For the Easter holiday, I wrote the song blogged earlier. I made the video over the weekend. You can download it here: (approx 6mb).
http://home.hiwaay.net/~cbullard/video/Gesthemane.wmv
Windows Movie Maker proves to be a good utility for this kind of work. Now that many churches have big audio-visual systems, there is a ready venue for it, so between the video-enabled iPods, the web in general, and the big systems, this is fun stuff to do.
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
Messages of Mutual Exclusion
For Staff:
Everyone is counting on you.
Good attitudes make good teams.
Teams make sacrifices.
When the team wins, we all win.
Keep up the good work.
For Executives:
Hire proven performers.
Eliminate doubt.
Fresh blood makes fresh ideas.
When stockholders win, options vest.
Keep up the good work.
I'm not disgruntled. I like to think of myself as the last of the original class of "nattering nabobs of negativism".
Everyone is counting on you.
Good attitudes make good teams.
Teams make sacrifices.
When the team wins, we all win.
Keep up the good work.
For Executives:
Hire proven performers.
Eliminate doubt.
Fresh blood makes fresh ideas.
When stockholders win, options vest.
Keep up the good work.
I'm not disgruntled. I like to think of myself as the last of the original class of "nattering nabobs of negativism".
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Gethesemane: A Song
Anyone who knows me or downloads my songs knows I write pop and not for the sanctuary. I was asked to do a solo for Good Friday by our choir mistress. This is the piece.
Gethesemane
The image of Christ praying in the garden is compelling to me because I believe this is when He is the most human. Confronting the hours of betrayal, humiliation, torture and execution, Jesus knows the real nature of original sin: to love life more than Heaven. So he prays to be released, and in this, he understands why He came: to pray for forgiveness for all humanity, Himself included.
Some songs come so easily, it feels as it they are breathed into me and all I did was write them down. This is one of those. If you enjoy it, credit the source and not the emanuensis.
Gethesemane
The image of Christ praying in the garden is compelling to me because I believe this is when He is the most human. Confronting the hours of betrayal, humiliation, torture and execution, Jesus knows the real nature of original sin: to love life more than Heaven. So he prays to be released, and in this, he understands why He came: to pray for forgiveness for all humanity, Himself included.
Some songs come so easily, it feels as it they are breathed into me and all I did was write them down. This is one of those. If you enjoy it, credit the source and not the emanuensis.
Thursday, March 16, 2006
Office Affairs
Office affairs are always among parties where at least one is married and not to another party to the affair. Otherwise, they would be office romances and while those can lead to problems or a better life, they don't break covenants so don't fall into all of the problems of the office affair.
The dynamics of office romances or affairs are such that in the beginning, the male is at the greatest risk because he typically initiates and until the female says yes, the male can always be gotten rid of with harassment charges. At the point at which the female says yes and the affair is consummated, the female assumes almost all of the risks. While both may have risks associated with their spouses, those are outcomes outside the office.
The unfair part of the office affair is that when concluded by consent or command, the most severe consequences usually are to the female. The worst that happens to males in the majority of cases is they are reassigned, warned, or can lose a security clearance, but little else economically or socially within the workplace unless the female is pregnant, and then the pregnancy is politely ascribed to the marriage. If all parties remain polite, life goes on.
When exposed, and the majority of office affairs are because these are transparent to colleagues, the female can lose her career and possibly her marriage. The male may lose the marriage but seldom if ever the career. There is something Western here, but it seems the modern opinion is that it is the female who is most at fault for accepting and loses the most trust among her colleagues and that is what devastates the career.
Men who are politically compromised may suffer a setback in upward career momentum, but it is typically short-lived if other skills are valued.
For a female to recover, she typically moves to another company and away from any social connections to the former company, often to a new town to ensure this. If there are spousal objections, the problem becomes much more complicated and often, the deceit, much deeper and difficult to manage. So the risks grow exponentially unless she and her spouse can cope with the infidelity openly or at least in private.
The male may have similar issues but they aren't as severe.
It is not uncommon for the male, having seen that the consequences are few, to engage in multiple office affairs serially or even in parallel. While the risks of parallel affairs are great, the risks for serial affairs are little as long as he can maintain the social arrangements of the marriage. In some networks and cultures, affairs by men are tolerated without approval, with little consequence to the marriage which is viewed socially as an economic and parenting arrangement. The primary mistake the male can make is to subject the spouse to social humiliation by publicly flaunting his other liaisons; so in these cultures, keeping the mistress or office girl at a distance from his social world is considered polite even if having her close at the office is not considered impolite but risky. Because a male gains status from risk taking and managing risk, the office affair can be a plus to his advancement.
This is never true for females.
None of this is fair. Fairness and justice are concepts of legitimacy and there is no framework in which the office affair is considered legitimate. They are part of the fabric of desire that drives the humans at the emotional and sometimes economic levels. That they are unbalanced as to consequences appears to be a cultural problem of perceptions, not a problem of right or morality. If they were right or moral, people wouldn't hide them, make up stories when confronted, or otherwise be 'keeping it on the side'. It is what it is: risky behavior.
How risk is managed and rewarded is the crux. Caveat emptor.
The dynamics of office romances or affairs are such that in the beginning, the male is at the greatest risk because he typically initiates and until the female says yes, the male can always be gotten rid of with harassment charges. At the point at which the female says yes and the affair is consummated, the female assumes almost all of the risks. While both may have risks associated with their spouses, those are outcomes outside the office.
The unfair part of the office affair is that when concluded by consent or command, the most severe consequences usually are to the female. The worst that happens to males in the majority of cases is they are reassigned, warned, or can lose a security clearance, but little else economically or socially within the workplace unless the female is pregnant, and then the pregnancy is politely ascribed to the marriage. If all parties remain polite, life goes on.
When exposed, and the majority of office affairs are because these are transparent to colleagues, the female can lose her career and possibly her marriage. The male may lose the marriage but seldom if ever the career. There is something Western here, but it seems the modern opinion is that it is the female who is most at fault for accepting and loses the most trust among her colleagues and that is what devastates the career.
Men who are politically compromised may suffer a setback in upward career momentum, but it is typically short-lived if other skills are valued.
For a female to recover, she typically moves to another company and away from any social connections to the former company, often to a new town to ensure this. If there are spousal objections, the problem becomes much more complicated and often, the deceit, much deeper and difficult to manage. So the risks grow exponentially unless she and her spouse can cope with the infidelity openly or at least in private.
The male may have similar issues but they aren't as severe.
It is not uncommon for the male, having seen that the consequences are few, to engage in multiple office affairs serially or even in parallel. While the risks of parallel affairs are great, the risks for serial affairs are little as long as he can maintain the social arrangements of the marriage. In some networks and cultures, affairs by men are tolerated without approval, with little consequence to the marriage which is viewed socially as an economic and parenting arrangement. The primary mistake the male can make is to subject the spouse to social humiliation by publicly flaunting his other liaisons; so in these cultures, keeping the mistress or office girl at a distance from his social world is considered polite even if having her close at the office is not considered impolite but risky. Because a male gains status from risk taking and managing risk, the office affair can be a plus to his advancement.
This is never true for females.
None of this is fair. Fairness and justice are concepts of legitimacy and there is no framework in which the office affair is considered legitimate. They are part of the fabric of desire that drives the humans at the emotional and sometimes economic levels. That they are unbalanced as to consequences appears to be a cultural problem of perceptions, not a problem of right or morality. If they were right or moral, people wouldn't hide them, make up stories when confronted, or otherwise be 'keeping it on the side'. It is what it is: risky behavior.
How risk is managed and rewarded is the crux. Caveat emptor.
Monday, March 13, 2006
Gethesemane
Father, take this cup from me
Swap it for a cooling rain
For a dream we share
By the river there
Cover your face from my shame.
Oh Father, take this cup from me
Take back this drink of despair
For the feelings that harden
So far from the garden
Gethesemane here ensnared.
I came to love them, Father
Share their joyfulness and pain
When our deaths were so far away
But now I share their hunger
For the breath of inspiration
Breathed into me, Father, Life!
It ends today.
Father take this cup from me.
Human, have you made me and frail.
Though your face I see,
Will I still be me
Remembering all beyond the pale?
Oh Father, forgive me, this sin I bare
For the love that you have for your child
From the garden of Eden
To the ending of the world
For forgiveness, merciful mild.
Oh Father, forgive.
len bullard 03/13/06
Swap it for a cooling rain
For a dream we share
By the river there
Cover your face from my shame.
Oh Father, take this cup from me
Take back this drink of despair
For the feelings that harden
So far from the garden
Gethesemane here ensnared.
I came to love them, Father
Share their joyfulness and pain
When our deaths were so far away
But now I share their hunger
For the breath of inspiration
Breathed into me, Father, Life!
It ends today.
Father take this cup from me.
Human, have you made me and frail.
Though your face I see,
Will I still be me
Remembering all beyond the pale?
Oh Father, forgive me, this sin I bare
For the love that you have for your child
From the garden of Eden
To the ending of the world
For forgiveness, merciful mild.
Oh Father, forgive.
len bullard 03/13/06
Pirates and Innovation
It's been calculated that money spent on R&D is not correlated to innovation. Believe it or not. If you don't spend any money on R&D, you lose, but if you spend too much, the stockholders lose. Since most management plans are couched in terms of shareholder value, one can pretty much forget pleading for R&D money without a solid short term turnaround return on investment.
So you still need an innovative staff, you still have to manage to get them across technology chasms requiring lots of homework, and you want them to be happy about that?
Children won't learn arithmetic writing numbers on a board. They will count the numbers of toy pirates they have and how many they lost in a sea battle with a friend. Occasionally, they will fill a ship model with firecrackers and gas and blow it up just to watch together and tell their chums.
Keeping the little buggers entertained is 80% of teaching hard lessons. There is no agenda on a playground but the one in a child's heart just before recess.
We can't spend money, but we can have fun.
ARRGGG! MATEY!!
... and they wonder why the development staff is so silly.
So you still need an innovative staff, you still have to manage to get them across technology chasms requiring lots of homework, and you want them to be happy about that?
Children won't learn arithmetic writing numbers on a board. They will count the numbers of toy pirates they have and how many they lost in a sea battle with a friend. Occasionally, they will fill a ship model with firecrackers and gas and blow it up just to watch together and tell their chums.
Keeping the little buggers entertained is 80% of teaching hard lessons. There is no agenda on a playground but the one in a child's heart just before recess.
We can't spend money, but we can have fun.
ARRGGG! MATEY!!
... and they wonder why the development staff is so silly.
Friday, March 10, 2006
XML Was Invented By The Losers: Part II
Point is, XML was a coup, Mike, over fish and bigger fish. ... and it was the right thing to do, implicature and inference. I don't want to reel off the names because that is an assessment based on the sales I saw at the time and who they were selling too. SGML systems were very expensive.
The bigger fish don't always win. It doesn't mean they are evil. Some are being eaten/herded by even bigger fish. But put enough losers on the street and they figure out how to beat the winning fish to the bigger fish. No legacy. Nothing to lose. Everything to win and software requires no more than household costs to develop to prototypes.
Were I The Evil Coyote at the Evil Empire:
Cut the loss leaders off into open source. Spread the risk and cost of development out. As the hardware costs come down, software is a bundled component and it is shipped that way. To reduce costs, reduce non-standard bundling of software and hardware. See Macintosh 1986.
A standard bundling of hardware/software collapses the licensing costs, sales costs and dilutes the threats of patents and patent trolls without removing the competitive edge of quality.
Solve the problems of versioning and identity management. The problems of the second are social in that they are the history of systems like those based on SSN beating against the new web based systems that are quick to grant rights and slow to revoke them.
The application of identity tokens such as Social Security numbers, that is, tokens which are printed and therefore easily lost are insufficient for a digital society. Because the rate of interconnection, relations, and types in the system have increased, the speed and size of damage is fast and hard to undo with current mixed human/machine schedules (eg, what user can contract with the server and what a human has to review/approve). Not relaxing the constraints on registration of transaction where the business logic is adequate to approve a transaction is costly and paranoid.
Portals must integrate notification services based on legitimacy, sensitivity and autonomy.
Identity theft is discovered only when the first collection agency calls. That is too late.
Services to stop all transactions on the lost id are closed on weekends. That is too slow.
Services can be insensitive. That is rude.
This lack of orchestration/choreography/event systems for building implicature and inference from events over data increases costs and reduces reliability. BI systems ARE the next hot emergence zone.
Reliability is a problem of undercertified systems. Undercertified systems require tests and tests must be transparent. Mapping specifications to open testing is still the best means to certify.
This requires all the big fish to put down their guns and see the desktop market equilibrium for what it can be: a cost cutting system that doesn't sacrifice the quality of the product to increase the rate of sales. Make sure this piece is a rock-solid indisputably patent neutral system.
Any time a component rises to commodity status, buy the rights and put it in the standard system. Buy the patents and put them in the public domain. Innovate and standardize by providing profits to the owner from the profits made of selling the system to public domain. Let the market economy do the rest.
Pretty much what The Losers do. Lose the least profitable risks by sharing the costs of the most profitable ones. In that way, economic gains are sustained by social benefits.
Then it's norms and affordances, or culture and rights. With these come national interests. We speak of society as if it were homogenous and that is observably not so. But given the power of nations, culture is where our standard systems and marketplaces interlock, where social benefits and economic gains are made uncertain by the unreliability of those relationships in the human context. Cultural interfaces mean system filters. System filters mean autonomy.
The conflict is here between human and virtual systems.That is the hard problem of the emerging generation of digital systems designers and strategists: to couple social benefits to economic needs through the dimensions of legitimacy, sensitivity and autonomy of the virtual systems with respect to the norms and affordances of the human systems. Where we cannot, we risk the nationalist agenda oscillating against our global conversations. But the rule of autonomy says that we cannot continue simply by system fiat: we must desire this. That is the crucible sensitivity over autonomy in the rights of the human over the virtual, and the virtual over the human, and by representation, human over human.
I have hope.
Last week I received an email from a fan who shares my music with his friends in China. My wife warns me people in China have a thriving business duplicating western music and selling it and might steal mine. I told her, "I hope so."
A bit of memory from my generation: the music of Motown made for peace in an integrating racist Southern America. If there is to be peace, it is to be found in our shared languages, and of these, music speaks to the heart. When we hear this, we listen. Then no one loses.
"Leave gentle fingerprints on the Soul of another for the Angels to read"..- Proverb
The bigger fish don't always win. It doesn't mean they are evil. Some are being eaten/herded by even bigger fish. But put enough losers on the street and they figure out how to beat the winning fish to the bigger fish. No legacy. Nothing to lose. Everything to win and software requires no more than household costs to develop to prototypes.
Were I The Evil Coyote at the Evil Empire:
Cut the loss leaders off into open source. Spread the risk and cost of development out. As the hardware costs come down, software is a bundled component and it is shipped that way. To reduce costs, reduce non-standard bundling of software and hardware. See Macintosh 1986.
A standard bundling of hardware/software collapses the licensing costs, sales costs and dilutes the threats of patents and patent trolls without removing the competitive edge of quality.
Solve the problems of versioning and identity management. The problems of the second are social in that they are the history of systems like those based on SSN beating against the new web based systems that are quick to grant rights and slow to revoke them.
The application of identity tokens such as Social Security numbers, that is, tokens which are printed and therefore easily lost are insufficient for a digital society. Because the rate of interconnection, relations, and types in the system have increased, the speed and size of damage is fast and hard to undo with current mixed human/machine schedules (eg, what user can contract with the server and what a human has to review/approve). Not relaxing the constraints on registration of transaction where the business logic is adequate to approve a transaction is costly and paranoid.
Portals must integrate notification services based on legitimacy, sensitivity and autonomy.
Identity theft is discovered only when the first collection agency calls. That is too late.
Services to stop all transactions on the lost id are closed on weekends. That is too slow.
Services can be insensitive. That is rude.
This lack of orchestration/choreography/event systems for building implicature and inference from events over data increases costs and reduces reliability. BI systems ARE the next hot emergence zone.
Reliability is a problem of undercertified systems. Undercertified systems require tests and tests must be transparent. Mapping specifications to open testing is still the best means to certify.
This requires all the big fish to put down their guns and see the desktop market equilibrium for what it can be: a cost cutting system that doesn't sacrifice the quality of the product to increase the rate of sales. Make sure this piece is a rock-solid indisputably patent neutral system.
Any time a component rises to commodity status, buy the rights and put it in the standard system. Buy the patents and put them in the public domain. Innovate and standardize by providing profits to the owner from the profits made of selling the system to public domain. Let the market economy do the rest.
Pretty much what The Losers do. Lose the least profitable risks by sharing the costs of the most profitable ones. In that way, economic gains are sustained by social benefits.
Then it's norms and affordances, or culture and rights. With these come national interests. We speak of society as if it were homogenous and that is observably not so. But given the power of nations, culture is where our standard systems and marketplaces interlock, where social benefits and economic gains are made uncertain by the unreliability of those relationships in the human context. Cultural interfaces mean system filters. System filters mean autonomy.
The conflict is here between human and virtual systems.That is the hard problem of the emerging generation of digital systems designers and strategists: to couple social benefits to economic needs through the dimensions of legitimacy, sensitivity and autonomy of the virtual systems with respect to the norms and affordances of the human systems. Where we cannot, we risk the nationalist agenda oscillating against our global conversations. But the rule of autonomy says that we cannot continue simply by system fiat: we must desire this. That is the crucible sensitivity over autonomy in the rights of the human over the virtual, and the virtual over the human, and by representation, human over human.
I have hope.
Last week I received an email from a fan who shares my music with his friends in China. My wife warns me people in China have a thriving business duplicating western music and selling it and might steal mine. I told her, "I hope so."
A bit of memory from my generation: the music of Motown made for peace in an integrating racist Southern America. If there is to be peace, it is to be found in our shared languages, and of these, music speaks to the heart. When we hear this, we listen. Then no one loses.
"Leave gentle fingerprints on the Soul of another for the Angels to read"..- Proverb
What Do You Do Here?
What do you do here?
Pick any two.
2. Resume Version: Senior Technical Consultant. The duties are to make sure Process Requests get answered promptly..
2. Email Signature Version:
Wyle E Coyote Society : Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow.
2. Blog Version:
I herd fish for the other predators.
A day without scaring a senior manager is a day without perspiration.
Being bad is easy; being evil takes practice, study, and planning.
2. Podcast Version:
"Speak of the Devil!"
"It's not my turn to be the Devil."
"Oh right.... it's my turn, but I've studied."
2. Zen version:
They ask you to move a mountain but will not buy you equipment or explosives. You notice a stream runs past the base of the mountain, buy a small house, and spend your mornings picking up sand off the bottom of the stream and dropping it back in the water to watch it flow toward the mountain. You grow old but you attain your goal and the water does all the heavy lifting.
Pick any two.
2. Resume Version: Senior Technical Consultant. The duties are to make sure Process Requests get answered promptly..
2. Email Signature Version:
Wyle E Coyote Society : Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow.
2. Blog Version:
I herd fish for the other predators.
A day without scaring a senior manager is a day without perspiration.
Being bad is easy; being evil takes practice, study, and planning.
2. Podcast Version:
"Speak of the Devil!"
"It's not my turn to be the Devil."
"Oh right.... it's my turn, but I've studied."
2. Zen version:
They ask you to move a mountain but will not buy you equipment or explosives. You notice a stream runs past the base of the mountain, buy a small house, and spend your mornings picking up sand off the bottom of the stream and dropping it back in the water to watch it flow toward the mountain. You grow old but you attain your goal and the water does all the heavy lifting.
Thursday, March 02, 2006
XML Was Invented By Losers
Here's something to ponder. Winners may write histories but evolution is determined by the losers.
How many of the XML designers and primary supporters had, owned or worked for companies that were losers in the SGML market or standards fights? Most of them (the exception being James Clark but he was independently wealthy and has his own reasons). XML wasn't the Revenge of the Forty-somethings as it was once described, but the victory of the SGML losers over the SGML winners.
The trick here is pragmatic (as in linguistic pragmatics): the sentence may be true and the implicature false. Implication is in the utterance, not the sentence.
Can you think of cases where the sentence is true? In possibly more cases than we like to admit, losers determine the direction of the next generation. Why? Motivated to change. That's why BigCos are seldom the place to look for progress. The cost of ditching legacy is not something short-term profit project managers want to account for. It's cheaper to offshore the old, delay the new, and melt down the competence capital of the engineering departments. Then you sell the company to your wealthier competitors or even to the offshore companies you have been sending work to. After that, losers take the next steps.
Happy Mind Melting.
What happens as the cost of computer hardware continues to fall? Traditionally, it has been cheaper to replace or upgrade software because hardware changes were orders of magnitude more expensive given a system of some size? If both costs are falling, isn't there a point at which it is cheaper to FexEx the entire system? Is it true that the only future profits for information technologies will be in local customization?
I don't believe any of that, but the implications are fun. Those buying those companies, for example, may win by acquisition and lose by possession of the obligations because the losers in the last round of competition are waiting and weren't loafing while all of the buying and selling was paralyzing the engineers like deers caught in the headlights.
And now that they have lost, they have nothing else to do but work on winning.
"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." Kris Kristofferson
How many of the XML designers and primary supporters had, owned or worked for companies that were losers in the SGML market or standards fights? Most of them (the exception being James Clark but he was independently wealthy and has his own reasons). XML wasn't the Revenge of the Forty-somethings as it was once described, but the victory of the SGML losers over the SGML winners.
The trick here is pragmatic (as in linguistic pragmatics): the sentence may be true and the implicature false. Implication is in the utterance, not the sentence.
Can you think of cases where the sentence is true? In possibly more cases than we like to admit, losers determine the direction of the next generation. Why? Motivated to change. That's why BigCos are seldom the place to look for progress. The cost of ditching legacy is not something short-term profit project managers want to account for. It's cheaper to offshore the old, delay the new, and melt down the competence capital of the engineering departments. Then you sell the company to your wealthier competitors or even to the offshore companies you have been sending work to. After that, losers take the next steps.
Happy Mind Melting.
What happens as the cost of computer hardware continues to fall? Traditionally, it has been cheaper to replace or upgrade software because hardware changes were orders of magnitude more expensive given a system of some size? If both costs are falling, isn't there a point at which it is cheaper to FexEx the entire system? Is it true that the only future profits for information technologies will be in local customization?
I don't believe any of that, but the implications are fun. Those buying those companies, for example, may win by acquisition and lose by possession of the obligations because the losers in the last round of competition are waiting and weren't loafing while all of the buying and selling was paralyzing the engineers like deers caught in the headlights.
And now that they have lost, they have nothing else to do but work on winning.
"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." Kris Kristofferson
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Fishbrains
Ever go to a meeting and while you are trying to work out terms and conditions, your customer or the consultant are regaling you with a story about a neat new box that let's them provide themselves and five strangers within two hundred feet Internet Access over their cellphone?
Has your next door neighbor who has yet to buy a life insurance policy for himself to cover his seven children from his first and second marriage and his new girlfriend's three shown you his 1975 Rolex that he bought at the flea market?
Did your brother in law have a yard sale that included a first edition copy of "Are You Experienced?" while keeping a copy of his Morris Albert album that includes the megahit "Feelings" because that was his song when he was dating you know who before she left him for you don't care?
More often than not, you are dealing with FishBrains. Fish don't stop to think when they swim toward bright and shiny objects in the water that the object may have a hook inside. Fish only care that something is bright and shiny and they'll swallow it.
It is always interesting at any social event to figure out who the FishBrains are and who are sharks pretending to be fish. The clue is that predators steer prey and if they hunt in groups, they steer them toward the other predators by distraction. Remember: bright and shiny. While your lawyer is showing your wife his new Jag, his wife is showing you her new tits. And you're listening? Right.....
I don't know why but in America, more women are eager to demonstrate their Fishbrains. It may be that American men are equally inclined to live in the space between their opposing eyes, but American women are faster. It may be that American men are just slow in general. A Fishbrain prefers Britney Spears to Lisa Loeb and maybe that is why fish survive long winters in cold water frozen to the bottom of lakes. They don't rise to ugly bait. Remember, bright and shiny aren't the same as smart and whiny.
Fishbrains still believe conversion to the metric system is inevitable in America. Why? The French say so. Fishbrains believe the Arabs are causing all of the world's woes because we get so much oil from them. Of course anyone who reads Wired or watches West Wing knows we get most of our oil from Canada. If we dig deep enough, we'll find out Canadian Fishbrains blew up the Iraqui mosque. Cui bono? And it was bright and shiny... "like a Rhinestone Cowboy".
Fishbrains still have their Mood Rings and keep them next to their favorite Pet Rock. They euthanized their last Pet Rock because it pissed on the couch and they know the cat is too smart to do that.
Fishbrains tie yellow ribbons to trees to welcome home veterans in honor of a song about a guy coming home from prison... on a bus.
Fishbrains think the Chronicles of Narnia is a serious philosophical movie, applaud Sean Hannity for his deep grasp of the truth, and laugh when told that NASA surpressed evidence of global warning because they know the Rapture is coming soon so consume.
When George W. Bush says Osama Bin Laden helped him get elected by issuing threats, wiley Fishbrains nod in agreement knowing it was a ruse to get them to vote for Kerry because Bush is bad for Bin Ladin and the terrorists' cause.
Fishbrains tell you that the next generation of the Web is here because they can interact with their best friends who live down the street over the wire by typing messages into a telephone keyboard with a pen.
Fish aren't all bad. Fish make great bait. Fish can be used to hunt other fish. Fish are brain food. In one of the weird results of life seeking higher intelligence, lower lifeforms trying with all their mighty might are just filled with GottaEvolveAnxiety and yes, that is the life force. You can eat that and become smarter. In world of eat or be eaten, timing and position matter.
Fishbrains rule. Why? The more eggs you lay the better the chances of accidental fertilization.
To mix metaphors, as I said to Kurt Cagle, the difference between a bag of helium and a bag of gold is the bag of helium will float away, but if you let go of the string, either will disappear just as fast.
Has your next door neighbor who has yet to buy a life insurance policy for himself to cover his seven children from his first and second marriage and his new girlfriend's three shown you his 1975 Rolex that he bought at the flea market?
Did your brother in law have a yard sale that included a first edition copy of "Are You Experienced?" while keeping a copy of his Morris Albert album that includes the megahit "Feelings" because that was his song when he was dating you know who before she left him for you don't care?
More often than not, you are dealing with FishBrains. Fish don't stop to think when they swim toward bright and shiny objects in the water that the object may have a hook inside. Fish only care that something is bright and shiny and they'll swallow it.
It is always interesting at any social event to figure out who the FishBrains are and who are sharks pretending to be fish. The clue is that predators steer prey and if they hunt in groups, they steer them toward the other predators by distraction. Remember: bright and shiny. While your lawyer is showing your wife his new Jag, his wife is showing you her new tits. And you're listening? Right.....
I don't know why but in America, more women are eager to demonstrate their Fishbrains. It may be that American men are equally inclined to live in the space between their opposing eyes, but American women are faster. It may be that American men are just slow in general. A Fishbrain prefers Britney Spears to Lisa Loeb and maybe that is why fish survive long winters in cold water frozen to the bottom of lakes. They don't rise to ugly bait. Remember, bright and shiny aren't the same as smart and whiny.
Fishbrains still believe conversion to the metric system is inevitable in America. Why? The French say so. Fishbrains believe the Arabs are causing all of the world's woes because we get so much oil from them. Of course anyone who reads Wired or watches West Wing knows we get most of our oil from Canada. If we dig deep enough, we'll find out Canadian Fishbrains blew up the Iraqui mosque. Cui bono? And it was bright and shiny... "like a Rhinestone Cowboy".
Fishbrains still have their Mood Rings and keep them next to their favorite Pet Rock. They euthanized their last Pet Rock because it pissed on the couch and they know the cat is too smart to do that.
Fishbrains tie yellow ribbons to trees to welcome home veterans in honor of a song about a guy coming home from prison... on a bus.
Fishbrains think the Chronicles of Narnia is a serious philosophical movie, applaud Sean Hannity for his deep grasp of the truth, and laugh when told that NASA surpressed evidence of global warning because they know the Rapture is coming soon so consume.
When George W. Bush says Osama Bin Laden helped him get elected by issuing threats, wiley Fishbrains nod in agreement knowing it was a ruse to get them to vote for Kerry because Bush is bad for Bin Ladin and the terrorists' cause.
Fishbrains tell you that the next generation of the Web is here because they can interact with their best friends who live down the street over the wire by typing messages into a telephone keyboard with a pen.
Fish aren't all bad. Fish make great bait. Fish can be used to hunt other fish. Fish are brain food. In one of the weird results of life seeking higher intelligence, lower lifeforms trying with all their mighty might are just filled with GottaEvolveAnxiety and yes, that is the life force. You can eat that and become smarter. In world of eat or be eaten, timing and position matter.
Fishbrains rule. Why? The more eggs you lay the better the chances of accidental fertilization.
To mix metaphors, as I said to Kurt Cagle, the difference between a bag of helium and a bag of gold is the bag of helium will float away, but if you let go of the string, either will disappear just as fast.
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Searching for Signal: Part II
Last night I turned the comments on. It only took a few minutes before the first spam message appeared in my inbox from the blog. Gad. The web predators certainly are evolving fast. One wonders. We want to have these participative conversations but as soon as we open up, the opportunists begin to piss in the soup.
I had a long conversation with the owner of a popular 3D chat room. She related an interesting bit. 3D rooms that don't have multi-user chat don't last. She said, "They're lonely places." That implies that many of the experiments in 3D enabling interactive but non-multi-user 3D apps don't have a promising shelf life. When I think of all the failed experiments in search engines, shopping malls and visualization that tried the sex of 3D and flopped, or the 3D cartoons that while fun to watch were really linear 3D and therefore could just as well have been 2D Flash or machinima, evidence builds that what we've always said is more true than ever: the killer apps are always presence apps where people can make contact with each other. Social worlds do better. Not exactly news but once again, we are reminded the users are mammals and mammals are social critters constantly searching for signal. The smart money develops apps to hook them up.
Searching for signal: it's a meme I guess.
Next week, we'll look into combative pragmatics. Being a contrarian, if the pundits and heros are going to proseletyze for Web 2.0 being pragmatically enabled for negotiation, I'll take the other side and discuss how to use pragmatics in combat with the other chimps on the hunt for bangmates and domination of the monkey tree.
I had a long conversation with the owner of a popular 3D chat room. She related an interesting bit. 3D rooms that don't have multi-user chat don't last. She said, "They're lonely places." That implies that many of the experiments in 3D enabling interactive but non-multi-user 3D apps don't have a promising shelf life. When I think of all the failed experiments in search engines, shopping malls and visualization that tried the sex of 3D and flopped, or the 3D cartoons that while fun to watch were really linear 3D and therefore could just as well have been 2D Flash or machinima, evidence builds that what we've always said is more true than ever: the killer apps are always presence apps where people can make contact with each other. Social worlds do better. Not exactly news but once again, we are reminded the users are mammals and mammals are social critters constantly searching for signal. The smart money develops apps to hook them up.
Searching for signal: it's a meme I guess.
Next week, we'll look into combative pragmatics. Being a contrarian, if the pundits and heros are going to proseletyze for Web 2.0 being pragmatically enabled for negotiation, I'll take the other side and discuss how to use pragmatics in combat with the other chimps on the hunt for bangmates and domination of the monkey tree.
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Searching For Signal
Queens follow kings. Kings follow danger
Seeking advice from a beckoning stranger.
Truth isn't easily found in your dreams.
It's nothing from nothing whatever it seems.
You crawl to the top. Ambition is calling.
The moment you stand, you're already falling.
Love's not a prize for a victory won.
Love's how you feel when the loving is done.
What taste do you think is more bitter than this:
The lie on your lips or her passionless kiss?
A gift without knowing the reason for giving
Is rotten as flesh when it's no longer living.
Heartless and void, merciless cold
You humbled yourself as the cameras rolled.
Now that its over while sycophants sigh,
You're searching for signal from an ebony sky,
len - 2/21/06
Seeking advice from a beckoning stranger.
Truth isn't easily found in your dreams.
It's nothing from nothing whatever it seems.
You crawl to the top. Ambition is calling.
The moment you stand, you're already falling.
Love's not a prize for a victory won.
Love's how you feel when the loving is done.
What taste do you think is more bitter than this:
The lie on your lips or her passionless kiss?
A gift without knowing the reason for giving
Is rotten as flesh when it's no longer living.
Heartless and void, merciless cold
You humbled yourself as the cameras rolled.
Now that its over while sycophants sigh,
You're searching for signal from an ebony sky,
len - 2/21/06
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Red Neck Valentine
My wife told me not to buy her candy for Valentines Day. So I bought her a two inch thick steak in the shape of a heart for her Valentine. For mine, she will cook it. It must be a good idea. Last time I saw her she was pounding on it with a wooden mallet and repeating my name.
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
Connecting The Right Dots: The Legal Use of Surveillance
President Bush claims that had the NSA surveillance of American citizens been in place prior to 9/11, the terrorists could have been intercepted. He says we have to be able to 'connect the dots'. He is possibly right.
On the other hand, had a perfectly legal message switch connected the police records systems of South Florida, the same result would have occurred because Mohammed Atta in a perfectly legal traffic stop was subject to a perfectly legal name query that would have returned information sufficient to detain him.
It isn't that we need to connect the dots. That is too simplistic. We need to connect the right dots legally, then I believe we would have all the connections we need.
The Executive Branch of the government is attempting to persuade us that in times of war, laws don't matter. When laws don't matter, we are a government of men, not laws. While I have no evidence that the information gathered by the NSA is or has been used for some purpose other than those claimed, the fact of law is that it is illegal to have done so. If the only reason for breaking the law is 'wouldacoulda', then one that is speculation, and two that is not the only 'woulda coulda' so it is loose speculation. The second coulda is also legal.
Law is sometimes imprecise and in need of rewriting to meet the changing technology and times, but it is not speculative. We are now confronted with evidence both of outing a covert officer and of using the covert systems to commit possible high crimes from the same Executive Branch. The Executive Branch must be held to account for the commission of acts that may on inspection provide evidence of high crimes, If we are to remain a nation of laws, not men, then this evidence must be discovered and deliberated to determine grounds for prosecution if indeed these grounds are supported by the evidence.
... even if the acts were mostly just stupid.
On the other hand, had a perfectly legal message switch connected the police records systems of South Florida, the same result would have occurred because Mohammed Atta in a perfectly legal traffic stop was subject to a perfectly legal name query that would have returned information sufficient to detain him.
It isn't that we need to connect the dots. That is too simplistic. We need to connect the right dots legally, then I believe we would have all the connections we need.
The Executive Branch of the government is attempting to persuade us that in times of war, laws don't matter. When laws don't matter, we are a government of men, not laws. While I have no evidence that the information gathered by the NSA is or has been used for some purpose other than those claimed, the fact of law is that it is illegal to have done so. If the only reason for breaking the law is 'wouldacoulda', then one that is speculation, and two that is not the only 'woulda coulda' so it is loose speculation. The second coulda is also legal.
Law is sometimes imprecise and in need of rewriting to meet the changing technology and times, but it is not speculative. We are now confronted with evidence both of outing a covert officer and of using the covert systems to commit possible high crimes from the same Executive Branch. The Executive Branch must be held to account for the commission of acts that may on inspection provide evidence of high crimes, If we are to remain a nation of laws, not men, then this evidence must be discovered and deliberated to determine grounds for prosecution if indeed these grounds are supported by the evidence.
... even if the acts were mostly just stupid.
Friday, January 20, 2006
Cosmic Evolution
Open source is both politic and software model applied to the business model.
Is it a business model? No. I agree with Tim Bray. It isn't.
IMHO, it is shared values. Not ideology, but values.
I won't enumerate those but for one by example:
Many turtle graphic systems have been developed, but
<canvas/> works because there is one language we all speak:
HTML.
HTML's ubiquity is not based on a business model but on a model of how software should evolve for the betterment of those who use it: by always being there. That was the choice of those that built it. Read their books, read their blogs, read their lists, love their flames, style, mendacity, eagerness to challenge and eagerness to learn and eagerness to explore.
... but most importantly, to share.
For that reason, HTML is the language we all speak.
That did not come of business, it came because of what we wished for and worked for for each other: to communicate across the boundaries, to seek each other out, to want to know the differences, and to discover in all of that those things by which we are the same embracing those we choose as we choose. Freedom to know ourselves and each other isn't a business model. It is yearning for each other.
It is the mammal in you. The human.
The older I get the more I find I only really believe in two things: music and love for these reliably bring us together in yearning. The web is that desire made very large. While governments watch nervously, we have opened up the world to each other.
Cosmic evolution is choosing the means to find each other. That's all. That's enough. But if in all of that you feel an even higher power, know that it is not an uncommon feeling among the humans. If the wisdom of crowds is usually reliable, then it is wise to yearn for each other for it is something we all want to do. And if we feel in that or life in numbers there is a greater power of yearning that touches all, it is possibly true.
Self-directed evolution is cosmic evolution. You choose and become.
As ye olde Hippie bands sang, "Who Do You Love?"
Is it a business model? No. I agree with Tim Bray. It isn't.
IMHO, it is shared values. Not ideology, but values.
I won't enumerate those but for one by example:
Many turtle graphic systems have been developed, but
<canvas/> works because there is one language we all speak:
HTML.
HTML's ubiquity is not based on a business model but on a model of how software should evolve for the betterment of those who use it: by always being there. That was the choice of those that built it. Read their books, read their blogs, read their lists, love their flames, style, mendacity, eagerness to challenge and eagerness to learn and eagerness to explore.
... but most importantly, to share.
For that reason, HTML is the language we all speak.
That did not come of business, it came because of what we wished for and worked for for each other: to communicate across the boundaries, to seek each other out, to want to know the differences, and to discover in all of that those things by which we are the same embracing those we choose as we choose. Freedom to know ourselves and each other isn't a business model. It is yearning for each other.
It is the mammal in you. The human.
The older I get the more I find I only really believe in two things: music and love for these reliably bring us together in yearning. The web is that desire made very large. While governments watch nervously, we have opened up the world to each other.
Cosmic evolution is choosing the means to find each other. That's all. That's enough. But if in all of that you feel an even higher power, know that it is not an uncommon feeling among the humans. If the wisdom of crowds is usually reliable, then it is wise to yearn for each other for it is something we all want to do. And if we feel in that or life in numbers there is a greater power of yearning that touches all, it is possibly true.
Self-directed evolution is cosmic evolution. You choose and become.
As ye olde Hippie bands sang, "Who Do You Love?"
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
Roll The Dice On Likable Choices: A Left Wing Lunatic Set of Amoral and Completely Unworkable Ideas Because No One Likes Me
Extremist Jihad Osama Bin Ladin Allah Muslim MightLikeNakedWomen... is that enough keywords to get the attention of the attention-obsessed with their hands on the dials?
You know who you are. And now, so does the rest of the world.
Now that I have your attention:
He is experienced, above moral reproach, hard working, well-educated, fiscally conservative, well-liked internationally and ... eligible. He can't be bribed because at his age, he doesn't need anything. He is an evangelical but not a neo-con. He is the perfect spoiler and has good hair. He can pronounce 'nuclear'. He is on a first name basis with most of the world's leaders and as far as we know, no one wants to assassinate him. With a solid staff and an eminent but trustworthy VP, he can do this. It would be fun to watch the attack dogs set on him because he could turn and say, "Now, there you go again." Priceless.
We elected him last time because we were tired of crooks and meanies. Anyone really happy about the current choices? Let's roll the dice on a person we all like.
Fess up to reality. The illusion of a frictionless community of zero cost code is made of models of the code itself, not models of the cost of owning the code. To improve that, reduce the amount of it you need, increase the quality of what you use and don't waste all of your time trying to measure that and control it. It is a ecosystem of cooperators who share costs for code evolution. Just stimulate it. It already knows how to do the rest.
I realize it's not in the nature of sales to espouse a commissionless system, but it may not be their choice. Software ecosystems don't require sales. They require non-negotiable price lists.
Services, of course, are negotiated. However...
If the top and bottom of the stack are free to use, all the IP and non-open source software is in the middle. That's a cosmic d'oh in the software development community, but I'm not quite sure the businessHeads get this. To control costs, you either
Accept a business model where the middle is commoditized (translation: no legacy interfaces, all standard business documents and forms, single roots for the ontologies, standard contracting and licensing, in short, very few negotiated options in the software costs, or
You measure and cut and name and send out an RFP with the best wishlist the organization or your consultant can produce. RFP authors take note: you have champagne tastes, you pay champage prices. If you can party on beer, prices are better.
Model one is cheaper. It means change for the organization but the mammals are quite adaptible. Be aware that the perceived value of local code is better costed as frequency of use/cost of use across some organizational boundary. The second term provides for the fact that low frequency cost hits even at higher costs are unavoidable because of the value proposition of the service. Software costs are not the source of the highest costs: the cost of use is.
The problem of the middle is local variations on common processes. Accelerate the purchase of XBRL and other standard contracting systems. Gains here scale all the way through the economic model of in both government and business operations. Provide grants for government systems that provably conform to the open standards.
You know who you are. And now, so does the rest of the world.
Now that I have your attention:
Re-elect Jimmy Carter for President
He is experienced, above moral reproach, hard working, well-educated, fiscally conservative, well-liked internationally and ... eligible. He can't be bribed because at his age, he doesn't need anything. He is an evangelical but not a neo-con. He is the perfect spoiler and has good hair. He can pronounce 'nuclear'. He is on a first name basis with most of the world's leaders and as far as we know, no one wants to assassinate him. With a solid staff and an eminent but trustworthy VP, he can do this. It would be fun to watch the attack dogs set on him because he could turn and say, "Now, there you go again." Priceless.
We elected him last time because we were tired of crooks and meanies. Anyone really happy about the current choices? Let's roll the dice on a person we all like.
Make Open Source Code Development Tax Deductible
Fess up to reality. The illusion of a frictionless community of zero cost code is made of models of the code itself, not models of the cost of owning the code. To improve that, reduce the amount of it you need, increase the quality of what you use and don't waste all of your time trying to measure that and control it. It is a ecosystem of cooperators who share costs for code evolution. Just stimulate it. It already knows how to do the rest.
I realize it's not in the nature of sales to espouse a commissionless system, but it may not be their choice. Software ecosystems don't require sales. They require non-negotiable price lists.
Services, of course, are negotiated. However...
Understand The Middle
If the top and bottom of the stack are free to use, all the IP and non-open source software is in the middle. That's a cosmic d'oh in the software development community, but I'm not quite sure the businessHeads get this. To control costs, you either
Model one is cheaper. It means change for the organization but the mammals are quite adaptible. Be aware that the perceived value of local code is better costed as frequency of use/cost of use across some organizational boundary. The second term provides for the fact that low frequency cost hits even at higher costs are unavoidable because of the value proposition of the service. Software costs are not the source of the highest costs: the cost of use is.
Make Internet Legal Services A Tax Deductible Purchase
The problem of the middle is local variations on common processes. Accelerate the purchase of XBRL and other standard contracting systems. Gains here scale all the way through the economic model of in both government and business operations. Provide grants for government systems that provably conform to the open standards.
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
Real In Alabama
When Dr. Martin Luther King said,
my generation was embroiled in the painful integration of the schools. We were the guineas, the living material of a Petri dish of social change. For all said on both sides, it was our daily routines, our social interests that had to adapt to the strangers put among us by law and not always out of choice. For all the praises now of that time, it was a hard slog to get past stereotypes and baiting, but most hard to get past the fear bred into us. Fear was our inheritance, a legacy of separate worlds, separate cultures and separate destinies. With every riot in the halls, every protest, every fight behind the gym, every kid held up to a wall for money, or threatened with bricks, or threatened with worse, we thought it a terrible time and a wonderful time, so great were our differences. It would take generations to make Dr. King's dream real. So we thought.
When my daughter asked me last weekend what she should write for her school assignment for the holiday my generation had celebrated as Robert E. Lee Day, I told her that she should remember her black friends and that part of Dr. King's speech. She should understand that some dreams are realized, if imperfectly, if late, if only in part, but that part realized is to be celebrated. Here in 2006, almost 40 years and most of my life later, it isn't a dream. It is real. My son and my daughter are that dream.
For justice' sake, for the sake of our children, for the sake of all children, be hopeful, be patient, be determined. What is dreamed can become real. Fear may live on, but a generation of praiseworthy parents can choose not to will it to their children.
As Dr. King said rightly, "Thank God almighty."
I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.
my generation was embroiled in the painful integration of the schools. We were the guineas, the living material of a Petri dish of social change. For all said on both sides, it was our daily routines, our social interests that had to adapt to the strangers put among us by law and not always out of choice. For all the praises now of that time, it was a hard slog to get past stereotypes and baiting, but most hard to get past the fear bred into us. Fear was our inheritance, a legacy of separate worlds, separate cultures and separate destinies. With every riot in the halls, every protest, every fight behind the gym, every kid held up to a wall for money, or threatened with bricks, or threatened with worse, we thought it a terrible time and a wonderful time, so great were our differences. It would take generations to make Dr. King's dream real. So we thought.
When my daughter asked me last weekend what she should write for her school assignment for the holiday my generation had celebrated as Robert E. Lee Day, I told her that she should remember her black friends and that part of Dr. King's speech. She should understand that some dreams are realized, if imperfectly, if late, if only in part, but that part realized is to be celebrated. Here in 2006, almost 40 years and most of my life later, it isn't a dream. It is real. My son and my daughter are that dream.
For justice' sake, for the sake of our children, for the sake of all children, be hopeful, be patient, be determined. What is dreamed can become real. Fear may live on, but a generation of praiseworthy parents can choose not to will it to their children.
As Dr. King said rightly, "Thank God almighty."
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
Famous On the Internet
I see some are comparing the haves and have-nots of Wikipedia. Last time it was Google numbers. Yes, friends, the vanity of the web's super heroes is showing. Of course, being mammals and web geeks, we their fans, turn that into hierarchy:
"You aren't listed in WikiPedia? How CAN I be related to YOU???"
Tough life for sidekicks, too.
"Well, yeah, you sorta came up with the idea, but I WROTE THE CODE!!!"
There are two distinct forms of fame on the internet:
o Wikipedia famous: has a distinct wikipedia entry containing approved facts about the person of note. This is bounded fame. It's value proposition is location. In this sense, the fame is bounded within an ambient: typically, professional contributions establishing authority.
o Google famous: has no Wikipedia entries but many entries in various sites such that the person is often referenced in conversations. This fame confers no authority yet is unlimited. The fame cannot be bounded within an ambient as this form of fame has no operational boundary. This is folk fame, aka, legend.
Examples of either form of fame are easy to find. Since folk fame could become WikiPedia fame, the Wikipedia entry is a star on the walk of fame, not the restaurant at the end of the walk.
"You aren't listed in WikiPedia? How CAN I be related to YOU???"
Tough life for sidekicks, too.
"Well, yeah, you sorta came up with the idea, but I WROTE THE CODE!!!"
There are two distinct forms of fame on the internet:
o Wikipedia famous: has a distinct wikipedia entry containing approved facts about the person of note. This is bounded fame. It's value proposition is location. In this sense, the fame is bounded within an ambient: typically, professional contributions establishing authority.
o Google famous: has no Wikipedia entries but many entries in various sites such that the person is often referenced in conversations. This fame confers no authority yet is unlimited. The fame cannot be bounded within an ambient as this form of fame has no operational boundary. This is folk fame, aka, legend.
Examples of either form of fame are easy to find. Since folk fame could become WikiPedia fame, the Wikipedia entry is a star on the walk of fame, not the restaurant at the end of the walk.
Monday, December 12, 2005
Writing On the Stone
I picked this up at CNN:
Zorba lives.
In these days of overocculated existence, relentless pursuit of digital perfection, and the elitist bad habits of the boomer generation that strangle the careers of our younger compadres while we try to hang on to that title as the Magic Bus Generation, it's nice to know some folks still get it. Living is live, it is messy, it is fun and it breaks your heart but without that, you can't know how good it is to have one.
Rock on, Tonino.
We watch too much TV, too many DVDs, and too many web sites with airbrushed perfect professionally posed pop tarts. To keep our attention, the images get brassier, the colors more colored, the music too loud and the emotions too cruel to contemplate. Working on the Dickens reading and giving it away as digital Christmas cards, I am being reminded of the joy of listening... just listening, as if the ear for so long the servant of 5.1 HDTV, becomes glad to be the main sense, to let the mind make up images in accordance with the dictates of the sound, the reading, the voice actors, the sound effects and Ludvig.
God bless Ludvig where ever he is. And thank you.
People say emotions are bad for business. Possibly. Do I really want to be in a business where that is true? I don't. Modern life in TechnoLand is too much like London in winter, and maybe that was Dickens' point. The relentless pursuit of any perfect moment, color, sound, love or just a cup of mocha is too much like sanding off my skin with coarse grain because I think beneath the blemishes of real life there is a better one. I don't think there is. There is this one. The difference is how much pain I create trying to perfect a world that already endures so much pain it has to paint it digitally and remake it into surround sound to escape. It is as Scrooge's fiance says to him as she irrevocably releases him, "You fear the world too much." and in her tears for what he once was, his heart dies.
So as the merchants go about taking Merry Christmas off the signs, making sure the ads are neutered of all special emotions and replaced with politically correct ones, while the hard Christian right has to face the facts that using Christ's name in the pursuit of power over others, to defend the unforgivable, that in doing that they caused the very pushback they say they are afraid of, that in their fears they found their demons and embraced them, I say listen to Dickens.
See the writing on the stone. It is a name.
Tonino Tola is a 75-year-old farmer from Sardinia, Italy. He starts his day at dawn with a little coffee, some cheese and one or two glasses of wine from his small vineyard. By midmorning he has milked his cows and walked miles to reach his pastures.
"If you don't drink to avoid dying, if you don't eat to avoid dying, if you don't smoke to avoid dying, and if you see a beautiful woman and you don't go after her... then you may as well be buried alive!"
Zorba lives.
In these days of overocculated existence, relentless pursuit of digital perfection, and the elitist bad habits of the boomer generation that strangle the careers of our younger compadres while we try to hang on to that title as the Magic Bus Generation, it's nice to know some folks still get it. Living is live, it is messy, it is fun and it breaks your heart but without that, you can't know how good it is to have one.
Rock on, Tonino.
We watch too much TV, too many DVDs, and too many web sites with airbrushed perfect professionally posed pop tarts. To keep our attention, the images get brassier, the colors more colored, the music too loud and the emotions too cruel to contemplate. Working on the Dickens reading and giving it away as digital Christmas cards, I am being reminded of the joy of listening... just listening, as if the ear for so long the servant of 5.1 HDTV, becomes glad to be the main sense, to let the mind make up images in accordance with the dictates of the sound, the reading, the voice actors, the sound effects and Ludvig.
God bless Ludvig where ever he is. And thank you.
People say emotions are bad for business. Possibly. Do I really want to be in a business where that is true? I don't. Modern life in TechnoLand is too much like London in winter, and maybe that was Dickens' point. The relentless pursuit of any perfect moment, color, sound, love or just a cup of mocha is too much like sanding off my skin with coarse grain because I think beneath the blemishes of real life there is a better one. I don't think there is. There is this one. The difference is how much pain I create trying to perfect a world that already endures so much pain it has to paint it digitally and remake it into surround sound to escape. It is as Scrooge's fiance says to him as she irrevocably releases him, "You fear the world too much." and in her tears for what he once was, his heart dies.
So as the merchants go about taking Merry Christmas off the signs, making sure the ads are neutered of all special emotions and replaced with politically correct ones, while the hard Christian right has to face the facts that using Christ's name in the pursuit of power over others, to defend the unforgivable, that in doing that they caused the very pushback they say they are afraid of, that in their fears they found their demons and embraced them, I say listen to Dickens.
See the writing on the stone. It is a name.
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
SOA: Like Ludwig Did It
What are the qualities one wants from federated aka, 'mashup' pages built over services?
Web components should fit together as neatly as Ludvig Von Beethoven's music and assemble as easily as Adobe Audition. Music tools are always about a decade ahead of the rest of the software industry; so if like other aphoristic models of technical development (see Moore's Law), I should get this eventually.
For my Christmas card this year, I recorded Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" doing all of the characters (except the Cratchits: my wife and kids took those parts), narration, sound effects, etc. I used Adobe Audition to do that in case that is interesting. Audition is good easy to use multitrack recording and mastering software with plenty of clean effects and an intuitive interface. But the real serendipity was choosing to use Ludvig Von's music over composing my own.
Why?
Beethoven and Dickens are close in era, so in timing, tone and theme, they are quite composable and reliable, but the delight is that Beethoven's works are seamless. I avoided the 'hits' (say Fur Elise, Moonlight Sonata, opening of the Fifth, etc.) and grabbed bits of lesser known pieces and inner pieces of the symphonies. Some of these were composed years, even decades apart and recorded by different performers in different periods. Using various recordings both vinyl and CD, I had to do some serious click and pop removal but, that is what Audition does well.
They fit together seamlessly. The effect is as my wife says, 'enchanting'.
Web Services Should Work Like Beethoven's Music: you can slice it and dice it and it just works. The level of knowledge of keys, transitions, melodic development, chordal progressions, dynamics and orchestration required are enormous yet almost all of his works are memorable, hummable and accessible. When he applied technical virtuosity, it was in service of the dynamic perceived by the user as emotional anticipation, fulfillment and release, not the performer's angst about playing fast and accurately on the device of the day. It's a high standard for musicians and I wonder if there are similar prodigies in the world of software services.
That is the challenge for the mashup component builder. When someone puts the services together, they have to just work. I can get that fromBeethoven.
The question would be, what would be the experience if I tried that with Beethoven and Mozart and Bach and Schumann. The challenge of today's software behemoths is exactly that: what happens if I take your components and mash them together? Will they just work? Will certain melodies stand out garishly in bad taste where taste matters? Or is it a matter of taste where taste is knowing what to choose or to stick to one company just as I stuck to Beethoven even with that Mozart CD staring at me like Marley on the knocker?
If we are to pick common formats, we should choose based on the ability of the web service builder to compose, mashup, and serve up without seams, without glaring bugs, and with the ease of putting together slices in sequencing/recording systems that are to web pages what Adobe Audition is to audio production. If Enterprise Engineering is to come to the Service Oriented Architecture, that's what we need for productivity.
Having discovered the joy of working with dead collaborators who don't object to me remixing their work, I plan to work with more famous decomposers in the future.
- Seamlessness: no big glaring boo boos in format or behavior.
- Reliability: no piece mysteriously failing and causing the other pieces to look bad
- Composability: pieces can be assembled together quickly and intuitively
Web components should fit together as neatly as Ludvig Von Beethoven's music and assemble as easily as Adobe Audition. Music tools are always about a decade ahead of the rest of the software industry; so if like other aphoristic models of technical development (see Moore's Law), I should get this eventually.
For my Christmas card this year, I recorded Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" doing all of the characters (except the Cratchits: my wife and kids took those parts), narration, sound effects, etc. I used Adobe Audition to do that in case that is interesting. Audition is good easy to use multitrack recording and mastering software with plenty of clean effects and an intuitive interface. But the real serendipity was choosing to use Ludvig Von's music over composing my own.
Why?
Beethoven and Dickens are close in era, so in timing, tone and theme, they are quite composable and reliable, but the delight is that Beethoven's works are seamless. I avoided the 'hits' (say Fur Elise, Moonlight Sonata, opening of the Fifth, etc.) and grabbed bits of lesser known pieces and inner pieces of the symphonies. Some of these were composed years, even decades apart and recorded by different performers in different periods. Using various recordings both vinyl and CD, I had to do some serious click and pop removal but, that is what Audition does well.
They fit together seamlessly. The effect is as my wife says, 'enchanting'.
Web Services Should Work Like Beethoven's Music: you can slice it and dice it and it just works. The level of knowledge of keys, transitions, melodic development, chordal progressions, dynamics and orchestration required are enormous yet almost all of his works are memorable, hummable and accessible. When he applied technical virtuosity, it was in service of the dynamic perceived by the user as emotional anticipation, fulfillment and release, not the performer's angst about playing fast and accurately on the device of the day. It's a high standard for musicians and I wonder if there are similar prodigies in the world of software services.
That is the challenge for the mashup component builder. When someone puts the services together, they have to just work. I can get that fromBeethoven.
The question would be, what would be the experience if I tried that with Beethoven and Mozart and Bach and Schumann. The challenge of today's software behemoths is exactly that: what happens if I take your components and mash them together? Will they just work? Will certain melodies stand out garishly in bad taste where taste matters? Or is it a matter of taste where taste is knowing what to choose or to stick to one company just as I stuck to Beethoven even with that Mozart CD staring at me like Marley on the knocker?
If we are to pick common formats, we should choose based on the ability of the web service builder to compose, mashup, and serve up without seams, without glaring bugs, and with the ease of putting together slices in sequencing/recording systems that are to web pages what Adobe Audition is to audio production. If Enterprise Engineering is to come to the Service Oriented Architecture, that's what we need for productivity.
Having discovered the joy of working with dead collaborators who don't object to me remixing their work, I plan to work with more famous decomposers in the future.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)