Month: March 2002

Other people’s water, and new readers

Just finished a gig with the Sloan E-52s for admitted MBAs at a lunch at MIT Sloan. I sing harmony with the soloist on one of the songs, REM’s “Superman,” and I got a chance today to do something I’ve always wanted to do. There’s a section in the song where the soloist is by himself for four measures while I lay out after hitting a couple high notes in a row. Today, after the second high note I leaned over to the table to my left, asked “Is anyone drinking this?”, took a big sip, and got back in time to make my next entrance. Look on the soloist’s face: Priceless.

After the gig, I had my first face to face meeting with a new reader to whom I’m not related. One of the admits introduced himself and said he found my site while searching for weblogs by Sloan students. (As far as I know, I’m the only one.) He’s a Seattleite who’s “99.9% sure” he’ll be at Sloan in the fall. He’s also introduced his fiancée to blogging, but his own blog is currently in design paralysis and he hasn’t written anything yet. Well, here’s your public push: Get writing! A weblog isn’t a weblog without content!!

You can avoid Congress, but not the civil service

New York Times: Landscapes Under Siege. The administrative review board for the Interior Department has halted oil exploration in Utah’s Dome Plateau, and “suggested that the bureau had ‘capriciously’ ignored environmental reviews mandated by federal law.” The editorial concludes:

Nobody expects the administration to retreat from its basic theology that aggressive exploration of the public domain is necessary to achieve independence from the energy-producing nations of the Persian Gulf. Perhaps, though, as part of the larger debate over a national energy strategy, the Senate will force the administration to proceed with much greater care.

Yeah, somehow I doubt that the administration that doesn’t even invite the Democratic leadership of Congress to national security meetings will pay much heed to the Senate. I think that the best chance we have for protection against the strong-arm anti-environmental tactics of the Bush administration is the civil servants who have to carry out the policy. Based on this action, they have shown they can do the job.
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Feeling like death warmed over

I’m in pretty bad shape this morning for no apparent reason. I didn’t sleep at all last night, I couldn’t breathe well this morning, and I think I’m feverish. So naturally I decided to go to school. After all, what fun is being sick if you can’t get anyone else sick with you? 🙁

It’s been a rough morning otherwise too. On the way to the T, I saw the wings of a pigeon, feathers intact but separated from their owner, lying on the sidewalk. And I got a lovely email from an old college friend tipping me off about one of our stranger classmates’ arrest record. The story gave me another visual I didn’t really need. Unfortunate kid, this Ilya. He was all of 14 when he started at Virginia, and apparently had a few screws loose….
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And here I thought it would be “The Waste Land”

The Illuminated Donkey: “The Warblog of J. Alfred Prufrock”. Hysterically funny, though somewhat slanted at political blogs. (Also the meter is not quite as catchy as the original.) A sample:

Let us blog, towards certain well-examined URL’s,
The banner ad unfurls,
The caustic digs at less-than-sharp writers,
Punches are thrown as by heavyweight fighters,
Links that lead to endless arguments
And caterwauling laments
But here we raise an overwhelming question…
How to appear in refer logs?
Let us link to A-list blogs.

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Adobe gets SOAP religion: New Web services

Infoworld: Abobe opens Web services publishing door. I’d love to comment more than just the press release, but I can’t find a URL for the service and Adobe hasn’t published anything about it on their AlterCast page.

“… Adobe AlterCast software is designed to automate the production and workflow of Web images and graphics. For example, AlterCast can resize a picture or manipulate layers of text dynamically.

The addition of SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) support to AlterCast will allow developers to access the software functionality over the Internet using Java or .Net APIs, which will enable dynamic Web image updating and production from a single command, according to Adobe officials, in San Jose, Calif.”

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The dark side of digitization

Ananova: Ancient Domesday Book outlives electronic version. It was only a matter of time before the other shoe dropped about digital content, as it usually does. While human languages change very slowly, digital languages, formats, and fashions age at an incredible rate. This is one thing that most tech people, especially, don’t think of as a hazard of junking paper in favor of bits, but it’s something to be aware of. For existing works, digitization is not a replacement for conservation, just a way to extend the effectiveness of the conservation by providing alternative means of access. For digital works that start out as digital, picking the right format is critical.

News is free…

Well, as a Radio user I have no more gripes about dearths of news feeds, having just found NewsIsFree. The only question remaining is, why don’t the newspapers go out and build their own RSS feeds to share–why do sites like NewsIsFree and Moreover have to do it for them? Seems to me they could disintermediate these guys in a heartbeat. And I would think that newspapers, above all, would understand the importance of syndication.
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Shadow government

The New York Times: 60 Feet Under. Maureen Dowd makes some good points here and gets some great zingers:

“Mr. Cheney is Lord of the Rings, ruling over his very own Moria, an underground kingdom of bureaucratic hobbits and orcs….

Without Democrats or journalists, the underground executive branch can operate the way the real executive branch would like to, and frequently does — without a lot of second-guessing, Freedom of Information Act requests, complaints from civil libertarians and attention to the rights of Marin County hot-tubbers.

Nothing will be transcribed. So there will be no reason to clean up the language in President Bush’s transcripts, as the White House has done routinely since 9/11.”

Interesting question. We’ve always assumed that we get full access to the running of our government, with the exception of stuff that we really don’t want to know about (national security). There’s the rub–this administration thinks everything it does is “national security.” And it doesn’t want to share anything with the people’s representatives in the Congress, either.

Maybe Tom Daschle should talk to Bill Clinton, who came back from being made almost irrelevant by Newt Gingrich. He might have some advice on how to restore checks and balances on a political power hellbent on eliminating them.
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Hooked on Radio

So I have to confess. I’m not using it for weblogging, but I’m finding Radio to be invaluable in feeding my news addiction. I love getting my favorite blogs plus headlines from CNET, Wired, Slashdot, and others all on one page. There are some really cool people out there building RSS feeds.

My question is, why don’t the major news sources (WSJ, NYT (yes I know there’s a scraped feed available), Washington Post) hop on the bandwagon? It would be fairly trivial, and I would think good business, to set up an XML headline link listing that would bring people to your site.
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Good morning!

It’s a beautiful gray day in Boston this morning. I’m feeling on top of the world for no apparent reason.

Lisa is out of town, having taken her mom to London for a shopping trip. (!) I spoke with her yesterday briefly just before my cell phone ran out of battery. They got upgraded to Business Elite class on their flight to London on Thursday. I didn’t hear many details; apparently Business Elite is a mythical place with champagne, good food, and cheese plates. If the rest of their trip is a tenth as good she’ll be on cloud 9 when she gets home.