it spoke to me -- it said, no it screamed -- YOU WANT ME. It was like meeting the most beautiful woman in the world, an experience I have had, btw. When that happens the only thing the alpha male psyche knows to do is GO GET IT.

I went home and ordered one the same day, and when it arrived my then-favorite laptop became a desktop and the Vaio went everywhere with me.

Then one day in 2006, the Vaio broke. I tried to get it fixed, but it wasn't possible. And search as hard as I could, I couldn't find a replacement. It seems Sony had decided that this model Vaio had been a failure and apparently stopped making it. I literally couldn't find something in that size, a sub-12-inch laptop. They didn't make them, at any price.

Until one day I saw a comment on FriendFeed about the Asus Eee PC 901 and what a lovely thing it was. As with the Vaio I bought one on impulse, and it was everything I hoped it would be. They had picked up the baton from Sony.

The point to both John and Michael is that until the netbooks came along this was an empty category. That they are cheap is a great bonus, but I would have bought one at two or three times the price. The small footprint laptop has always been a market imho, and it hasn't been served fully until the netbooks came along.

Update #1: Apparently they do still sell the Vaio I liked so much. But the price is $3199.99. That's almost ten times the price of a decent netbook!

Update #2: This picture illustrates the difference between a laptop and netbook computer. Which would you throw in a knapsack?

What is a netbook?

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 19:46:41 GMT

In October, I wrote a piece that explained why I like netbooks. It listed a set of criteria that says if something is a netbook or not. Yes, it's my opinion. But someone has to start this conversation. There have been some ridiculous ideas of what netbooks are and aren't. According to Steve Jobs, an iPhone is netbook. Heh. He's making a joke. It's funny. I have an iPhone and I like it -- but I have a netbook too.

Anyway, without further ado, here's my list of what makes a netbook a netbook.

1. Small size.

2. Low price.

3. Battery life of 4+ hours. Battery can be replaced by user.

4. Atom processor.

5. Rugged.

6. Built-in wifi, 3 USB ports, SD card reader. Ethernet, SVGA, webcam, audio in and out.

7. Runs any software I want (no platform vendor to decide what's appropriate).

8. Competition (users have choice and can switch vendors at any time).

9. Windows XP.

All these things are important. I think we could make room for a Macintosh netbook, but it's tough because one of the things that's super important is that we're not locked into a vendor. I could replace my netbook with an MSI or Acer, even though I've bought two Eee PCs. Apple could make their operating system run on the hardware these other guys make, so they could ship a netbook that meets these criteria. But we're all pretty sure, if they deign to make a netbook, that it won't offer users this choice. We'll have to wait to see how it feels, but I'm not sure if I'd switch to an Apple netbook, even though I use a Macintosh desktop and use Mac Minis as my entertainment center system (I have three of them). I've been able to integrate XP computers into this network without too much difficulty. (Which surprised me, when I switched to Macs in 2005, I thought I'd never use Windows again.)

Another concern came up in a recent thread on FriendFeed with Kevin Tofel of GigaOm, who is one of my closest netbook buddies. We share information and pretty much share a philosophy of netbooks. He says there's still a cloud over XP, that Microsoft says they're going to withdraw it at some point. They keep saying that. To which I said, Geez Louise guys, come on -- you have a winner. Microsoft has to be the most out to lunch technology company out there. By now you'd think they'd realize that the market doesn't want a new operating system, that XP is just fine, thank you. But they have their own reasons, like the auto makers, to do what they do. Or the journalists. The last people they'd let drive the market are the users, right? Microsoft is basically a full employment charity for operating system programmers. They should let all those programmers go, and hire some new ones from the user community, fix bugs and give the users what they want. Of if they insist, keep them employed, but please let us continue to use XP. It's not a half-bad operating system and its cheap and runs on cheap hardware. We like it!

Microsoft's attitude about XP reminds me of the National Lampoon issue where they had a picture of a cute dog with a gun pointed to his head. The headline said: If you don't buy this magazine we'll kill this dog. (Ouch.)

Update #1: Don MacArthur says the purpose of Vista is DRM. That's why Microsoft wants to kill XP. And maybe that's why we like netbooks -- you can watch a movie or listen to a podcast without hassles.

Update #2: Other features you should expect to find on your netbook: a webcam, audio in and out. AM Pressman says some netbooks only have two USB ports. That's debatable. It's amazing how quickly the market has rejected products without all the features of the others. Two USB ports are the minimum you can get by with. Three really is pretty important, beyond "nice to have." I added the webcam and audio features to the list, above.

Update #3: People immediately say that I should broaden the definition or narrow it to include or exclude their idea of a netbook. That's not what I'm trying to do, though. There really is a specific product the market is settling on, and it's happening quickly. Partially due to constraints Microsoft is putting on XP licensees; and partially because there are applications that require certain configurations. I'm not trying to influence anyone, I don't have that power and don't seek it. I'm doing something pretty much like reporting -- this is what I see. You may see soemthing else, or may have a different purpose, and you can (of course) to write your own piece explaining netbooks.

Embargoes are stupid and unbloglike

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 02:49:36 GMT

See this FriendFeed post.

http://bit.ly/BrEAf

Thanks!

My great uncle's letters

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 16:55:13 GMT

German author Arno Schmidt was my great-uncle on my mother's side, my maternal grandmother's younger brother. I never met him, but when he died in 1979, my mother ended up with a collection of his writing. We want to donate these writings to a library for long-term preservation. We're going to do this slowly and carefully, because we want to do right by an ancestor, but also to learn as much as possible about the process to apply to preserving digital archives. I'll write more about the book collection later.

I also have a taped interview with Lucy Schmidt Kiesler, my grandmother, done by a Schmidt biographer, which I'm going to digitize and then release as an MP3 podcast. It'll be the first time I've heard my grandmother's voice since she died in 1977.

Today I want to see if it's possible to do some detective work to find some of my great uncle's letters to my grandmother, his sister -- from his home in Germany to her home in Rockaway.

Here's what I know. According to my mother, in 1977, a doctoral student from the University of Texas, Kenneth Wayne Egan, visited and with permission, studied the letters, which had been left to my mother by her mother, my grandmother, Arno Schmidt's sister. Apparently Mr. Egan took the letters, according to my mother, without permission. One thing's certain -- we don't at this time have the letters.

I have a letter from Dr. H-B.Moeller, Assoc Prof in the Department of Germanic Languages, thanking my mother for her help and hoping that she would extend her welcome, if needed again, in the future. My mother says she attempted to contact Dr. Moeller to inquire about the letters, but he didn't respond.

I scanned the letter and uploaded it to Flickr. Click on the thumbnail below to see the full image.

We did some searching and found Egan's doctoral dissertation mentioned in the bibliography of an analysis of Schmidt's Zettle's Traum. It's possible the originals are in a library at the University of Texas. If so, they should be returned to my mother so we can include them with the collection of our books in our donation. I'm not saying that Egan, or Moeller or the University of Texas did anything wrong, memories can fade over 30-plus years. But we believe the letters belong with the rest of Schmidt's writings, as a collection. In any case, it would be helpful to know where they are.

Update: Jeff Beckham sent a link to Dr. Moeller's page on the University of Texas website. I sent him an email asking for his help in locating the letters.

The lame duck ducks, redux

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 18:49:33 GMT

Yesterday I posted a video of US President George Bush having a pair of shoes thrown at him by an Iraqi journalist while yelling insults at him. Bush did what you'd hope he'd do, he ducked -- then came back up unbelievably with a half-grin on his face, just before ducking again as the guy threw his other shoe.

I also posted a number of questions on Twitter that I should have posted here, which would have made more clear my concern.

1. Will Secret Service make reporters remove shoes?

2. Bush is POTUS. Such disrespect of US is bad

3. Will they throw shoes at Obama? Will we think that's funny?

4. What if it escalates? Where is the line where it stops being entertainment?

Now Twitter is the opposite of verbose. In a blog post I can fully explain, which I will now do...

First and foremost until January 20, Bush is more than Bush, he is the President of the United States. When you throw shoes at this guy, until then, you're also throwing them at the office, and at the country. If you're an American and your pride in your country isn't offended by this, then well, you're different than me. I think Bush is the worst President we've ever had. But until he's out of office, he is our President. I hope we make it to January 20 without paying more dearly for our terrible choice.

Second, I found, from watching the video, over and over, that while I saw the humor in it, and I laughed out loud, that I can't help sympathizing with the guy who's being attacked. I admire his spirit. He didn't get angry, he sort of acted like a goalie, and fielded the shots. But as funny as it is, it is sad for us.

The day-after reaction in the Arab world confirms this. They can get away with throwing shoes at the President. What's next? Shit? What if one of those shoes had injured the man? Do we want discourse to go this way? And then what if someone throws shoes at Obama. Can you imagine there wouldn't be a response from the US? There better be or else the next symbol to go could be something bigger -- but wait a minute -- there is no symbol bigger than our President.

If you're not an American, imagine your leader visiting our country and being physically attacked this way by an American. Yes I fully understand that the Iraqis have legitimate issues with America and with Bush, but a visiting leader of a foreign country is entitled to some respect and protection. Otherwise how can we have relations? It's the same principle that provides immunity for diplomats.

This is no good. Sorry if you don't understand, when people say the shoes were being thrown at the man and not the office and not the country, I can't agree. Until the 20th of January, there's no difference between the three.

Twitter federates with Google?

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 18:38:24 GMT

Not sure what to make of the announcement that Twitter is becoming part of Google's federation. That could be the wrong way to describe it. Here's what I do know. You'll be able to use your Twitter ID to sign on to any site that supports Google's API and the relationships between you and your followers and the people you follow will somehow be reflected in the Google "social graph." It'll be interesting to see how this works because "follow" isn't mutual, if I follow you it doesn't mean that you follow me, where friendship in social networks is two-way.

Also unsure of how safe this is for Twitter. Once they've let Google have a shot at their users this way, how far a reach is it for Google to provide a Twitter-like service to all of Twitter's users and all of their users? Maybe this isn't interesting for some reason?

Update #1: Twitter is also connecting with Facebook.

Update #2: And leaves MySpace wondering WTF.