Month: May 2003

Happy and eating

End of the first full day here in South Carolina. It was not as hot as threatened—the thermometer only made it to about 85° F—but with humidity well in excess of 80%, I felt enervated and listless all day. Guess I’ve turned into a bit of a hothouse flower living in the Seattle suburbs, where 85° is generally the hottest it gets and the dew point rarely climbs above 50° F (meaning the humidity is generally too low to be noticed).

Dad and I cooked breakfast this morning. Unlike my uncle’s festive breakfasts, which tend to center around lots of cured, fried pork products, today’s was poached eggs on corned beef hash, asparagus, fresh tomatoes, grits, homemade applesauce, and English muffins—with mimosas to start for Mother’s Day. We were stoking up, anticipating not eating another meal until the barbecue showed up around dinner time.

A note about the pig-pickin’—in years past my uncle had taken a reasonably hands-on role in mixing the barbecue sauce and generally cootering around with his buddies cooking the pig, but this time (given the long cooking time needed for 140 pounds of dressed pig), he left it in the hands of a professional.

Which meant that by the time we washed the breakfast dishes and walked down past the tennis court to the cookshed where the long trailer with the barbecue smoker sat, our chef had already pulled half the pig off the fire, where it had slow cooked since midnight the previous night, and cut it up for leftovers. But the other half was still there for photographing, and as soon as I get a cable to connect the camera to the computer I’ll post some shots.

After that, the day was pretty slow: a tour of the facility in the bed of my uncle’s pickup (during which I picked up a mean sunburn), a quick swim in the afternoon, and, eventually, the barbecue.

This was my first experience with the South Carolina version of barbecue, which is a more tomato-based sauce than what I’ve had before, and features some different accompaniments, including rice and something called “Low Country hash,” which contains, among other things, ground pork meat and liver in a tomato-based sauce and has the consistency of a well-cooked lentil dish. (It was actually much tastier than I’ve just made it sound.)

After that my mom trounced me at Scrabble. And so to bed.

Postscript: For the original reference for the woeful pun that titles this post, see my current listening (or click here), song 5.

In case it wasn’t obvious…

I did get at least dialup access from the place we’re staying and was able to post the two items I wrote on the airplane yesterday (thanks, Brent, for draft posts in NetNewsWire). I also noted that Esta is jealous that she’s not here (for good reason: she has to work today). Cheer up, dear. So far we’ve just had breakfast. Granted, it was a dad and me special, but otherwise you didn’t miss much. Except the mimosas.

An online pubcrawl generator

I’m missing a charity pub crawl in Kirkland today (no direct URL because I’m disconnected, but Google will find it handily). A shame, because I would love to learn more about my neighbors and the businesses in my new home town, and the pub crawl would be a great way to do it. (It also seems like a really smart way to drum up local business in a recessed economy.)

Blogdex to the rescue: next time I want a pub crawl, it looks like I can try using the Up My Street Pub Crawl service to put my own together.

Dumb airplanes, smart mobs, smarter blogs

Reading Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs in the airplane this morning between Seattle and Atlanta, it occurs to me that reading books—at least nonfiction books—has become a poorer experience since the advent of the Internet. Part of the power of Rheingold’s writing is its allusive nature: he collects dozens of points of reference and authorities across as many fields of study and assembles them into a pattern. But you’re always aware that there are depths beneath each name that illustrate different aspects of the story, such as wearable computing/cyborg Steve Mann’s collision with the new blunt instrument of airport security, who forcibly unwired him.

Reading such a work on an airplane, without an always-on Internet connection, is a poorer experience because it deprives the reader of the opportunity to check context, collect evidence that informs or opposes Rheingold’s point, and follow lines of inquiry that may digress from the path of the narrative. It also deprives one of access to Rheingold’s Smart Mobs blog, in which he continues collecting, pointing to, and commenting on evidence of the emerging collective, mobile intelligence evolving around us.

At least the laptop provides some measure of disconnected “backup brain”—I don’t know that I would have remembered that the Smart Mobs blog had its own domain rather than a home on Blogspot without NetNewsWire, my RSS aggregator of choice, which gave me the relevant URL when I command-clicked the Smart Mobs blog listing in my subscriptions list. NNW also aggregated my unread headlines as I was finishing my packing this morning, providing me with some supplemental reading material.

Maybe aggregators like NetNewsWire provide the best option for disconnected experiences and travel access to information. They’re certainly a better alternative than the previous iteration of the technology. When I was a software consultant and traveled occasionally, I relied on Lotus Notes and an extensive array of company databases that could be replicated for offline reference. Really, though, I only ever needed a small fraction of the material contained in any of those databases. Providing RSS feeds from blogs, where I can choose my subscription list based on individual providing the information, allows me to make choices based on voice and reduces some measure of information overload.

It’s not perfect, by itself. But next generation tools like Blogrolling.com (for exploring what the people to whom you subscribe are reading), Technorati (for finding out what people are saying about you), and even Weblogs.com (for sheer serendipity—I’ve had some really great random experiences by clicking on the links to blogs I knew nothing about, save that they had posted in the last three hours) help to expand the scope of my interest beyond the “echo cavern” of talking to myself by providing primitive reputation systems and filtering.

What’s the next step? How about a blog recommendation engine for people who don’t themselves blog, maybe based on search patterns or even Amazon purchase history? Google, in addition to recommending Usenet groups or DMoz directories, could recommend blogs that follow your interests, as expressed by your search terms. (This is the real power in Andrew Orlowski’s suggestion in the Register that blogs should have their own Google tab—not getting them out of people’s search results but making it possible to expand the UI into more expressive recommendations.

Of course, on the airplane I can’t do anything about this, for now.

The death of blogging has been exaggerated

Particularly the death of William Gibson’s blogging. Great post today about Shadowrun (“the admixture of cyberspace and, spare me, *elves*, has always been more than I could bear to think about”) and about buying his books, in which he makes a nod back to the discussion I had with him in February at the start of his book tour:

When people are downloading your pirated texts for free, it means you’re already pretty widely distributed. I view downloading as a sort of natural, organic tax on reputation.

Buying used copies is ecologically correct and to be encouraged. The list price on a hardcover PATTERN RECOGNITION in Canada is $40. After GST and PST, that would be closer to $50. When people have the courage to shyly tell me they’re waiting for the paperback, I’m all the more amazed and flattered at the number of people who buy me in hardcover. I didn’t start buying new fiction in hardcover until I was in my thirties and owned a house. And most of the paperbacks I bought, up to that point, I bought used.

Interesting absence(s)

Last week, you could buy Radiohead’s OK Computer in the iTunes Music Store. Not this week. No comment, no notice.

Wonder if the leaking of Hail to the Thief to the web soured Thom and the boys on the whole music download thing? If so, I hope it’s a short term anger…

Also now absent: Sigur Ros. They had a headline in the Alternative section last week.

Update 9 May 9:12 am: See the expanded version of this post at Blogcritics.

MoveOn moves on

When you’ve mounted some of the most effective online anti-war protests ever, but still refused to prevent the war or convince the president to pay any more attention to your arguments than he did to his b-school classes, what’s your next act?

Some might give up. Not MoveOn. Currently they’re mounting a petition against the pending FCC ruling to further deregulate media ownership. The first round of this process was radio. Like your local radio station? Odds are you liked it better before Clear Channel bought it and started running it out of a central location hundreds of miles away. How do you like your local newspaper and television station? Want them all controlled by the same corporate interest? Before you say “it couldn’t happen,” think about what’s happened to radio. Yet most congresspeople only hear from the media on this one.

MoveOn is mounting a petition to convince Congress to block the FCC’s move. I think this one is worth signing, or at least looking at.

To South Carolina for pig-pickin

So, what’s the story with South Carolina, Greg asked me last night. Well, I’m not sure how best to describe the setup, but here goes:

  • My uncle and aunt live one hill over from my parents on the family farmland in western North Carolina
  • My uncle retired as an executive in a transportation company; his company has an executive retreat in a forest in South Carolina
  • Said retreat features fishing, hunting, horseback riding, and other outdoor sports facilities (when I was younger (11?) I rode a horse for the first and last time there; it bolted and I got a bloody tuchus)
  • My parents, my aunt and uncle, and another couple or two are sharing a multi-bedroom house at the retreat for a week next week
  • I managed to squeeze in two days off next week to join them
  • I will arrive on Saturday, the day before the pig-pickin’

What’s a pig-pickin’, my Northern readers are now asking. It’s something like a barbecue, if by barbecue you mean “cooking and eating a ridiculous amount of pork cooked on a fire.” But that doesn’t do it justice; neither does this (though it gives a little of the flavor and some of the recipe). All I can say is, after you’ve been cooking a whole pig on an enormous grill for a day, you’ll be hungry enough to eat anything. The fact that even without the anticipation the meat (dressed in a vinegar sauce only, please, no “smoky barbecue” tomato sauce here) is ambrosial is icing on the cake. And of course there are all the side dishes, and beverages, and occasionally (if it’s a pig-pickin’ that my uncle organized) live country music.

Why is it called a pig-pickin’? Well, because after being cooked over a slow fire all day the pork is soft and moist enough to be pulled off the pig and eaten with one’s bare hands, if one is feeling barbaric. And after a taste of the stuff, one could certainly feel that way. It does seem to awaken a deep hunger. In fact, I’m hungry now…

So this has been a dry week for posting, partly because I’ve been crazy busy at the office, but partly in anticipation of the stories to come.

Clinton: the story that refuses to die

Salon is serializing Sidney Blumenthal’s White House memoir, The Clinton Wars. It’s amazing reading. Certainly not objective, but after reading everything that the rabid Clinton-haters have slung for almost a decade at the man, it’s interesting to read a perspective from the opposite side, inside the second administration just before all hell broke loose.

I wonder if it’s coincidence that the depiction of the president in the first installment sounds a lot like President Bartlett on The West Wing.

Weblogs.com – Seeing the curve

When I looked a few minutes ago, Weblogs.com was only 50 updates away from breaking over 2400 weblogs in a three hour span. This would be the first time since the war was declared over that we might set a new high water mark (on April 7).

In related news, John Robb suggests that it may be time for Weblogs.com to do a “three-for-one split” (my words, not his) and start displaying only an hour of data at a time. If this happens, of course I’ll restate the traffic curves that we’ve been seeing—but it will only be an average approximation, since there’s no archive of data to tell us what the actual hourly high water mark is.

The interesting part is why the need to move. Take a look at the curve below (last updated 4/7):

linear plot of weblogs.com high water mark growth, 6 may

See the uptick? It could be caused by one of two things:

  • The war and corporate earnings season together caused an upswing in blog posting traffic that may not be repeated
  • We could be on the cusp of an exponential explosion in weblog activity, driven by the virtuous cycle of blogging: publish – subscribe – read – comment – publish.

The above graphic was a linear plot of the traffic to date. Take a look at this log-normal plot, which maps the high water marks on an exponentially increasing scale:

linear plot of weblogs.com high water mark growth, 6 may

This suggests that the hockey-stick shape of the first graph is no accident; there really are some reinforcing loops driving the growth of the blogosphere. If that’s the case, yeah, it may be time to move to displaying a shorter time increment on Weblogs.com…