June 2009
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Beyond celebrity obsession
Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people. — Eleanor Roosevelt Somebody I wish to discuss an idea here. It’s an idea about celebrity, and it follows an event that has become a black hole in nearly all media: the death of Michael Jackson. According to Don Norman, a black hole… Continue reading
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Life in Cox tech support hell
Major props to Cox for cranking up my speeds to 18Mb/s downstream and 4Mb/s upstream. That totally rocks. I’m getting that speed now. Here’s what Cox’s local diagnostic tool says: TCP/Web100 Network Diagnostic Tool v5.4.12 click START to begin Connected to: speedtest.sbcox.net — Using IPv4 address Checking for Middleboxes . . . . . .… Continue reading
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Living Ends
This twitter post, from @KNX1070 four minutes ago, says Michael Jackson is dead. Google News‘ latest, from Fox, says he’s being rushed to the hospital. Here’s the latest Google search, as of 3:42pm Pacific: A snapshot in time, already changed. (FWIW, the KNX item came up the first time I searched, but not this time.… Continue reading
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Tech hell, cont’d
The idea was to take some down time in Santa Barbara and get work done in my own nice office, with my nice comfortable chair, surrounded by space and time, with soft sea breezes blowing through. Instead it’s been tech crash city since I got here last Thursday. (Except for getting out to the Live… Continue reading
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This latency is caused by ____ ?
Starting a few days ago, nothing outside my house on the Net has been closer than about 300 miliseconds. Even UCSB.edu, which I can see from here, is usually no more than 30 ms away on a ping test. Here’s the latest: PING ucsb.edu (128.111.24.40): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 128.111.24.40: icmp_seq=0 ttl=52 time=357.023… Continue reading
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Punching out of connectivity hell
For reasons I don’t have time to trouble-shoot, there is too much latency between my house and Cox, my Internet provider here in Santa Barbara. On top of that, re-setting my SMTP (outbound email) to smtp.west.cox.net, which has always worked in the past, doesn’t work this time. So mail isn’t going out. I don’t have… Continue reading
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Hotel jumps to light speed
Hard to tell from the looks of these, but they’re columns in front of the Park Plaza Hotel in London. The rest of my London shots from last week are here. Continue reading
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Apple control freakiness
Apple has the best taste in the world. It also has the tightest sphincter. This isn’t much of a problem as long as they keep it in their pants, for example by scaring employees away from saying anything about anything that has even the slightest chance of bringing down the Wrath of Steve or his… Continue reading
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Cluetrain Chugs Again
I think this may be the first time I’m listed first on anything alphabetical. The S in my surname usually puts me near the back of the aphabetical bus; but with Weinberger and Zittrain’s help, I’m listed first. Cool. I also love the early-60s design and typeface. That title “So How’s Utopia Working Out For… Continue reading
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Dwarf Star Alliance
I fly United Airlines with a frequency sufficient to earn me 1K status. That stands for more than 100,000 miles per year. I’ve had that status for at least the last three years, and was an Premier Exeutive (next status down) for years before that. United belongs to the Star Alliance, which includes a bunch… Continue reading
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Weather and Air France 447
Check out two very provocative Baltimore Weather Examiner pieces by Tony Pann: Air France 447 electrical problems and the South Atlantic Anomaly and Air France 447 mystery, LOST, and The Bermuda Triangle. The latter is not as goofy as its headline suggests. Tony is a degreed meteorologist and his unpacking of weather arcana, especially in… Continue reading
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A tipped hat back to Eric Norlin
The Cluetrain Manifesto wasn’t the biggest nonfiction book to come along in early 2000. That would be Who Moved My Cheese. I never read that, but I did read what was probably the second-biggest: Malcolm Gladwell‘s The Tipping Point. Like Cheese, Tipping is about change. Unpacking one chapter in the book, Malcolm writes, “I think… Continue reading
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Trainfeed spotting
With the 10th anniversary edition of Cluetrain coming out, I thought I’d try to keep up with postings that mention “Cluetrain” — through four five Live Web* search engines: BlogPulse, Google BlogSearch, Technorati, FreindFeed Search and Twitter Search. I’ve got all four feeding into an aggregator. As of 3:33pm EDST, BlogPulse finds 20 posts so… Continue reading
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#Cluetrain @10
Ten years ago The Cluetrain Manifesto was a website that had been up for a couple of months — long enough to create a stir and get its four authors a book deal. By early June we had begun work on the book, which would wrap in August and come out in January. So at… Continue reading
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A perfect storm in midair
They might have split up or they might have capsized They may have broke deep and took water And all that remains is the faces and the names Of the wives and the sons and the daughters. — Gordon Lightfoot, from “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” A storm on Lake Superior drowned the Edmund… Continue reading
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Opening the paying field
When we went looking for an apartment here a couple years ago, we had two primary considerations in addition to the usual ones: walking distance from a Red Line subway stop, and fiber-based Internet access. The latter is easy to spot if you know what to look for, starting with too many wires on the… Continue reading