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| Monday, April 28, 2003 |
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Coming true 
| | I just saw the last third of Field of Dreams here in the hotel. It moved me as much as the first time I saw it. |
| | Hey, I'm a believer in dreams. |
| | Here's one. Back in the late 80s (around the time they were making that movie), I found myself sitting outside on the terrace of the La Paloma hotel in Tucson, at the end of the last day of a PC Forum, with Mark Stahlman, who was an analyst with Alex.Brown at the time. We were the last two souls left by the departing crowd, and we found ourselves giving the event a post-mortem. |
| | First, we agreed that the industry, and perhaps the whole world, was at the end of something. Personal computing seemed to be over in a fundamental way. Up to that point personal computing had been mostly something you did by yourself and with a printer. If you were networked, it was to share files and printers and not much else. Email existed, but it was mostly a proprietary affair. There were online services and BBSes, but nothing that looked like the Net we take for granted today. |
| | What comes next?, we wondered. When we thought about how a toddler matures, gradually realizing that the world isn't just a personal place, we came to an agreement about the nature of The Next Stage; It would be social. |
| | Mark wrote up something for Alex.Brown about Social Computing, and I wrote a few things too. (I see Mark is still writing along similar lines.) I remember using some of what Mark wrote to help promote MORE for Symantec. |
| | There is something Field-of-dreamy about social software. Not in the sense of "If you build it, they will come," but in the sense that it isn't just personal. It's about us, whoever we are. It's where the one meets the many. Maybe it's a dream right now, vague and not well defined. Others may see hype and worse; but I see a there there. |
Luck = Preparation
| | My glasses fell apart today. Fortunately, I keep a spare pair, old and scratched but still useful, in my suitcase. Coming in handy. |
| | Sometimes things go right. |
Flyblogging
| | I made the most of sitting in Seat 29G on a 767 between LAX and JFK yesterday. I've done the same in many other seats many other times, often taking pictures of places I think I might want to visit later on the ground. Yesterday, it was Capitol Reef in Utah: |
| | I've been there before, but only pasing through. Next time I'd love to check out the geology. This shot is from the North end of the park which goes quite a distance along the same Waterpocket Fold. |
| | A few minutes later we passed over a bunch of ski areas that still seemed to have plenty of snow. Here are Breckinridge (to the left of the ridge there) and Copper Mountain in Colorado: |
| | Last month, on the way to PC Forum in a short-hop jet from L.A. to Phoenix, I got a shot of poppy-covered mountains just east of L.A. (and south of Riverside). I've seen these before, but never this extreme. It was an amazing sight. The mountains looked like they had been spray-painted orange: |
| | Hey, beats the crap out of seeing "Drumline" for the fourth time. |
| | [Later...] Follow-ups from Marc and Coyote Gulch, which I know I have also photographed at one time or another from altitude. I have it somewhere around here... |
| | Man, it's hard blogging visuals over dial-up. Arg. |
Uh oh
| | Guess where I've been gradually moving Searls.com, plus a pile of other stuff? Might need to fix that before something bad happens. |
Dinner in NYC, Thursday
| |  Here's the default plan: Katz' Deli (other links here and here), 205 E. Houston St., at 7pm. A gracenote on the chord of Katz extreme cultural significance is this fact: it's where Meg Ryan faked her orgasm in When Harry Met Sally. Hey, maybe you can have what she was having. |
Dial-up is hell, part N
| | It's amazing to me that I used to travel the world with a Duo 250 and post all kinds of stuff from everywhere (to Compuserve forums and other forgeteries of which approximately nothing remains) over a truly crappy 14.4 modem. |
| | I'm sitting here in a hotel in Long Island at 4:15am, trying to do a little flyblogging (which I'll explain when I have the bandwidth), and getting one time-out error after another. Arg. |
| | Posting with Radio is impossible, so I'm using EditThisPage. |
| | Soon it's off to work. Hope I can grab some bandwidth there, but if not, I probably won't be posting anything until late Tuesday night, when I get to a friend's place in Manhattan. |
| | [Later...] I just got a bit of Ethernet out of the wall where I'm hanging today, so I was able to get back on with Radio. Nice. No time to add anything, though. |
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