b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
Most Popular
- Historical Yearly Average Gasoline Prices
- Outlook 2003 Message-ID Insanity
- Real-time Sand Animations
- Adobe Acrobat 7
- Adobe Announces Name Change and New Product
- Largest Technology Boondoggle in Public Education History
- Yahoo! Buys del.icio.us
- Skype - Disruptive, Not Compelling
- Aluminum Christmas Tree Museum
- Network Printing Hell and windoze XP
Book Reviews
Recently
Legal Services Anywhere Anytime
How Much RSS?
Weblogs and IM
Folk Music Goes Indoors
Experts Not Always Right
Space Flight Not Routine
On Negotiating Better
Getting to Space
Tuesday, February 4, 2003
Abominable TV Dialogue
I've seen my share of B movies, dreadful SciFi, and late-night television, but I've never seen anything as bad as the cliche-ridden, over-hyped, ping-pong dialogue on the WB's Gilmore Girls. Yech. It's a "favorite" at my house and I just have to leave the room after about the third witty exchange between a group of brainless adolescents. If you took Moon Unit Zappa, transplanted her to Boston for a decade, and then gave a 20-minute recording of her voice to Sir Mix-a-Lot you couldn't get any worse than the over-rehearsed, concatenated, dialogue on this show. That my 12-year-old daughter thinks this is good is a really frightening thing.Legal Services Anywhere Anytime
I just completed my first online legal transaction: met the attorney via his weblog, discussed my needs and ordered the work via e-mail, paid for the service via PayPal on my credit card -- Damn! This is really cool.Martin Schwimmer of Schwimmer Legal and The Trademark Blog is the most aggressively e-commerce ready attorney I know. He just completed the trademark search and opinion for my new business, and we conducted the entire thing without a phone call. We had a couple of brief IM sessions. When divorces get this easy things are really gonna change!
One tip for Marty -- don't leave that money in your PayPal account too long. They've been known to do stupid things with it.
How Much RSS?
Jim McGee likes full posts in his aggregator -- but I don't; Forcing what I want on (potential) readers of this weblog cramps their ability to use info in the way that's best for them -- which is bad; I want multiple RSS feeds:- one with headlines only
- one with some arbitrary character limit -- e.g. 500 chars
- one full feed
Why can't I get that in Radio without having to be a programmer?
Confessions of an RSS bigot.Yes, I'm an RSS bigot as well. And yes, I know that I could create my own feed using something like RSS Distiller as John Robb points out. But as my own support staff, I scarcely have time to stay current with the material that already comes into my news aggregator. the time to figure out how to parse a site's html and generate a reasonable feed generally isn't worth it. [...]
Agreed. It's still too damned hard to create useful RSS feeds with scrapers. Unless you know regex it's a really frustrating, hunt-and-peck experience.
[...] It's about managing my poor, limited, attention which needs all the help it can get. For my selfish purposes, the more material that flows into my news aggregator the better. And better still if I can get full posts instead of teasers. I've yet to find a blog post that read better in context than it did in my plain aggregator. [...] [McGee's Musings]
Weblogs and IM
Paolo makes a few points about the limits of IM, and a salient point about how IM can extend traditional voice contact and internal weblogs.
IM and BlogsDave started this very interesting thread on weblogs and IM.
I use both technologies a lot. I use IM to interact with most of the people I work with, to the point that even when I talk to them on the phone we usually keep an IM window open to exchange links or images while we talk. I also use weblogs both for public and internal publishing. [...]
What I would like to have is a tool to attach IM conversations to weblog posts, just like there are comments linked to each post today.
[...]
This would probably not be applicable to public weblogs, also if it happens all the times that people ping me because they find a link to my IM address on this page and it's usually quite interesting, but it would definitely be very useful to manage internal communications on our k-logs. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]
Folk Music Goes Indoors
Home concert givers better be wary -- the copyright police may be showing up at your door.I guess folk music is having some sort of resurgence -- I don't know much about it -- but there is a little coffee house in my exurban neighborhood that's been hosting live folk music for a few years. I've been told it's pretty good, if you like that sort of thing.
One thing I do know is that the little coffee house has been in a protracted legal battle with ASCAP -- the The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers -- over royalty fees. ASCAP and BMI run what can charitably be called legalized extortion rackets which operate on the same "voluntary" principles as the Teamsters Union.
Artists appearing at the coffee house play original folk music -- their own compositions -- and the coffee house plays only CDs it gets from the artists themselves. So there are no royalties owed to any Music industry extortion service. But that doesn't matter to ASCAP. As far as they're concerned, if you play music you must be infringing someone's copyright and for a flat fee they'll license you against all "piracy", passing the money along to an artist of their choice (after extracting their hard-earned service fee, of course.)
Just one more symptom of a terminally ill industry.
Private homes are nano-venues for e-folkies. Folk-music has found a renaissance is the most nano of micro-venues: people's living rooms, promoted by listservs.
Concert-goers bring the chips, dip and beer. A basket is set out for the suggested $10 to $12 donation for the musicians, and the living room, dining room and family room are filled with people wanting to hear folk music.With few venues willing to hire folk acts and few middle-class suburbanites willing to make the schlep downtown, search out parking and elbow other patrons to get the bartender's attention, folk house concerts are quietly spreading like wildfire with the help of e-mail and Internet advertising.
Monday, February 3, 2003
Experts Not Always Right
Today's Wall Street Journal article (subscription required) on the future of manned space flight quotes a number of "experts" -- not all of whom are right.
[...] "Any specific mission you can identify to do in space, you can design and build an unmanned space craft to do it more effectively, more economically and more safely," said Alex Roland, a professor of history at Duke University and for eight years a historian at NASA. Manned space flights are more about capturing the public's imagination than science, he said. "It's circus, it's just pure circus." [...] [WSJ Online]
By this philosophy we don't actually need doctors, history professors, or even steering wheels in cars. Let's just have machines do it all. It was a dumb thing to say.
Sunday, February 2, 2003
Space Flight Not Routine
I have a lot of respect for some of the folks who are analyzing this disaster, but I don't know how anyone could convince themselves that traveling at 17,500mph is routine, or that entering the earth's atmosphere at 12,000mph in a 30-year-old craft isn't risky as hell. We may be a century away from making space travel as safe as air travel, if ever. The real questions become, "Is our approach to space inherently riskier than necessary?" and "Given the approch we've chosen, have we ignored reasonable precautions?"
On the Space Shuttle crash....Sunday: Space Flight Not Routine. The most sensible single article on the Columbia loss that I've read appeared in today's New York Times. In this article, the risks of space flight are dissected. As my colleague Jeff Carlson noted , we have to hope the astronauts were given as much insight into the chance of failure and other risks as were realistic. Elsewhere on the Net, I've seen quotes from Richard Feynman appear from his conclusions after the Challenger disaster that have similar conclusions, but this heartfelt statement from a NASA official sums it up best: Capt. Bill Readdy, associate administrator for space flight and a former astronaut, said at a news conference yesterday afternoon: "Today was a very stark reminder that this is a very risky endeavor, pushing back the frontiers in outer space. And after 113 flights, unfortunately, people have a tendency to look at it as something that is more or less routine. Well I can assure you it is not ... [GlennLog] [Ye Olde Phart]
On Negotiating Better
An analysis of two negotiating strategies -- "Getting to Yes", and "Start with No" -- which take opposite approaches and actually have two very different goals. James Vornov takes a personal look at the two paths to reaching agreement, and points out that "Win-Win" just may not be. James places the analysis in a context that will feel familiar to most business executives.
[...] The best agreement is the one that maximizes utility or value for all parties involved. It will involve give and take and tradeoffs to solve the common problem, but there will be some optimal solution.Thus, the principle of "Getting to Yes" or "Think Win-Win" yields optimal solutions.
Or does it?
It was Jimmy Carter who made me uneasy with "Getting to Yes". It was clear to me that he had been trained by this school. Sometimes I felt the approach would yield agreements that should never be made. After all, if one side is, in truth, right and one is, in truth, wrong, then a win-win agreement is wrong. [...] [On Deciding...Better]
Terry Frazier at 12:13 PM
| Permanent Link
| Trackback URL | Categories: Terry Frazier Consulting
Getting to Space
Amid the over-analysis, finger-pointing, self-flagellation, mourning, and reexaminations happening post-Columbia, I don't see anyone actually asking the right, tough question -- is this really the right way to get to space? Columbia was the oldest of the shuttles. Any malfunction in the controls in the flight regime can get her into an unrecoverable attitude, which is probably what happened.Let us honor the dead, then understand how we should be Getting to Space:
Almighty Ruler of the all,
Whose Power extends to great and small,
Who guides the stars with steadfast law,
Whose least creation fills with awe,
O grant thy mercy and thy grace,
To those who venture into space.
-- Robert Heinlein, the Prayer for Travelers
Syndication
Contact
Presence
This Page was last updated: Wed, 02 Jul 2008 21:06:57 GMT
