Category: observations

I was thinking over this story of indeterminate length as I drove back from IKEA (a good stretch of road: had to return the tree we rent each Christmas and spend the $10 deposit) and it struck me: why on earth would I have a lawyer as the protagonist of the story? My experience with that breed doesn’t merit that. And I know too many good lawyer jokes to let that stand (below the fold).

So he now becomes a retired mining engineer which a. opens up a lot of possibilities and b. is a reference to the hero of the first and greatest adventure story of them all, “The 39 Steps,” a book which, to this day, I cannot pick up without reading through. (Just now, I started reading through the e-text while getting the link sorted out.)

Now playing: I Am Stretched On Your Grave by Sinéad O’Connor from the album “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got” | Get it

Continue reading “what was I thinking?”

Is Your Library Blogging Yet?:

Blogs aren’t just for marketing – there are many areas of the business where they can help improve information flow, reduce clutter and avoid the dreaded ‘but I didn’t know about that’ situation. Here’s ten ways that we’ve used blogs for managing projects – both internally and with our clients.

At my last fulltime gig, I tried to sell the idea of weblogs as a knowledge management solution and my peers as a way of breaking through the oral culture, the lack of easily accessible information (I didn’t know we even had time sheets for my first 6 weeks or so, that’s how bad it was: got paid anyway, so you get a sense of how rigorous the processes were).

This might be a good question to start asking on interviews: not “do you blog?” but something more general about self-publishing and decentralized knowledge management within a consistent architecture.

Now playing: The Playboy Mansion by U2 from the album “Pop” | Get it

I got this from a book, but once I can make it from memory, I call it my own. Herewith, a recipe for a hearty and substantial yellow pea soup.

Ingredients:

• 2-3 tbsp olive oil
• 1 onion
• tbsp rosemary (if fresh), tsp if dried
• 1 lb split yellow peas
• 3 qts water
  1 tbsp salt

Assembly:

• Heat up the oil in the biggest cauldron you have: be mindful of the three quarts of water.
• Chop the onion, add to the warmed oil.
• Add the rosemary, chopped or otherwise broken up if it’s fresh.
• Cook it slowly, letting the onions soften and the flavors to come out.
• Wash and sort the peas, looking for stones or other non-nutritious surprises.
• Once the onions are soft and golden, add the peas, and turn the heat up.
• Mix it all together and add the water.
• Add the salt.
• Bring to a boil, then turn down to a simmer, uncovered.
• Takes about an hour to an hour and a half to cook down.
• Check it at an hour and dish it when it’s how you like it.

Serve with a hearty artisan bread in rough chunks for dipping.

“Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Book 6)” (J. K. Rowling)

I’m ordering mine.

94.9 KUOW: Seattle’s NPR News and Information Station:

Podcasting: The Next Big Thing?
Listen to RealAudio
Listen to MP3

This sounds interesting, more than I realized at first. I would like to try it (I have a face for radio, as has been said), but I don’t have idea what I would read. I’ll have to listen to some and see if anything strikes me.

Yahoo! News – iTunes user sues Apple over FairPlay DRM:

Thomas William Slattery has filed a class action suit against Apple Computer Inc. in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging Apple is guilt of violating federal antitrust laws and California’s unfair competition law by requiring users who buy music from the iTunes Music Store to use an iPod if they plan to take their music on the road with them. Slattery’s suit cuts to the heart of an ongoing issue related to Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology present in commercial downloaded music.

I just realized the other night that I had 250+ paid-for tracks in my library, and over the same period of time, I have bought 2-3 CDs. As I’ve said before, I’m a bit wobbly on DRM as it works in iTunes: it’s sufficiently loose as to be manageable and I worry that if for whatever reason it got more stringent, it would make things worse (I realize that for some, the mere existence of DRM is as bad as it gets).

Then you have this from the chairman of the most derivative company in the tech sector:

Boing Boing: Bill Gates: Free Culture advocates = Commies:

There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. [image credit]

Lawrence Lessig says it best:

It’s one thing to read this sort of thing from a studio exec, or head of a record label — surrounded as they are by the sort that surround them. But the people I’ve met at Microsoft are miles beyond this sort of silliness. Does Mr. Gates not even talk to them?

I hear over and over again that there are lots of smart people at MSFT: why do they stay? Are they that wedded to their options and the perks of working at the big house? I realize there are a lot of cool R&D things going on there that no one else has the resources to fund, but that’s not the case with all of them. I wish I could remember where I saw it, but there was some guy there who was blogging his progress toward his first million.

Looking through the logs, since I have an uptick in traffic to exploit here, here are the top 25 useragents request my rss files (rss2 and atom) today.

1. 458 YahooSeeker/1.2 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0; MSIE 5.5; yahooseeker at yahoo-inc dot com ; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/shop/merchant/)
2. 70 NewzCrawler/1.7 (compatible; MSIE 6.00; Newz Crawler 1.7; http://www.newzcrawler.com/ )
3. 50 Bloglines/2.0 (http://www.bloglines.com; 1 subscriber)
4. 34 –
5. 30 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
6. 26 NewsGatorOnline/2.0 (http://www.newsgator.com)
7. 22 NetNewsWire/2.0b6 (Mac OS X; Lite; http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/)
8. 21 NetNewsWire/2.0b10 (Mac OS X; http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/)
9. 20 Mozilla/5.0 (Sage)
10. 16 NetNewsWire/2.0b3 (Mac OS X; http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/)
11. 15 Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1; aggregator:Rojo; http://rojo.com/) Gecko/20021130
12. 14 Bloglines/2.0 (http://www.bloglines.com; 4 subscribers)
13. 13 NewsGator/2.0 (http://www.newsgator.com; Microsoft Windows NT 5.1.2600.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322.2032)
14. 13 NewsGator/2.0 (http://www.newsgator.com; Microsoft Windows NT 5.1.2600.0; .NET CLR 1.0.3705.0)
15. 13 Bloglines/2.0 (http://www.bloglines.com; 7 subscribers)
16. 12 FeedBurner/1.0 Beta (http://www.FeedBurner.com)
17. 11 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041028 Firefox/1.0RC1
18. 8 FeedDemon/1.10 (http://www.bradsoft.com/; Microsoft Windows 2000)
19. 7 NetNewsWire/2.0b6 (Mac OS X; http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/)
20. 6 NewsFire/0.61
21. 5 Syndic8/1.0 (http://www.syndic8.com/)
22. 5 PubSub.com RSS reader – http://www.pubsub.com/
23. 5 BlogzIce/1.0 +http://www.icerocket.com/
24. 4 fastbuzz.com
25. 4 UniversalFeedParser/3.0-fc-2 +http://diveintomark.org/projects/feed_parser/

NetNewsWire 2 gets my vote.

x.x.x.x - - [05/Jan/2005:07:29:44 0800] "GET /wordpress/wp-rss2.php" HTTP/1.1 200 6167 - Bloglines/2.0 (http://www.bloglines.com; 7 subscribers)

7 readers via BlogLines is a peak for me: all due to my mention of CNN’s newly-minted RSS feeds (and coincidentally, I mentioned to someone there that I hope they use BlogLines). I doubt I’ll have anything that interesting in the days ahead, but perhaps I’ll surprise both of us.

Now playing: I Am the Resurrection by The Stone Roses from the album “The Very Best of The Stone Roses“

ADW:
Mammalia: Classification:
Some questions arose after dinner about the difference between hares and rabbits, so off to Google to find out more. This site at University of Michigan was very interesting. I could browse it for quite a while: there have been some changes to the classifications since my school days.

Percentage Cacao

The Washington Post says “Hershey’s milk chocolate contains about 11 percent cacao.” Our friends at Scharffen Berger have a new 82% Extra Dark Chocolate. Once you’ve gone over to the dark side, you can never go back.

I had the best hot cocoa I have ever tasted New Year’s Eve — and by far the simplest. Simply melt 6 oz of Scharffen Berger in a cup of milk, then once it’s dissolved, add 3 additional cups of milk (total: 1 quart). Serve and swoon . . . .

We used the 70%, but I can only imagine the 82 might need a touch of sugar or vanilla (the 70 has crushed vanilla beans). I see a new website button — Powered by Scharffen Berger — but the message may not fit in the little box.