Unmediated

If I may appear faintly ridiculous for a while, I would like to return to the topic of Chris Lydon's show and the "un"-discussion by his guests.

I think it's unremarkable that Doc notes many of the reactions were more favorable than my own. Most of the people listening and posting their reactions likely share the same set of beliefs and worldview that Doc, Dave and Dave seem to share; and indeed, they are something of the authorities or "visionaries" of that view. So a good number of people had their views affirmed by one or more of the people they regard favorably already, and their positive reactions were unsurprising and not terribly useful.

It's quite likely, as others have recently noted, that the phenomenon of weblogging is "off the radar" for most people, and so it's probably reasonable to say that many of Chris Lydon's listeners heard something they had never heard before by listening to Doc, Dave and Dave. But still, it represented almost a monolithic view, and a fair number of broad assertions were made and none was challenged by any of the guests or the host, and nobody is well served in those circumstances.

So let me deal with one assertion I wish to challenge that I haven't already challenged here before. Doc made a comment to the effect that he objected to people calling the web or the 'net a "medium," because the web is so "unmediated" as to make the term "medium" meaningless. This is not the case, and it is part of a larger phenomenon of ignoring the inconvenient meaning of words in order to embrace and promote what they perceive are the positive aspects of their view of whatever it is they're talking about.

Of course, Dave Weinberger made his familiar assertion that the web is more like a "world" than a "medium," and I've objected to that, however inartfully, before. This time I want to address what it means to have a message "mediated."

The web is a medium, it is a physical path for conveying information from a sender to a receiver. Ideas, the "content" if you will, of a message must be converted ("mediated") by the sender into a form that can be accommodated by the medium. It is perhaps useful to note that there is also a kind of psychological or cultural mediation that occurs as well as the sender tries to ensure the receiver gets the "message" as they intended it.

The ideas I conceive in my "mind" must be converted into language, and the first mediation my ideas are subjected to are their conversion into English. Further, I try to exercise my use of language in such a way as to make it engaging for the reader. One of my nagging doubts is that I seldom actually achieve this; but that's less troubling than another nagging doubt that I seldom manage to make myself clear. My "voice" in Groundhog Day is different, to some extent, than my "voice" in work-related correspondence or reports. That's not entirely related to authenticity, either, but perhaps we'll return to that later.

Because I'm writing for the web, and I wish to ensure my message reaches as many people as I may ego-centrically believe have something to benefit from receiving my message, I make certain other accommodations to the medium to facilitate that result. I use hyperlinks because I know Technorati will make them visible to anyone searching for information regarding Doc's comments. I'm relatively confident that most, if not all, writers on the web use Technorati to see if anyone is responding to something they wrote. I do it, but I always wash my hands afterward. Further, I click on my own hyperlinks just to ensure at least one will appear in the target's referrer logs.

It goes further than that. On Groundhog Day, I observe the conventions of a weblog with relatively brief posts displayed in inverse chronological order. If you want people who are writing things you wish to disagree with to engage with your ideas, you have to make some effort to meet some of their expectations. The mere fact of your disagreement represents a barrier to understanding, and by not observing some of the conventional norms of the form, you merely create distractions as the reader tries to "figure out" what your site really is. I also offer an RSS feed, which is another type of mediation adapted to the internet, and I offer full-text feeds because it reduces just one more barrier to understanding.

My weblog has a title, again a convention of most weblogs. My title is a cultural allusion to a movie that, hopefully, suggests something to the reader about this being a humorous weblog, perhaps a repetitious one, perhaps one that deals with notions of enlightenment and redemption. Hopefully. So titles themselves are an effort at mediating a message.

This is what I was alluding to, rather obviously I hope, in my previous post to Doc. Doc is, or was, (always will be?) a marketer. His job was to craft messages to "sell" products. His weblog is crafted in a way that "sells" his ideas. The title suggests a "brand" rather than a person. His stylized image bears more resemblance to a logo than to his face. Contrast this with Jeff Jarvis, the self-celebrated egotist who went so far as to replace his ordinary headshot on his weblog with one of his face on a television screen, the image that seems to most appeal to his own vanity. Doc's weblog is as heavily mediated as network television, it's just that there's only one box in the org chart and his name is in it. This isn't a criticism, it's just an observation. I will offer a comment later that may be criticism, but hopefully it will be received in the spirit it is offered.

What Doc is objecting to is the notion of some external "authority" mediating the message. I have no "editor," other than myself. ("And it shows!") I have no publisher I must appease, other than myself; and in that regard Doc is somewhat correct in that the web is perhaps less mediated than other media. But there are mediators on the net, make no mistake. These are the "gatekeepers" that Jon Garfunkel discusses. But this aspect of the medium represents no special virtue about the web, and is not to be so celebrated as to make any sort of assertion of it being "unmediated." Technorati itself, as well as Google, blogrolls, trackbacks, and other internet technologies are also mediating technologies competing to "add value" to the myriad messages crisscrossing cyberspace. The presence of Doc, Dave and Dave was itself a manifestation of mediation (in a masterpiece of near-alliteration), as Chris Lydon endeavored to spread the message of his new radio show.

We are not telepathic. Short of direct mind-to-mind transmission, which I do not rule out because I believe there may be forms of apprehension/comprehension/insight that might be shared in an immediate/"unmediated" fashion in certain unique circumstances, all messages require a medium and all senders must mediate their messages. There's nothing wrong with this; but it's almost certainly helpful to be mindful of it. To suggest that the web is unmediated leads to misunderstanding and creates false dichotomies which people will use to bash one another over the head.

I've mentioned before that marketers have a very loose relationship with language and the truth. Words mean what they want them to mean in the particular circumstances they're using them. Which is why "markets" can be "conversations," and "authority" without "responsibility" isn't a cause for alarm. Doc writes about "forming" one another as we go about "informing," and "making and changing minds." These are warm and fuzzy notions, but I believe they're more a matter of mediating Doc's messages than they are of conveying some aspect of the truth. I don't know about anyone else, but I don't have the power to "make" or "change" anyone else's mind. And evidence for the effect is so scant as to be absent.

I've written before that, to me, authenticity is the difference between speaking the truth and trying to sell it. You can't sell the truth because, unlike the web and another unhelpful assertion from Doc and Dave, nobody owns it. What people sell is their authority, and so they mediate their messages to make their own authority as pleasing and palatable as possible. Doc, Dave and Dave share a vision that is quite appealing, but which is one that is crafted more to serve Doc, Dave and Dave than to illuminate some aspect of our changing experience due to technology. Technology changes how people do things, it does not change what we do. The bad goes along with the good. No matter where we go, there we are. Their ideas may have merit, but if they do then they deserve to be challenged, tested, criticized. We heard none of that Monday night, and we don't hear it enough at any other time.

Dave Weinberger is big on "voice," which I interpret (The "mediation" of the receiver on the received message!) to be a measure of "authenticity." When I read Doc Searls' weblog (note the use of the possessive apostrophe), his "voice" is the most "authentic" when he's not writing about the web. The best things he's written, in my opinion, have been about studying the constellations with "the kid," or the geology of California, or the propagation of radio ground waves. When he writes about the web, he sounds to me like just another marketer, albeit one with a good "ear," a gift for a clever turn of phrase, and a warm, pleasing vision he's using to "sell" his authority, his "brand." By all accounts he's one of the nicest people on the planet, and far be it from me to dispute that, he's been far kinder to me in his links to my feeble efforts here than I deserve. But I think some of his efforts with respect to shaping our beliefs about the technology of the web and what it means to our shared humanity are not helpful.

I'll close with a couple of quotations from Self Reliance, which was mentioned in the show, but I sort of wonder how familiar the panel really was with it:

"Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken."

And perhaps the best rejoinder to all the hyperbole offered in the service of authority:

"A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles."

Twisted

I picked up Wario Ware Twisted this weekend after reading this article about it. I'd tell you what I thought about it, except I didn't get a chance to play it all weekend. My daughter Caitie loves it, and it saved me from an untold number of utterances of "I'm bored."

In a somewhat related development, I finally completed the Campaign phase of Advance Wars 2. There's another Advance Wars coming out for the Nintendo DS.

Is it supposed to do that?

I just noticed this, and it does it in both Tiger (10.4.1) and Panther (10.3.9). I have the Dock set to auto-hide. So when it pops up when I dive to the bottom of the screen, it covers whatever document happened to be in the frontmost window. Generally, I like my windows nice and tall. Not a big fan of scrolling am I. (Talking like Yoda I am.)

Anyway, when the Dock pops up, if you happen to hover over a space on the dock that also happens to have a hyperlink in the window beneath it, the little tool-tip flag will open up, displaying its text. Which is kind of distracting.

Resistance is Futile

You will be assimilated. Or something.

"Welcome to the desert of the real..."

Serendipity

Britt Blaser and Robert Frost.

But something's lost and something's gained...

...in living every day. (Obscure (well, maybe not if you're over 40) Joni Mitchell reference.)

Jeneane Sessum on the aggregator lifestyle.

Insomnia

I spent more time by the pool (and in the pool) in the last three days than I've spent, combined, in the last three years. I suspect the combination of too much sun, chlorinated water, sun screen and caffeine are keeping me from my usual blissful sleep of the innocent.

I note that Doc Searls has linked to me again. Another tumbler in my master plan to unlock total world domination quietly falls into place...

Doc, while I have your attention, can I mention a couple of things? And please, I offer this in a sincere, un-snarky way: Do you ever get the feeling that you're becoming "a brand?" Note that the window title for your weblog page in the browser reads "The Doc Searls Weblog." [Italics mine.] Also note that the title banner reads "Doc Searls Weblog," with the possessive apostrophe conspicuous by its absence. And the whole Quaker Oats thing... What was that part about the web not being a "mediating" medium again? Mediums don't mediate. People do that exploiting a medium. Even when we do it to ourselves. Just a thought.

I also note that Chris Lydon's show for the 1st of June is entitled, "God 2.0." I wonder if anyone will observe that our faith in technology seems to exceed our faith in God, or even ourselves. What would Emerson have to say about that, I wonder? Israel 4 BC had no mass communications. Don't you get me wrong...

I owe Jon Garfunkel a response to his series The New Gatekeepers, and I am delinquent. Additional time resources due to insomnia notwithstanding, I'm likely to remain so. In the mean time, allow me to call your attention to the series.

World

I'm listening to, take a guess, Doc, Dave and Dave talking to Chris Lydon on the inaugural edition of his new radio show.

At one point, Chris asked, and I'm paraphrasing, who the great writers were on weblogs, and our esteemed panel named... no one.

This is just one big group hug for weblogs, the Cluetrain™, Dave Weinberger's "web as world" fantasy, and just.... blech.

Is anybody asking hard questions here, or is it just a group grope?

So if you're Chris Lydon and you're launching a new radio show, and you want a "blog" dimension, you name it "Open Source," and invite three white guy A-Listers who can be relied upon to direct lots of attention to your new show.

No, there's no "power structure" in the blogosphere. It's just as we used to say in the navy, "Same shit, different day."

I think I've found my new tag line.

The only thing that's missing is Scoble. Oh, and Jeff Jarvis. They're probably in hot standby for sweeps week or something.

Dave Weinberger just said that schools are missing the fact that kids know the way to be smart is to have smart friends! Isn't there a tautology in there somewhere? Beats me. Must not have the right friends. I try to think for myself. It doesn't work terribly well, obviously - I'm not rich!

Whoops! Time's up! There was a brief phone-in guest from India, I didn't get her name or weblog (I heard it, but I'm not going embarrass myself by trying to guess at how it's spelled.) I'm sure someone else, one of my "smarter" friends will get it though. Nothing to worry about.

Just remember boys and girls, "Them that has - gets."

Finally, I'm reminded why I posted those excerpts from Emerson's Self Reliance, (which actually gets a mention in the show, sadly (Self Reliance, not my excerpts)):

"The power men possess to annoy me, I give them by a weak curiosity."

I need to work on that.

.Mac Mail

If you've recently sent me an e-mail to my .Mac account (dave_rogers A T mac.com), chances are I may not have received it.

And thereby lies an interesting glitch in Mail and .Mac.

I had apportioned 20MB of my 250MB .Mac storage to e-mail. For the last few days, I would periodically receive "Unable to save as draft" messages while composing e-mail in Mail. Since I seldom save as draft, I figured it was probably a permissions glitch, and sending appeared to work as it usually did.

When I hadn't received a reply from a correspondent I usually hear from fairly promptly, I looked into my Sent mail folder to see when I had sent them my last e-mail. There was no sign of it.

That's pretty alarming. So now I'm into a more thorough investigation of this "Unable to save as draft" weirdness, thinking it's related to the missing sent message. Another clue clicked into place when I recalled thinking it was very odd when the upgrade to Soundtrack Pro arrived at my doorstep on Friday without the usual shipping notice from Apple. I had also not received the e-mail copy of the invoice, but I wasn't concerned about that at the time; because at the time of the order the store was reporting it wouldn't ship for 4-5 days. If I recall correctly, the invoice is sent at the time of shipping, but I wouldn't swear to that.

Now I know I'm missing mail from Apple, and I'm not sure mail I'm sending is actually getting sent. I went to the .Mac web page and logged in there, just to see if the web mail client gave me a different view of what had been sent or received. I didn't think it should, but I wanted to make sure. Well, there on the .Mac page, after I logged in, was an alert that I was approaching my storage limit for e-mail. Checking my account settings, I was actually 2MB over my 20MB storage limit! So I reapportioned my .Mac storage giving 40MB to Mail and 210MB to iDisk.

Now I can save drafts, and Sent mail is showing the mail I just tried to send as being sent.

I guess I would have expected some type of e-mailed alert from Apple that I was approaching my storage limit. I get them all the time at work for my company and contract accounts. Apparently you don't get those from .Mac. So if you use .Mac as an e-mail account, you may want to check your storage limits when you receive an "Unable to save as draft" alert.

And no, I'm not going to shift over to G-Mail or whatever Google's product is called. I've been pleased with .Mac overall, and this is the first time I've been disappointed by them.

But if you sent me something in the last week or so, and are wondering why you haven't heard from me, ping me again. Sorry for the inconvenience.

OmniGraffle 4.0

The Omni Group, makers of fine Mac OS X - only software, and thus heroes to me, have released a beta version of OmniGraffle 4.0.

One of the new features of OmniGraffle Pro 4.0 is output to SVG, or Scalable Vector Graphics. I think SVG is very cool, but there isn't a Mac client for it that's worth a damn, that I've been able to find.

That, however, may now be moot. Safari, along with Mozilla and presumably, FireFox, support a new html tag "canvas," which does at least the most useful things we'd hoped SVG in the browser would eventually support.

Now, I'm not a web developer, and of all the things I'm not an authority on, this is one of those, so don't get all bothered if I've just gored someone's ox here. I'm not grinding an axe.

So, what I'm getting around to noting, is that while it's cool that OmniGraffle Pro 4.0 will support SVG, it would be way cooler if they supported html output with the canvas tag.

One of these days (which means, most likely, probably never) I'm going to get around to drawing pictures on my web page with Tinderbox. I could probably get around to drawing pictures on my web page more quickly if the good people at The Omni Group were to include support for html output with canvas in one of the upcoming releases of OmniGraffle.

Correction

I posted an addendum to the Know Thyself: Part 42 post from the other day. Because of the way I have Tinderbox set up, it scrolled from the main page, and it doesn't appear as a new item in the RSS feed either. Until I figure out some other way to do this, I'm just going to point to original post here.

Friday Night

I wanted to do something a little different with my daughter Caitlin this weekend, and I heard one of the local radio stations mention that one of the Jacksonville Beach Moonlight Movies series was being shown last night. The feature was Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. So I ran by Target and bought a couple of beach chairs and a little cooler before I went to taekwondo class.

In between weapons and sparring, I mentioned to Mr. M. that I was planning to take Caitie to the Moonlight Movies event. He said that I ought to get there by 7:30 if I hoped to get a spot anywhere near the screen. Well, since class didn't end till 7:45, and I still had to pick up Caitie, that was going to be a problem.

Caitie and I arrived near the park around 8:30, traffic was very heavy, and there was no place to park anywhere nearby. In hindsight, I should have anticipated this on a nice Friday evening at the start of the Memorial Day holiday weekend. We ended parking about three quarters of a mile from the beach, almost a mile from the park. By the time we arrived at the park, it was covered with blankets and beach chairs. I might have left, except I didn't feel like carrying all that crap all the way back to the car.

We ended up wedging ourselves in around one of the poles erected to hold one of the speakers for the sound system. I had a reasonable view of the screen, with just a wire from the speaker running through the right side of the screen. I think Caitie's view was a little better.

Once the movie started, it was kind of pleasant. The sound system was awesome, and there was something different about the experience of watching the nighttime and outdoor scenes outdoors at night. We didn't stay for the whole thing though. Caitie started to get a little cold. By the time she bundled herself up on her chair with both of the beach towels and pillows I brought, covering her face and head in the process, I figured it was time to leave. It was just as the freighter carrying the Ark was being stopped by the German submarine. I wanted to avoid the mass movement of people and cars at the end anyway.

It was kind of a fun thing to do, and I certainly learned a few things about how to do it differently next time. I'd skip taekwondo, go very early and try to park in the parking lot at the beach, preferably facing outward in the space and near an exit. That might be difficult on any Friday, but it would be worth trying. Go to dinner at one of the restaurants near the beach, then go stake out our spot by about 6:30. There were a number of areas where folks had put down blankets and chairs, but no people were on them, and most people seemed to respect that.

"Songs are like tatoos"

Seems there's a backlash against blue LEDs. Not me. Blue is my favorite color. It's also my favorite Joni Mitchell album, though Court and Spark is right up there with it. My analyst told me that I was right out of my head...

I'm waiting for the news of the backlash against backlash.

I'm sure someone will blog it momentarily.

My Dad's a Winner

With so many people eager to point to others as losers, I'm pretty happy and proud to point to my father as a winner.

Literally.

Seems he cleaned up at Bingo last night.

Know Thyself: Part 42

File this under: No shit, Sherlock.

Like somebody from Bloom County once said, "You can't argue with research."

Well, you can, actually. I'm just not arguing with it in this instance.

Update: Got a nice note from Cecil Coupe that pointed out that basically, the folks who conducted this study didn't support their claim for any genetic or evolutionary basis of prejudice, because there was no way to control for the environmental basis in the study. He's right. This post is a good example of uncritical, knee-jerk, "this validates my point of view, so let me point to it," weblogging. It's also an example of me "not paying attention."

Away He Goes

Took my son to the airport this afternoon. He's on a trip with some other kids from his high school to visit Europe for two weeks. I can't afford to go to Paris, but I cashed in two weeks of vacation to underwrite part of this trip.

He's only going to be gone for two weeks, but this feels harder than when we would send him off to Maine for six weeks at camp. Of course, I'm excited for him too. He gave me a funny look when I handed him a package of Dr. Scholl's gel insoles. I told him to just put them in his suitcase, and if he didn't need them they still wouldn't be a burden. On the other hand, he might find they'll come in handy.

Runaway Bride's Freedom of Speech

There's this whole responsibility thing that seems to go along with that freedom thing. It's all so terribly confusing.

"They cry liberty when they mean license."

I forget who said that. I'm sure Google remembers, but I'm too late and lazy to look it up just now.

Halley Suitt, of this previous post, remarks that she thinks bloggers may be losing their freedom of speech.

Nonsense.

What Halley's referring to is the idea of consequence-free speech, where you can say anything you want and only good things happen as a result.

There's no world like that, nor do I think we should want one.

Halley wrote a deliberately provocative post about feeling alienated that had a number of fairly ugly generalizations made toward married women whose children attend the same school as her son. It seems to me that when we're trying to be provocative, or "edgy," we should probably expect people to be provoked, and we probably should not be surprised at the result.

File this under, "Blinding Glimpses of the Obvious."

Dave Catches a Break

Apart from more blessings than I could possibly deserve, let alone count, I did catch a break today. I happened to be in the Navy Exchange to pick up a few things and I cruised through home electronics just to see what was new or on sale. There was my Sony LCD monitor for $349.00! Woo-hoo! The Exchange does offer 30 day price protection, so I'll get the $90.00 difference back.

Taking Ourselves Too Seriously

Doug Miller offers what is very likely a reasonable commentary on the state of commentary surrounding the "blogosphere." He takes some smart jabs noting that ubiquity quickly trumps novelty, and that the "blogosphere" is likely no more compelling a notion than a "'telephonosphere,'and getting all sweaty about how the telephone enabled 'personal real-time verbal messaging.' In short, I think we're taking ourselves a bit too seriously."

He offers,

Equally however, I find the seemingly never ending rants of those who feel compelled to attack the so-called power structure of the A-list equally boring, and faintly ridiculous. Really, folks, there isn't any power structure there, and pretty nearly everything that seems a big deal in the "blogosphere" just isn't out where most people live and work. Again, we're taking ourselves way, way too seriously. Almost none of what the supposedly disenfranchised seem up in arms about has any real impact, anywhere. Much blogging is largely just people getting emotional and venting in public, things that have been happening for thousands of years. It's just people being interested in different things than you are, and that can only have an impact on you if you let it. Nothing any A-list blogger has ever written or done has ever cost me a job, damaged my marriage, hurt my kids, whipped my dog, or cost me a red cent. But again, hey, if you get your jollies by raging against "The Man" in what you perceive to be his new form, far be it from me to get in your way.

I must say, I felt a bit as though that might have been directed at me, or others like me who have had something to say on that very topic of late. It's quite possible I am boring and faintly ridiculous. Perhaps that's not so bad though, there are worse things one could be I think.

But I have to wonder if Doug's take on the situation is really as simple as all that?

The telephone is a marvelous device, and it certainly brought about a number of welcome advances in the way people make their way in the world, chief among them in my opinion being pizza delivery. But the telephone is merely one cranky old man with too much time on his hands talking to one other bored listener, if indeed he is fortunate enough to have one. The capacity for mischief seems largely limited to telemarketing (and its evil variant, "push-polling"), "do you have Prince Albert in a can?" and the occasional unwelcome obscene phone caller. The internet, as a medium, is fundamentally different from the telephone. Perhaps it, and the ways it may be used, merit being taken a bit more seriously than the telephone. I don't know, I'm not an authority on any of this. I'm quite possibly just a boring, faintly ridiculous fellow who gets his jollies by raging against "The Man."

The Further Adventures of Tech Support

Last weekend I converted my dad over to a new application for posting his weblog. It's called RapidWeaver, and it has the virtue of being very similar to Site Studio, but seemed to be better behaved and it came with some documentation.

One of the features it offers is support for an RSS feed, but that doesn't seem to be working just now and I haven't had time to look into it yet. We still don't have permalinks, but at least it supports archives.

Copying and pasting all of my dad's posts from his weblog into the new application made it clear to me just how much he's been writing. Yikes! He does love to tell a story.

I do all my tech support via iChat and Apple Remote Desktop 1.2, which no longer works under Tiger so I have to use the iBook to see his machine. That's a little inconvenient since they run their eMac at the same screen resolution as the iBook, and so there's usually a fair bit of scrolling as I mouse around the desktop and sometimes I find myself looking at my stuff instead of his and getting a little confused about where I'm at. But the good news is, I can get it done.

Yesterday, Al Hawkins pointed out this application, Near-Time Current as a candidate for Dad's blogging application. I intend to look at it some more, but at first blush it looks like it might be a little more complicated than I'd prefer.

Dad's 78, and his short-term memory for unfamiliar tasks is somewhat compromised. It's interesting though, because I've been reading how the mind deals with resource limitations in memory, and while he has difficulty recalling what button to click on to perform a particular task, he can recall that he has a meeting with someone, or an agenda to write or any of a number of myriad details surrounding his latest project, with seemingly little difficulty. I believe that's because these are very familiar tasks to him, and so much of the memory support for those is being supported by areas like the frontal cortex, where planning and reasoning take place. That's where RapidWeaver's similarity to Site Studio was fairly useful.

I'm confident he'll eventually master all the functions of the software that helps him produce his weblog, but it's going to take a great deal of repetition to help form those new neuronal connections in the frontal cortex to help make up for short-term memory deficits. Of course, at the rate he's posting, that probably won't take very long!

iTunes Podcasts

Integrating podcasts into iTunes is pretty cool. It will be very cool, to me anyway, if they manage to convince NPR to offer their programming as podcasts. I'd especially welcome The Diane Rehm Show being offered as a podcast.

Losers

That whole Desperate Housewives post was, obviously, based on Halley's post which she titled, Do Our Kids Think We're Losers?

Winners and losers. Up and down. Top and bottom. Hierarchy, hierarchy, hierarchy. Big heads, long tails.

To Jeff Jarvis, whose voice I had the intrusive displeasure of hearing this morning as I awoke to NPR, a loser is someone who dresses up as a Star Wars character and stands in line to see a movie, as he related in this bit of deathless prose that he felt compelled to grace us all with:

What a relief

: No more stories about dorky Star Wars losers without lives waiting in line for a damned movie.

So, Halley, under no circumstances should you dress up, even as a sexy Princess Leia, complete with bronze push-up bra, and stand in line to see a movie. I don't know if your kid would think you're a loser, but Jeff Jarvis would. And we all care what Jeff Jarvis thinks.

Don't we?

Don't we?

I thought so.

Desperate Housewives

Cat fight!

I will never understand women.

There are some pretty ugly feelings being expressed here. Ugly feelings that have something to do with being physically attractive, and who's looking at whose ass. Ugly, but all too human.

Read those comments. Wow!

As a man, I feel I'm qualified to offer the following generalization regarding all men's behavior: We look at all women's asses. Some just longer than others. Doesn't matter if they're single or married asses. And mostly, it's just an involuntary reflex. Fat men do it, skinny men do it, single ones, married ones, and the married ones who pretend to be single, all do it.

We look at them all, because we judge them all. That's what we do. That's who we are. We observe, and we judge.

Of course, that's true of both genders. We observe, and we judge and we are observed and judged.

We all do this. Where do I fit in in this particularly hierarchy? Who's higher than me? Who thinks they're higher than me? Who's my ally? Who's my competition? Who's my enemy? Who can I use to attract attention to me? Who can I use to make myself look better? Who do I find desirable? Am I desirable? Who else desires what I desire? Who desires me? Does anyone desire me? Am I an "alpha male," or just chopped liver? Have I "let myself go?" Do I look like I've "let myself go?" In the immortal words of one of the bards of the blogosphere, "Am I hot or not?"

And it can make us damn cranky. And a little "edgy" too, I might add.

Kind of like how Halley's feeling.

I think.

So Shelley offers a couple of pretty critical comments in reply. But I guess Halley was looking for validation, since that's what most of us look for when we're bitching about something. And so Halley slams Shelley for not attending another conference where Shelley would presumably "stand up" for what she believes in.

This is a little off topic, and I know it may sound odd, but why does one have to attend a conference to do that? And here's another question... who pays for all these people to attend all these conferences? Is that a paying gig? If so, where do I send my resumé? Because I for damn sure couldn't afford to be winging my way over to Paris to hob-nob with the Top 100, and then jet over to the left coast to stand up for what I believe in. But I'd be happy to do it if someone else is paying the bills! But I couldn't afford it on my own, and I have a job, and I'm pretty sure Shelley remains unemployed. Because, you know, Microsoft looked, and there aren't any good programmers to be hired in this country.

Where's the transparency?! For the love of God! Where's the transparency!

Anyway, then Liz figures she has to stick up for Halley, and so she slams it to Shelley!

Oh, it's so "on," bitch! (That's not a quote. That was just what the prejudiced stereotyped voices in my head said to me as I read this exchange.)

But, as you know, as the wise Doc Searls tells us, the "blogosphere" isn't like high school. Much.

And the world is flat.

Which, as you learned in high school, or elementary school... either one... is not true.

And neither is that other thing.

Gameboy

The Electronic Entertainment Expo was last week and Sony and Microsoft unveiled their new consoles. I watched a few minutes of the MTV special that introduced the new XBox, but quickly concluded I wasn't part of the target demographic. I did happen to see the bit where Frodo introduces Tony Hawk and his new game American Wasteland, which was followed by clips from a number of other games including some racing game, a football game and the same old "ultra-violence." I'm not sure the producers had a "moment of Zen" in mind when they had Hawk using the words American Wasteland followed by several clips of violence and destruction, but there you go.

I've never been a huge console gamer. But, having kids, I have owned a couple of them. The first one in our house, I didn't buy. Back when we were less well-off financially, and probably more responsible parents as a consequence, we told Melissa if she wanted a Nintendo, the old NES or, Nintendo Entertainment System, she'd have to earn the money herself. So she got a paper route, saved up her money and bought an NES.

Then she quit the paper route! She's very goal-oriented. I remember her frustration with Super Mario Brothers 3, and having to tell her it was only a game. We'd have to tell her to put it aside and do something else, because she was absolutely bent on completing that game. Which she did. I mentioned she was very goal-oriented, didn't I?

We skipped the Super Nintendo, that coming along during the period in Melissa's life when she wasn't into games very much; and before Chris was old enough to care about them. By the time he was, we were doing better financially and so we bought him the Nintendo N64, even though the Sony Playstation was supposedly the better machine. He wanted Mario and Zelda, and I thought cartridges were likely to last longer than CDs.

At some point we bought him a GameBoy as well, during that whole Pokémon thing.

When the PlayStation 2 came along, we were impressed, but it was expensive and so we waited to see what the Nintendo GameCube would be like. I'm glad we did. We bought the GameCube when it was introduced, and as I recall it was significantly less expensive than either the PlayStation or the XBox. Chris wanted the black one, but the only color in stock at the time was "indigo" which looks a heck of a lot like purple to me, but what do I know? The small "cube" console fit easily into our existing entertainment center, and it has been a quiet and reliable performer ever since we got it.

I've never liked the XBox, mostly because I just don't like Microsoft, that and there's nothing particularly "innovative" about it. It seems like they invade every space where there are already products I like, and then they drive them from the market. Microsoft has lost over 2 billion (that's "billion" with a "b") dollars on the XBox, though it's probably a bit more than that by now. The only reason it's still on the market is that MS's monopoly position in operating systems gives it a revenue stream that can underwrite the kinds of financial losses no other competitor can sustain. That $2B managed to buy them a larger piece of the console game market than Nintendo, but they still lag Sony. Since America is all about paying attention to winners and losers, the speculation seems to always be along the lines of, "When will Nintendo be driven from the market?" As a Macintosh user, it's an experience I've grown quite accustomed to. That speculation is particularly acute today, now that Sony is pressuring Nintendo in the handheld gaming area with the PSP. I don't dislike Sony in the way I dislike Microsoft, but I like Nintendo enough that I hope that they survive.

I've purchased three GameCubes, one each for Chris and Caitie, and one for myself. I also have a GameBoy SP, though I only have three games for it, and I only play two of those, Advance Wars and Advance Wars 2. I've also got the adapter that sits under the Cube that allows you to play GameBoy games on the TV using the GameCube controllers. I was playing Advance Wars 2 last weekend. I have to win the final battle and I'll have completed the campaign portion of the game. It's a lot easier as a 40-something to play it on the TV, but I do use the handheld when I want to kill time waiting somewhere. I'll probably buy a GameBoy DS (Double Screen) one of these days, just because I think it's a unique and interesting gadget. I have the GameCube mostly so I don't have to cart Caitie's back and forth when she's staying with me. I do play the occasional game on it. I completed Red Faction II, and Time Splitters and I enjoy a few others from time to time.

Nintendo's next console, the Revolution, isn't looking as though it's going to be competing on raw computational power. Sony and Microsoft each seem to have gone after the technical specification crown. The XBox 360 looks a hell of a lot nicer than the original XBox. At least you won't have to build an addition onto your home just to house the thing. The images I saw of the PS 3 look bigger than the current model. Both seem to be making some kind of play for being a kind of digital media hub. Nintendo's Revolution is less ambitious in that regard. What's interesting about Nintendo's offering, from what we think we know now, is the kind of economic "long tail" play it's going to make. Supposedly, you'll be able to download games from Nintendo's previous consoles and play them on the Revolution. I'm pretty sure there's going to be a charge for that, but I don't know if it'll be part of a monthly subscription, or if there's a per-title "rental" charge. We shall see, but I think there would be some interest among Gen-X gamers to be able to play their old NES and SNES games on the Revolution.

Anyway, Nintendo has remained profitable the last few years, even in the face of a scorched earth campaign from Microsoft, so they won't be going away anytime real soon. The pressure from Sony and the PSP may alter that situation somewhat. I just hope they continue to remain profitable because they seem to be more adept at coming up with interesting ideas than either of the two "industry leaders," who just seem to focus on "more, more, more!" (of the same).

Everything Bad is Good for You

Along the lines of Steven Johnson's thesis that popular culture is making us smarter (though I hasten to add that there's no evidence to suggest it's making us any wiser), it would appear that being overweight isn't as bad for you as many authorities have suggested.

The current issue of Scientific American, not online as of this post, has an article entitled The Overblown Obesity Epidemic.

And we've already noted the backlash forming from the fast food front, with Burger King's heart-attack-in-sack omelet, and reports of similar efforts from other vendors.

I just get this mental image of authorities on either side of a pendulum and each gets a chance to push it. It's bad enough when the finger is not the moon, but when they're all pointing to different moons, it's time to stop paying attention to authorities and really start thinking for yourself.

But I think I will nip out for a package of white chocolate chip, macadamia nut cookies. Be right back... ;^)

Star Wars

My son Chris and I went to see Revenge of the Sith last night. Like most people who've seen it, I think it was better than either of the previous two movies. But I don't think it's as good as any of the first three.

I think it's somewhat ironic that one of the things that made the very first movie kind of special was that the rebel spaceships were all kind of dinged-up and dirty, the Millennium Falcon was kind of held together by bailing wire and duct tape. SF cinema to that point being defined by the spacecraft in 2001: A Space Odyssey, all NASA clean-room sterility and perfection. In the last three outings of Star Wars, everything has been pristine. I guess CGI hasn't quite reached the point where it can reliably render the effects of entropy. Just kidding. It's probably that Lucas or his CGI team haven't quite outgrown their affection for just how perfect they can make everything appear.

The volcanic planet did appear a bit dingy though, I have to say.

Hey, what happened after Grievious (is that how you spell that?) broke the window in the star cruiser (I hate it when that happens), and all the air started rushing out and everyone was hanging on for dear life? Next thing you know, we're all buckled in and "landing" half of a disabled star cruiser. Did I miss something? And FTL (that's "faster than light") space travel seems to be much faster in the latter days of the Republic, where folks seem to flit from star system to star system in less time than you spend waiting to board a typical flight. This is definitely "Space Opera," with about as much attention to real world physics as the average episode of Flash Gordon.

Anyway, it was an interesting diversion and it does make me want to watch the original trilogy again. It's too bad the last three episodes didn't have anything in the way of interesting human characters. After the debacle of Jar-Jar Binks, it seems all the funny bits were left to the droids. At least the first three had human beings who bickered and made smart-ass comments to one another. Maybe it's all the enlightenment that comes with being a Jedi Knight that sort of destroys their sense of humor. Maybe humor is part of the Dark Side or something.

Like a lot of people, I guess I'm glad it's over. Now I can go back to just paying attention to the first three and forgetting the rest.

Truth and Transparency

Among the hip and trendy buzzwords used by all the cool kids these days is the word "transparency." It's supposed to reflect (Oooh, I like that!) the idea that one can see what someone else is doing. Its virtue is supposed to reside in the fact that, too often, we can't see what someone or something else is really doing, until we've been manipulated into, or committed to, a position we may not like once we can "see" what they were doing.

Transparency is like "truth" or "honesty," except it's neither of those things, which is why it takes a new term of art like "transparency" to accomplish its intent. We're all cynical enough to know that we ought to be very skeptical whenever we observe that some authority figure, or company is doing something, especially something that appears to be altruistic. We intuitively understand that it's unreasonable to expect entities that compete for attention and authority ever to be completely truthful or honest about their intentions. We want to believe that promoting and embracing "transparency" may inhibit those entities from the worst examples of deceit, and give us the opportunity to "see" the truth behind their actions.

We also want to believe in ourselves, in our power to "change the world," or, at least, make the world a better place. Part of believing in the notion of "transparency" is also a wish to believe in ourselves and this power to make the world a better place.

The entities that compete for attention and authority understand all this. Therefore, many of them they try to act in ways that give observers some reason to believe that they're being "transparent." They understand that this makes the people who believe in "transparency" feel good about themselves. It validates and flatters them. People enjoy receiving validation and flattery, and they're quite reluctant to criticize those who give it to them.

Instead, they will turn their attention to other entities that they perceive as not being as "transparent." They will criticize them and feel good about themselves in their effort, believing they're helping to "change the world." It's a "win-win" proposition. The supposedly "transparent" entities benefit, from having negative attention directed at their competitors.

I think that the entities that make no show of embracing "transparency," are the ones that are the most transparent. And I think that people who don't put any particular faith in the idea of transparency are the ones most likely to actually see what's going on.

Eighteen

My son turned eighteen yesterday, and we celebrated with what has become a family tradition, dinner at Chizu, a local Japanese restaurant.

Here are the kids, Caitie, Melissa and Chris:

Every time we eat there, Gino is our master of the culinary arts. A picture of the master:

Melissa was a waitress at Chizu for many years, and met her future husband, Pat, when they were both working there. Pat's just become a firefighter for Duval County, and Melissa is a supervising manager for condo conversions with her company. She's quite the taskmaster.

After dinner we went to Melissa's and Pat's for cake and ice cream, and to give Chris a few gifts. I gave him a Canon Powershot A510 camera to take with him on a school trip he's taking to Europe later this month. I also gave him Dr. Seuss' Oh, The Places You'll Go! He won't graduate from high school for another year, but it's a good book right about now anyway. Perhaps it can get through that peculiar barrier that sometimes exists between fathers and sons at these times better than I could.

We also watched the season finale of That 70s Show, because Melissa and Pat have TiVo! This was quite the priority for Chris. We all had a great time, though I ate too much. What else is new?

Responsibility, Authority and Accountability

Then, the captain left one final offering - his command star, buried in the dirt.

Big heads take note.

Moving Mountains

As much as I hate having to arrange my life around giving her the required eye drops several times a day for a month after cataract surgery, I'm going to take her to get the other eye done.

Some, and too often it's women, know the burdens of responsibility only too well.

Time On My Hands

But I am a curious asshole with some time on my hands.

And I note, in a very Buddhist sort of way, everything is connected...

Time and Thought

It troubles me, though, not feeling like I have enough time (or is it brainpower?) to think things through.

A similar issue, and a concern I often share as well. On a somewhat different note, I find I have to make time not to think as well. And I do.

Critical Care

The truth is that I edit myself mercilessly, even when I write for the web. If 30% of what I initially write actually makes it into a post, it's a banner day.

I lack the discipline to edit myself well. Basically, it's all just first draft except I go back and fix the gross spelling and grammatical errors. The ones I can detect anyway. My biggest doubt is that I've made myself clear.

Another Doubt

Gone with the wind and went the emotion, added another doubt in me; where should that "feeling" go to?

Thinking Out Loud

Dr. James Vornov is thinking out loud at his Decision Tools weblog.

I recommend Nishida Kitaro's An Inquiry Into the Good. A relevant paragraph:

"Many people think that perception and thinking are completely different because perception is consciousness of concrete facts whereas thinking is a consciousness of abstract relations. But we cannot be conscious of purely abstract relations. The movement of thinking occurs by virtue of certain mental images, and without them it cannot take place. To prove, for example, that the sum of the angles of a triangle equals the sum of two right angles, we must depend on the mental image of a particular triangle. This thinking is not an independent consciousness divorced from such mental images, for it is a phenomenon that accompanies them. Gore explained that the relationship between a mental image and its meaning is identical to that between a stimulus and its response. Thinking is the response of consciousness to a mental image, and a mental image is the first step in thinking: thinking and mental images are not separate things. A mental image, regardless of its type, never stands alone, for it inevitably appears in some relation to the whole of consciousness, and pure thinking is thinking in which this aspect is especially distinctive." (p. 14)

Nishida gives me a headache, but it's a good headache.

The whole concept of emergence is, to me, merely a western articulation of Nagarjuna's contingency of arising phenomena.

Aspirin is helpful.

Keeping Score

Do best-of lists spur schools to try harder - or simply feed an obsession with rank?

May 17th

I can't let the date pass without noting that it was on this day in 1987 that former shipmate ET3 Kelly Quick was killed along with 36 others aboard USS STARK.

On a happier note, my son was born the next day.

Regarding Caliban's Mirror

Or, "Never Bullshit a Bullshitter."

Herewith being a considered response to Kevin Marks.

When you try to engage, they ignore you. When you conclude your point, and ask as a favor they not try to engage after the fact, they ignore that. Who's being passively aggressive?

Well, maybe it's Kevin Marks.

I try not to be passively aggressive. I prefer to be aggressively aggressive, when I choose to be aggressive. But who knows, maybe I was being passively aggressive.

I had hoped to avoid being drawn into a pointless exchange after I put the period after the rhetorical Q.E.D. regarding the myth of markets and conversations; but perhaps Kevin gives me an opportunity to at least reinforce my point by noting he totally missed the point.

Kevin replies to both my post and that of Mike Sanders, though he doesn't really respond to the points offered in either one. Yeah, Mike tripped over some curve terminology, and that's about all the attention Kevin gives to Mike. So then he turns his attention to yours truly.

He writes about his early history as a weblogger, " My first few posts had a similar blustery tone to the one that Dave and Mike have employed with me here, pointing out where I thought others' pronouncements were unsupported or based on misreadings."

From which we are to infer what? That my passive-aggressive bluster is something Kevin evolved out of long ago? Not sure. Let's keep reading...

(Editor's note: I am quoting out of context, but I don't think I'm being unfair about it. You're certainly encouraged to "read the whole thing," but I'm only going to quote the parts that are relevant to the point regarding "markets" and "conversations.")

"What I found over time was that neither obstreperousness or obsequy added value, but considered discussion did."

So, neither passive-aggressiveness, nor bluster, nor sucking up add value? I think that's a reasonable statement; but what's this part about "considered discussion?" Keep those two words in mind ladies and gentlemen, we'll return to them momentarily.

"Technorati's top 100 list, and listing of the number of inbound links and blogs by search results is a way for you to see how others have linked before - you can click on the little speech-bubbles and see what they said in linking to them, we expose that directly. The top 100 are not some fixed group, they come and go, but in general they link a lot themselves, and write frequently."

I experienced a momentary prickling of interest, thinking that perhaps Kevin was actually going to get around to answering one of my questions. Alas, he just waves his hands and seems to dismiss the significance of the Top 100, much as he did in his original comment at Shelley's that prompted my comment in reply. So much for "considered discussion," but we're not done with those words yet, either.

Kevin then quotes me and I'll get dizzy with self-referentiality if I quote Kevin quoting me, so suffice to say it was about markets being exchanges of value, and those with something to sell always seeking to influence perception of value.

"Markets are indeed about exchanges of value, but the market price is an emergent property of this spontaneous order of transactions between individuals, an information network that defies representation and measurement. A market is a spontaneous order, as is a conversation. The subtleties and complexities of these interactions are a source of fascination for me, as they do defy easy representation or theory, and we know that the analyses we can derive from blogging are only partial reflections of a complex reality, but we hope that they may be found useful, and that we can improve them and add to them over time."

Wow! Talk about bullshit! Woo-hoo! High fives, Kevin!

How does one parse a "considered discussion" out of that? If neither obstreperousness nor obsequy add value, what then can be said of obfuscation? I'll do my best here. The point I was making is that people with something to sell try to create the perception of value in the mind of a potential buyer. This shouldn't be a blinding glimpse of the obvious to many. Whether or not it is "emergent," "complex," or "spontaneous," or "defies representation or measurement" has nothing to do with the fact that the words Caveat emptor are in Latin because they've been true for a very long time. (Well, I just made that part up.) If there were ever a moment when a buyer should beware, it's when confronted with streams of fascinating polysyllabic vocabulary that defy easy representation or theory, like that!

Thank you Kevin, that was most illuminating. Really. Probably not in the way he intended though. (Was that being passive-aggressive? Snarky? What?)

He then quotes me again where I invite any of the principals in this non-discussion to do me the favor of ignoring me, and calls...

"Bullshit. Of course you wanted my attention, or you wouldn't have repeated it in different places and phrasings. So quit the passive-aggressive reverse psychology posturing and think a bit."

I suppose I could have been a little clearer. I wanted to conclude my point inasmuch as I was fairly convinced that there would be no reply forthcoming from either Kevin or his boss at any point further in the future, and I wanted to put a point on that. I thought that doing so might very likely provoke a response, at least from Kevin, but I genuinely did not want to pursue the subject anymore as I thought I had made my point. I'm sorry he felt I was being passive-aggressive, I find that annoying as well.

He continues, "Of course conversations are meant to shape perception; if they didn't there would be no point."

I don't agree. The "point" of a conversation is the experience of exchanged and shared attention. It is not to have a "point." As Phil would say in Groundhog Day, "Did you want to talk about the weather, or were you just making chit-chat?" This is an example of how marketing corrupts language in the service of mercantilism. Conversations are pleasant, social interactions. They aren't used to "shape perception," except by calculating, manipulative people seeking some advantage. We're not having a conversation here. We're not having much of a "considered discussion" either, since half the discussion isn't considering what the other half is discussing. We might be having a debate, or a dialog, or a vigorous exchange of opposing points of view. We are most assuredly not having a conversation.

"Doc Searls and David Weinberger express this well, and differently. Doc explains that the root of information is that we are trying to form one another. David points out that without each other we are not human - look at children raised by wolves, and says we are writing ourselves into existence online."

Again, I don't agree with either Doc or Dave. I especially don't agree with Dave. Existence precedes narrative. If anything, we're writing ourselves out of existence and painting ourselves into corners instead.

"Blogging is an arrogant act, as you say, Dave, and a personal one, but we are accountable and responsible to one another, and we reveal a lot about ourselves by writing continuously over time."

Where did I say "blogging is an arrogant act?" I don't think I ever did. It is ego-centric, but it need not be arrogant, though it often is. And I don't agree that we are accountable and responsible to one another. We are responsible to certain features of groups, whether they be the "norms of behavior" that members of a group expect, or the laws of the government. We are only held accountable by those authorities that have been given the responsibility to enforce those norms or laws. I am neither responsible nor accountable to you, nor you to me. This misunderstanding of the relationship between authority, responsibility and accountability is manifest on the Technorati web site where the About page says "Technorati is the authority on what's going on in the world of weblogs." Yet the Terms page offers:

YOUR USE OF THE SERVICE IS AT YOUR SOLE RISK. THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED ON AN "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE" BASIS. TECHNORATI EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT.

b. TECHNORATI MAKES NO WARRANTY THAT (i) THE SERVICE WILL MEET YOUR REQUIREMENTS, (ii) THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, TIMELY, SECURE, OR ERROR-FREE, (iii) THE RESULTS THAT MAY BE OBTAINED FROM THE USE OF THE SERVICE WILL BE ACCURATE OR RELIABLE, (iv) THE QUALITY OF ANY PRODUCTS, SERVICES, INFORMATION, OR OTHER MATERIAL PURCHASED OR OBTAINED BY YOU THROUGH THE SERVICE WILL MEET YOUR EXPECTATIONS, (v) ANY ERRORS IN THE SOFTWARE WILL BE CORRECTED, (vi) OR THAT THIS WEB SITE, ITS CONTENT, AND THE SERVERS ON WHICH THE WEB SITE AND CONTENT ARE AVAILABLE ARE FREE OF VIRUSES OR OTHER HARMFUL COMPONENTS.

I guess it's so important they feel they need to SHOUT about it. But, to me, that reads a hell of a lot like asserting authority while disclaiming responsibility. Authority without responsibility. Pretty good gig if you can get it, I guess. But what do I know? (For the record, I've been having this one-sided discussion since last December.)

I thank Kevin for the invitation to think. I shall endeavor to do that better. Allow me to share a few of my thoughts here:

First, I think he might try to focus a bit.

Second, I think, if he valued the utility of "considered discussion" as much as he seems to say he does, he might have posted a brief comment in Shelley's comments that he wished to reply at greater length later on when he was feeling better. I think there's a certain temporal dimension to any considered discussion, and that a certain amount of immediacy, consistent with reasonable "consideration," adds a great deal to the value of the discussion. I know I have a short attention span.

Third, while I'm happy to hear Kevin's feeling better, I still think he wouldn't have responded had I not used his unresponsiveness and that of his employer as a demonstration of the myth of markets as conversations.

Fourth, I think Kevin wrote a lot of words without managing to address even one of the questions I raised in response to his comment on Shelley's post. Which raises a question in my mind regarding how much value he really places on "considered discussion."

Fifth, I think it's really weird that the post Dave Sifry wrote about the new list of 100 he was promoting no longer has any comments associated with it. That was where I posted a number of pointed, challenging questions that garnered zero response, let alone any sort of considered discussion.

Sixth, I think that nothing in his reply amounts to anything approaching a "considered discussion," and I think this whole exercise should serve to reinforce my point that markets are not conversations, Technorati seeks attention and asserts authority without accepting any responsibility. The Top 100 List is a way of attracting attention, and exploiting the attention-directing "authority" of the "big-headers." I think if the Top 100 were as insignificant as Kevin Marks would have us believe, it wouldn't be on the front page. And if the world were as flat as Doc Searls would prefer, it wouldn't exist at all.

Finally, I think I've made my point.

If I may be permitted a kind of Steve Jobsian, one more thing... I am not the Dave Rogers that Kevin quotes at the end of his piece. I know, it confuses me sometimes too.

Tiger Point One

10.4.1 installed to no ill effect. Thus far my Tiger experience has been very smooth.

This Just In:

I'm still not on TV.

Stay tuned as we follow this developing story.

More Quartz Composer Stuff

A Tiger screen saver from Flickr photos.

Prototyping ambient displays on Tiger.

A Quartz Composer weblog.

Of Satellites, and Digits, and Worlds, Flat or Otherwise

"The finger is not the moon." That's not Emerson, but it might as well be. It's usually attributed to some early Zen teacher. Who knows? Maybe someone.

But the finger is here, and the moon is far away. The mind that the finger is attached to can be, if not apprehended, at least imitated, parroted and aped. Some more Emerson, just because my finger is a little tired:

"Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic."

"The world has been instructed by its kings, who have so magnetized the eyes of nations."

"Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say 'I think,' 'I am,' but quotes some saint or sage."

Spare me. The irony is not lost.

A thing is not true just because Emerson, or Dave Rogers or Doc Searls says so. Chances are, as imperfectly as we may know the truth, we're all wrong. And while I agree with much of Emerson, I think he neglects some important things as well. But I could be wrong. By no means have I read all of Emerson. But Self Reliance doesn't talk about how to be a good member of a group, as we all must be much of the time.

A thing is true when it becomes your truth, the product of your own understanding and your own thought. If you think this is easy, maybe your IQ is higher than mine. I haven't found it terribly easy all of the time. Part of the problem is "the truth is not what you think." It's not impossible though, it's just not as simple as reading the latest best seller from a New York Times pundit, or the latest post from an A-List weblogger. But rather than think, we're much too inclined to exploit attention to the newest "big ideas." This is how snowballs rolling down hills usually end up being so destructive in the cartoons they only appear in.

"The finger is not the moon. And I'm giving you the finger."

That weak little pun is my effort to promote your own authority, to separate my thinking from your own. If you're a little put off by the thought of a stiffly raised middled digit waved vaguely in your direction, you'll be less inclined to view me as an authority. In this regard, I'm confident I have been at least half successful.

But some people use their finger pointing to the moon as an end in itself. That finger gets them in front of audiences and in the pages of books and magazines, and lots of clicks and links on the internet; and it only does so successfully because so many are so willing to allow others' fingers to become their moon. "Dittoheads" and people riding the "Cluetrain™" share more in common than they'd probably care to acknowledge, even if they knew what it was.

Something to think about this Sunday as you regard all the important fingers pointing to the moon for you today. Perhaps it would be well to recall they're all giving you the finger too.

A Little Emerson for Shelley

No hypocrite, she.

Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

A Little Emerson

Self Reliance, The Good Parts:

"The power men possess to annoy me, I give them by a weak curiosity."

"If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith, let us at least resist our temptations; let us enter into the state of war, and wake Thor and Woden, courage and constancy, in our Saxon breasts. This is to be done in our smooth times by speaking the truth. Check this lying hospitality and lying affection. Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse."

"A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles."

Liking My Prison Stripes

Actually, just a Tiger update. See, I'm trapped in a proprietary prison, or locked in trunk, or a silo or something. This presumably results in some particular problem that will manifest itself at the worst possible moment and I'll wish I used some other more "open" platform or something. I try not to lose much sleep over it.

The Radeon 9800 Pro allowed me to play with some of the eye-candy apps like Quartz Composer, and there are some interesting things being done with that app. Haven't really had much time to do much else with it, what with tilting at windmills and all.

I had to reinstall my printer. Basically, I just deleted the Lexmark Z52 from the printer list and added it back, this time with a different driver. Seems to work just fine.

DevonThink offered a neat little plug in to the PDF actions in the print dialog. I can now save a webpage directly to my DevonThink notebook. That may be possible under Panther as well, since PDF actions were a part of Panther, though I never enabled them.

None of my applications have given me any particular trouble with Tiger, other than Saft, a Safari plug-in. Updating it to support Safari 2.0 costs a few bucks, but I'm not sure if I want to yet or not.

Talking to Myself

A week ago I mentioned that there was a discussion going on at Shelley Powers' Burningbird weblog about the value or utility of "blogrolls," the list of other weblogs many people include somewhere in their own weblog.

This isn't to rehash that whole issue, but merely to point out a couple of things. First, one of the authorities of the "blogosphere" is Technorati, which is a web site that is also a company, which provides a service to people on the web. As a company, it competes with other companies doing the same thing, chiefly Google.

In Shelley's comments, Kevin Marks, a Technorati employee, as near as I can tell, made a comment regarding the meaning of the so-called "Long Tail" (the vast majority of weblogs that receive a tiny fraction of the attention that the "A-List" receives), and Technorati's Top 100 list (which seems to be regarded, at least from my perspective) as the definitive enumeration of the Top 100.

I responded to Kevin Marks' comment with some questions and hoped for a response from him. These weren't easy questions, and the intent was to challenge some of the manufactured beliefs around Technorati's image.

At the same time, I posted some questions at Dave Sifry's weblog regarding a new list of 100 his company and another online venture, Always Online, were creating. Again, they were pointed questions, but I felt they were legitimate ones. Dave Sifry is the founder and CEO of Technorati.

As A-Lister and authority on the new "flat" world, Doc Searls has us believe in his exhausted post-marketing, marketing phrase: "markets are conversations." This is one of the core beliefs of the Cluetrain™ Manifesto belief system, a document intended to make authorities out of its authors, one that has been very successful I might add. Not unsurprising given the fact that two of the three authors were marketers. Presumably, internet enlightened entrepreneurs and business people know this and have incorporated it into their belief systems as well. Followers of the Cluetrain™ Manifesto routinely criticize companies that don't embrace this concept, like Apple, who instead presumably seek "control" of their "message," unlike, presumably, those companies aboard the Cluetrain™.

Technorati, again, as near as I can tell, is held in positive regard, at least by the members of the "A-List." I'll leave it to the reader to decide if this was an act of inspired genius to create a list that simultaneously flatters the egos of the people most in a position to criticize the company, draws attention to itself, and exploits the attention-directing "authority" of high attention-earning webloggers (the A-List) to draw even more attention to itself. I'd say probably not, since it's been done before; but it's still a pretty effective way to garner attention and achieve a measure of insulation from criticism.

But here we are a week later and I find myself talking to myself. Neither Keven Marks nor Dave Sifry deigned to entertain my questions. Perhaps I wasn't obsequious enough to merit being taken seriously. Perhaps I lack sufficient authority. I'm absolutely certain there's a "reason." But I don't think there's any explanation that can restore the fiction that "markets are conversations."

Markets are about exchanges of value, and those with something to sell will always seek to manipulate the buyers' perception of value. Even if that means pretending to be engaged in the latest hip, trendy, feel-good, manufactured belief system created to garner attention and manufacture the perception of authority for its authors.

If this criticism garners attention, that is not my intent. My intent is merely to state the truth as best I can perceive it. Any effort to engage in a conversation regarding whether or not Technorati believes "markets are conversations" at this point is merely a further effort to manufacture and shape perception. Hopefully that will inoculate me from having to engage in any pointless, back-and-forth, damage control efforts with either Mr. Marks or Mr. Sifry. If all of you would continue to do me the good favor of ignoring me, I'd appreciate it.

Fevered Dreams of a Flattened World

Now, this isn't a comment on whether or not "flatness" is good or bad, just or unjust. It's just some speculation on my part of what a "flat" world might look like.

Remember when air travel was deregulated in this country? Lots more competition. A lot more people could afford to fly. The airline industry became a lot more competitive, and flatness is all about competition.

So I think a "flatter" world will most likely resemble present day air travel. Some people, at the highest ranks in the hierarchy, will be able to afford to fly "business class," while the rest of us will all get to experience the intimacy of a flat, intimate planet; much as we do aboard commercial aircraft today.

Enjoy your peanuts!

Instant Karma

It pays to cultivate mindfulness at all times. Especially in the practice of a martial art.

It's all too easy to allow ourselves to fall into the trap of believing the things ego wishes us to believe and pursuing the things ego wishes to pursue. These things are almost always false, and pursuing them only leads to suffering.

Yesterday I was sparring with a partner who I've been sparring with for some time. She's very good, but I've noted a particular weakness and I've been able to kind of exploit it each time we've sparred recently. In the past, when I've sparred partners who are better than I am (which is nearly all of them over the age of 12), I tried to be very mindful of my limitations and to respect their ability, because I'd learned that if I did not, I would sometimes get hurt.

But I've been improving somewhat in my sparring in the last few months; and as I mentioned, I'd noted how I could exploit a particular weakness of this one partner, so I've been kind of feeling pretty good about myself when sparring. This should have been a clue. I always enjoy sparring, but I can see now how that has kind of morphed into something a little more ego-centric of late. Before last night's match, I'd talked to my partner about how she needed to overcome this vulnerability. She doesn't like to punch, and she doesn't like to get punched, so she'll retreat rather than allow someone to get close enough to punch. She kicks extremely well though, so in a point-sparring match, it's more likely that she'd score on someone trying to punch before they would be able to close enough to land one.

When our turn came up last night, I tried a couple of kick combinations, but always followed up with a few punches, many of them scoring. If I moved in quickly enough, her retreat would make her kicks less effective and I could usually avoid getting kicked, or block it, then land a few punches. Well, I started enjoying myself while I was doing it, and got a little too cocky. One time I started to move in and she didn't retreat and I took a really hard round kick to the left side of my face. I didn't see stars, but it rattled my teeth and I think I was a little cross-eyed for a bit.

Getting kicked pretty hard in the head is a really quick way to reset your humility. All of a sudden I wasn't having a good time anymore. What was a little different was that I didn't get angry at her because of this, which has been my habit in the past when getting hit hard. I'd usually get mad and then try to hit back harder, at which point the instructor would usually stop the match. We finished the bout and I think I went on to spar someone else right after that, but I really don't recall. When I touched the side of my face, I had two lumps right above and below my left cheekbone. When I got home last night, I just put some ice in plastic bag, took some aspirin and laid down on the couch with the ice to may face. It's hurt all day today too. It's not serious, it's just a good, painful, bump. No bruising though, which seems a little odd.

Another thing that's a little different this time is that before, when I'd get hit hard enough to really hurt, I'd get really down about doing taekwondo and think about quitting. There are only a few of us near my age in my school, and most of the other adults are under thirty. Like it or not, nearly everyone is better than me at school. I've learned not to compare myself with them, but with myself. I'll try to be better today than I was yesterday, and that seems to be working. I've also learned that to spar successfully as an old man, you have to spar like an old man and not like a young man. That means being patient, and alert.

Last night I got carried away believing something about myself that wasn't true, feeling pretty good about it and forgetting something important about myself and the other person in the ring. My sore cheek will be a valuable reminder to me about respect and humility and mindfulness next time we put our sparring gear on. Probably a life lesson or two in there as well.

As always, I'm an authority on nothing. I make all this shit up.

Conference Report

This just in to Groundhog Day World Headquarters: Long-tail webloggers, Dave Rogers, Al Hawkins and Doug Miller today met for an emergent, flat, virtual conference using the multi-person audio chat facility built into Apple's flat-world dominating Tiger OS.

When Rogers queried the group regarding whether or not we should blog the results of the conference ("Results? There can't be any results!"), Al Hawkins opined that it would be incredibly dull. Doug Miller agreed. Mr. Rogers ignored them.

No photographs were taken, therefore there will be no obligatory links to Flickr. Think of all the bandwidth we're saving.

There you have it, good people of the "blogosphere." Another emergent, flat, semi-smart mob, social-software-enabled, long-tail, open media, virtual(!) conference report brought to you by Citizen Journalism™.

We now return to our regular programming.

Vornov Speaks!

Another long-time, long-tailer, (I think he was once what we'd consider an A-Lister back in the early days) who's had one of the most consistently interesting (and consistently more infrequent) weblogs in the entire metaphorical "blogosphere," Dr. James Vornov has surfaced and posted!

Hope life gives you a few more minutes to share with the rest of us soon.

The Heart and the Shadow

I've been remiss in not pointing this out sooner from fellow long-tailer, Ken Loo.

Another link you won't get from the A-List.

"Set pixels to incinerate!"

One of these days I'm going to buy a new computer. Which one of these days seems to be a moving target, and one that is moving faster than I am. But that's okay, it's our task to accommodate ourselves to those of our circumstances that remain beyond our power to change. Or, as The Boss put it: Ya gotta learn to live with what you can't rise above...

My present main machine is a PowerMac G4 MDD 867MHz DP (for Dual Processor). It was at the trailing technological edge when I bought it over two years ago, but it vastly exceeded the power of the iMac DV (400MHz G3) that it replaced. Since then, I've bumped it up to 1.75GB of RAM, stuffed two more hard drives into it, and a DVD burner in addition to the combo drive it shipped with. Up until last week, it was attached to a 19" Viewsonic CRT monitor, which has long been engaged in a slow, steady decline into darkness.

Since far too much of my day is spent peering into this 1280x1024 pixel portal onto the joys and sorrows of a benighted and suffering humanity, (Tell me I can't torture a sentence! Well, maybe it's just a stress position.) I began to fear for my eyesight almost as much as my sanity. So I did what any rational American would do in such circumstances: I made an impulse buy.

The local Navy Exchange was carrying the Sony SDM-HS74P LCD monitor, and since it was one of the few LCD monitors there with a DVI input, I bought it. Many times we regret impulse buys. This might be one of those times. But then again, maybe not. After I got it home and set it up, it was like WOW! It's so amazingly bright! I've got it set at the lowest preset brightness level. I sure don't need any more illumination for my iSight camera (Which I kind of kludged to the top of the monitor. You can't have everything.) And the image is beautiful! And there's not a dead or a stuck pixel anywhere. But...(There's always a "but.") It seems I probably paid too much for it.

It looks like it's a discontinued model, and most of the places that carry them online are second-tier retail outfits ("No A-List for them!"), but it runs about $90.00 less than I paid at the Exchange. Which is what we call in Dave's World A Lot of Money. But this display is like crack cocaine. No way am I detaching this thing from my computer to box it back up and return it and wait for another one to be shipped to me that just might not be as absolutely perfect as this one is. And last time I checked, the Exchange won't price-match online retailers. I may ask again, but I'm not optimistic. So, I guess I'd say I think the display is worth what I paid for it, so I'm happy. I'm a little unhappy that I might have gotten it cheaper, but who knows if I would have even considered it as a discontinued model, instead buying a different monitor entirely and perhaps not being as pleased as I am with this one.

Well, if that weren't enough, Tiger (aka Mac OS 10.4) has upped the video ante in the OS infrastructure. Core Image, Core Video and Quartz 2D Extreme all seem to require a current generation 3D graphics processing unit, which my Radeon 9000 decidedly is not. And since my new monitor is so spiffy, it would seem a shame not to be able to use it to appreciate all of the bells and whistles and eye-candy Tiger is able to deliver. Now, a wiser man would probably buy a Radeon 9600 re-worked by Other World Computing to run in a PowerMac G4. That would only cost about $120.00. But I am not a wise man, and a fool and his money are soon parted. Or partying. Or something.

So on to Buy.com where I was able to obtain the Radeon 9800. It's probably more video card than this computer can really use, given my 133MHz bus speed. But that's mostly of concern in video games, I think. If I want to get really stupid, I mean, courageous, there's a hardware hack I could use to bump up the bus speed to 167MHz, and the processor clock rates to 1GHz, but I think that might be "a bridge too far."

In any event, my new computer has just receded into the future by some amount proportionate to the money I've just spent on this one. The monitor isn't a bad investment, and I did need a new one anyway. But the video card is just an indulgence in instant gratification.

The 9800 should arrive tomorrow.

Update: Turns out there's a $50.00 rebate for the 9800 from ATi. Cool.

An A-List of Sorts

It occurred to me the other day that I'm already a member of an A-list, (no, not the one that refers to a certain anatomical (there's another a-word!) feature). One of the attention-seeking digerati runs a web site that categorizes weblog authority by their relative position within the animal kingdom.

I think I was down there in the amino acids, which is, you have to admit, perilously close to, like, hydrogen and other explosive atoms.

Anyway, life's pretty good down here at the far end of the long tail. (Another metaphor that invites thoughts about how far you have to go just to be considered part of that unnamed anatomical feature that begins with the letter "a.")You don't have to worry about any of those folks Mike Sanders calls the big headers actually taking your questions seriously and responding to them.

Now, truth be told, Scoble did sort of reply to me, obliquely, in a response to Jon Husband who, admittedly, was probably much nicer in his criticism than I was. But Robert wasn't being very nice, whether he thought he was or not. And his response exhibited the same appalling lack of sober reflection that the original post did, which makes you wonder if he really thinks about things very much. And why is this guy Microsoft's "Chief Humanizing Officer?" But the whole Technorati thing seems to be a case of "I'm not going to dignify that with a response."

It's quite okay by me. Just another reflection on the whole myth of the "flat world," "conversations," the "Cluetrain™," and the "self-correcting nature of the 'blogosphere." Note the liberal use of the aptly-termed "scare quotes."

Remember, ladies and gentleman, that the finger is not the moon. I'm giving you the finger.

And, most emphatically, so are they.

Dad Remembers

I know it's Mothers' Day, but it's also V-E Day, and my father remembers here. (Note: Until I get something with permalinks, you may have to scroll to the 5-8-05 entry.)

The pictures of Nagasaki my father mentions are here.

I have to get him a new weblogging application.

John Robb's New Digs

John Robb has moved his weblog, and you'll find him here. He also bought a 17" Powerbook, and he's in the throes of making the switch.

Irritable Vowel Syndrome

Medical science now has a name for my problem with the A-List.

Just Out of Curiosity

I'm wondering if the "flattening" of the world includes all corporate policies for resolving difficult issues? Most major corporations have established policies for resolving conflicts that, while imperfect, usually afford some measure of "due process" to all concerned. That is, all parties usually get the opportunity to be heard through a process that is known to all, and a decision is rendered by a person or a group of people who have the responsibility to resolve such questions; and they are usually accountable to other people above them in the much-maligned "org chart."

So now we have weblogging super-hero Robert Scoble, who played a role in reversing Microsoft's position regarding some state legislation addressing gay rights, who is now offering to take up the cause of any Microsoft employee who feels they've been discriminated against by management at the company.

I've asked Robert some pretty pointed questions, which he has chosen to answer in a flippant, defiant manner (which, truthfully, I admire - I don't think he's helping himself though). Robert states in a post that, well, let's use his words:

I'm against ALL discrimination. If I hear that a Christian didn't get a job or a promotion just because of their faith I'm going to go freaking ballistic -- and any manager who behaves that way should live in fear of being exposed in public.

At the end of the post he offers:

Any Microsoft employee who thinks he or she is being discriminated against for any reason, please let me know and we'll shine light on that problem together. It's just not acceptable.

So, how does the proverbial "reasonable man" parse this declaration? In this instance, Robert is specifically citing Christians because of push-back he received on the gay-rights legislation from some Christians. But clearly, he's against all discrimination. No problem there, that's congruent with Microsoft's corporate policies. What the threat that he's going to "go freaking ballistic" really means, I have no idea. Perhaps that's frightening to some people. I've got a career and a lifetime's worth of experience dealing with people "going ballistic," it doesn't really affect me anymore. Maybe "freaking" ballistic should scare me. Maybe it's one of his l337 skillz. But the second half of that sentence is chilling: "any manager who behaves that way should live in fear of being exposed in public."

It seems to me that implicit in this statement is the threat of Robert taking a discrimination issue before the public in his weblog. I asked him about this in the comments to his post:

"And are you trying to intimidate MS managers with the power of your bully pulpit-weblog?"

And his response?

"Hmmm. I guess so."

I also asked Robert if he would go about investigating any claims of discrimination put before him, prior to taking the issue public. He didn't really answer the question, offering a question unrelated to my own instead. You can read the questions and the replies in his comments.

So, I have to wonder if Microsoft envisioned Robert Scoble's duties and responsibilities at Microsoft including resolving discrimination complaints? Does he have some responsibility to do that? Does he have the authority to do so? If so, who is he accountable to in that function? Is intimidation by weblog part of the new transparent corporate culture at Microsoft? I think these are reasonable questions.

Microsoft has a human resources department, and I'm reasonably certain they have a process in place to deal with discrimination complaints. I believe if I asked for the procedures involved in resolving a discrimination complaint, I would probably receive them. Certainly any employee or manager would. Indeed, they're probably the subject of employee training at regular intervals.

What are Robert's procedures for resolving a discrimination complaint? What is the threshold for public exposure of a manager who is alleged to have unlawfully discriminated against a Microsoft employee? What avenues of appeal are there for a manager who may be the topic of a Scobleizer post in connection with a discrimination complaint?

I don't know. It doesn't really matter to me. But I think Microsoft's managers have some reason to be somewhat concerned. What about employees who feel they've been unfairly treated by the existing process? Have they been invited to bring up past incidents of alleged discrimination to Robert to have a public hearing in the Scobleizer weblog? I don't know.

Has Robert established a parallel process to resolving discrimination complaints? If so, has he coordinated this with human resources or some other responsible authority at Microsoft so that the two processes might work together and not a cross-purposes? Does Microsoft welcome Robert's efforts in resolving discrimination complaints through public exposure without a clearly defined process that protects the rights of all concerned? Again, I don't know.

My only interest in this subject is my interest in the ideas of responsibility, authority and accountability. Ideas with which I'm afraid too many people in the "blogosphere", flush with the thrill of attention confused with authority, are unfamiliar; and may have to learn the hard way. Or who, having not learned them, may needlessly injure or harm innocent people.

Again, just doing my bit to promote transparency, subvert hierarchy and make the world a "flatter" place.

Creatures of Habit

I'm a creature of habit, as we all are; especially the folks who happen to believe they aren't. Anyway, one of my habits is to frequent the same places for something to eat and, in some fashion, get to know some of the people who work there.

I go to Subway nearly every day for lunch and sometimes for breakfast. It's not so much that I enjoy Subway sandwiches as it is that I've gotten to know the people who work there. One of them, Melissa, has probably been working there for more than five years. I first met her when I was still on active duty. I've known Tom, the manager, for probably three years. Caroline's been there for more than a year now.

When you see someone only three or four times a week, and only for a few minutes at a time, it takes a long time to get to know them. But if you keep doing it for a few years, you find that you do. Melissa gave me a valentine's card this year, and I gave her a box of chocolate. We know about each others' kids and our respective challenges in life. We share a laugh or two each week over something one of our kids has done. Tom's active in his son's Scout troop, as I was when Chris was in scouting. So we talk about campouts and stuff from time to time. I was cleaning out my closet the other day and I gave Tom a couple of large K'Nex sets I had sitting around taking up space.

I used to go to Al's Pizza in Neptune Beach every Friday for dinner and got to know Jennifer, the manager there, quite well. She went with me to see Cher when she was in town. Then I moved away and started going to taekwondo every Friday, which pretty much precludes eating pizza and drinking beer beforehand. I saw Jennifer the other day when I departed from my normal Subway habit and went to Al's for lunch. She doesn't work Friday nights anymore, but she does work Sundays now. So maybe I'll start a new habit.

One of my habits is to go to another local sub shop called Firehouse Subs. There's one right near my apartment that I like to go to every Saturday after taekwondo. Kids are a bit less creatures of habit, or maybe they're just more sensitive to their parents' habits, because Caitie doesn't like the fact that we go to Firehouse every Saturday after taekwondo. Well, it's only every other Saturday for her. In any event, I went there yesterday and was pleased to see Ursula, my favorite cashier. She reminds me of Donna from That 70s Show, tall, very similar voice and attitude. I can't say that I've gotten to know anything about Ursula, but she recognizes me and asks me where my daughter is when I come in without Caitlin. I hadn't seen her the last couple of times I'd been in, so I remarked how nice it was to see her yesterday, and then she told me it was her last day there.

I was kind of bummed. In the grand scheme of things, it's a pretty petty disappointment, but still, it's a loss. I've lost touch with so many people over the years, one more shouldn't be cause for any particular angst. The good news is she's going to start working at the Neptune Beach Firehouse, which is the one I used to go to when I lived at Shangri-La. (Shangri-La is what I called my marital home when I lived there as a single parent. It's currently back to being Casa Mia. My present residence is referred to as Dave Cave III for those who came in late, being the third apartment I've lived in in the last six years.) So, quite conceivably, I can go to that Firehouse after taekwondo, since the school is literally right around the corner in Neptune Beach as well. So, maybe it's not a loss at all!

But there are other losses, some that are decidedly not petty. My best friend Sandy lost her mother last Thursday after a brief illness. She was able to be with her mother when she died, but it was still very sudden and came just before Mothers' Day and her mother's birthday so it's freighted with even more emotional weight. I called Sandy Friday morning after I received an e-mail from her telling me of her mother's death. We talked for several minutes and I don't know if I was of any comfort to her. But I know how much Sandy means to me, and I tried to be as much of a friend as anyone can in those circumstances. I hope I was. It's a source of some small discomfort and great pleasure to think that Sandy and I go back more than thirty years now. There was a large gap for many years, too large I'm afraid; but it wasn't a loss. I do have to credit the internet with helping us get back in touch with one another. We e-mail each other and talk by phone from time to time. I'm going to make my way out to Utah one of these days in the not-too-distant future and see what she's been up to with her husband out there.

Some habits you never break.

And we're all the richer for it.

Top 100

Over at Shelley Powers' very commendable weblog, there is a bit of a discussion going on about the value, utility and consequences of maintaining a "blogroll," a list of links to other weblogs.

In the discussion, Kevin Marks, who appears to be affiliated with Technorati in some fashion offered this comment:

The long tail is not a myth, and the many do outweigh the few. Pick a few words around a topic that you are interested in and search for them at Technorati and see who you find.

The top 100 is not the most interesting page on our site by any means. I wrote about this before - Call off the Search

To which I replied:

I think Kevin misunderstands the use of the word “myth” in this context. Whether or not “the many do outweigh the few,” it is the few that most profit. If the Top 100 is not the most interesting page on Technorati, then where does it rank in Technorati’s hierarchy of interesting pages? Second? Third? Why is it on the front page at all if it isn’t very interesting? Is it not in Technorati’s interests to maintain the attention of those in or near the top 100 to influence their attention-directing authority for Technorati’s advantage?

Finally, why can Technorati claim to be “the authority” on what’s going on in weblogs, and then specifically disclaim any responsibility to anyone who relies on that “authority?”

I still have hope that Kevin Marks will reply, it is the weekend and he probably has a life, but so far, nothing heard.

This is related to my concerns I've reiterated here many times, most recently in Life 101 and I Never Mataphor I Didn't Like, and the only reason I mention it is because Technorati has another effort underway to create a "list of 100."

I comment there as well, but I wanted to call your attention to it because, again, I'm very skeptical of the motives for efforts like these. Technorati must compete with other companies that provide online services to generate revenue. It looks like advertising is going to be the dominant revenue source for these companies, as Google seems to be eating everyone's lunch and everyone else is trying to be a "fast follower;" i.e. trying to get there before all the money is gone. What Technorati needs is sustained and growing attention, so it must do things to attract attention to itself. This is the purpose of the Top 100 list. It makes Technorati a valued asset to the highest attention-earning webloggers, who, in turn, direct attention to Technorati.

That may be a source of diminishing returns, however; as the Top 100 stratifies and stagnates, there isn't as much "flow" being generated toward Technorati except as the subject of criticism. Once Jeff Jarvis made the Top 100, he pretty much stopped talking about it, preferring, naturally, to talk about himself.

So there's now a new list being created of the Always Online/Technorati Open Media 100, and to make sure it garners enough attention, Technorati is calling for nominations from the "blogosphere." Seems like they might have gotten off on the wrong foot with women though, as the very first category for nominations is called Founding Fathers. Yeah! Go Y-chromosomes! But that's okay, because attention is attention and even negative attention works to sell advertising!

You know, I wouldn't care, normally. But the bullshit level is getting pretty high around here, and it's starting to stink up the joint.

Anyway, just thought I'd point this out in the interests of "transparency." Just doing my bit to subvert hierarchy and make the world a flatter place. Just your friendly conductor handing out barf-bags onboard the Cluetrain™.

Scoble Vows to Use Powers Only for Good

This just in: Robert Scoble, fresh from his victory over the forces of evil at Microsoft, has issued a stern warning to all Microsoft managers who may practice any form of discrimination. Scoble said if he even hears about anyone not getting a job or a promotion because of their faith, he will use his freaking ballistic super-powers to quash the offenders, and do so quite harshly. He invites all oppressed employees of Microsoft to reach out to him so that together they might Scobleize evil.

Sources close to Microsoft's Chief Humanizing Officer say he is undecided about a secret identity in order to more effectively use his blogger super-powers.

Life 101

There are some things that we must learn for which no classroom is sufficient, and none is necessary. They are not especially difficult ideas to grasp, but they seem to elude nearly all of us most of the time.

Hierarchies are here to stay, they are essential to how we function in groups. There is nothing inherently bad about hierarchy. But there are many undesirable traits of human behavior associated with hierarchy. We can wish for a flatter world, but that isn't going to change human nature. People will always be seeking to increase their rank in the hierarchy.

We have evolved some fairly sophisticated, fairly useful ideas as human beings to cope with the worst undesirable traits of human behavior in hierarchies. Rank in a hierarchy is measured by authority. If you visit Technorati, ("the authority on what's going on in weblogs"), you'll note that one of the ways they order your "cosmos" is by having the sites that link to a particular weblog ranked by "authority." This is an incorrect use of the term, because all Technorati can measure is some aspect of attention, which it presumably uses as an indicator of authority. There is little basis to believe there is any connection, but it's a common mistake.

In most ordinary uses of the term authority, those who are subordinate in rank are normally expected to exhibit deference to those higher in authority. Many times in our history, people have achieved high rank in the hierarchy, and a significant measure of authority, which they then went on to abuse in order to secure their position, or improve it. We require authorities and hierarchy to direct the activities of the larger group in order to preserve and promote the greater interests of the group. Authorities who abused their authority to promote themselves usually did so at the expense of the group.

To curb this kind of abuse, two important ideas were attached to authority, at least as it was implemented in most formal arrangements. They are responsibility and accountability. In the "blogosphere" one often reads about "authority" or "accountability," but seldom about "responsibility" when it comes to weblogs. And almost never all in the same piece of writing. There is a reason for this, because the ideas of responsibility and accountability constrain the exercise of authority, and the opportunity to achieve higher rank in the hierarchy. Right now, there are a lot of greedy little egos who seem to think they aren't doing any harm, and they want to take every advantage to promote their own interests.

There's nothing inherently wrong with promoting one's own interests. Where we, as a culture and perhaps even as a species, seem to object is when one does so at the expense of the greater interests of the group, or at the expense of a particular class or sub-segment of the group. For the moment, it would seem as though nobody, at least no "authority," perceives any particular deficiency in this regard as it relates to the "blogosphere." Perhaps it's because I spent most of my adult life in uniform, closely, even intimately, familiar with the ideas of authority, responsibility and accountability, that I seem to be more sensitive to it. Plus, I've just never liked a braggart, and they are abounding in the stratospheric reaches of the "blogosphere."

Right now, there are people in the "A-list" who are viewed as authorities. Many of them overtly embrace this and exploit it to their advantage. Some of them, Doc Searls probably most notable among them, demur; but make no explicit disclaimer, seeming to prefer to allow people to have their misperceptions. What is troubling about this is that none of these individuals has indicated they have had any thought as to what their responsibilities may be as a result of their authority, regardless of how they happened to come by it. They can't simply disclaim, "Hey, I didn't ask to be on the A-list." The fact is, they are.

What most of them are doing is exercising authority without clearly defined responsibilities, and nothing, apart from the potential actions of a "smart mob," to impose any measure of accountability on them. They exercise their authority to promote their own interests, whether it's open source software, Microsoft, Inc., or getting their face plastered on TV as often as possible. In the process, some of them say some very intemperate, even vile things about other people, usually in an effort to attract attention. I think this hurts the greater interests of the group. I think it encourages divisiveness and corrodes what little remains of civic discourse. All for the sake of a little more "whuffie," for themselves. I think we can observe a great deal of those excesses of human behavior, for which the notions of responsibility and accountability were created to check, in the "A-List" and among those who would seek to become members of the "A-List." Yet there is no sign of any acknowledgment of responsibility or accountability that I can discern anywhere in the "blogosphere," with the possible exception of certain blogging professionals, (That is, people who practice genuine professions, where the notions of authority, responsibility and accountability are taken quite seriously. Doctors, lawyers and engineers (the kind that work with atoms (which don't suck), not the kind that work with bits.).) who seem to observe the same standards of professional conduct on their weblogs that they do in their professions. I would note that such restraint is usually confined strictly to professional topics, and in most other respects they are as willing to exercise their apparent "authority" in other matters with no thought to responsibility as anyone else.

Absent any real responsibility or means of accountability, what the "A-List" really is, is a lot of people with a lot of opinions who get a lot of attention. Yet the fact remains, as a result of that attention, they are regarded in other quarters as "authorities." So we have the situation where some type of authority being is being exercised without regard to responsibility or accountability, and that's a formula for being an autocrat (lots of "A" words associated with the "A-List" - I won't mention my favorite one), or a fraud; and I regard many on the "A-List" as both. But that's just my opinion.

I specifically disclaim any authority. Regular readers (insert obligatory "all x of you" reference here) know what I'm going to write next: I'm an authority on nothing. I make all this shit up. Do your own thinking.

I offer that for a number of reasons. First, because it's true. The only responsibility I have is to myself with regard to the truth, and that is to speak it as best I know it. I'm not here to sell it, because the truth is not for sale. And I could be wrong. I'm not here to sell my authority, because I specifically state I have none. In this space, I have no authority over you, and I'm not responsible for you, and I'm not accountable to you. Nor do I seek to obtain any of those things for myself. Been there, done that, got the paycheck.

But when are we going to have the "conversation" about all the other folks who get to appear on television and tell everyone else what a weblog is and what weblogs "think." All the folks who tell us the world is really "flat" or that the "long tail" is really a good thing? My guess is, it'll be a cold day in hell. I still don't understand how Technorati can, practically in one breath, claim to be "the authority" on weblogs, yet explicitly disclaim any responsibility in connection with that authority. I guess "transparency" hasn't quite penetrated the more cherished parts of the "blogosphere." You won't see the Top 100 criticizing the thing that makes them the "Top 100," flat world or no. The "self-correcting" nature of the "blogosphere" (according to the "authorities") is on display for all to see.

Gravity Considered Evil

Think about it for a minute: How sweet would life be if we didn't have to suffer with gravity? Set aside the inconvenient fact that life ("as we know it") couldn't exist. Wouldn't it be great if falling down on our asses didn't hurt? Wouldn't it be great if we didn't fall down at all? How about breasts that never sagged? Yeah! That's what I'm talkin' about! Gravity sucks people! (Actually, there is no such thing as gravity. The earth sucks.)

See, there's just so much suffering because of gravity! Why aren't more people up in arms about this? I don't understand.

Well, maybe it's because it's just part of nature and, unlike climate, there's probably not a lot we can do about it, so we just sort of accept it and work around it as best we can. And I suppose we probably ought to even appreciate it for all the good things it allows, like having a planet to live on and a star to orbit and provide energy. You know, it's the little things in life that really matter.

But there are other parts of nature too, especially something we call "human nature." But since it's got the word "human" in it, it must be something we can assign blame and rail against. Especially since blaming and railing are such big parts of human nature.

So unlike gravity, we feel quite righteous railing against things like "public education," for all the evil things it does to people. It's important to point out the evil things that public education does to people because otherwise they probably wouldn't even realize it. That's all part of the insidious evil conspiracy - keeping you in the dark. It's not about, you know, sort of giving someone something to climb on a soapbox about. Something to rail against. Because, it's, like, evil.

Why am I flashing on Monty Python's The Life of Brian all of a sudden? Hmmm...

REG: They've bled us white, the bastards. They've taken everything we had, and not just from us, from our fathers, and from our fathers' fathers.

REG: Oh. Peace? Shut up!

Yeah, those bastards in public education! Taught us all how to read and write and now look at us! We're stupid! We need other people to tell us how oppressed and "dumbed-down" we are! If we'd had a decent education, we'd already know!

Who's zoomin' who here? Watch carefully ladies and gentlemen as their hands never leave their sleeves.

And On That Note

Perhaps a link to this is in order:

Ego - The False Center

Flattery Will Get You Nowhere

That being said, I wish to gratefully acknowledge a couple of nice things people have said about me. (Why they did so, I have no idea. But I don't lose any sleep over it.)

First there's Rob Fahrni, an online acquaintance of mine for some time now, who's under the somewhat delightful misapprehension that I am a writer. Well, that I can "BIG-WRITE" anyway. I'm not sure they're the same things, but in case they are, allow me to demur. I'm a guy with a computer and internet access, which makes me a writer in the same way that I think everyone is a Buddhist, most of us just don't know it. Real Buddhists and people of other faiths might take some exception to that. Real writers might take some exception to any claim that I am a writer. And I wouldn't object. But thanks, I'm glad you enjoy reading what I put up here. And I enjoy following your weblog too.

Then there's this new-to-me weblog The Vision Thing which has mentioned me a few times in recent days. This must stop. I have a large head already. Really, you should see my hat size. I was especially amused to read this line, "Dave Rogers takes it to the hoop." This inspired an equally unlikely and ludicrous visual of an old, short, fat, white guy doing a slam-dunk. "Yeah! In your face, Shaq!" So, yeah, hard as it may be to believe, that's the first time anyone's ever said that about me. Maybe there is something to this whole weblog thing after all. Anyway, Mr. Ethan Johnson has had occasion of late to say a couple of nice things about the stuff he finds here, so thanks for that. He has an interesting weblog that I commend to your attention as well.

While I don't wish to participate in the whole competition for rank in the hierarchy thing, the thought that this recent overwhelming surge in linkage to Groundhog Day has Jeff Jarvis hearing footsteps and feeling my cold breath down his back does have a certain appeal. Can a breakthrough to the Technorati Top 100 be very far off? Stay tuned boys and girls...

I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like

(...to stretch beyond all rational bounds, and to torture into a useless, unrecognizable, if ever-so-hip, neologism. Preferably, one that is also a pun.)

Doc Searls' latest assertion that blogging isn't "school":

What I love about blogging is that it isn't school. Instead it's a great way to discover how the long, flat tail features plenty of original and brilliant individuals. These good folks succeed by earning links, not grades. It's a much better, and a much flatter, system.

But here again we note an implicit standard for "success" by "earning links." So it seems that, by definition then, those at the tail-end of the "long tail" (another idea that's quickly exhausting its utility, perhaps because it was mostly intended to justify and thus preserve the status quo), are "unsuccessful."

Here's a link to Mike Sanders who offers this thought on the subject:

The long tail is a blogging myth in which the heavy-traffic bloggers try to convince the little guys, like you and me, that we are really the important ones in the blogosphere. And we should keep on blogging and linking to the big guys, since collectively the bottom 99% has much more viewership than the top 1% - or something like that.

Like somebody said a long time ago, "It ain't flat."

Tinder-Fu

This guy's kung fu is very strong.

Mail 2.0

People have expressed their opinions regarding the new "buttons" in the Mail application, and many don't like them at all. I don't feel that strongly about it, but I would like to mention something I think you might wish to change.

The default button arrangement in an open message looks like this:

I'm not much of a keyboard person, having become accustomed to mousing around the screen most of the time. I know, that doesn't make me one of the technological "elites" either, with encyclopedic knowledge of arcane key-combinations to invoke all manner of digital prestidigitation, and being 13.879004% less efficient than my technological betters. I like beer too, go figure. Anyway, that delete message button is too damn close to the close-window button.

So just control-click or right-click on the tool bar and select Customize Toolbar. Then grab that Delete/Junk group and slide it over to the right of the print button.

Now, granted, it's just as easy to undo "Delete" as it is to cancel a reply, maybe even a mouseclick or two easier. But it's less "traumatic" to accidently reply to a message than it is to accidentally, if only temporarily, delete one.

Incidentally, I moved the "back" arrow in Safari too. Too often I've managed to close a browser window when I just meant to go back to the previous page. Now I just resize the window. I know, if I used keyboard commands, that would never happen.

New iMac G5s

I'm pretty pleased with the specs of the new iMac G5s. The speed-bump, standard RAM increase and the upgraded video card I expected. Standard 802.11G and Bluetooth wireless, gigabit ethernet were a surprise. Looks pretty sweet to me.

How to decide between a 17" Powerbook and a 20" iMac G5? The Powerbook is portable and supports monitor-spanning. The iMac is more user-repairable and has more screen real-estate, to say nothing of the faster clock speed and the G5 processor. Monitor-spanning probably works with the usual firmware hack too. Plus, it's a lot more affordable.

iTunes Error

I tried to buy a few songs on iTunes last night, but had quite a bit of difficulty. I could buy one or two, but on the third one I'd get an error message suggesting I try again later. I'd do so, only to encounter the same thing. And despite using the Check for Purchased Music item from the Advanced menu, I managed to get (and pay for, I'm sure) two copies of one song. Ninety-nine cents isn't worth my time to call and object, but it is a bit irritating. I don't know if it's a Tiger thing, or something else but it was the first time I'd encountered this amount of difficulty in purchasing music through the music store. We'll see how it goes tonight.

Faith and Fear

I've pretty much persuaded myself that there are really only two ways to approach life, the poles that create the tension and the harmony of binding opposites: faith and fear. Presumably, the ideal is to always act out of faith and never out of fear. But ideals are ideals, and almost never do we achieve the ideal in our daily lives.

I've been thinking about how to think about this. What that means, I'm not really sure. I know that I'm not too happy with myself when I want to jump up and down and castigate the latest hate-mongering moronic idiocy from the keyboard of that attention-seeking, ego-centric, irresponsible, unaccountable would-be authority who I will not name, except to say that I have uttered his alliterative appellation here several times before. I know that my anger and frustration come from fear, which is also the origin of his own ignorant, bilious vituperation.

So while I'm sort of not-very-obliquely indulging my own bad self here just now, I'm also trying to see it from a different point of view, and see myself a little differently as well. Because we're all pretty much the same. I call you names, I'm really naming myself in the process. "You must become the change you wish to see in the world." Probably the secret to the whole thing right there. The trick is in paying attention, or learning to pay attention.

Abstractly, I think I know that everything is exactly the way it's supposed to be. I believe that's because we're not here to "change the world," so much as the world is here so that we might learn to change ourselves. While I know I'll probably never approach the ideal, I also know that even though sometimes I have fear, I know fear doesn't have me. And though I sometimes don't have faith, I know faith has me. That wasn't always the case before. And by "faith," I think I mean something a little different than what all my very religious friends and enemies might mean. All that means is that I know which way I want to go, which way I wish to turn. Doesn't mean I don't get turned around from time to time, but I know there's a difference, and I have a choice. Some people don't know that. I didn't always. For much of my life, I was completely unaware of the extent to which I allowed my fear to have my life.

Some things are harder to learn than others. The only thing a teacher can do is help a student find or develop the authority that is within themselves. If the student merely parrots the teacher, both student and teacher have failed. In some martial arts, you have to break a board. You can't imitate your teacher and hope to fool anyone. We start out that way, of course; but eventually, you have to break the board. I've been fortunate to have had (and still have) some good teachers. But there is always more to learn. I'm beginning to think one of the things one has to learn is how to recognize a teacher. Sometimes it's easy. Other times, not so.

This may be one of those times.