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And if you really want to get creeped out
The wind finally died down a bit. The five bad phone lines aren't back up yet, though. Odd to find that only the DSL works. By the way, If you want to check out any of these earthquake hazard maps, look here. This one was produced by highlighting "Woodside" and "Peninsula Segment of the San Andreas Fault System." If you check some of the other scenarios you'll see that this is exactly what happened in the 1906 earthquake, before which the area to the left of the black line (the 40 quadrillion ton Pacific plate) was about 12 feet to the Southeast of where it is now. You'll also see that approximately nothing happened here in the 1989 Loma Prieta Quake. Remodeling Reality Not long after they all left Novell and started The Burton Group, Craig Burton, Judith Burton and Jamie Lewis invited me to Salt Lake City to help mull over a tall challenge: changing a whole industry's conversation without leveraging the economic and marketing heft of a Major Vendor. They believed that the industry should be talking about interoperable services — directory, security, file, print, management, etc. — and not just their own isolated and monolithic "solutions," which often caused more problems than they solved, mostly because they wouldn't interoperate with anybody else's stuff. To a remarkable degree, TBG succeeded. I was amazed to watch one large vendor after another adopt the model's language and conceptual framework, usually without consciously making a point of it. One of TBG's most influential instruments in this subversive work was the Network Services Model, a paper (revised over the years) that articulated the concept of networks as collections of interoperable services. Over the last year Craig Burton has been talking to me about a successor to that model: one that scaffolds understading with both a new vocabulary and the larger context of the Internet. Now he's vetting it through his weblog. Dig it here. Living at the mercy The winds have been gusting to 60 mph outside. The Weather Channel says "gusts to 40," but we live on top of a hill, and it can get a lot faster than down on the flats. The olive and eucalyptus trees are bent windward, flashing the silver undersides of their leaves. A chair blows through the open fence of a neighboring yard and across the vacant lot between us. Objects don't fall: they fly. That's the amazing thing about high winds. If the winds go fast enough, everything lighter than a landform has wings. But it's not that bad. It often gets windy up here. What I am worried about right now is fire. Emerald Hills is very similar to Hiller Highlands in the Oakland Hills, which I watched burn in 1991 (one couple I know lost two houses and all they owned). We have the same kinds of vegetation, the same narrow roads. And right now, the same high winds, only cooler and from the West, which is good. Still, it's been a dry winter and hasn't rained in days. I'm writing this after the power is back up, for the second time. . When it went off around 3pm I lost everything I had been writing. Fortunately, it was only about 45 minute's worth. But while the grid was down we turned on a portable radio and promptly heard a report about a downed and whipping power line, also on fire, on Edgewood road. This is one block from Jeffrey's preschool, and right at the bottom of the dome of wooded land which is Emerald Hills, at the crest of which we live. Now the radio has stopped talking about the bad power line, but does report that power is out all around us — though oddly it's fine here. The voltage is 122 right now. Normally it's 119-121. I was watching the meter the second time it went. In about two seconds it went 118...110...82...10...0. Five of our six phone lines is out, all in the 361 exchange. The DSL line is up, fortunately. Now the radio is talking about the "dot com failure." Thus economics adopts the language of electric utilities. Life in California. Carry on. Geeks on the half shell I'm in the midst of writing about Linux Lunacy, the Geek Cruise I'll be going on next October. If anybody's been on one and wants to testify, I could use a quote or two. Among other things, my research has led me to the fun site of Randall Schwartz, fellow on-cruise speaker and Perl maven. Will patents follow? Amazon has introduced a paybox payment system that just got Slashdotted. I notice they don't say "tip jar." That's good.
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That's a map of 
