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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 of other airlines, including Swiss, the airline I am flying today.

So here’s what skeeves me. I can’t pick a seat on Swiss, no matter how far ahead of the flight I book. It’s just not available to non-Swiss flyers. As a non-Swiss flyer (as I understand it, and by now I have spoken to half a dozen or more people), I have to get whatever seat I can at the gate.

Now, I realize that sitting in a chair at 35000 feet and zooming through the sky is a recent and still rare privilege, so maybe I shouldn’t complain. But what’s the point of having flying privileges, and an “alliance,” if there are no privileges for “partner” airlines other than supplying them bodies to fill the seats?

One plus: they have a nice lounge here at Heathrow. See ya in Zurich. Then Boston.

@Jesusitafire, of the Los Padres National Forest, is tweeting. So far following ø, followed by 12. Hey, it’s a start.

Twitter says “Something is technically wrong”. The hotel wi-fi is up and down. Mostly down. My Sprint data card gets squat from this hotel. AT&T is borderline useless at #sxsw, probably because 90% of the attendees have iPhones.

My wife is headed off to Europe in the morning, and I’m trying to get her going with a Skype account for her laptop because we failed to unlock the Nokia phone that used to run on AT&T but hasn’t been used in a bit — and because Skype would be good to have in any case. But Skype just gives her a spinning wheel for long periods before saying “Unable to connect to Skype P2P network”, which is apparently a known problem. A post there says to go to http://heartbeat.skype.com/ … but that page doesn’t load.

Grrr.

Now it loads and says everything is fine. It ain’t. So we’re giving up.

Had a great breakfast with Rex at the Bouldin Creek Coffee House and Café in Austin this morning. It’s about 1.5 miles from downtown on South 1st. Found it on Yelp.

Great little place. I had two vegetarian egg variant tacos. One was a veggie chorizo thing (I forget the details), and it was outstanding. The cappuccino was good too. Service and atmosphere are both friendly and comfortable. Highly recommended.

We withdrew from TV this morning. I called Verizon and cancelled our FiOS TV service. Kept the Internet, of course: $64.99 for 20Mb symmetrical service. No complaints there. But what I want from Verizon is á la carte — or something close — and they don’t offer that. If it’s HD you want, it’s kind of all-or-nothing.

The interesting thing: after escalating the call to a higher-level customer service person, Verizon offered to drop the rental fee for the DVR/set top box, and to drop the price of Extreme HD (”more than 100 HD channels”) to $47.99. That’s a good deal, actually, if you watch a lot of TV. The problem is, we don’t. And we need to save money. So: off it went.

If my plane beats the snow out of Logan in 40 minutes, I’ll be speaking and hanging out at Ecomm for the next couple of days. When I get back I might rig up something to get OTA (over the air) TV stations on an old laptop. Not sure, though. I kind of like the idea of moving on completely, to see how that feels.

After that I called Dish Network and cranked service at our West Coast place down to the minimum required to keep the account active. After we get out there in April, we’ll see how we feel about killing the old tube there too. The situation there is a bit different because we’ve invested in a nice big Sony flat screen, and we often have guests over.

By the way, credit where due to Verizon. The quality of the video is better than you’re going to get either from cable or satellite, simply because the data rates through fiber are so much higher. If you’re into TV, and it’s available, go for it. In fact, if you’re into Internet, that service can’t be beat either. Unless you live in France of something.

Meanwhile, I can think of a lot better uses for that bandwidth, especially in the long run.

I just put up Get ready for “fourth party” services, over at Linux Journal. It comes from thinking about new kinds of businesses that serve users, or customers, first.

Traditionally, “third party” companies are accessories to sellers. So I’m thinking we should call accessories to buyers “fourth party” companies.

See what you think.

blogs exist because they fill a void, blogs that refuse to do so become void. Tony Pierce.

Has President Obama made a single appointment that says “change”?

Here’s his latest.

Reading David Armano from Marcus Brown.

Wicked, but funny.

Wish I could embed videos here, but I haven’t mastered that yet.

Investigating the Financial Crisis and My Passion for Borsalino Hats is an outstanding post by Stephen Lewis — one that characteristically combines several things I didn’t know, starting with a helpful suggestion for incoming administration: a sweeping inquest into the twin housing and stock market crashes to create both the intellectual context and the political constituency for change.

Those words, and the original suggestion (which Steve endorses) are Ron Chernow’s, offered in Where is Our Ferdinand Pecora?, in the New York Times. Turns out Pecora was the former New York proscecutor brought in as chief counsel for the Senate Banking and Currency Committee, which investigated the financial meltdown that ushered in the Great Depression.

I won’t give away the rest of Steve’s story. I’ll just say that anybody who grew up around New York in the mid-to-late 20th Century should be familiar with the setting, if not the characters: Barney’s, the men’s clothing store at the corner of 7th Avenue and 17th Street — a location I recall from having it drilled into my head by decades of radio advertising.

Go read the post. And my “lid” is off to Steve for writing it. Great story.

I may be wrong, but I’ll betting that Esther Dyson is already the most frequent flyer on Earth.

Now she’s looking to fly at higher altitudes.

Here’s the latest on her Edventure site:

And here is her latest at the Flight School blog. Plus an earlier post about committed to blogging as well. Among other things. Read around. Many links to follow.

Hat tip to Chris Locke.

We were flying along in the bus when wham: it started snowing. Heavily. Now we’re creeping along through Westchester, and the road is clearly getting a little dangerous. There’s an inch or so on the ground now, and it’ll probably get a lot deeper before it starts raining later and turns it and turns it all into slush. Or “wintry mix,” as they now call it.

Love the weather map above, though. Looks like a flag.

Arg. I’ve got the picture, but Wordpress won’t let me put it in this post. Dunno why.

I’m at the WBUR open house “tweetup”, where I just learned about Tweetworks from Mike Langford. Thus the lego-like greater Twitter add-on zone grows.

We left SFO at 11am yesterday, and got into BOS at 3am. The delay in the middle was at ORD: O’Hare. We arrived at 6pm to find that our 7pm flight had been delayed to 9:10. After going to dinner at the Macaroni Grill (chosen after tweeting a request that was answered nicely by Todd Storch), we parked our butts at the gate, where the departure time kept moving back until it was nearly 11pm. For a long time there was no gate agent at all. But the board behind the counter kept rolling the departure time outward. I finally became one of those travellers who stretches out and sleeps with head on knapsack.

The plane for our flight never arrived, so United put us on another one with fewer rows, which made for even more fun. I felt sorry for whoever didn’t get to Chicago on the plane we couldn’t take.

I did sleep for the whole flight to Logan, then got to bed at 4, and up at 6. Now I’m back in the saddle, at my desk in our apartment.

The biggest relief here is Internet speed. On the road everything seemed slow. The hotel in Morgan Hill, CA barely cleared dial-up speed. The house where we hung out was okay (about 500k up and down), but seemed to take forever to bring anything up. My Sprint data card outperformed every wi-fi connection I encountered.

Here at the apartment we have 20Mb symmetrical service from Verizon FiOS. The hub-router thing craps out a lot, but otherwise it’s rock-solid and makes Net access into a relatively wide smooth highway. The only better connectivity I’ve experienced is at universities.

Anyway, good to be back. Now off to work.

Back in September or so I blogged in favor of the $700 billion stimulus package. In those days, now so long ago, I thought, against my otherwise better judgement, that we needed to do something.

Now I don’t.

Now I think we need to let the train wreck finish happening before we “stimulate” anything. If we even bother at all.

I say that for two reasons.

First is that nobody knows wtf to do, really. If we do anything.

Second is that “doing something” is overrated. For that insight I thank this excellent piece in the Washington Post, by Shankar Vedantam. And to Russ Nelson for pointing to it.

The gist:

We’re flailing, and we’re doing it with trillions of non-existent dollars. Spending them risks making them even more worthless than they already are.

EOLcat is a palindrome.

0400GMT, 4am London time, seconds after the polls close on the West Coast and Hawaii (and not a vote yet reported from any of those reliably blue states) CNN calls Barack Obama the winner. On the 100th Anniversary of the founding of the NAACP, four months past the 232nd birthday of a country whose first fifteen presidents could have owned slaves, forty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, an African American is being elected President of the United States.

George Will, conservative columnist and historian from Chicago, just quoted King (I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land…) in a warm and humble voice.

His quote is from King’s “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech. It’s about history:

I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of general and panoramic view of the whole human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, “Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?” — I would take my mental flight by Egypt through, or rather across the Red Sea, through the wilderness on toward the promised land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn’t stop there. I would move on by Greece, and take my mind to Mount Olympus. And I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides and Aristophanes assembled around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality.

But I wouldn’t stop there. I would go on, even to the great heyday of the Roman Empire. And I would see developments around there, through various emperors and leaders. But I wouldn’t stop there. I would even come up to the day of the Renaissance, and get a quick picture of all that the Renaissance did for the cultural and esthetic life of man. But I wouldn’t stop there. I would even go by the way that the man for whom I’m named had his habitat. And I would watch Martin Luther as he tacked his ninety-five theses on the door at the church in Wittenberg.

But I wouldn’t stop there. I would come on up even to 1863, and watch a vacillating president by the name of Abraham Lincoln finally come to the conclusion that he had to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. But I wouldn’t stop there. I would even come up to the early thirties, and see a man grappling with the problems of the bankruptcy of his nation. And come with an eloquent cry that we have nothing to fear but fear itself.

But I wouldn’t stop there. Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty, and say, “If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy.” Now that’s a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around. That’s a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a away that men, in some strange way, are responding — something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee — the cry is always the same — “We want to be free.”

And another reason that I’m happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we’re going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demand didn’t force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence.

That is where we are today. And also in the human rights revolution, if something isn’t done, and in a hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed. Now, I’m just happy that God has allowed me to live in this period, to see what is unfolding. And I’m happy that He’s allowed me to be in Memphis.

I can remember, I can remember when Negroes were just going around as Ralph has said, so often, scratching where they didn’t itch, and laughing when they were not tickled. But that day is all over. We mean business now, and we are determined to gain our rightful place in God’s world.

And that’s all this whole thing is about. We aren’t engaged in any negative protest and in any negative arguments with anybody. We are saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people. We are saying that we are God’s children. And that we don’t have to live like we are forced to live.

Now, what does all of this mean in this great period of history? It means that we’ve got to stay together. We’ve got to stay together and maintain unity. You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula for doing it. What was that? He kept the salves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh’s court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that’s the beginning of getting out of slavery. Now let us maintain unity.

After silencing the boos, John McCain gives a concesson speech for the ages. In the end McCain — a man who has given more for his country than any presidential candidate in history — expresses the kind of grace that is the true source of honor: kindness, generosity, modesty, self-sacrifice. Country First, indeed.

He talks about promise. About how Americans never quit. He places a bookend to the history that has passed since King’s speech, given in Memphis the day before being shot dead there. King’s last paragraph begins,

… I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land.

And here we are.

“…the Because Effect feeds on openness. And it’s more than an API.” — Dave Wallace

David Sedaris on undecided voters:

Hat tip to Rob Paterson.

Watching the “debate” between McCain and Obama. Hard not to. After eight years of a truly bad presidency, it matters more than usual who our next prez will be. But these guys aren’t saying much.

Worse, I don’t believe either of them are going to do what they say they’re going to do.

Anyway, I’m shunt-blogging the debate mostly on Twitter.

Bonus link.

Who else reads your e-mail? is an op-ed by my colleague Harry Lewis, in the Christain Science Monitor. At its core is a loophole that’s sort of a peephole:

By coincidence today is also the release date for Blown to Bits, Harry’s new book, co-authored with Hal Abelson and Ken Ledeen.

Bonus tune.

If just some of this is true, it’s bad news for McCain.

It’s been suggested that Sarah Palin hasn’t had much media training. On the contrary, she had plenty enough as a sports reporter. Check this out:

In that video, from her days reporting for an Anchorage TV station, she’s clearly not Major Market. But you can see how her persona today is a combination of aw-shucks-doggone-it hockey mom, smart political operator and TV personality. And the latter cannot be discounted.

Here’s a Web Pro News interview of yours truly by Abby Johnson at Blogworld in Las Vegas a couple weeks back. I think I said “um” about a hundred times. Gotta work on that.

Shel Israel: I think that www.whitehouse.gov should just show the Fail Whale from now through the next inauguration.

Just arrived at LAX, taking a few minutes before flying off to LAV (to which I would like to append oratory) to post a couple of pointers to what I read and heard on the plane.

First is A Conservative for Obama, by Wick Allison, who actually gave the maximum sum to McCain earlier this year, “…when there was still hope he might come to his senses”. A few grafs:

The other is this interview with Tom Friedman on Fresh Air. I’m not sure he’ll succeed at making green “the new red, white & blue”, but if you don’t have enough reasons to vote against McCain already, he’ll load you up with a few more good ones.

Bonus link.

The Buyer’s Envelope, Please is a post over at the VRM blog in which I do some thinking out loud about a topic I’m still learning about.

I’m currently #2 on this list, behind Clay Shirky. (In spite of what may be the worst picture ever taken of me.) Context from Dan Thornton.

Today is the 100th birthday of my father, Allen H. Searls. He only lived about 71 of those years, but they were all good ones, and I miss him still.

I’m writing this from Portland, Maine, on our way up to his sister Grace’s place near Booth Bay, where the family will gather to reminisce and otherwise enjoy the world we all occupy for too short a time.

Here is a photo gallery of shots from Pop’s life, including some amazing ones from his job working as a cable rigger on the George Washington Bridge — a structure that went up, almost literally, in his front yard. (A few decades later, when the lower deck of the bridge went in, the house he grew up in was demolished to make room for more roadwork.)

I’ll be adding more to this collection over the next few days as we scan and upload more shots from this collection and Grace’s as well.

Here’s my report (with links to as much as I could gather in a short time) on the VRM Workshop, over at the ProjectVRM blog.

It was an outstanding event. Lots of projects and subjects were not only vetted with the whole group, but moved forward very effectively. Thanks to everybody who came, or participated over the Web.

And thanks to the Berkman Center for hosting the event, and to Harvard Law School for providing excellent facilities. Well done.

Here is a Fox News video* that tours the Gap Fire area from the air. It’s clearly submitted by an amateur using a helicopter, judging from the monolog, flavored with casual explitives. To those (like me) familiar with the landscape, the video does an excellent job of showing how “perimeter” is a mileading notion. The fire is in many places at once. Wish that Fox or the shooter gave us a time/date for the footage. (Maybe they do and I miss it.) Seems to be from yesterday morning.

A lot of commenters on Edhat take exception to Santa Barbara’s decision to go ahead with the city’s fireworks on the waterfront. I don’t. It looks right now like the fire’s moving away from the city, which means plenty of work for firefighters keeping the rest of us safe to enjoy the holiday. Huge kudos to them for some of the hardest and most dangerous work that humans can do.

* I lost the direct link. The link to the video was in a narrow banner atop this story on Fox News, which I found via an Edhat comment. The banner is gone, and I can’t find anything through searches on the Fox site. I can still see the video, which comes up in a separate window, but copying the URL doesn’t seem to work. The URL I see is not what copies. Instead it’s the story that no longer has the banner with the link in it. (I hate this too-clever video crap on sites like this. Not to mention the lame search as well.) If anybody else has luck, let us know in the comments below. It really is an interesting video.

Got my first “thin” meal with my second breakfast this morning. The first breakfast was the usual broth and tea. Then for lunch I had my first real meal: baked scrod, a salad with strawberries and dried cranberries with a few almond slices and a lowfat dressing. Chicken noodle soup with a few crackers. Generic stuff. But I loved eating it, while watching clips from The Last Waltz on the laptop.

It’s been about an hour since then, and everything feels fine. My bloodwork shows everything normalized. Blood pressure of 120/70, heart rate of 58, oxygen uptake of 98%: an athletic profile in the absence of any cause other than genetics. My liver and pancreatic chemicals all look fine. White cell count is high at 20, but coming down from wherever it was. No fever in days.

Gotta make room here for sick people. Figuring I’ll punch out in a couple hours. Can’t wait.

Yesterday on the drive from SFO to Palo Alto, I hit SCAN on the rental car radio. Aside from the sports shows and the still-awesome KPIG (with a little signal on 1510 out of Oakland… check it out), most of what I heard was partisanship at all costs.

Eventually you get slips like this one on Fox News, by the formerly substantive journalist Liz Trotta. What began as a slip of the tongue ended with a slip of the mind that is just freaking scary.

Sez Trotta,

… but saying things which, at some level, we still mean. That level in this case is a warped and degraded form of conservatism, dressed as news and delivered as entertainment. Again, partisanship at all costs.

What Liz Trotta told her audience was to hate Obama as much as it hates Osama. And to trivalize the advice, all in one move. Were any unhinged future assassins watching? Let’s hope not.

While the kid had his violin lesson this evening at his school, I went out and shot hoops for as long as it took. Hits vs. Misses, all shots from beyond the foul line in any direction. When the kid came out, I was up 42 to 37. After we started playing HORSE, a couple of athletic young folks, a guy and his girlfriend, invited us to play a quick game to eleven, two on two. Make-it-take-it. The Kid made most of our points, but I hit the winning shot from out near top of the key. Swish. Nothing but net: 11-8.

Of course, the guy on the other team wanted his girlfriend to take most of their shots. He probably could have beaten us one-on-two. He was that good. But still, it felt satisfying. I think the last time I played an Actual Game was in the Ford Administration. Made me want to do more. Which is ludicrous, since I’m overweight, pushing 61, and gifted with the leaping ability of a culvert. Still, I played, made rebounds and put up shots that went in; and that alone felt good.

It’s a warm breezy day in Cambridge, a perfect pre-summer day for the Motown Orgy that WHRB is holding right now. I caught it first this morning on my way back from dropping the kid off at school, and it’s been hard to tune away since. Great radio, even though it’s weird getting schooled by DJs a third my age about what I still regard as my music (along with that of a billion or so other people).

WHRB doesn’t have a huge signal on the air. But their stream sounds great (in 96kbps stereo), worldwide. That’s the high-bandwidth one. If you’re listening over the cell system or someting, use the low bandwidth one.

In The connection between PR spam, global warming and magazines, Chris Anderson of Wired addresses something which, as both a magazine writer and reader, I truly hate:

Bravo.

Thinking it over, seems to me that blogging has for the most part become flogging, but that trying to rebadge the former as the latter is a job for Sysiphus (about whom Camus says some interesting stuff here).

A while back Dave Winer said he would quit blogging one of these days. At the time I thought that would be a bad idea, but lately I’ve come to sympathize with it, in part for the reason Seth Finkelstein gives here. Blogging today ain’t what it was when Dave started it, and when I followed in his footsteps. The kind of writing we both try to do — what I once called “making and changing minds” (including our own) — is an ever more narrowing slice of the whole, even if the amount of it is still going up.

So I want something new. Something for which the making of money is at most a secondary or lower priority. Not sure what that should be, but I am sure, if it ever happens, it won’t be called blogging.

Net Neutrality? That horse left the barn, got on a boat and went to Europe long ago. — DeWayne Hendricks, speaking at F2C

DeWayne is leaving the country. Going offshore. Because he’s giving up on geeks here in the U.S. We’re not fighting for the Net, he says. And we need to.

A link: ipsphere.org. Somebody on the show chat says it was…

Cable is not a monopoly. You can choose from any cable company you want in America, just by moving your house. — Brad Templeton, at F2C

Taking notes on the Media Re:public gathering here in Los Angeles.

“Its not clear to me that one unit of increase in media equals one unit of increase in democracy” — Ernest Wilson, of the USC Annenberg School of Communications.

Arianna Huffington: “Bloggers suffer from compulsive disclosure disorder, and journalists suffer from attention deficit disorder.” (Damn, I’m both, though one is — mostly — under control.) Quoted by Richard Sambrook, currently on stage. Might have that a bit off. Also, “The DNA of big media is absolutely hard-wired to the one-to-many model.” He continuers, UGC is “way too narrowly defined”. And “this kind of participation is still a minority sport”. Great line: “The notion that you need a business model for accountability is an interesting one.”

“YouTube, I understand, is about to go live”. That’ll be fun.

“Personalization has overpromised and underdelivered for fifteen years. But I think it’s about to happen.” And “Web 3.0 … the data driven Web… is about to break hard upon us.”

“Reinvent a social purpose for media that resonates with the public”: A challenge to the room.

EthanZ to Richard: Do you believe citizens can shape the agenda? Rather than you guys choose first and (and then the audience reacts)? He advises “really sophisticated media monitoring”; but of the blogosphere, and not just other traditional media.

Susan Mernit on reconnecting media with social purpose… We only see two kinds of coverage: events that happen, and events that people make (e.g. civic leaders).

Much more (than what I’ve written here) from David Weinberger and Ethan Zuckerman.

Roberto Suro, USC Annenberg: We conflate journalism as a business enterprise with journalism as a social actor.

David Weinberger, speaking, being deep and funny as usual: We spend most of our time online trying to figure out what we came in to do… Every tag is a front page. Every tag is a bookshelf.

DW: In an age of abundance of good, the struggle is over metadata. And, I have trouble applying the ‘commodification’ term to everything here, because it suggests that all things have equal value. Or low value.

Tag: MediaRepublic.

Was just pointed to The Age of Conversation. Not sure I’m in it (don’t think I am, anyway). But hey, I’m glad to see others roll a snowball I helped start.

Next up: The Age of Relationship.

My main disappointment with living in Boston this winter is the crappy snow. I think we’ve had only one or two snows this winter that were not what they ephemistically call “wintry mix”: snow mixed with or changing to rain. This morning we had another nice little snow, about half an inch, that has since been washed out almost completely by rain. What started pretty turned into a completely yucky day.

Still, we had a great time. Guests came. We dyed eggs. Had a great dinner. And I cloned the old dying laptop onto a new one that so far seems to work fine.

The music that comes to mind is When the Music’s Over, by The Doors. These lines especially:

(Warning: be careful what you click on.)

I suppose there are more charitable ways to view how human beings have gouged and stained the Earth. Charitable toward humans, anyway.

The older I get, the more I view the human contribution to geology — that is, toward the Earth itself — as catastrophic. That is, a moment of difference recorded in the fullness of time.

Most of your large geological features are catastrophic in nature. The Himilayas are mostly sea floor pushed northward by the prow of India, which broke away from Africa a few dozen million years ago, plowed across the ocean and smashed hard into the side of Asia — an event that’s still in progress. (The east coast of Madagascar and the Malabar coast of India are two straight lines that used to touch.) As John McPhee likes to remind us, all of geology can be encapsulated in a single fact: that the summit of Mount Everest is marine limestone

And no one fact about human habitation of the Earth sums our contribution more than amount of dead matter we have burned for energy — and will continue to burn until it’s gone. Never mind the elemental materials — the ores of copper, iron, uranium and other solids in the periodic table. Mining and burning of oil and coal will do. At best these materials — which took many millions of years to make, and which won’t be renewed for millions more, if ever — will be gone in a few hundred years, tops. Most of us don’t care because we won’t be here. And we care no more about our nameless descendents than we do about our nameless ancestors. We hardly care that burning fossil fuels is melting the ice caps and raising the seas. Humans on the whole don’t seem to be built for that form of contemplation. What we are built for is plunder. We do that out the wazoo, and we rationalize every bit of it, from burning rain forests to emptying mountains and prairies of coal.

After taking thousands of pictures out the windows of airplanes, it is clear to me that our species is pestilential, and that we’ll continue to exploit the Earth until it can stand no more, and collapse will follow. This event will also be recorded as a momentary discontinuity in the long saga of Earth’s history — one that went for billions of years without us around, and will surely continue for billions more, until the Sun burns out and the larger cycles continue spinning.

Of course, we can attempt to educate ourselves, and I salute the good folks who try. One is Patrick Gregston, who says here that we should watch this video here. Do that. It’s one among many wake-up calls we’ll all be getting in our short lifetimes.

Odds are, however, that most of us will keep hitting “snooze”.

Nice to read by Phil Windley that Kathy Sierra is back in the game.

Buzz Bruggeman, to Kevin O’Keefe:

We should have known the gig was going to be up when Hillary’s handlers made “conversation” a buzztheme of her campaign early on. Wrote Todd Ziegler (at that last link),

Guess that’s over. The word “conversation” no longer appears on the Hillary campaign site.

Now (via Chip Hoagland) comes Frank Rich, giving Hill a huge thumbs-down in The New York Times. One sample:

It gets worse. Concludes Rich,

Elsewhere in the Times, Stanley Fish writes about the Clinton-haters (and -hating), familiar to anybody who hits SCAN on an AM car radio. I’m not sure what it is that makes folks on the right loathe (rather than merely dislike) the Clintons, Hillary especially. And I hold nothing against her myself. But it’s … interesting … to watch Democrats slow-roast one of their own leaders. After all (or during all) Frank Rich isn’t flaming from the right. Rich is a leftie.

What surprises — and even saddens — me a bit is that Hillary has been so non-savvy about the Net. If this were 2000, or 2004, she’d have a good excuse. But it’s 2008. Obviously her campaign team doesn’t get it, while Obama’s does. How much difference would it have made if her team’s savviness were the equal of Obama’s? A lot, I think.

I’ll be at There’s a New Conversation, in New York, on the evening afternoon of Feb 13. Subtitled, Cluetrain Manifesto - 10 years later. Numbers aren’t really ages, of course. While Cluetrain hit the webwaves in early ‘99 and the book was written that summer (to come out in January of ‘00, just in time to cause the dot-com bubble crash… sorry), the conversations that eventuated in the Cluetrain instantia began in ‘98, so I guess we’re cool dating the dawn from then. Via Ted Shelton and James McKee.

NewsGang Lives.

Tony wishes Moxie a Happy Birthday, recalling the July 12, 2002 party at which many L.A. bloggers, including yours truly, met. Here’s my own rundown on the event. Here are PatioPundit (Martin Devon)’s pix and commentary. Nice to see both his blog and his archives are still up. Perhaps not so nice to see he hasn’t posted since October. Nor has the party’s host, Brian Linse.

When I check the links, and names, from that party, it’s kinda sad to see some gone silent or gone altogether. Moxie and Tony are still going strong. So are Mickey Kaus, Matt Welch, Charles Johnson, Emmanuelle Richard, Bill Quick. But I’m not sure where Dawn Olsen went (that link now goes to a blog that I doubt is hers). Or Ann Salisbury. Warren Zevon, who was never a blogger but who attended the party while life was killing him, is dead.

Lot of offline talk lately about what’s happened to blogging. One friend sent an email I hope he puts up soon. Among other quotable lines is “most of the blogosphere has become a full-on commercial wankfest now”.

Not that it wasn’t then. But it was fun to hang out with a bunch of people, most of whose politics were vastly unlike my own — but whose writing was interesting and compelling and fresh and far more personal and open-ended than any op-ed page — and to believe we were beginning to make some kind of positive difference in the world. In retrospect, I don’t think any of us was making a dime on blogging at the time. For what that’s worth. If anything.

Bonus links… Competing Messages: Elections and Governance and Honesty. They both challenge. They both make you think. The Bill Hicks video on marketing in the latter is way too close to what too many of us — including yours truly in a former life — call home.

That was the sunrise on New Year’s Day here in Santa Barbara. Here’s the sunset from the same day:

Both were harbingers of sorts. As I write this we’re having the worst rain of the new year. Huge storm happening.

A couple nights ago David Sifry floated an interesting idea past me: a LazyWeb facilitation service that would flow tweet or blog requests for answers through a bloglike site to which readers could subscribe. Something like that, anyway.

I liked it because it looked to me like a Live Web service with VRM aspects as well. (For example, it empowers individuals to issue requests, independently of any supplier’s silo.)

Dave was looking for name ideas. One I came up with was “hoosgot” — as in “who’s got ___?” Coming up with names isn’t easy these days, with nearly every possible word combination scarfed up, either by legitimate sites or domain squatters. Anyway, Dave went with that one.

Interestingly, the Live Web was first named by my son Allen, whose company GlobeAlive worked to shorten the distance between questions and answers — as did Wondir, the next company Allen worked for.

This is different, but it moves toward a related ideal: getting answers (and things) from the lazyweb. It’ll be interesting to see how Hoosgot goes.

Here’s where Dave explains Hoosgot, and how he’d like feedback and suggestions.

In The RIAA is Right, Robert Scoble offers a tongue-in-cheek take on the RIAA’s insane idea that ripping one’s own CDs is illegal.* Among other things he says,

Robert is right about all but one thing. Because VRM is about independence as well as engagement, it can’t come from “a site”. Or from anybody other than ourselves. It’s something that lives on the buyer’s side, allowing him or her to relate independently with many suppliers, on terms that are mutually agreeable.

I unpack some of this in a comment under Robert’s post.

A few months ago I also proposed a VRM system that would extend the RadioHead model to any artist.

* According to this post, that’s not really what the RIAA is doing, but they’re “still kinda being jerks about it”.

My sister Jan put up a nice photo series of our Aunt Grace Apgar, flying with our cousin Mark Crissman. Grace is 95 and doesn’t look or act a day over… hell, pick a number. Make it a low one.

Her mom lived to 107, and Grace is in better shape at 95 than Grandma was at the same age.

Hoping here that some of those long-lasting genes got distributed in my old bones too.

Cool to see Dave is going to CES. This has become an annual pilgrimage for me — covering the event for Linux Journal. 2008 is no exception. I’ll be there for the whole thing. (Though I’ll skip the always crowded and equally pointless Bill Gates keynote.)

CES stands for Consumer Electronics Show, although it’s really about Producer Electronics. At some point the abundance of individual and small producers will outweigh the big name brand ones, and a flip will happen in the marketplace. I think that will come when the customers are no longer just consumers, but active participants in the market’s conversation about product development. There are already moves in that direction. Expect many more.

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.

Dave on non-centralization:

So do you go for buzz, or do you go for substance? Yes, you can go for both, but if your main purpose is popularity you sell out substance. That’s just how it goes. You may still traffic in substance, but it’s secondary. And if you go for substance you’ll sometimes get some buzz, but as a secondary effect.

The difference is a matter of vectors: where you’re coming from and where you’re going to. Also what you’re pushing and why.

Centralization can move stuff forward too, but not the way decentralization can.

We need both. But you can’t see the latter while covering the former. Not enough of it, anyway. That’s why the MSM misses so much. They want to cover companies, personalities. They’d rather cover sites than services, or protocols, or formats, or anything that no company in particular is working on. And they don’t know what to make of something new and world-chaning until it’s gotten all buzzy.

What make Bug Labs and Chumby interesting is less what those companies are doing than what others are doing with those companies’ products and services. Problem is, those ‘others’ are hard to follow. Not just because they’re small or unknown, but because they’re not a fixed substance. They’re growing and changing.

Out here in the wild we educate ourselves and each other while making stuff and helping others make stuff and thinking out loud about how it works and how it oughta work. It’s not R&D but R via D. Lots of great stuff gets made this way, but it doesn’t get covered much by the MSM because it’s not being done by big or hot companies and/or personalities.

But it may be what matters most, no matter how much buzz it gets.

Can VRM fix DRM? I’ve visited this before, in A Public Market for Public Music.

Just got into Chicago, and now I’m sitting in seat 4F, at the window, camera at my side, while the rest of the passengeriat boards the 737.

Beautiful view of Toronto, Hamilton, Southern Ontario, Lake Huron and Central Michigan after clearing the clouds in Central New York. Got some pix I’ll put up later.

Can’t get to my point, Have to turn this off. durn.

Okay, we’re en route to Atlanta, and permission has just been granted to use laptops and other “approved electronic devices”. These do not include “all electronic devices including two way radios using cellular wi-fi technology”. The technical among you will know that the last phrase was not written by a technical expert.

Anyway, my point, two paragraphs up, was that these prohibitions, while serious in one way, are silly in others. I’d bet that most of the open laptops on this plane have wi-fi on by default, putting out whatever little signal that involves. I have my wi-fi turned off, which spares the battery in any case.

More to my point about silliness, for the first time ever I was told by a flight attendant to turn off my camera, presumably because it is an “electronic device”. I can only assume, because I didn’t ask. Her pissy and reproachful tone made it clear that asking questions would not be helpful. So I complied. Meanwhile we crossed the north shore of Chicago, with brilliant fall colors and many scenes I would like to have shot, but alas. Not big as deals go, but still annoying. The risk to the aircraft caused by my shooting pictures out the window is exactly zero. The benefits to the airline exceed that, though perhaps not by much.

I’ll check when I get to the hotel, but I’ll bet that about half of the 17,000 or so pictures I’ve put up on Flickr were shot out of plane windows. (Later… 4303 are labeled “aerial”.) A lot are blah, but more than a few are pretty darn good. Including many shot on approach or take-off.

And now I’m in Atlanta, at Apachecon, working.

Chaos theory: advertising cash will soon decrease, by Jeff Jarvis in the Guardian. I get quoted:

It’s hard, but necessary. And far from impossible.

How Not to Talk to Your Kids: The Inverse power of praise, a piece by Po Bronson in New York Magazine, makes a case that praising kids, especially smart ones, may be bad for them. Specifically, Giving kids the label of “smart” does not prevent them from underperforming. It might actually be causing it.

Among the early paragraphs are these:

The sad and bad thing about this article is that it fails to challenge two things that desperately need challenging. One is school as a system and the other is IQ tests. Bronson, like most of us, regards compulsory schooling and IQ tests as independent variables — and other factors, such as parental praise, as dependent ones. So it blames parents. Not the creepy caste system made explicit by the admission methods of Thomas’s school. Not puzzles we call tests that our school systems use to measure the essentially unmeasurable: namely, the worth of our children.

On the former I submit to the vast experience and wisdom of John Taylor Gatto, who succeeded excessively as a teacher precisely because he refused to carry out the system’s curriculum. By so doing he carried out what he said was a teacher’s first duty, which is not to pour curricula into the empty vessels (some larger, some smaller) that are then tested for leakage, but rather to “get out of the way everything that prevents a child’s genius from gathering itself”. Gatto succeeded as a teacher because he believed in his kids, as individuals, each unlike all others, each vastly able in his or her own way, each with incalculable value to contribute to the world, each challenged by the need to exceed the bounds of the bell curves the school was built to manage, no matter where those kids fell inside the bounds of those curves.

On the matter of IQ tests, there’s what I said yesterday, plus far more from Steven Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, written decades ago and no less valid today.

Po concludes,

My advice to Po, and to all parents, from the perspective of a veteran parent and kid whose own experience with school was instructively both very good and very bad, is this: Believe in their genius, and believe just as much in the immeasurability of that genius.

And remember that what you teach best is what they’ll learn because of you, yet on their own.

The best schools are the ones that are good for every kid. Not just for the ones with labels.

Craig Smith: The road to the Academy Awards now goes through Santa Barbara.

Over at Linux Journal, I just posted Maybe UCANN school ICANN on whois. It begins,

The subject is equally geeky, wonky and important. You might wanna check it out.

Lanna Action for Burma, a new Thai blog, is running a Panty Power Campaign against the government next door, in Burma. I’m not making this up. Here’s what it says:

SPDC is the State Police and Development Council, which rules Burma, brutally.

The pointer comes from a friend in Thailand who says this thing is serious — or about as serious as things like this can be. Except there is nothing else like this. But I’m not there and have no idea.

Meanwhile, Violet Cho of The Irrawaddy writes this in “Panties for Peace” Campaign Wins Wide Support:

The “Panties for Peace” campaign aimed at Burma’s military regime is gaining momentum, with the establishment of a committee to drum up support in Thailand.

The campaign began on October 16, with women throughout the world sending packages to Burmese embassies containing panties. Burma’s superstitious generals, particularly junta chief Than Shwe, believe that contact with any item of women’s wear deprives them of their power.

“Panties for Peace” campaigns have sprung up in Australia, Europe, Singapore—and now Thailand, where a Lanna Action for Burma committee has been formed in Chiang Mai to support the feminine protest.

Ying Tzarm, a co-founder of Lanna Action for Burma, told The Irrawaddy that the campaign was aimed at undermining the superstitious beliefs of the military regime.

Liz Hilton, a supporter of the Lanna Action for Burma and a member of the Empower foundation, said that by sending underwear to the men of Burma’s overseas embassies women would be delivering a strong message to the regime.

Beats going to war, seems to me.

To Andria Krewson at Global Vue for the kudos. Good stuff there, btw. Also at Andria’s other blog.

Every family has a black sheep. That’s what Bill Burton, an Obama spokesman, said after discovering that Lynne Cheney revealed that Barack and Dick are 8th cousins.

Looking for my Leopard. Silly. But I laughed.

Zoli: our online network should reflect our real-life one, instead of being an inflated collection of data record Amen.

As Rick Segal reports, I’ve taken a board seat with PlanetEye, a Toronto-based company in the travel space. (One which, as many of you know, I practically live in.) I’m equally excited and flattered to be there, and look forward to helping the PlanetEye bring the Intention Economy to an industry that desperately needs it. If you’re interested in PlanetEye’s beta, by the way, there’s more here.

Reading through the comments to Loose Linkage, where I pionted to Jalopnik’s What’s the oldest car you’ve ever owned, I got to wondering if I could remember every car I ever owned, and what happened to it. Here’s a try:

1. 1963 Volkswagen Beetle. Black. Belonged to my parents. Rolled it during summer school after my freshman year in college. In fact, it rolled over three times before coming to rest right-side up. I remember trying to hold onto the bottom of the seat, watching the pavement come up to the window and disappear overhead, over and over again. I was fine, but the bug was totaled. Still, it brought $425 at auction from a guy who cut it in two and attached the front end of it to the back of another one. New it was $1250 or so.
2. 1960 English Ford Consul. Black. Leaked oil from everywhere. Bought it for $400, sold it for almost nothing, which is what it was worth. The low point came when it croaked in Hickory, NC, where it limped after the alternator belt blew up on the Blue Ridge and where no replacement could be found, so we had to hitch back to Greensboro. In the rain.
3. 1958 Mercedes 220S. Midnight blue. Bought it for $250, needed new upholstery, which I put in. Had a “hydrax” semi-automatic transmitssion. 4-on-the-column, no clutch. The transmission went bad, and I sold it for $75.
4. 1963 Chevy Bel Air. My parent’s old car, and the first new car they had ever bought. Drove it to 125,000 miles, when the transmission started to go. Sold it.
5. 1966 Pugeot 404 wagon. Bought for $500. Had dents in all four doors, and lots of stupid “features” such as screw-on hubcaps and spark plugs hidden down inside the valve cover at the far ends of bakelite sleeves that would break. Got rid of it after driving it from New Jersey to North Carolina, in the middle of which a resonator can on the exhaust manifold blew off; and, in an unrelated matter, large hunks of the floor between the front seat and the pedals fell out, so I could see the pavement under my feet, hear the engine noise bypass the exhaust system, and breathe the exhaust, all at once. For about 400 miserable miles.
6. 1966 Volvo 122S. Bought it from my parents, who bought it new in Belgium . Great car, very solid. Ran out of oil once, however, and damaged the engine. Sold it with 110K miles on it to a guy who replaced the engine.
7. 1967 (?) Austin America. Belonged originally to my sister. Loaned from my father, who later sold it for almost nothing, which is what it was worth. An early front-wheel drive, it had lots of good ideas but terrible construction. I think Pop sold it for $10.
8. 1971 (?) Datsun pickup. My father’s, actually. But I drove it for awhile.
9. 1969 Chevy Biscayne. Snot green. Black vinyl seats. Looked like an unmarked cop car. Developed leaks in the roof. Turning on the heat would steam up the windows.
10. 1978 Volkswagen Squareback. Bought it for $200, sold it for $225. Something like that. A few months after I sold it cops showed up at my door to tell me I needed to get its corpse out of the woods, where somebody had set it on fire. Still had my plates on it. Fortunately, I had the paperwork for the sale. No idea what happened after that.
11. 1969 Pontiac Catalina. “Big White.” Bought if from my uncle. The trunk would fill with water in the rain, making it useless for carrying stuff in there.
12. 1980 Chevy Citation. The famous “X car”, created to compete with Chrysler’s equally bad “K car”. It had front wheel drive, which was new in those days, and a roomy sloping hatchback. But it was crap and didn’t last long. Gave it up in a divorce, in trade for my ex’s old Pinto.
13. 1974 Ford Pinto wagon. One of the worst cars ever made. This one had been in an accident at some point in the long prehistory before I came into possession of it, and the frame was bent, so it moved crabwise down the road. Every once in awhile it would start to veer wildly out of control, even on the straightaway. It did this once on the boulevard between Chapel Hill and Durham, hooking bumpers with another car, sending them both spinning. Fortunately, the Pinto’s bumper bent completely while the other hardly had a dent. Which was both strange and amazing. The lady driving the other car wanted money anyway, and I paid. At some point the car just died, as best I recall.
14. 1979 Honda Accord hatchback. Very nice, smooth-running car that went completely dead on a winding coastal road in the black of night, and then produced light in the form of a flame coming up from between my legs. I slowed to a stop as fast as I could while feeling the shoulder of the road like I was reading braile through my right tires. When I fished a flashlight out of the glove box and got out of the car I found the honda had come to rest exactly one foot from a parked car. A look under the dash revealed a hot lead (from the + side of the electric system) to Everything had been cut at some point in the past, spliced poorly and wrapped in gooey old black electric tape. As the splice came undone, electricity passed through an ever-narrower path until it turned into an incendiary thread, set fire to the tape and then fell apart. So it was easily fixed. But the car, in a very un-Honda-like way, was cursed with problems. I sold it to a young woman for whom it performed fine until the engine blew up. She contacted the mechanic who sold it to me in the first place, found that he had misrepresented the car (saying the engine was original, for example, when it wasn’t), and then sued me rather than him, because I had sold her the car. It was a small claims case in North Carolina. I was by then living in California. So I settled. By then, fortunately, I had bought my…
15. 1985 Toyota Camry. Basic model with a stick. My first new car, and the first that had working air conditioning. Best car I ever had. Gave it to my daughter when I got the Subaru in the early 90s.
16. 1998(?) Subaru 4Wd wagon. Tried to drive it into the ground but failed and gave it to a friend earlier this year.
17. 2000 Volkswagen Passat wagon. Bought for $5k from a friend who was moving out of the country. Put another $3k into it, to bring it up to top shape. Wish it was a stick, but otherwise it’s a great little car.

I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few, but that’s an outline for countless stories.

[Later...] Fun comments below. By far the most entertaining (or frightening, or both) pointage out goes to the Head Lemur’s list. Wow. Reminds me of Hot Rod Lincoln, one of the Great Gassed Insanity Songs. Those linked lyrics, by the way, are from the Commander Cody version. The Commander gives the definitive performance of the piece (I just went through the karaoke exercise supported by the audio at that last link, and The Kid said he was glad “nobody was here” to hear it), although full props go to George Wilson for writing (and living) the original.

“I saw your dad playing basketball yesterday,” a girl in my kid’s school told him yesterday. “It was weird”, she said.

Somehow I made the Go from hell post below disappear tonight. Just got it back. My bad. Apologies.

Just discovered I made a whole ‘nuther post disappear, though. Completely. Damn.

Just caught this post by Thomas Hawk about Yahoo’s reported decision to kill off a photo of a girl smoking, because the company has a policy about not showing those kinds of photos. Its a shot titled “Priscilla 1969″, by Joseph Szabo, and familiar from an old album cover that used it. Thomas is CEO of Zoomr, a Flickr competitor.

We passed the moment of Equinox at 9:51am GMT today.

That was 17 minutes ago, as I write this.

Got in yesterday (Sunday), around noon, a week exactly after leaving Santa Barbara.

The trip could hardly have been easier, considering. The weather was pretty much perfect, every day. The car, which turned past 120,000 miles in Arches National Park, ran smoothly and with no complaints. The dashboard says “EMISSIONS WORKSHOP”, with a little “check engine” light that means the same thing. It’s been that way for months, and was supposed to be fixed by the VW dealer before we left Santa Barbara, as part of its routine 120,000 mile workup ($639), but that didn’t happen. It also didn’t make any difference.

The apartment is the top two floors of a typical Boston-area house built in 1920, and lovingly maintained by a landlady who prepared it more than well. We bought a few items from the prior tennants (such as the desk on which I’m typing this now), and Halley also provided us with some very helpful provisions from her surplus collection of cookware and other household goods. But we’re still short of about 99% of the furniture we’ll need.

We oriented in the afternoon to the nearest Costco, Target, Peet’s and Trader Joe’s, which are our base-level desert island requirements. We visited Costco and Target late in the afternoon, and found both to be about 2x the size of any we’ve met in California. Those will help while we tool around from one garage sale to another today. Meanwhile we’re camping here on air mattresses.

It’ll be good to get Verizon’s FiOS fiber optic internet service, but it won’t get here until the 11th. Meanwhile we’re on with EvDO. (One of us uses the card, and turns the laptop into a wi-fi bridge for the other one — it’s a kluge, but it works okay.)

It’s fun to be in a house of the same vintage as the ones I remember from when I was a kid in New Jersey. First was my grandmother’s house on Hoyt Avenue in Fort Lee, a stone’s throw from the George Washington Bridge. My grandfather (born in 1863, during the Civil War) built that house around the turn of the last century. It was typically Victorian: tall (with two apartments — one each for the top two floors), long and narrow. It was high off the ground so there was room for a delivery truck to dump coal through a chute into a bin in the basement. This is the house where my parents were living when I was born in 1947, and I believe it was still heated with coal when we lived there. I can remember the coal pile, in any case. Grandma lived there until I was eight years old and I remember the place vividly.

Our next house was on Edel Avenue in Maywood, not far up Route 4 (”root faw”). That one was built in 1920 and a good bit smaller: 17×23, including the porch. It was heated by oil that produced steam for radiators in each room. In spite of its small size, it was better than three stories high, with a full basement and an attic. We lived there until I was six. I remember that house vividly as well, which is why our apartment reminds me of it. There’s the oil heat in the basement, the front porch with latticework underneath, the steep stairs to each floor, the little nook & cranny storage areas beneath the triangular spaces outside the attic and under the roof.

I’m writing this from the attic in our apartment; and though it’s a lot longer than the Edel Avenue house, it still has the same look & feel — even the same old-wood smell when you open the storage spaces. Funny to think that the old Edel Avenue house was only 28 years old when we moved there in 1948.

Our next house was on Woodland Avenue in Maywood, a few blocks form Edel. It was new in 1953, and almost identical to every other new house that went up on that block at the same time.

Two of those three houses of ours are now gone. The Ft. Lee house was cleared to make room for access roads to the lower deck of the George Washington Bridge, back in the mid-1960s. And the Woodland Avenue house was bulldozed several years ago so the new owners could put a new house there. I just learned from an old friend and former next door neighbor that all the big trees in our lot — a wild cherry, a locust and a maple, have all been taken down. We planted the maple and the locust. The Wild cherry was there when we moved in, and I used to climb the thing almost daily. My mother made jam from the berries, which were almost too tart to eat raw. I’m more bummed to learn about the trees than the house. Even though it hardly matters. (And who knows… maybe the house and the trees were all shot by now.)

Here in New England they’re more conscientious about saving the old stuff. Not that they succeed every time; but it’s nice to know it’s somewhere in the value system.

Tomorrow I start as a residential fellow (at least in the literal sense) at the Berkman Center. Can’t wait to take the bus there.

We almost went to Cedar Breaks, but it was raining heavily up there — and all around that part of Utah — when we left Cedar City this morning. So we went up 15 to 50 and headed down to 70, where we took in the Castle Country, San Rafael Swell and San Rafael Reef before arriving at Moab in late afternoon, just in time to take in some nice (though very intermittent) lighting on the most amazing rock formations in the world.

Check here for pix. They’re uploading now on the dial-up speed wi-fi here at the hotel.

I’m hitting the sack, hoping to catch the solar eclipse at 4am or so.

Two casual photos I’ve taken of Baltimore have made their way into the Schmap guide for the city.

JP Rangaswami: When you don’t focus on the user, the user gets shafted.

That’s when the antecedent of you is a developer or a company that needs, by mission, to focus on users.

Such may not be the case, however, for deep infrastructure developers. This is why with Linux, for example, we draw a sharp distinction between kernel space and user space.

What happens in user space depends on what happens in kernel space, but user space doesn’t run development in kernel space. More about that here and here.

Ray Ford has an excellent piece in the Independent on the Zaca Fire.

The good news:

The bad news:

This map from the NewsPress shows the expanded fire perimeter. Not sure how it matches up with the Independent’s report. The official maps are at InciWeb, which is down as I write this.

It’s frustrating to follow this from the other side of the country. I’m listening right now to “The Baron” Ron Herron on AM 1290, the News-Press station. There’s a link to the stream on the NewsPress home page. Even live coverage is locked behind a subscriber paywall, however. And the station itself has no webpage, which is inexcusable for a news station.

KTMS is back to being “AM 990″. I guess they’re still also on 1490 and have decided not to sell off the 990 signal. But there’s nothing live on the site. No streams. Dennis Miller (yes, that one) is on right now. He’s actually a good morning man. You can subscribe to the show for $49.95/year. Podcasts are free, it appears. Dennis lives in Montecito, the thoroughly wooded town that comprises the East End of Santa Barbara.

Now The Barron is reading news from this morning’s paper. This has been the routine since AM 1290 went on the air a couple years ago. The news station itself has no apparent news staff. The station just ran CNN news, and is now running BBC World Service. Not exactly Local Stuff.

It’s going on a month since I wrote Lighting a fire for public radio in Santa Barbara. Nothing much has changed since then, other than the urgency.

I won’t be back in town until after the 15th. If we still have a house, and a town, it would be good to meet and talk about the possibilities. A number of people have written me with support for getting the ball rolling. If you want to add to that number, say so in the comments below, or send an email to (my first hame)@(my last name).com.