Cheese Omelet: Waitin' On a Sunny Day

Had a great, albeit exhausting, weekend. Friday night was The Boss. Saturday night I went to the Jags-Dolphins pre-season game. We lost, but it was fun going to the game. Afterward, my neighbor's friend gave us a tour of the broadcast booths. That was cool.

Sunday we had our second annual Lebowskifest party. We had several new Urban Achievers joining us this year, and many White Russians were consumed, some of them with Russians. That party started at 11:00 a.m., and while I, sometimes believing that discretion is the better part of valor, went home shortly before 9:00 p.m., the hard-core remained until the wee hours of the morning.

My voice is slowly returning, although I'm still somewhat tired. I was able to rally enough to attend yoga class yesterday evening, which was a wise decision I think.

Got a nice e-mail from one of my friends regarding the concert, and it seems that indeed she is a new fan of BS, as she calls him, with tongue firmly in cheek I think. I'm loaning her the VH-1 Storytellers DVD, which I watched again last night. I hadn't watched it in over a year, and I'd forgotten how good it was. If you're any sort of Springsteen fan, or even a non-fan who might wonder why he remains something of an iconic figure, buy, rent or borrow that DVD. It's not the same experience as a concert, by any means. But it may give you a new appreciation of a remarkable artist and a very decent human being.

Tropical Storm Fay is going to make things a bit damp and breezy for the next few days. Fortunately, it doesn't appear that it will become a hurricane, and so the destruction and property loss should be minimal. Which means insurance premiums shouldn't become utterly unaffordable next year. But, it is still early in the season...

We Floridians kind of hold our collective breath for about six months out of each year. The hurricanes are a little scary, but what's really terrifying is how much we're at the mercy of the insurance industry. Silly us, we thought these national or multi-national insurance corporations were actually spreading risk across, you know, the nation. Sometime's we're paying for forest fires for folks out west, or floods for folks in the midwest, or earthquakes for both of those regions, and sometimes they're paying for hurricanes for those of us on the east coast. Guess not. And there's no shortage of indignant, self-important individuals, far wiser than us (and they'll even tell you so), who also tell us we're fools for living so close to the ocean. As if a great deal of our economic activity doesn't take place close to the coasts for what one might have thought were rather obvious, and practical, reasons.

But anyway... You have to take the good with the bad, I guess. And while I don't have to worry about mudslides and floods and earthquakes and wildfires (though we've had one or two of those I suppose), and tornadoes, I suppose it's worth it to worry about the occasional hurricane to see the sun come up over the ocean every now and then.

Things I've Learned: Kinds of People

There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who divide people into groups, and, um...

Well, maybe there aren't two kinds of people in the world.

Think about it.

MobileMe: Moonshots

I've been goofing around with iPhoto and MobileMe a bit. Just a quick and dirty to see what's what, but here are 18 pictures I took of the moon in the last four years. You'd think I'd get better at it...

iPhone: The story thus far...

My experience with my iPhone 3G continues to be a positive one. No dropped calls. 3G coverage, even Edge coverage, is a bit weak at the naval station where I work, but it's pretty good at most of the places I tend to frequent.

The device itself works well. Call quality is equal to or better than what I experienced with the Nokia 3660.

I've been reading about some people having problems with the iPhone 3G, but my experience has been great. I'm happy with the phone, and I'm pleased with the service from both Apple and AT&T to this point.

Happy Birthday Hal Rager

Hal Rager celebrates his 53rd (or "LIII," as he put it) birthday today. Two days ago was the 10th anniversary of his ordination as Clerical Member of the Zen Buddhist Order of Hsu Yun. And he's an archeologist! Somebody ought to make a movie about this guy!

As has been noted before, here and elsewhere, Hal and I go back to 2000 or so, in the old editthispage.com blog family.

Cheese Omelet: The Boss

You may recall the young ladies, Ally and Inga, flanking your genial host above, as we were last all together in March at the Gate River Run. But last night we were back downtown to see The Boss. And yes, the iPhone camera does leave a great deal to be desired, but at least I could get it into the arena.

I had to explain about "The Boss." I'm sure you know, Frank was the Chairman of the Board, Elvis was The King, and Bruce is simply "The Boss." (Whether or not those appellations really are titles and therefore appropriately capitalized is left as an exercise for readers with more time on their hands than me.) But when I asked Inga if she'd like to go see The Boss, her response was, "The who?" (Which might have lent itself to a whole Abbot and Costello thing, but I demurred.) Anyway, neither of my friends could be said to have been Springsteen fans, but I think that's a little different now.

Five years, five months and eleven days previously, I had been downtown for the same reason. Things seem to have changed a bit in the intervening half-decade. Last time, I was thrilled with Bruce and unhappy with the audience. This time, the crowd came to play, although they did throw me a bit of a scare.

Learning my lesson from the last concert, I got tickets on the floor this time, so I could stand up and pretty much make a complete fool out of myself as much as I wanted to. The tickets said showtime was 7:30, but I'm not so foolish as to believe that. Nevertheless, when we did wander onto the floor about 7:40, probably half the seats in the arena were empty. I confess I was pretty much convinced Jacksonville had let me down again. But I guess they were all out in the passageways buying t-shirts or something, because by the time the band finally took the stage, the place was full, and on their feet.

It was a much better concert, in my opinion, than the one in 2003. I suspect at least some of that is due to much better crowd reaction. It may also have been due to the two-week break they had before this show. In either case, it was an awesome show. The sound was a little louder than I would have preferred, but it wasn't so loud that it was painful. My ears are still ringing as I write this, but I've been to worse. Bruce was balls to the wall the whole time. Every time the camera focused on Max Weinberg, I worried about him a little. He's probably the only guy up there working every bit as hard as Bruce and he was looking a bit tired toward the end!

Mary's Place was the centerpiece of the revival pitch, which Bruce has changed a bit from the one you're probably most familiar with in the HBO Special or Live in New York City DVD. Lots of "house building" goin' on. I loved it. He offered some political commentary in the intro to Livin' in the Future, which didn't garner a hostile reaction that I could detect. Jacksonville is pretty much a right-wing, almost reactionary town. But last night, the only response I could hear was actually positive, so maybe we're a little less republican than we used to be.

Big surprise of the night for me was the performance of Back in Your Arms, which was a tour premiere, and a song I care about a great deal. It was the only slow number of the night. I think the show ran just about three hours, quite a bit longer than the 2003 show. His set lists have been running about 28 songs for most of the year, and this one was a bit under that at 26, but I'm not complaining. I don't think I could have made it through two more numbers. I left with a pounding headache, mostly from that whole "make a complete fool out of myself" thing. Because I did.

I'm a bit deaf and very hoarse this morning, but very pleased and happy. It was a great show with some great friends and a great showman. I don't know how many more times I might get to see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, but I'm ever so glad I had this one.

Politics: If only...

Sometimes, not often, I get the urge to write about politics, but I choose not to. More so than even the other things I write about, people's minds are closed, their beliefs are fixed; and about the only thing one can contribute is another layer of ossification, or some shallow titillation.

But Hal Rager commented on something another blogger wrote recently, and while I normally agree with Hal on most things, I don't agree with his sentiment here. And I know he knows better, which probably sounds both presumptuous and arrogant.

Anyway, check it out, but for the sake of those too Google-addled to do so, it's a reflection on Clinton's sexual indiscretion, inspired or provoked by Edwards'. And it catalogs a litany of presumably undesirable outcomes, if only Clinton had "kept it in his pants."

This misses the obvious point, and it illustrates a fundamental flaw in our nature, a blind spot. We like simple answers to complex problems. We like to affix blame to specific people, sometimes specific groups, for specific negative outcomes, on some inherent moral failing. But, "the fault, dear Brutus..."

A sexual indiscretion, or marital infidelity, is a personal tragedy for the principals involved. It's a sideshow to everyone else. That is to say, it's none of our business. Yet we allow ourselves to be distracted by it, or manipulated by others using it, exploiting it and us, for that purpose. We can choose not to be distracted by it, but we don't because we actually enjoy witnessing the major moral failings of others, particularly those who are presumably superior to us in some fashion. "All men have feet of clay," yet we focus on the failings in our leaders, or would-be leaders, perhaps because it allows us to ignore, indulge, or forgive our own.

"Well, I've never cheated on my spouse," might be a likely rejoinder. And that, while admirable, doesn't grant anyone license to offer sweeping judgments about the moral failings of others; even less, the historical consequences thereof. We just do it because it makes us feel good about ourselves. We exploit the imperfections in others for our own selfish reasons. Even as I hope, perhaps vainly, that I'm not doing so here.

So there's little to feel good about, even as I try to avoid the news about Edwards and the pain his family is enduring; and I unintentionally encounter the disappointing and dispiriting comments of others. We know better, and I know we know better.

And all those negative outcomes that presumably stemmed from Clinton's inability to "keep it in his pants," are really the negative outcomes of our own inability to be the kind of people we know we ought to be, and nothing more.

Some of us look to political leaders to "make the world a better place." Some of us look to technology. And as much as our reliance on simple answers is almost invariably an error, the answer really is simple. It's the execution that's really hard.

If you want the world to be a better place, try being better people.

Olympics: You Go, Girl

Damn, I hate crying into my breakfast cereal. "It's showtime."

Cheese Sandwich: My Point of View

Cheese Sandwich: Rainbow

While the camera in the iPhone is by no means great, it is often at hand. On my way out to the store yesterday evening, I happened to see a very lovely rainbow. I thought about turning around and running home to grab the Oly, but figured I was running late for a party anyway so I'd just use the iPhone. It's not bad:

iPhone: T-Mobile Not Evil

I received my final T-Mobile bill in the mail yesterday, and I was somewhat not surprised to find a $200.00 charge for early termination. So I reviewed the bill and found the 9 minute call I made to customer service on the 10th of July where I informed them I wished to cancel my contract because of the change in SMS pricing, and then I called customer service again.

Apart from a little frustration dealing with the voice menu, I got to a customer service rep with little difficulty. She listened to my issue and put me on hold a couple of time for less than a minute each, and finally came back and said they were taking the $200.00 charge off the bill. Throughout the whole thing we were very cordial to one another. She did try to lure me back to T-Mobile, but that's out of the question for now.

Truthfully, T-Mobile always gave me excellent service and if it weren't for the iPhone, there would have been no reason for me to switch. In fact, around here, I like T-Mobile's coverage more than AT&T's. I had great connectivity at work, while it's spotty from AT&T. While it would have been better had the $200.00 charge never appeared, making it go away was about as hassle-free as these sorts of things ever get. So, props to T-Mobile for being decent about the whole thing.

iPhone: 2.0.1

Installed the latest update to the iPhone firmware, 2.0.1, to no ill effect. Can't say I've detected any differences in performance, good or bad. The UI seems about the same in terms of responsiveness, which has been pretty satisfactory for me. I've installed a few apps, to the point where I now have three screens of icons, though only two are on the last one.

Battery life is a non-issue for me. It's certainly no worse than my old Nokia 3660, and I hardly used that for anything other than making calls.

One interesting thing I've noticed myself doing is watching a lot more YouTube videos. Something to pass the time, while I'm waiting for my Win 2K machine to wake up in the morning.

My brother Mark is also a new iPhone 3G owner.

Things I've Learned: On Drinking With the Russians

Always fun. Seldom a good idea.

Competing Messages: This just in...

I got some feedback about uses of the term "digital sharecropping." ("The wisdom of the crowd!") I've read the relevant citations, and I'm inclined to discount them as both of them are unrelated to the concept as it is applied as a criticism to Web 2.0 efforts.

Anyway, with respect to uses of the pejorative term "digital sharecropping," we have earlier uses than Seth's, and one of them, albeit in a different construction, is by Nick Carr.

Specifically, the earliest use brought to my attention is from Robb Beal, by way of Tim Bray, who offered the term in the context of developing software for closed platforms. This is conceptually far removed from the commercialization of uncompensated users' social interactions and "cognitive surplus," so I'm strongly inclined to discount it, but there it is in 2003.

Nick Carr offered the concept of "Google sharecropping" in a piece from April '06 about the policies and procedures of Google's AdSense program. Again, a different construction, but perhaps conceptually a little closer to the notion of Web 2.0 firms exploiting uncompensated users' social interactions and "cognitive surplus." Though I think anyone hoping to make money from advertising on their site is just looking for easy money, rather than being exploited by a major corporation. The "float" Carr writes about is, though, exploitive in the Web 2.0 sense. But, you know what they say about sympathy. It can be found in the dictionary...

Finally, in an August '06 piece, Carr questioned the notion of "peer production" at Digg, reforming it as "peerage production." In a comment, Seth offered a different interpretation, "digital sharecropping." This is perhaps the earliest example of Seth's own construction, and probably, in my opinion, the one most closely related to the concept as a criticism of Web 2.0 efforts. Which, to my admittedly biased way of thinking, supports my contention that the term is most properly credited to Seth.

My sincere thanks to Jesse Vincent and Seth Finkelstein for the important clarifications. Always nice to hear somebody notices my rants. They may also be something of a refutation of the idea that Google may be making us stupid. As long as enough people have spare processor cycles between their ears to look this stuff up, maybe we will make it up in volume!

Or, not. Okay, nothing more to see here. Move along. Move along.

Competing Messages: Google and Stupidity (or carelessness)

I still kind of follow the commentary that occasionally issues from the high attention-earning minds of the anointed ones, the prophets of the blogosphere and the visionaries delivering the promise of digital liberation and salvation to us, the benighted masses. I don't know why. I guess I need a hobby or something.

Anyway, a while ago Nick Carr, who is not among the anointed, suggested that the way we go about learning and thinking about things, at the cognitive level, i.e. the neural mapping of our brains, is being changed by the technology of the internet. We're growing more shallow, less able to focus. We're all becoming, and raising future generations of, Robert Scobles. People with interests a kilometer wide and a nanometer deep, and insights that penetrate not quite that much. I guess the thinking is we'll make it up in volume.

So it was with some amusement that I read Tim O'Reilly's latest bit about Open Source and Cloud Computing. For what it's worth, I kind of like cloud computing as a technology. And I'm really looking forward to referring to Joni Mitchell in future posts! But, I digress.

In a post, the length of which is something of an indirect rebuttal to Carr, O'Reilly tries to perceive the future of the open source model in a cloud-computing, software-as-service world. I suppose it's worth a read if you're interested in such things, but there isn't a great deal of meat to it. But irony is the fifth fundamental force of the universe, so I had to check and then chuckle when I read these sentences: Jesse Vincent, the guy who's brought out some of the best hacker t-shirts ever (as well as RT) put it succinctly: "Web 2.0 is digital sharecropping." (Googling, I discover that Nick Carr seems to have coined this meme back in 2006!)

I associate the term "digital sharecropping" with Seth Finkelstein, so I wondered if Carr really was the first to introduce the idea? They write about similar things and link to each other from time to time, maybe Carr did use it first. So I did what O'Reilly did, I "Googled" it. (Google being one of those interesting new words that is both a proper noun and a proper verb! Living in the future is so exciting!) And lo, there in the results from Google's index is Seth's post from October 2006, higher in the index than Nick Carr's December 2006 post, and predating it by almost two months. Carr gets the attention and Seth gets ignored.

Of course, if you're familiar with Seth's writing, you know he often expresses his frustration and disappointment with being unable to receive the benefit of the attention-directing power of the anointed ones, the A-Listers (Which don't exist, according to them.). So I was kind of sad to see that replicated here. I don't wish to reignite that debate, I just had to point out that Google, if not making us actually "stupid," certainly hasn't made us any more diligent. I have no idea why O'Reilly linked to Carr as the "meme-coiner," except perhaps Carr's name is more familiar to him and it leapt out at him from the index.

I did some additional searching at Carr's blog and could find no earlier instance of the phrase "digital sharecropping," his earlier post related to the subject was in the context of Jaron Lanier's "digital maoism." So I'm pretty confident that there are no references to "digital sharecropping" earlier than October 2006, at least among those two webloggers. It's entirely possible someone out there in the "long tail" actually did use the term first, and we're just too lazy to go look.

Anyway, the point of this is to kind of poke O'Reilly and the anointed ones in the eye a bit; and to give a shout-out to Seth, who fights the good fight, and let him know some of us are listening. And Google, while not "making" us stupid, certainly isn't making us any more diligent, or careful.

It's clouds' illusions I recall

At all

Joni Mitchell, Both Sides Now