While I was out…

I went a little light on blogging the last week or two as a combination of workload and concert week stress took their toll. And, as is customary, all hell broke loose across the blogosphere. The combination of the discovery of the identity of Salam Pax (he’s a gay Iraqi translator who now has a column in the Guardian and who worked for other reporters without their even knowing!) and the passage by the FTC of the new relaxed regulations for media ownership (though no one has actually seen the regulation in question, I’m told it probably still requires media owners to be human) has me reeling.

So reeling, in fact, that I’m half inclined to give both of them a miss. I’m feeling some post-war numbness, folks, right around the spot between my eyes. So better wait until this afternoon for my critical instincts to kick in. I’ve got to get to work, but I’ll be loading up my CD player with Big Star and New Pornographers for that pop inspiration.

Prices going down, down, down

MacSlash: Price Drops on 15″ Powerbooks. This price break brings the 1 GHz 15″ PowerBook I’ve been lusting after down to $2599, which is still rather a lot but close enough to drool over.

Of course, what it really means is that by the time I might actually replace the Pismo, the 15″ model will have been replaced by an entirely new model. Apple lowering the price on an existing model is usually a sure sign that they’re clearing out inventory.

A congressman on media deregulation

I used MoveOn to contact my congressman, Jay Inslee, about the pending media deregulation. He contacted me back:

Thank you for contacting me about the proposed Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations regarding further deregulation of the ownership rules for media companies.  I appreciate hearing from you.

Like you, I believe that the airwaves belong to the American people, and I share your concerns about the end result of the FCC’s most recent Notice of Proposed Rulemaking.  It is important to maintain the diversity of information sources so that the public interest can best be served. 

I have joined with several of my colleagues in leading the fight in Congress to prevent the FCC from allowing this rule change to go through.  Recently I sent a letter to my colleagues in Congress alerting them to the potential negative effects of the deregulation.  I also testified against the rule at the FCC hearing in Seattle held in March, and I wrote an editorial published in the Seattle Times that further expressed the dangers that further media consolidation pose to our system of free press and American democracy.  I have attached the editorial below for your review.

As you may know, in the FCC’s 2002 Biennial Review there are four major rules being considered for possible relaxation:

  1. Broadcast-newspaper cross-ownership rule: This prohibits the daily newspaper and a broadcast TV station from being owned by the same company within the same market.
  2. Local TV multiple ownership rule and the radio/TV cross-ownership rule: These rules limit somewhat the number of stations that any one entity can own in a single community.
  3. National TV ownership rule: This policy limits the number of TV stations a single company can own. The current limit prohibits a company from controlling stations that collectively reach 35 percent of all TV households.
  4. Dual Network Rule: This policy prevents one of the four major networks-ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox-from buying another network.

Please be assured I will be monitoring the FCC’s decisions closely.  I hope you will continue to contact me about the issues that concern you, as I both need and welcome your thoughts and ideas.  I encourage you to contact me via email, telephone, or fax, because security measures are causing House offices to experience delays in receiving postal mail.  My email address is: Jay.Inslee@mail.house.gov.  Please be sure to include your full name, address, including your zip code, in your message.  If you are a resident of the First Congressional District and would like to receive policy updates and newsletters via email, please email me to let me know.

Very Truly Yours,

JAY INSLEE
Member of Congress

The email included the content of Inslee’s editorial in the Seattle Times, which, as the paper notes in its archives, contains a factual error but is otherwise on the money.

So what has your representative done about the FCC action?

Only in my world…

…could a weekend that consisted of a ferry ride to an exclusive exotic plant nursery that only opens one day a year, mild food poisoning, a concert featuring one of the most difficult and rewarding pieces by an American composer in the twentieth century, and a leisurely Sunday evening of grilling, with WiFi on the side, be considered normal.

Welcome to my world.

I rehearsed until I could hardly stand straight on Friday for my Saturday concert with the Cascadian Chorale. As I’ve written before, the Copland is a humdinger and continued to be so this weekend. However, on Friday I came to appreciate the quality of our guest group, a high school chorus from Inglemoor High on the North Shore. More on them in a moment.

Saturday morning I awoke with a vague sense of promise which was fulfilled in a way I didn’t expect, as Lisa mentioned there was an exclusive nursery that only opened for two days every year. Would I mind going? As I prepared to say “Sure,” she said, “And it’s near Kingston.” Kingston? I wondered. “You get there by ferry,” she said.

Gulp. I looked at my watch. 11 am. I had to be in tux and at the church for our concert by 6. Probably could make it.

We drove to Seattle and hopped the ferry to Bainbridge Island, and motored up across the pass onto the Kitsap Peninsula, where we followed the long string of cars to Heronswood Nursery. Wow. Plants from all over the world in woodland garden settings. After agonizing deliberation, Lisa picked a few flowering grasses and a Daphne seedling and we took the Kingston/Edmonds ferry home. Somewhere in all of this I was famished and had a McDonalds chicken sandwich, and began to feel awfully ill about halfway across on the ferry ride back. (Go on, McDonalds, sue me like you did Italian “slow food” critic Edoardo Raspelli who called your hamburgers “cardboard.” I’d be proud to be in that company.) I spent the time between getting home and donning my tux alternately prostrate and frantically dashing to the restroom. But don my tux I did, once I was convinced that my legs would bear my weight, and after grabbing a handful of crackers drove to the concert.

And was blown away by the choir from Inglemoor, who bettered most college choirs that I’ve seen. They were so amazingly good, singing complex modern and polyphonic pieces from memory and pitch perfect, that they inspired us to an astonishing performance of the Copland. Considering that my first performance of In the Beginning went into the muddy acoustic of the Washington National Cathedral, my perspective may be a bit tainted. But we gave the piece a better performance than I’ve ever heard, live or in recordings. The Rachmaninoff “Bogoroditse Devo” and even the Fauré Requiem suffered, but only by comparison; both were great performances. And I managed to stay on my feet the whole time. A victory.

And the grilling with WiFi? All I can say is, you can take the network away from the boy, but you can’t take the boy away from the network…at least, not when it’s wireless. Or something.

I IPO’d—and I didn’t know it

I hadn’t paid much attention to BlogShares for a while since it went out of beta. But my curiosity got the better of me after I got some linkage from Doc Searls and others recently. When I checked today, I found that my blog had IPO’d with a valuation of $4500 on Tuesday. And that people had been trading it pretty actively, driving the price per share up to $224 before dropping it with a huge sell order down to $56 yesterday. Now it’s trading around $173, which yields it a P/E (according to the game) of 193.

Pretty funny considering how little it has to do with what has actually been happening on my blog. Actually, that’s my main criticism of BlogShares: other than the basic valuation model, which counts incoming links and values your blog according to the value of those links, very little in the game seems connected to what goes on on the individual’s blog. And very little of the trading seems connected to the fundamentals of the blog’s value. If I had paid attention to when my blog IPO’d, I could have bought a bunch of shares of Esta’s blog on the cheap, knowing she was going to jump in value after my IPO.

Ah well. Only a game, right? 🙂

Upside down on the left coast

It’s been an interesting week all around—stuck in rehearsals three nights out of the week, lots of stuff going on at work. But I’ve noticed a few things. For instance, the weather here on the east side has been hotter and drier than the weather on the east coast. And the air has been full of motes that I assumed were bugs, but on closer inspection turn out to be something like cottonwood spores.

What a tangled web…

Someone finally pulled together all the wonderful administration lines about the Weapons of Mass Destruction that were the reason we bombed hell out of Iraq, risked American and coalition lives, destroyed our international credibility and moral authority, and set the precedent that nations can invade each other on suspicions and flimsy pretexts.

Starting with: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction” (Dick Cheney, August 2002), going through “I just don’t know whether it was all destroyed years ago—I mean, there’s no question that there were chemical weapons years ago—whether they were destroyed right before the war, (or) whether they’re still hidden” (Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, Commander 101st Airborne), and ending with “For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction (as justification for invading Iraq) because it was the one reason everyone could agree on” (Paul Wolfowitz, May 28, 2003). All sourced and hyperlinked.

Still any question about the contempt with which this “administration” holds its citizens, and the world?

Greg: The Green[e]house Reloaded

Congrats to Greg on taking the Green[e]house to a new level and a new home. He has some interesting discussion on what prompted his move:

Blogspot turned slow last week — if you think that posed a problem with reading it, imagine posting under those conditions. My RSS provider got testy around the same moment, interrupting hundreds of feeds with a tacit warning to pull the plug.

Between those issues, periodic trouble with Haloscan, and a burgeoning interest in Movable Type, I decided over the weekend to take the adage that “you get what you pay for” to heart…

Having discussed the joy of living on a free Manila server with a couple of other EditThisPage veterans, I’ll second that last thought. A hearty welcome to greenehouse.net.

Legends of the Mothman: Appalachian Trailblog

I’ve written before about my friend Jim’s hike of the Appalachian Trail this summer. What I didn’t realize when I got the first email was that he planned to keep a regular email “road journey.” We’ve been getting two to three email messages a month from Jim, or “Mothman” as he’s known on the trail for reasons yet unrevealed.

With Jim’s permission, I’ve reprinted his emails, unedited save a few personal details, in a new section of my site: The Mothman Chronicles. (As with all my new sections, you can subscribe to the updates via RSS). So far Jim’s hit three states and is “621 miles into the 2,172 mile journey.” He’s on track to hike into central Virginia in time for his ten-year reunion at the University of Virginia (oh, to be there…). I’ll keep the Mothman Chronicles updated as I get news from Jim.

Finding cheaper salmon

After complaining to a few people about the high price of Copper River salmon, a friend let us in on a secret: if you’re willing to buy a whole fish, and to take sockeye instead of king, Costco will sell Copper River salmon for somewhere around $4 a pound. We brought home a five pound sockeye (cleaned, in a plastic bag) last night; I filleted the thing and grilled both filets in a hurry (it was after eight). And it was delicious. And the whole meal cost us less than the king salmon entree Lisa had eaten the previous Friday. Whoo hoo.

Calling the bluff: why I won’t cry about iTunes 4.0.1

Heh. I’ll call your bluff, Craig.

I’m really bummed about the XML problem. I complained vocally when Radiohead and Sigur Ros disappeared from the store. But I won’t be crying about the shutting down of sharing beyond local subnets in iTunes 4.0.1. Why? Because the reality is that despite all the Brave New World stuff, Apple is piloting a brand new channel in the face of what I’ve repeatedly called out as one of the most consumer-hostile industries the US has ever seen. And I want them to succeed. And, as someone pointed out on Slashdot,

there are so many ways to legally share your music… heck, just setup a live365 station if you want to share your music. Why insist on doing it illegally, and ruining it for everybody?

Sorry, flame off. I am pissed off about the XML stuff—that’s one really good AppleScript that will never see the light of day.

Dave: Who will pay?

Over the weekend, Dave wrote an amazing pair of essays around the topic of who will pay for software:

I pay $1 to ride the subway downtown. It costs $300 to fly to NY and back (two hours in the air). A cab ride to the airport — $40. My monthly rent is in the thousands. Medical insurance about $10,000 per year. Everything costs money. So does software. Don’t fool yourself.

There’s an interesting strawman here: are people really not paying for software? I don’t know the statistics. I do think that a lot of what’s going on in the OS world is shifting the pay point to where the value happens. If you’re sitting on a commoditized operating system stack, in this model, the way to make money is to provide increasingly specialized and valuable services that ride the top of the stack.

That may be why I have yet to see anything that positions Windows Server 2003 as a file-and-print server, the most commoditized of any server implementation. Instead, the server sim-shipped with Visual Studio.NET 2003, the new edition of Microsoft’s development environment, and the scenarios tout the OS’s integrated application platform.

But back to Dave’s point: what happens when all the independents are squeezed out of the market because no one buys their stuff? Do we end up with a market with a bunch of journeymen developing shareware and freeware and then a few large software companies taking all the money? But if people aren’t buying the independents’ stuff, how long before they want to get the large companies’ stuff for free too? Scary thought if your skill set is software development…

Weekend draws reluctantly to an end

That’s me, in the headline, committing the pathetic fallacy. But it was such a good weekend. Friday: day officially shortened by four hours (thanks, David!), blissfully spent wandering around downtown, complete with both lunch and dinner with my lovely wife. —Note to restaurateurs: I don’t care how rare Copper River King Salmon is; spending north of three Hamiltons for a quarter of a salmon filet is too much in anyone’s book.

Saturday we weeded, mowed the lawn, cleared out underbrush, and purchased some more stone for a hastily planned and executed landscape addition. We were preparing for our first outdoor barbecue party on Sunday, which was preceded by a grueling four hour stone-laying session. We created a sparsely paved patio north of the grape arbor overlooking the garden beds. We will plant creeping thyme among the stones to fill things in, thus banishing another outpost of weed-harboring bark mulch (there’s that fallacy again) from the garden. The party was great. Burgers and fantastic grilled vegetables, lots of great conversation.

Today a late start, a leisurely trim and feeding for all the roses, and Chinese for a late lunch. Then naps in the living room. Now off to rehearsal. One of these days I’ll post some garden photos…

“No rock-and-roll fun”

Getting some traffic from a new site (as in it’s new to me), No Rock and Roll Fun, who pointed to my February bit about the Charlatans UK. (Permalink on their site broken, I don’t know why I even bother since Blogspot never gets archives right, but it’s still on their front page.) The rest of the articles appear to be a mix of music links and scandalous gossip—excellent late Friday afternoon reading if things at the office get a bit slow. Which they won’t for me, as I get the afternoon off to do an early start on Memorial Day weekend.