In no particular order…
Jumping on the three-wheeled bandwagon.
“If you wouldn’t buy your product/service, there’s really no point trying to get others to do so”.
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The shot above, of Kettle Point on Lake Huron, is one of many in a series taken in a line running from Pinery Provincial Park in Ontario, across Michigan looking north toward Saginaw (and its Bay), Grand Rapids, various towns on the Grand River, and then the shore of Lake Michigan, all while flying from Boston to Chicago on the way to Atlanta last week.
The woods near Kettle Point, and up the coast into Pinery Park, comprise the largest oak savanna in North America, left unspoiled because the sandy land beneath was bad for farming. The lines running through them are the remains of old shorlines. I won’t say “ancient”, because they aren’t. They’re markers of the rising land and shrinking size of the lake, which is actually a puddle left by the melting glacier that comprised an ice cap that recently came south as far as Long Island and Cape Cod, which were both built along its southern boundary of dirt and rock the glacier had carried there. In fact all the Great Lakes, and nearly every Lake in Canada, is but a dozen thousand years old, at its most elderly edge (this one here).
Kinda puts global warming in perspective. You could stand at any one of those lines at any time in the past 12,000 years, and speak of global warming as a progressive fact.
By the way, fall colors stand out in many of these pictures, if you look closely for them.
Two links. EveryOSsucks, by the DeadTrolls. And The World is a Better Place Now, by Antonio Rodriguez. No agreement, yet both are right.
I figured there had to be a “Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator”, and sure nuff, there is.
On the fourth click, this came up:
Thus an old cure becomes a new symptom.
In Post-Hiatus Notes: Kudos and Quixote, Markets and Soup-Kitchens, Hip-Hop and Zoot Suits, Podcasts and Dante, Stephen Lewis covers much ground, including rewarding conversations between us on the overlapping subjects of infrastructure and markets. Where I often traffic in supposition, Steve carries knowledge and experience — two assets of his on which I have come to rely, through a friendship that now stretches more than forty years. One sample of Steve’s substance:
| My part-time studies and work at the fringes of the field of Ottoman history has kept me close to the vision of markets as accretions of interactions, conversations, and trust. Over the course of more that a half millennium, the Ottomans evolved physical infrastructure and institutions that enabled commerce and information exchange as well as conquest. One facet of this infrastructure was the Imaret — the combined publicly-financed travelers’ lodge and soup kitchen — a veritable “internet” of which dotted the roadways of the Ottoman Empire from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Middle East and North Africa. Those interested in the subject should turn to a newly published volume edited by historians Nina Ergin, Christoph Neumann, and Amy Singer: Feeding People, Feeding Power; Imarets in the Ottoman Empire (Istanbul, 2007). |
And, on occasion, I return the favor. Such as Steve relates here:
| Three to four years ago, I was vocally skeptical when Doc was amongst the first to enthuse about the Copernican revolution podcasting was about to create by liberating content from the limits of time and geography and by enabling listeners to choose and pull broadcasts rather than having them pushed at them. At the time, I saw podcasting as technology without worthy content. Events proved me totally wrong and I now live from podcasts. I reload my I-Pod daily, supplementing my usual mix of Bartok, Turkish and Armenian Oud virtuosi, Monk and Ellington, Aretha Franklin and the Rev. James Clevelandm and the like with the latest podcasts from the BBC’s Melvyn Bragg, PBS’s Bill Moyers, the New Yorker magazine, NPR’s Car Talk Plaza, and WNYC’s Sara Fishko, Leonard Lopate, Brian Lehrer, and John Schaeffer. A few days ago, I admitted to Doc that if there isn’t a special circle in the Inferno for those of us who doubted podcasting there should be. With magnanimity, Doc offered to release me from such a fate if I posted my confession on this site … thus this entry! |
Okay, my plane is boarding…
I’m not only missing Red Sox celebrations in Boston, but also Halloween in both New England and our other home in Santa Barbara. Every year there we’ve enjoyed the annual Halloween Journey at the Waldorf School. Still, we have memories. And photos. Here’s one photo from the last year’s Journey, with linkage to the whole set:
Dana Blankenhorn: Dump the Silo Model. His gist (quoted in the long because by shortening it I risk leaving out his full thrust and the importance of it.
| Bob Frankston says we should all own our own infrastructure. Bob Cringely calls for people to own their own last mile. |
| I agree, but I’m into simplicity. I say, free the bits… |
| Getting from here to there means blowing up a century of laws designed both to control content and to collect taxes, laws based on an assumption of scarcity. Regulators don’t want to free the telecomm bits because they’re on the take, in the form of “stealth” taxes (look at your own bill sometime). The same is true for cable. |
| But the companies that sell these bits are also in on the scam. They make more money by defining bits as “services” and by controlling what those bits do, than they would otherwise. That’s because, by selling services, they’re able to act as monopolists, as gatekeepers, controlling both the customers and the content. If they were selling bits they would have to compete, and all their power would be gone. |
| This dance of definition, taxation and regulation made sense 40 years ago, when technology was analog, spectrum was scarce, and networking was complex. But today anyone can be a network manager for the price of a $100 router. |
| So you should have the power over bits, no one else. You, the consumer, and you, the producer of content defined by bits, should have the power to choose how you send them and choose how you get them, without constraint. When you want to send bits or receive bits, you have the right to a competitive market. And you have the right to define what those bits mean. |
| The market, and the government, exist to serve you, not monopolists. You have the power to make this happen, but only if you seize that power, only if you demand that power, only if you organize with a single, simple demand: |
| Free the Bits. |
Good place to start. The key, in making the political as well as the business arguments, is to show how regarding the bits as free (as in freedom, not as in beer, by the way) will be good for the larger economy, including the carriers who will be asked (or told) to leave money on the table.
We need to show the benefits to incumbency that are not those of monopolists. What are those? If we can’t answer that question, we won’t be able to sell it.
The Red Sox are up 12-1 in the bottom of the 5th, an inning that’s lasted half an hour, with runners advancing nearly every at-bat. Eight out of nine starters have at least one run. Two out right now, bases loaded.
The reliever just walked a guy home. 13-1.
Reminds me of a story from Ball Four, the classic book by Jim Bouton. Jim was a former fastballer who lost his stuff, but came back after learning how to throw a knuckle-ball. He was pitching for the late Seattle Pilots in a losing game. The manager, Joe Schultz, came out to the mound. Jim said Joe Schultz was the perfect name for a baseball manager, and the guy had the perfect manner as well. Ever wonder what managers tell pitchers out there on the mound? In this case it was something like, “Hey, kid. Whaddaya say ya throw ’em some low smoke, we’ll go across the street and pound some Budweiser.”
It’s one of those times for the Rockies.
[Later…] Thanks to Glenn for the corrections (including the quote).
James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti. Thanks to Jim Thompson for the lead.