December 2009
-
Happy Early Year
It’s almost 3am in Zermatt, which turns into one huge party town for New Years. First we rode in from a nice day in Lausanne on a train packed with rowdy party-goers. Then we found Zermatt turned into one wild-ass place. Fireworks — big ones — were set off from everywhere all over the town,… Continue reading
-
Matterhorn by Moonlight
There are mountains, and there is the Matterhorn. It’s all a matter of sculpture and presentation. Great art, great framing. The Matterhorn is ice sculpture. It was carved by ice out of rock pushed to the sky by a collision between Italy and Europe that’s still going on. The ice was as high as the… Continue reading
alps, blue, Cervino, Matterhorn, night, Pennine Alps, Photography, snow, switzerland, white, winter, Zermatt -
Skiing is believing
The shot above is a pano taken by The Kid with my iPhone, which isn’t good for much else here in Switzerland. (Click here or on the shot to see the original, including larger sizes.) On the left is the Matterhorn, which may be the most impressive mountain on Earth. It’s hard to imagine more… Continue reading
Cervino, Gornergrat, Matterhorn, snow, switzerland, vacation, Valais, Wallis, white, winter, Zermatt -
Progress
Back when I started coming over to Europe for work (mostly to France), in the mid-90s, I listened almost every night to U.S. armed forces radio (then called the Armed Forces Radio Service, or AFRS) on 873KHz on the AM (or, in Europe, MW) dial. I’m listening again now, almost surprised to find it still… Continue reading
-
Earth to Hollywood
Please get rid of the @#$%^& region coding. See, our family meant to bring along some movies when we came to Switzerland for our holiday vacation. Forgetting them was my fault. But not being able to watch other movies, that we would be glad to pay for, on our laptop, is not our fault. It’s… Continue reading
-
Still lacking in DIY ease of use
I want to give some linklove to Mike Warot, and point to his latest post, Indeterminant Intermediaries Imminent. Mike has been a stalwart contributor to the VRM conversation, and a thoughtful dude. A teaser quote: The future of the live web is in doubt, for good reasons. I would like to add some things that… Continue reading
-
And the longest night of the year
We passed the Winter solstice at 17:47 today, universal time, or 12:47pm Eastern time here in the U.S. It’s 4:02pm right now in Boston, as the Sun enters the horizon at the lowest angle of the year. From now until the summer solstice, the days will only get longer. That’s the optimistic angle on the… Continue reading
-
Amazon runs dry
So I ordered a bunch of gifts from Amazon for my sister to open on Christmas. Did it all last week so we’d have time for screw ups. Turns out we needed it. I won’t go into the details (including stuff that was my fault), but will instead jump ahead to a bug that needs… Continue reading
-
Do we want “smart” utilities?
‘Smart’ Electric Utility Meters, Intended to Create Savings, Instead Prompt Revolt is a New York Times story that perhaps suggests a deeper truth: People don’t want their utilities to get smart on them. Except, occasionally, on request. Like, when a bill one month is strangely high. These paragraphs encapsulate several problems at once: At the… Continue reading
-
Building better markets. Not just better marketing.
The comment thread in my last post was lengthened by Seth Finkelstein‘s characterization of me as “basically a PR person”. I didn’t like that, and a helpful back-and-forth between the two of us (and others) followed. In the midst of the exchange I said I would unpack some of my points in a fresh post… Continue reading
“David Weinberger”, advertising, Allen Searls, Berkman, Berkman Center, blueberries, Carpenter, Chris Locke, Colette Searls, CXO, Durham, Eleanor Searls, fcc, George Washington Bridge, google, Göteburg, Hodskins Simone & Searls, Malmö, marketing, Mom, Palo Alto, paradise, Pop, PR, projectvrm, restaurtants, Ricke Levine, Searls, Seth Finkelstein, The Searls Group, Todd Carpenter, twitter, Wanigan, WWII -
The Revolution Will Not Be Intermediated
So I just followed this tweet by Chris Messina to Mike Arrington‘s The End of Hand Crafted Content. The tweet-bite: “The rise of fast food content is upon us, and it’s going to get ugly.” Meaning that FFC “will surely, over time, destroy the mom and pop operations that hand craft their content today. It’s… Continue reading
-
Egging on
Nice piece in the Baltimore Sun (front page of the Arts section, above the fold) about The Crystal Egg, a new production we’ll be seeing this weekend. Written and directed by Colette Searls. More here. Continue reading
-
Season’s Leavings
So I’ve been out and about London the 2-3 days. Had a great time. Beautiful city in Christmas season, even (or perhaps especially) in the rain. Not much connectivity, or time to connect, actually. The above is one of the few pix I took, before breakfast with JP Rangaswami this (or yesterday, depending) morning. Shot… Continue reading
-
Reversing the comms industry power ratio
Empowering the Internet One American at a Time is an excellent post by Erik Cecil, a battle-hardened telecom lawyer whose vision of the Big Picture and around all curves continues to delight me. The post first appeared on a mail list, and is addressed primarily to fellow Internet and telecom obsessives (myself included). Here are… Continue reading
-
Liberating the Net from Telephony
Yesterday the FCC released a public notice seeking comment on the “transition from circuit switched network to all-IP network.” (Here’s the .pdf. Here’s the .txt version.) Translation: from the phone system to the Internet. This is huge. Really. Freaking. Huge. Or maybe not. Could be it’s all just posturing or worse. But I don’t think… Continue reading