March 23, 2006
"Monkeys In My Pants" Moved
Because of ongoing server problems, I've moved this blog to a new URL. You'll find it at http://wagner.typepad.com/.
I'm a little bummed about this--I've been running this blog at this URL for more than three years, much of that time using the current design. I've gotten used to it, and rather fond of it. The new location uses the default design for the Typepad service.
I was also, until recently, happy with the service provided by the company that provided Web hosting, Blogomania. But I've been having problems for three weeks or so, and they haven't responded to my e-mails and bug reports at all--they haven't even acknowledged that a human being has seen them. I suspect there may be no human beings running Blogomania at all anymore; they're just running on autopilot.
So if you're thinking about using Blogomania for your hosting: Don't.
Irony: Part of my problem is that I've been unable to update the blog all day, which means it's going to be tough to post this message pointing you all to the new location.
I hope one day to be able to customize the blog at the new location to make it look more like I'd like it to look. And I hope to revive the mitchwagner.com domain, on another server. But I don't know when I'm going to be able to find the time to do those things.
03:59 PM | Categories: Administrivia
March 19, 2006
My brother lives across the street from a castle
About a month ago I got a big promotion at work, it was part of a larger reorgnization at the company, and when the music stopped, I was sitting in the chair marked "Executive Editor, InformationWeek.com." Since then, I've been getting accustomed to the new responsibilities while continuing with my former job of helping keep the site running--I felt it would be a career-negative outcome for me if the site caught fire and drove off a cliff while I was supposedly in charge.
Fortunately, I have a nephew and nieces to keep me humble. A four-year-old boy and twin three-year-old girls are not impressed by the word "executive" appearing in your title; they view their Uncle Mitch as an object to be climbed on, and punched. Also, to deposit saliva on; I left my brother's family's house covered by a fine coating of spit.
I got to be climbed on, punched, and saliva-coated because I've been in New York the past nine days or so, coming back to New York to do meetings appropriate to my new responsibilities. I did not have an opportunity to see most of my family and friends here, to my undying shame. I am, however, being punished for my ignoring connections by freezing my ass off; it's unseasonably cold here for New York mid-March.
I'm at a Panera's (free Wi-Fi) in Port Chester, N.Y., running low on vanilla soy latte and battery power, so I better sign off soon.
Here's something amazing: My brother and his family just moved to a new house a couple of months ago. It's a typical four-bedroom suburban colonial, on a typical, affluent suburban street; the houses are all large colonials and ranches on half-acre lots. It's a lovely house and lovely neighborhood, but also virtually indistinguishable from tens of thousands of streets like it in any suburb of any big city in the Northeast or Midwest.
Except for the castle.
Yes, there's an actual castle, directly across the street from my brother's family's ordinary suburban home. Ward's Castle (cached version here) was built by William E. Ward, built in 1875, a pioneer in concrete construction. Neighbors expected it to collapse and called it Ward's Folly, but it's held up pretty well, and it's now called Ward's Castle.
I have photos.
According to my brother, Ward was an industrial baron who made his fortune by inventing standardized nuts and bolts. Until Ward, nuts and bolts were handmande and each nut and bolt was part of a unique pair; Ward pioneered nuts and bolts in standardized sizes, so you could just have a bucket of nuts and a bucket of bolts and grab one at random from each and have them work together.
09:53 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Categories:
March 10, 2006
The Stripper And Bill Gates
Reading over the recent blog entry by InformationWeek editor-in-chief Rob Preston, I found myself thinking of a certain ex-stripper from Texas, and wondering who's got more business sense--the stripper or Bill Gates?
Read the rest on the InformationWeek Weblog.
11:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Categories: InformationWeek
March 09, 2006
He won the war without wearing pants
This is neat--a 1943 propaganda cartoon starring Donald Duck, urging Americans to save for their taxes to help beat the Axis: "Donald Duck: Spirit of '43."
06:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Categories: Links
March 08, 2006
Hey there, pay attention for a minute
The theme of this week's O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference is "The Attention Economy," about tools and techniques for filtering all the demands we have on our time and attention. The scene as I walked through the hotel Tuesday morning, approaching the registration desk, was a perfect illustration of the problem. It couldn't have been better if the O'Reilly people had planned it.
I passed by a few clusters of people talking, and far greater numbers of people sitting with their backs to the wall, hunched over their laptop computers, connecting to the Internet.
These people cleared off their schedules to go to this conference. Many of them took long, uncomfortable, and expensive plane flights. And then they spend time sitting with their backs to the wall, hunched over computer keyboards, physically alone but, presumably, connecting to others online. They've chosen to focus their attention elsewhere.
Would Linda Stone, one of the speakers at the conference, find that behavior harmful?
Stone, a veteran of senior positions at both Microsoft and Apple, coined the phrase "continuous partial attention" in 1998 to describe the state most of us have lived in for as long as we can remember. We've got some primary task in the foreground to which we're devoting most of our attention, and we're also monitoring things in the background, and prepared to switch to another primary task at a moment's notice. We might be talking to someone else face-to-face, while answering our cell phones, and monitoring our pagers and BlackBerries. Or we might be writing a blog entry about the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference, while also monitoring e-mail, instant messaging, keeping our cell phone within arm's reach, and still wearing the headset we were wearing for a conference call that ended a few minutes ago, and we're ready to drop everything and take a call at a moment's notice.
Read the rest on the InformationWeek Weblog.
07:07 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) | Categories: InformationWeek
VIDEO: Get Your Hands On Your Information
If you've ever been frustrated by the limitations of your monitor-keyboard-mouse windowing display, you'll love this demo of a tabletop computer display that lets you manipulate data with your hands, drawing, resizing and moving objects on a touchscreen with one finger, more than one finger, or your whole hand, as well as creating an infinite amount of space on the desktop to work.
Check out the video here, where you can download it or just watch it in our spiffy new inline video player.
06:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Categories: InformationWeek , Video
March 06, 2006
Authentication required to post comments--an unhappy development
I apologize for this, but from now on you're going to have to register to post comments here.
Why? It's because of the fucking spammers, that's why. Any blog that has a comments area is going to get drive-by assholes who think that the comments area is their personal place to post their shitty ads.
I've been getting a lot of comments spam for the past day or so, and I just don't have time to manually monitor it anymore.
So, effective immediately, you're going to have to register to leave a comment. I apologize for that, and I wish there was a way that I could avoid punishing my friends and family for criminal attacks on my servers. But there it is.
E-mail me if you have any problem leaving a comment.
06:13 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0) | Categories: Administrivia
March 05, 2006
Oscar talk
Clearly, Reese Witherspoon only won for "Walk the Line" to make up for her being cheated out of the Oscar for "Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde."
10:27 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0) | Categories: Movies
March 02, 2006
Praise for Bush from two unlikely sources
The first unlikely source is Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen:
There are times when George Bush sorely disappoints. Just when you might expect him to issue a malapropian explanation, pander to his base or simply not have a clue about what he is talking about, he does something so right, so honest and, yes, so commendable, that -- as Arthur Miller put it in "Death of a Salesman" -- "attention must be paid." Pay attention to how he has refused to indulge anti-Arab sentiment over the Dubai ports deal.Would that anyone could say the same about many of the deal's critics. Whatever their concerns may be, whatever their fears, they would not have had them, expressed them or seen them in print had the middle name of the United Arab Emirates been something else. After all, no one goes nuts over Germany, the country where some of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists lived and attended school.
...
That Bush has done this should come as no surprise. As a bigot he leaves a lot to be desired. He has refused to pander to anti-immigration forces, and shortly after Sept. 11, if you will remember, he visited Washington's Islamic Center. He reassured American Muslims and the worldwide Islamic community that neither America nor its government were waging war on an entire people.
The second unlikely source for praise of Bush: Me. Good for you, Mr. President.
07:35 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) | Categories: Politics
InformationWeek Daily Podcast Thursday March 2
Today's InformationWeek Daily Podcast, which is mine, and is by me, covers Internet Explorer upgrades, Google, cell phones, and porn. That's two articles--you figure out how they break.
03:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Categories: InformationWeek
March 01, 2006
Microsoft Will Stumble On Windows Vista And Office 2007
The thing about the story of the boy who cried wolf is that the wolf eventually showed up.
Every time Microsoft updates Windows and Office, pessimists say that customers won't adopt the new version. This trend goes back more than a decade. It happened with Windows 95, with Windows 98, with Windows ME, and with Windows XP. And the pessimists have been wrong every time.
But this time around, it's looking like the pessimistic view is the right one. Neither Vista nor the upcoming Office 2007 offers compelling reasons to upgrade.
Certainly, Vista offers many improvements over Windows XP, things that make you look forward to getting your hands on it. I discussed this issue with my colleague Scot Finnie; he pointed out a few right off the top of his head. The new user interface is much more attractive and easier-to-use than the existing user interface. The performance is better, making the user experience much more pleasant--you no longer have the experience, as you have now sometimes with Windows XP, that you're dealing with bloated, sluggish software. Shutdown and startup time will be much faster for most users.
And Vista includes some intriguing technology for indexing information, making it easier to organize and search for documents.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 is much better than IE6. It includes tabs, a feature missing from IE6 that has been standard in alternative browsers like Firefox and Opera for years.
All of those things sound pretty good. But they don't make you want to rush out and buy a new PC right away, or, if you're an IT manager, make room in your 2006-2007 budgets for upgrades to your PCs. You're probably thinking, as I am, that you'll upgrade to Vista whenever you get around to upgrading your hardware.
To read more about why users will be reluctant to upgrade to Vista and Office 12, visit the InformationWeek Weblog.
09:10 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) | Categories: InformationWeek
February 27, 2006
Teaching computers to read minds
I just popped out another video for InformationWeek.com, this time looking at research on tools to allow computers and robots to sense moods.
11:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Categories: InformationWeek
February 26, 2006
Lawyers, lizards--same thing. They're both reptiles.
Warm, pleasant day today; Julie and I had Starbucks on the deck, and, later, I went to the workshop meeting, where we convened in the host's backyard, rather than inside the house.
The host's husband is a building contractor, and has built the Best Treehouse Ever for their son. Well, except for the tree part--they have a hill in the backyard that's so steep it's virtually a cliff, and the treehouse is located halfway up the face. It looks exactly as a treehouse should, sort of unfinished, with a rope ladder to climb the necessary 30 or so feet up the cliff wall. That climb makes me hope they have a lawyer in the family.
They do have a lizard in the family.
Coming home, walking up the stairs, I smelled something great, and wondered which of the neighbors was cooking what. Turned out it was Julie--lucky me--neither of us usually cooks, but this afternoon she was inspired, and whipped up a chicken stew with chunks of white meat, finger potatoes, baby carrots, celery, carmelized onions, and red wine. Mighty tasty.
Also, I'm the laziest eater in the world, and I like food that I can eat with my hands, or with one instrument. Cutting up my food is far too much effort. This was a one-bowl meal, and the chicken was so tender it separated with a fork.
Yesterday's dinner was at Marie Callendar's. We don't go there often enough, I don't think. Food is always good, and there's never a significant wait to get a table. I think my only objection to the place is that it gives off the vibe of being an old person's place. I feel like we're violating some kind of age limit by going there even though we're well short of 80 years old, and neither of us requires a walker.
I used to object to Marie's because it's a chain, but I'm so over that.
I had the French Onion soup with cheese, and a new menu item; a buffalo chicken meat salad, made with spicy chicken strips, Thousand Island dressing, and chunks of bleu cheese. I kept commenting throughout the night, "Man, that was a good salad." Julie said I said that every time I burped. Well, that's the sign of fine cuisine--tastes as good on the way up as it does on the way down.
Later, we went to CompUSA, where their absent sales staff thwarted my efforts to check out a Tablet PC. Took 10 minutes to locate a salesman, and another 10 to get one to actually pay attention to me; I had to deliver a flying tackle that would've netted me a severe yardage penalty from the NFL. What is it with electronics stores--is there some law that keeps them from hiring salespeople that will pay attention to you?
Turned out they only had two Tablet PCs on display, and the salesman could only find one of them, and that one was one of the convertible kind, that can function either as a tablet or as a conventional notebook computer. It was chained down to the display table by fearsome locks, and could not be released, and so the only way to play with it was in its notebook computer mode, which is useless to me--it's like shopping for a car but you can't go on a test-drive, you can't even sit in it, all you can do is peer in the windows.
09:50 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0) | Categories:
February 24, 2006
Great porn movie titles
"American Booty"
"Backside to the Future"
"The Sopornos"
10:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Categories: Funny
February 23, 2006
Big smelly feudal lords and ancestral elephants
I've pretty much given up on George R.R. Martin's "Song and Ice and Fire" series of novels, which is his fictional retelling of the English War of the Roses, with the names changed and set in a fantasy magic kingdom with dragons and wizards. It weighs in so far at four volumes, each about 700 pages; I read the first three with diminishing enthusiasm, got about halfway through the fourth and chucked it in. It's showing no sign of drawing to a close; there are many more volumes to go and I just don't care anymore.
The series, like many high fantasies, jumps from one character to another. There's lots to like in this series. Martin has always been adept at drawing compelling characters; he's uneven at that here, but the shrewd dwarf Tyrion Lannister is one of his best creations, as is Jamie Lannister, a handsome warrior prince whose good right sword arm has been amputated.
Still, the series suffers in that it's too episodic. the characters move from one adventure to another without really changing, or moving forward toward their goals, or even (in many cases) *having* goals. This is fairly conventional in high fantasy. High fantasy fans like this kind of thing--and why shouldn't they? If you like something, it's perfectly reasonable to like a *lot* of it, and that's what multi-volume high fantasy series deliver.
There's something I just don't get about high fantasy. I never really cared for "Lord of the Rings."
So, good-bye, George R.R. Martin.
After putting aside the Martin book, I picked up something very different. This one is science fiction, rather than fantasy, set mostly in Los Angeles the day after tomorrow and 12,000 years ago. It's called "Mammoth," by John Varley.
The day after tomorrow, the richest man in the world is sort of a cross between nerdy Bill Gates, and the young Howard Hughes, an exceedingly wealthy man with many interests and passions, who uses his money to fuel his hobbies. He has taken an interest in mammoth, and when he learns of a perfectly preserved mammoth frozen in the Canadian tundra, he sends a team off to collect the beast and extract a functioning ovum or sperm cell (depending on whether the mammoth is a pointer or a setter) so he can clone the beastie.
The scientists are excited to find the mammoth. They are even *more* excited when they find human remains buried next to they mammoth. They are even more excited still--and confused--to find the 12,000-year-old corpse is wearing a wristwatch and carrying a briefcase.
The story proceeds along predictable grounds from there.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden once told me that one of the keys to successful popular fiction is this: Readers like to go behind the scenes, they like to feel like they're learning something, and in particular they like to learn about other people's jobs. That explains the popularity of John Grisham and police procedurals--readers of those books feel like they're learning how criminal lawyers and cops work.
Varley follows that rule in "Mammoth." One of the main characters is an elephant trainer for the circus, brought in by the eccentric billionaire to care for the mammoth clones. Varley takes us behind the scenes at the circus, at a major theme park, and into the day-to-day lives of a man worth $40 billion, and his personal assistant. We visit Los Angeles, both in the present and 12,000 years ago, the Pacific Northwest, and Eskimo villages in northern Canada.
The premise lacks originality. Anybody who has paid any attention to pop culture since the Twilight Zone can figure out the ending just from knowing the setup. The setup is this:
But, really, who cares about predictability and original story? Varley is one of the most entertaining science-fiction writers around, he has a sure, clean writing style, and he creates quirky, likeable characters.
10:49 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0) | Categories: Books