Walking down the hall at work, I hear an engineer lament.
“Click to focus? Arr!!”
And of course, I shout:
“Focus follows mouse!!”
I hear, beyond cubicle walls, a chorus of agreement.
Back at my desk, which I have recently switched from XP to Ubuntu, I note that I’m clicking to focus. Fortunately, I spent the morning tweaking mutt, which I started using again, after many years, because it deletes e-mail faster than Thunderbird does.
I like this place.
I hear muffled discussions of multiple desktops. I think I’ll figure out how to FocusFollowsMouse in this Gnome stuff real quick before I return my attention to work-work.
ObSolution: In Ubuntu / Gnome, go to System > Preferences > Windows and enable “Select windows when the mouse moves over them”
I am a big fan of Google and their myriad products, but sometimes they get on my nerves. I like having Yahoo! as an alternative. I love Flickr. I would hate to see Yahoo! swallowed up my Microsoft, leaving the biggest players on the Internet being a choice between the Google and the Microsoft.
I prefer an online world that isn’t simply black and white, but which also has a weird shade of purple to it.
I have been less the NPR / Politics junkie than I have in the past. And in the February 5 primary, it doesn’t take much thought for a Democrat from Chicago to prefer Barack Obama. I have already had the privilege of voting for him twice to get him in to the Senate. I just really like the guy: he is eloquent and he seems like and honest, good-hearted, hard-working guy who can pull things off.
But I don’t know much for him on the substance, so I have kept kind of quiet on the matter.
I want, for once, someone I can vote for not because I dislike the other candidate, but because I’m proud of mine. Obama is the real thing.
Obama has shown a real commitment to open government. When putting together tech policy (to take an example close to home for xkcd) others might have gone to industry lobbyists. Obama went to Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons (under which xkcd is published) and longtime white knight in the struggle with a broken system over internet and copyright policy. Lessig was impressed by Obama’s commitment to open systems — for example, his support of machine-readable government information standards that allow citizens’ groups to monitor what our government is up to. Right now, the only group that can effectively police the government is the government itself, and as a result, it’s corrupt to the core. Through these excellent and long-overdue measures, Obama is working to fight this corruption.
Obama stands against bad governing not only in his support of specific practices like open data standards and basic network neutrality, but in his work against corruption from day one. He’s sponsored legislation to restrict gifts to Congress by industry representatives (which also carried a whole slew of anti-corruption measures that were a breath of fresh air). He’s fought against vote fraud. He’s been pushing for election and lobbying reform from the start, and in his campaign he’s refused to take lobbyist money.
[…]
The Democratic party has a long, painful history of nominating unlikable, uncharismatic ‘default’ establishment candidates who are eventually swatted aside by the voters. Nominating Clinton would be continuing that tradition at the very time when we have a chance to do so much better. Let’s not let that chance slip by.
I like Hillary Clinton, as well. Don’t know much about her, but the thing is we have had “Clinton” or “Bush” in the White House for two decades now, and it is time to do something different. I liked the Clinton years, but they could have been . . . more inspired.
I can’t say that the system won’t grind Barack down in his first year in office, but you gotta dream, right? And Barack Obama is the candidate who inspires me most.
We’re basically looking at LinkedIn (they even import your LinkedIn profile) except that you can set a price at which you would be willing to interview with a prospective employer. The idea being, maybe you are happy where you are but you’d be happy to talk about being somewhere else, though your time is valuable. (Employers, of course, already know that recruiting is an expensive undertaking . . . it is not hard to see them pony up . . .)
Apparently this is from “Peerflix refugees” so I’d peg it as “an interesting innovation that rips off an existing proven idea that is probably ahead of their ability to execute.”
I accepted the invite, to check it out but mainly so I could invite a friend who is job hunting. I figured if Powerset and Yahoo giving it a go . . .
First Impressions:
Very rough: when I declined to invite everyone I know on LinkedIn the site closed its own window.
Lame: the “invite-only preview” site is protected by a shared HTTP authentication username and password . . . then you log in.
Also Lame: you can’t view any of their web site (like “About Us”) without the HTTP authentication credentials. Amateurs!
Steals your LinkedIn profile very nicely, but requires your password. Wonder how soon LinkedIn will block them.
I don’t see why LinkedIn couldn’t just add the “set price to interview” as a feature within about two months.
Feels very much like a LinkedIn rip-off.
Snickering towards Doom: Their own “Jobs” page reads, in total: “VP of Business Development”
Doomed: The site is very slow, even as a limited preview. Methinks their engineers aren’t so great.
Actually, now I feel dirty. I’m changing my LinkedIn password . . .
If you have a couple of hours free, I recommend sitting back and watching this video of Randy Pausch’s “final” lecture at CMU. He is a smart, talented, ambitious, and accomplished professor who seems to know how to give a lecture, and on this occasion he delivers a lecture some months before he is expected to die of cancer.
He isn’t talking about cancer or dying. He is talking about his life and his advice on how to live life well. I have no commentary; I enjoyed this special moment a great deal and I believe that it is worth sharing.
Cool things I have come into as a consequence of volunteering with One Brick these past few months:
$50 gift card for Williams-Sonoma at the Elks Lodge Blood Drive
My new job, after a tip from a One Brick volunteer coordinator
This past weekend, a hand-me-down laptop that I can soon re-gift
Or, as Saint Francis put it: “it is in giving that we receive.”
If you are looking for fulfilling ways to spend your free time, I heartily recommend One Brick, which is very simply an organization that organizes volunteer opportunities: just sign up for their e-mail list and every week you’ll be informed of cool opportunities to get out, do some good, and make friends.
On June 28, 2007 I somehow found myself on a guest list of 35 people, “including top bloggers, top Web 2.0 companies, and members of the press.” We were guests of Powerset, to attend their premier public demonstration of their new natural-language search engine. Being as I must be, a top blogger I took notes on my Web 1.95 T-Mobile Sidekick.
I had previously applied to work at Powerset: where everybody gets a Mac. The offices are located near the Caltrain station, making them a reasonable commute for the Peninsula crowd as well as for those of us accustomed to public transportation. I had interviewed informally with a former colleague, who in sizing me up as a Systems Toolsmith, looked at me with pity when I confessed that my sole capacity for analyzing and expressing complexity is English, and not the formal notation Computer Scientists call “Big O.” (Why must they only hire smart people?)
He did, however, pique my curiosity. “The easy part” of building a new search engine, he had explained, was crawling the entire web. “The hard part,” he went on, was to bring in enough computing capacity to build natural-language indexes. To my ears, Powerset is pushing the envelope of what is feasible, which is cool. And as Google hath shewn, if you can build a better search engine, the world might beat a path to your URL.
Infiltration: Perimeter Security
Manipulate the Press with Special Kool-Aid
I found the corporate headquarters on-the-corner-of-Brannan-and-Fourth with only modest difficulty. Powerset had a guest list to get upstairs, but the building security guard informed me that if I was here for the Steelcase party on the ground floor, I should just go right in. Given my duties to the blogosphere, I indulged in a bit of Gonzo Blogulationalism, and crashed the Steelcase party for 25 minutes. Steelcase apparently designs really innovative office furniture that would look right at home in The Container Store. They also had a great spread of tasty Asian dishes, origami kits, and booze. I made sure to tip the bartenders for my Sapporo, and for the Anchor Steam that I pocketed for the journey upstairs to Powerset, where they had not only booze, but special Kool-Aid, and blue pills.
I was among the first to arrive at Powerset. I swiped a handful of Red Pills, and then a handful of Blue Pills, washing them down like candy with my illicit beer. As I waited for the jelly beans to kick in, I found myself chatting with a voluptuous and extremely blond computational linguist with a cool Nordic surname. She was afraid of being misquoted by would-be top bloggers, but I assured her that I am terrible at remembering names, and besides I had been ingesting dubious substances. I got her to admit that she had always approached her work with enthusiasm, but now she felt as if she was working in a company where every last person had great talent and intensity, on a project that she felt could improve the ability of people to search the Internet, and thereby change the world. To a person, the Powerset staff came off as sharp and enthusiastic. It seems that they do drink their own Kool-Aid.
The Powerset lobby quickly became choked with geeks–standards nerds–top bloggers, members of the press–and someone (Powerset) was giving booze to these god-damn animals–and hors d’œuvre! The mushrooms were seriously tasty. Before long, the Beautiful Norse Computational Linguist surprised the milling herd of geeks with a stream of self-confident ejective syllables, and we were ushered into the Powerlabs meeting room, where we took seats, kibitzed, and prepared to be dazzled.
Steve Newcomb, (pronounced “Nuke’m”) the COO, and other Powerset staff introduced themselves. Steve explained the Powerset tradition that every Thursday, at 4:20, all Powerset staff gather in the room where we were now assembled, and are invited to ask questions. The only rule on these occasions is that Steve has to give some sort of answer. It is in this spirit of openness that Powerset sought to present their technology to us. (more…)
If you enjoy listening to Internet-based radio stations like SOMA FM, please take a brief moment to lobby your legislators. The Internet Radio Equality Act needs co-sponsors in the Senate. The aim of the bill is to override a March decision by the Copyright Royalty Board, at the behest of the RIAA, to drastically increase the royalty fees for music streamed through the Internet.
What is really upsetting is that the $20 billion commercial radio industry is exempt from royalties!Meanwhile, over on the Internet:
The six largest Internet-only radio services anticipate combined revenue of only $37.5 million in 2006, but will pay a whopping 47% (or $17.6 million) in sound recording performance royalties under the new CRB ruling.
Since a lot of Internet broadcasters are small, independent operations with shallow pockets, it is feared that many will be forced to cease operations. There is substantial fear that this will bring the funky weird planet known as Internet Radio more towards the monotonous monopolistic drone usually heard on traditional commercial radio. I would rather that not happen, so I dropped the following missives on my Senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, and I’ll share it here with you, too, in case you’d like to spend a few minutes to make the Internet a better place:(more…)
“It isn’t professionalism really, as much as it is your own integrity.”
Perhaps we might say that professionalism is applied integrity.
Different industries, companies, and people have their own standards of professionalism, and the surface details will vary. But I don’t think that I could ever accept an environment where professionalism is not built upon integrity.
But even more important is that I should regularly review my professional conduct and ensure that it squares with personal integrity. People get carried away with all that they must juggle day-to-day that they can sometimes stray from their ideals for the sake of short-term efficacy. (Or even short-term gratification.)
I think it was last week that I attended a presentation at Adaptive Path, where Scott Berkun gave an engaging presentation based on the material he presents in his new book: The Myths of Innovation. He is a very engaging speaker and the presentation was a treat. He got me thinking about innovation, what it means to be innovative, and what to expect along the way.
Some ideas include:
Innovation doesn’t just happen: apparently, Newton may never have been struck by an apple, but even if it did, it was just one of many inspirations along with a subsequent twenty years of work to describe the mathematical idea of gravity.
History picks winners and heroes to remember, but the truth is that innovation is the product of taking many many new ideas and putting together something new. Standing on the backs of giants . . .
. . . it takes more than just a great idea to produce the next innovation: without the resources to implement, promote, et cetera, and even more important: if the culture is not yet ready for a great idea, it will be remembered, if at all, as “ahead of its time.”
What I found more interesting is when he talked about what people have done with this improved understanding of how innovation really works. He spoke about the 3M corporation: Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing. After some false starts with mining they ended up making good money selling sandpaper. Then an engineer, noticing the difficulty a customer was having at trying to paint cars two different colors, asked his boss if he could work on an idea to solve that problem. The boss resisted, but the engineer couldn’t let the idea go, and he eventually figured out masking tape, which was an even better product than sand paper. Management realized that allowing for some creative exploration was within the company’s best long-term interests, and worked to develop a culture friendly to creative endeavor. Post-it notes are another famous example from 3M: they had developed an adhesive that was too weak, but after some time this led to a creative solution to the question of “I would really like to make notes in my research without marking up these books.” (Actually, I think Google was what happened when Larry and Sergei wanted to create an annotation tool for the web . . . and now they are famous for their “20% time”.)
I bought the hardcover for nearly $30, and Scott was good enough to sign it for me. I am nearly finished reading, and since Scott is not only very engaging, but he also left work some years back to devote his entire energy to writing, I thought it good to plug his work. It is not some weighty, serious tome: he has fun along the way, gets you thinking, and then lets you off where you were with perhaps a bit better insight. I will share the very first paragraph from the preface, which made me smile, and if you choose to read further, it is all on you:
“Prefaces are often like bad first dates: too much talk, too soon. Books, like future significant others, should know how much to say and when. Chapter 1 gets the first slot for a reason: if I’ve done my job, you can start with the first sentence and continue until you hit the back cover. That said, I offer you the choice of skipping the rest of the preface and digging in, or skimming around. It’s the only way to know if we’re right for each other. I hope we are, but if you don’t like what you find, it’s me, not you.”
Ok, let’s have some fun. Let’s talk about women. Freud said he didn’t know what women wanted. I know what women want: a whole lot of people to talk to. What do they want to talk about? They want to talk about everything.
What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish people wouldn’t get so mad at them.
Why are so many people getting divorced today? It’s because most of us don’t have extended families anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to about everything. The groom got a lot more pals to tell dumb jokes to.
Most of us, if we get married nowadays, are just one more person for the other person. The groom gets one more pal, but it’s a woman. The woman gets one more person to talk to about everything, but it’s a man.
When a couple has an argument nowadays, they may think it’s about money or power or sex or how to raise the kids or whatever. What they’re really saying to each other, though without realizing it, is this: “You are not enough people!â€
A husband, a wife and some kids is not a family. It’s a terribly vulnerable survival unit.
I met a man in Nigeria one time, an Ibo who had six hundred relatives he knew quite well. His wife had just had a baby, and they were taking it to meet all its relatives. Everybody was going to hold it, cuddle it, say how pretty or how handsome it was. Wouldn’t you have loved to be that baby?
I sure wish I could wave a wand, and give every one of you an extended family, make you an Ibo or a Navaho or a Kennedy.
I hope America, over the long run, finds some way to provide all of our citizens with extended families – a large group of people they could call on for help.
Living in California has caused me to worry, in varying degrees, about the need for family connection. Although the pay wasn’t great, I really enjoyed living in Chicago the last time around, in part because I was near family and because the Office was a close-knit bunch. Two tribes! Right after the marriage I accepted the raise to move to Walnut Creek, and I did worry somewhat that leaving family and friends behind could make the marriage more difficult . . . but that we’d do alright.
Living in San Francisco, though, is much better. Plenty of social activities even for those of us between families, between jobs . . . and you don’t even have to drive to get there! (Parking is horrible, anyway.) But, yeah, next marriage, especially when we get to child-rearing time, we want to be a little more vigilant that we have got some manners of family to back us up!
Regarding Mountain View burrito restaurants, if I recall correctly, La Costena annoyed me because it involved driving and too many choices, so I’ve always been a Los Charros guy. I think we had La Costena the day Tellme had its first round of layoffs. We were in mourning for a fallen comrade and we needed to get AWAY so we got burritos and ate them in the park. Since it was on the company tab, Joe ordered their very largest burrito, which was, as he described it “about the size of a baby.” It took him two days, but as I recall he says he ate every bite.
Citing the ever-awesome Maciej Ceglowski, I then offered a link to his recent write-up of the most impressive burrito-related public works project our nation has ever undertaken:
So, I enjoy travel. Trains are, of course, the very best form of transportation ever, but on a good day you can see some really really beautiful stuff out the window of an airplane. Sometimes, I will even try to snap some pictures, and sometimes, they even come out pretty well.
Cathy Davies, an artist based in Los Angeles, has similar feelings about the relaxing joy of looking out of an airplane window. So much so that she has built a screen saver to simulate the experience. Neater still, last April (when I was really down in the dumps) she contacted me for permission to use one of the pictures I had taken out of the airplane window, and posted to Flickr under a CC license.
Well, last month she wrote to announce that despite some delays induced by carpal tunnels, she was at last shipping her newest creation: Holding Pattern 2.0 . . . I have been behind on e-mail but I should get a chance to try it out myself really soon, as she offered me a complimentary copy in exchange for my picture.
If you visit her download page, you’ll see this photo I took of Mount Diablo in May, 2005. At least, I’m pretty sure that’s Mount Diablo, as seen from about Hayward . . .
. . . Cathy told me she selected that photo because it was “one of the lushest, greenest landscapes I saw” . . . even so, it looks like she had to tweak my saturated image so users will get a better sense of the very green green that one sees in the spring-time hills of Contra Costa county. (They are yellow the rest of the year.)
It is gratifying for me and very neat to see that something pretty I caught with a camera one day be put to further creative use. There may even be a few people out there getting a bit of calm from the relaxing illusion of flight, and I like the thought of having contributed to that.
