DISQUS

This I learned from my wife, who was for awhile among United's most frequent flyers, taking trips of up to sixteen hours from the U.S. to Hong Kong, sometimes every couple of weeks: sleep the whole way, or close enough. Sleep aggressively. You can't have too much of it. Gets the job done. She would always arrive rested and energized.

She can do that. I can't. The world outside -- even the open ocean -- is too interesting. Having a choice of 10 movies and watching all of them at once, jumping around, is too interesting. Work on a laptop is too interesting. So are music and podcasts I haven't heard yet.

Anyway, whatever gets you through the flight.

Good to have you back.

I agree, Dave, though I'm not sure about the timing. I thought we were turning the corner when the gas crisis hit in the 1970s. Remember that? Gas was rationed. There were long lines at the pumps. If your license plate ended in an odd number, you could only buy gas on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and alternate Saturdays. People stole gas from each other at night with siphons. Jimmy Carter sounded like the Al Gore of his time. But it ended, we elected Reagan and forgot about it.

But hey, maybe this is it. Not that it much matters. In the long run our shit will hit the big fan. Here's what I wrote about it a few months back:

"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."

Great essay, Phil.

It's sad and wrong that real conservatism has been marginalized by the Republican party. When I look at how many good solid conservatives favor Obama in this election -- simply because they don't know a better way to repudiate the wrongward drift of ther party -- I can't help but feel that conservatism has been cast out rather than corrupted. Yet I'm not sure. Christopher Buckley, George Will, David Brooks and many others on the right seem to comprise a faction in exile from a party that was taken over, as if by a junta. They await.

I am certain that we (the country) need to wrest the Republican party from Hannity, Limbaugh, Savage and other AM radio loudmouths who have conflated partisanship for its own sake and mockery of Democrats with conservatism. The former is not the latter. But I don't know if it will be easy, or even possible, to do that.

Meanwhile, as an Independent (and a former Republican *and* Democrat), I wish the best for a sane and strong GOP. Perhaps we'll see that emerge under the new administration. But I'm not making bets.

Great album. My fave was "Easy Money."

Lowell was *so* good. Yow.

Asses the masses may be, but not just because of idiocy. Incurious rectitude is far more common.

Also a quibble. You have readers and viewers. Not an "audience". If we were just that, all we could do is clap or boo.

I doubt Pelosi wanted this outcome. I don't think Bush, Obama or McCain wanted it, either. I think a lot of house members who thought they might not get re-elected caved in to local pressures -- more than any of the leaders expected. Hard to say exactly what happened when both Yay and Nay were bi-partisan.

As for getting Obama elected, I'd say the McCain folks are doing a great job of that lately.

But hey, what do I know? I'm the guy who thought this would be an election where both candidates would take the high road. Oh well. Truth isn't just the first casualty. It's a dead horse both sides have beaten to a pulp.

Good question, Robert. Thanks for asking it.

I second Ed Felten.

And, while I appreciate Phil Whitehouse's nomination of yours truly, I'm busy and far less qualified than Ed (and many others).

FWIW, the extant Office of Science and Technology Policy is here: http://www.ostp.gov. It's headed by John H. Marburger, III. Here's a quick look at its bureaucracy: http://www.ostp.gov/cs/about_ostp/leadership_staff.

I'll say more in Linux Journal this morning. Have a look over there if you're interested. http://linuxjournal.com.

All analogies are flawed. Same with all metaphors. That's how they work, actually.

The song I like to sing (as Dave puts it below) is that the software industry will become *like* (not the same as) the construction industry. I'm talking about the industry here -- a broad group of people, professionals and amateurs, working on stuff. Not just about what their tools and materials are made of, and what those do.

Maybe it's wishful thinking on my part to want to see religion go away fort what Dave calls the OS theorists. (And hell, maybe I have my own.. is my "song" a hymn?) In any case, Dave is right to flag religion as an issue. It gets in the way.

Good topic. My 2¢...

The practical values that matter are modularity and freedom for builders from lock-in. That's the way it works in the construction industry, and that's the way it's going to work in the software industry. But we aren't there yet.

The construction industry is basically open-source. Nobody owns or controls the code in the basic tools and building materials, all of which come from nature (starting with trees and rocks), and are built from the periodic table. And, if a crew figures a better way to hang a door or put up shingle, they don't keep it secret or patent it; they share it with others and the skilled practice spreads.

Construction involves lots of different tools and building materials. Some are proprietary and thick with patents, other are not. They all get along, however, because construction is modular. You can mix one kind of building material with another. For example, you can use a plain wood 2x10s for your floor joists, or you can use patented laminate beams. Either way, you're not building your house on the Weherhaeuser or the Georgia Pacific "platform". A company like Weherhaeuser can encourage the purchase of their products through something like iLevel ... http://www.ilevel.com/ ... but even there you're free to substitute building materials from any lumber yard.

What makes the GPL difficult for software builders is that is says something about the nature of software. It says this stuff is free -- but in specific ways that require explanation that goes far beyond "free as in freedom" vs. "free as in beer". And those explanations tend to be conditional, long-winded and hard to understand. Even the clearest explanations of the GPL, such as this one here ... http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200312... ... leave a lot of people, myself included (and I've been covering this stuff for many years), scratching their heads. "I can't do ... what?" they say. The result is dialogs like the one you point to on FriendFeed. Contrast the head-scratching in that thread with the kind of plain-talk dialog you'll hear among builders at a construction site, debating which materials to use and how they might work together.

The latter is where we're headed. Talking respectfully among ourselves will help shorten that distance.

In my experience, you need to do three things: 1) Write quotable posts; 2) Link a lot; and 3) do both over a long time.

Cheers,

Doc

Dave, have you noticed a difference in the HD video quality? Comcast (like all cable systems) has to compress video much more than required by satellite. Results: lots of compression artifacts. That big screen of yours is probably looking a lot better on the HD stuff now.

And have you tried adding local channels? That's where your best picture will come from, because local stations don't have to share bandwidth with other data streams over coax or satellite wireless. Your DirecTV receiver has a local channel receiver built in. Required by law, I believe.

Since your house has line-of-sight to Mt. Sutro and Mt. San Bruno (meaning there are no landforms in the way), you should get all the over-the-air HD signals from your local channels. There should be a choice in your setup or installation menu for it. Hitting "scan local channels" to "add" them will usually do the trick. But bear in mind that none of the stations are on their "branded" channels. Here's your line-up:

KTVU/2 (Fox) is on 56
KRON/4 is on 57
KPIX/5 (CBS) is on 29
KGO/7 (ABC) is on 24
KQED/9 is on 30
KNTV/11 (NBC) is on 12
KBWB/20 is on 19
KCSM/60 is on 43
KBCW/44 (CW) is on 45

Some (most?) of these are not carried on DirecTV by satellite. And most have two or more "stations", since they are digital and can do that. DirecTV probably doesn't include those, either.

For an antenna, all you need is a 5" length of stiff wire to stick out the center of your coax antenna connector. A twist-tie, stripped at one end (to shove in the hole), will do in a pinch. Start with that, and if it doesn't work, get an indoor "HD" antenna from Radio Shack. "HD", by the way, just means UHF, because that's the band used for digital transmission. The right length of antenna for receiving UHF is about 5", give or take.

And if you need any help, gimme a call. :-) I'm your friendly (not-very-local) over-the-air tech support guy.

Oh, and your Sony screen also has an HD tuner. You can practice on that one, using the same little wire as an antenna. My Sony screen is pretty similar to yours, as I recall, and the Sony UI is horrible; but it does work if you can figure it out.

Just to clarify, VRM is user-driven rather than user-centric. This may seem a fine distinction, but it's an important one. "User-driven" comes from the user. "User-centric" is centered on the user, but implies an outside perspective.

We need to grow markets by equipping the demand side, and not just the supply side. We need to make customers more capable of engaging with and relating to sellers -- and not just in ways that the sellers alone provide.

At ProjectVRM we're not trying to do everything. We're one ingredient in a new recipe for relationship. An essential one, I believe; but just one.

Hmm... You want the guy who said Web 2.0 is "what we’ll name the next crash" on the list? :-)

Great find, Dave! Thanks!

I'm there: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2008/07/02/fre...

Specifically, http://identi.ca/dsearls

For what it's worth, I've been ignored plenty.

I'm also not sure what the "Top 1%" is.

FWIW, my readership has been running from a few hundred to a (very) few thousand a day since 2000. There were that many when I was #16 at Technorati, and again when I dropped to #600, and then when my URL changed and I had no "authority" at all and had to start all over again.

I just checked my stats, and the blog had about 3700 visits today (a lot for me), and just under 37000 for the whole month. I believe Scoble gets as many in a few hours.

But I don't care and I never did. I blog mostly to share ideas that might or might not catch, and to lend some original thought to ideas others bring up. I don't do it for the money, or the strokes, or for the highly conditional and narrow recognition it brings.

Even the writing I do at Linux Journal, which is for money, is done without *any* mindfulness about whether or not it's commercial. In fact I think most of my writing there is about the least commercial stuff we run.

As for what's on my radar, it's mostly topics. The feeds that matter to me are topical ones. And they change all the time.

Not sure where I'm going with this, except to say that the "%" caste system, at least in blogging, is silly and wrong and more a matter of perception than reality.

It's also still early. We're about 5 nanoseconds into the Net's Big Bang and mostly have hot gas and light elements. No galaxies yet. Long way to go.

Cheers,

Doc

Wish I could be there, and sorry I missed your hospitality last week. Let's talk today or tomorrow and catch up.

I was there. It was original and very effective. So I'm surprised it hasn't become more the norm. Or at least a major brach of conference types.

Actually, I think it will. We just need more of them. And maybe a new name for them, perhaps. Maybe something based on "discuss" or "discussion".

Thanks, Dave.

I'm not sure how courageous I'm being. I mean, it doesn't *feel* courageous. Just determined to get through an ordeal which -- for the first few days -- had no apparent end. Getting through required documenting it, seemed to me. I was doing something beyond keeping readers (especially friends and relatives) up to date. I was shaking the long tail. It worked. As a result of many comments and emails I am learning much more about pancreatitis and related matters. Some of those learnings may save my life. For awhile, anyway.

Medicine is a collection of silo'd specialties and feifdoms that often don't communicate well, even when they're on a "team" or part of a single system (such as the one here at this hospital). Much of what they do is pro forma, routinized, and for good reasons. But remarkably little of it takes into account the individual characteristics of the patient, especially if those are highly idiosyncratic. As it turned out, my chance of getting pancreatitis was not the 1-in-20 that the doctor said, but 1-in-1. Why? Could we have known that in advance? Maybe not, but I think so. I first faced the possibility of pancreatitis when a consent form on a clipboard was pushed under my face as I lay on the table about to undergo the procedure. In fact, it was just while writing this paragraph, a few minutes ago, that I finally had the conversation I wanted with my gastrointerologist (the one who did the procedure): convincing her that perhaps my blood disorder, and the iron accumulation it tends to cause, might be involved. She'll meet later with my hematologist. That's a good thing, but it's also late for this game. (Though perhaps not for the next.)

You're right about eventually losing the battle. Life is a journey that has an end. The path is uphill, and it only gets steeper. The older you get, the more hazards appear, as the body wears out.

But I'm getting past this one. The pain is gone today. I'm able to chew ice chips now, even as I dream of pizza and Mexican food. I can sleep without drugs. But my energy is very low. My blood count is at the severe anemIa level, and I'm woozy much of the time. I have had no food in more than a week, living on a diet of IV drips from bags on a rolling pole.

But tonight the GI doctor said I should be out on Sunday, and moving to a low-fat diet and a somewhat normal life again. Can't wait.

So thanks again for the good wishes and healing vibes. I feel them, and they help a lot.

Cliff,

Thanks for understanding VRM so well — and for adding to that understanding.

A couple thoughts.

First, you are right that VRM is an Archimedean challenge. I prefer that metaphor to ocean-boiling. If we borrow the ocean metaphor, it's to look at the sea (half million and counting) of open source code bases out there for the right combination of small wheels we don't need to re-invent. I believe this is exactly what Adriana, Alec and friends are doing with the work she points to in her comments. It's also what we're doing with the relbutton. The nice thing there is that we have a handy symbol behind which all kinds of code can be placed.

Second, the "Searlsian" adjective makes me cringe. I'd prefer something descriptive. "The relationship decade" or "The live Web decade" perhaps? I like 'live" because I think the most important and meaningful interactions will happen in close to real time. Too much of demand works that way already in any case, and the site-based static web can't cut it. Not alone, anyway.

I also think it needs to be mobile. A whole 'nuther topic I don't have time to go into, but let's stick a reminder there.

And thanks again.

I did not "announce" anywhere that I was "leaving the blogosphere." I did complain here...

http://www.gillmorgroup.com/2008/04/10/the-last...

... about what you call "crash commercialism". And I am looking for online journalism to evolve past the blog stage. That's what I was writing about here...

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2008/04/06/wha...

But meanwhile, I'll keep blogging, even if there's more crap than ever to complain about. (And hell, maybe that's a good sign.)

Thanks for your kind and thoughtful words.

To clarify things a bit, I'm not thinking of stepping away from the blogosphere, even as I look forward to progress along technological paths toward better tools for writing and sharing than blogging tools currently provide.

We can do better than Moveable Type and Wordpress. In fact, we *did* do better, in some important and overlooked ways, with Dave Winer's Manila and Radio Userland. It's going on two decades since MORE came along, and there has never been a better writing tool since. I still miss it every day.

If those tools are as radically different as blogging tools were, we'll have something new. Otherwise, we'll still have blogging, which will still have plenty of good stuff, even if it's a shrinking percentage of the whole.

To Carleton Benjamin: "The blogosphere" is not one thing, nor did more than a small part of it react with "sore and raging petulance". Also, the Times piece was not an "examination" except by a large stretch. It also mistook the few for the whole, and damned the whole by association. As Dave Winer said somewhere else, the Times was talking to itself on that one. Or worse, trolling.

Deaths and heart attacks happen to people of all ages, bloggers included.

For what it's worth, I'm 60, and I would say that blogging on the whole is a positive part of my lifestyle. (And a negative one, to the extent it increases my tendency to be a desk potato.) If I croak next week, though, please don't blame it on blogging. I have more than enough true vices to blame.

I'm old enough to remember how JFK's religion -- Roman Catholic -- was a Big Issue. Not as big an issue as race still is today, but still: an issue. Would his policies be independent of The Vatican? Would he answer to the Pope? Much ink was spilled on these questions.

What mattered in the long run was not that JFK was elected "in spite" of his religion, but that his election put to rest the whole issue. His religion, it turned out, didn't matter.

Barack Obama is plenty qualified for the presidency -- neither despite nor because of his race. If he is elected, I look forward to race being as much a non-factor is his presidency as religion was in Kennedy's.

For race to not matter, at all, does not need to be a cause. But it is an effect that is long overdue.

Flash is closed. Silverlight too, though perhaps more friendly to Apple's purposes.

Yeah, I know all kinds of stuff is available only on the Flash (and soon, Silverlight) closed "platforms" (or whatever you'd call those), but the winds in the long term blow in the open direction. Apple should adopt and support as much open stuff as they can. So should everybody. Even if they hedge their bets with the closed crap in the meantime.

I am feeling remarkably sanguine about the economy, even though I know we're in an economic downturn. Perhaps that's because I have almost nothing invested in the stock market. Perhaps that's also because i know, as you said, this is cyclical.

But I think there is something different this time around. The American Empire, the worldwide Pax Americana that defined the First World following WWII, is ending. We are as far in denial of this as Wiley Coyote is of gravity after he's run off the edge of a cliff, but has yet to fall.

Yet all the great colonial powers, including our own Mother Country of England, came out of their Ages of Empire to enjoy prosperous times. Eventually.

My main long-term concern is with The Environment. But not in the usual way. i see the human species as inherently pestilential. We not only have explosive population growth, but a parasitic attitude toward every non-replaceable resource we can use.

The time scale I see is geological. And in the geological context, what humans are doing to both the earth and its plant and animal life is destructive and in the long term catastrophic. The Earth right now is being attacked by humans on a grand scale, and is being changed by it.

At the same time the Earth is going through natural cycles that will raise the seas and shrink the footprint of land on which humans and other land-based species live. Global Warming has been a fact since the last Ice Age began to end twenty thousand years ago. See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Atmospheric_...

The ice cap that dumped Long Island and Cape Cod where they are only began to retreat in what is nearly the geologic present. The Great Lakes as we know them are puddles left by a glacier that still covered Canada only a few thousand years ago. Lake Superior is barely older than the pyramids. More northerly lakes are younger. Canada is still thawing out, and if you fly over its northern regions you can see fresh roads and pipes leading out to land made exploitable by the retreat of permafrost. Another illustration: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:GreatLakeFor...

As the ice caps finish melting back, perhaps including Greenland and Antarctica, the seas will rise. Coastlines will move inland, as they've been doing since, only several thousand years ago, you could walk from San Francisco to what's now the Farallon Islands. Much of Florida, Louisiana, Texas, Finland, Bangladesh, Brooklyn and other lowlands will be under water. If we're lucky they'll be tidelands capable of sustaining life. if we're not, well...

I don't think there's much we can do to prevent it, or even slow it down. I am sure it will happen, however.

It isn't about Robert vs. Facebook. It's about Independence vs. Dependence:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1006009