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| Saturday, December 31, 2005 |
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Have a double diamond year 
| | Man, the Millennium is going fast. We're six years into it already. |
| | This is the first New Years I've slept through. After we came back from a party that involved kids (we celebrated New Years on New York time, which was 9pm Pacific), we did some stuff around the house and crashed at around 11pm. |
| | Now I'm up early to get ready for the family drive to Las Vegas, where we'll hang out and do shows and stuff before I get all professional at CES and then Macworld. |
| | Funny thing about getting older. Time goes faster. When you're young you do time on the bunny slope, easing along at a slow and careful pace. Then as you grow up and become an adult, you go over to the intermediate slope, making the most of time rushing by. Not quite finally, as your dotage approaches, you move over to the black diamond slope, and you carreen downward to Certain Death. |
| | Or so it seems at 6:20am on a Sunday at age 58. |
| | I'm working on so much stuff now. Except for breaks with the family, it seems I never stop working. (And I do most of it at home, too, which rocks.) |
| | And I love it. I'm enjoying work now more than ever, running life's slalom like a wacko skier in a Warren Miller movie. |
| | The certainty of death doesn't bother me. If anything, it motivates me. But the word "retirement" creeps me out. It's a relic of the Industrial Age I've devoted my life to ending. |
| | Jeneane begins her year with a meditation on grief and loss. Especially the early death of her father, when she was just six years old. |
| | There is so much to grieve. 2005 was a year packed with tragedies, massive losses. |
| | I worry about terror and war, about the insanities of ideology, which somebody (Hannah Arendt?) called "a fighting creed". Many more will die from, and for, all of it. |
| | Yet I worry more about lack of knowledge. About the high price of ignorance. |
| | But I'm also excited about the increased abilities we now enjoy to learn, to teach, to become proficient, to flatten the world's useless hierarchies, as Tom Friedman wrote about his book last year. |
| | Watch how hyperlinks tunnel through the pyramid we call CES. Watch how more and more "consumers" hack the machines built to herd them like cattle. |
| | This is going to be a great year. |
| | [Addendum: Don't know why, but my blog is stuck in 2005, even though I've "flipped" the page into 2006. No time to figger it out, so I'm adding this post to the 2005 pile.] |
Big Question
The invisible old hat
| | The government cookie story is getting stupider by the day. The AP — having naively believed they had some investigative scoop when they discovered that the NSA site, like most every site on earth, sets cookies — now finds that the White House has "bugs": gifs that let stats software count visitors (like the garish, multicolored thing on the very bottom right of this page). All it does is measure traffic. It is an issue only with the tin-hat society. This is a nonstory born of ignorance and paranoia and now hype. |
| | While the White House (AP reports) only counts the number of visitors anonymously and doesn't record personal information, the issue of Web bugs is bigger than that, because the things can, and are, used to track users who, whether they know it or not, are no more anonymous than their IP addresses, which are totally knowable. |
| | Wanna get paranoid? Think about that the next time you visit a porn site. Or a site considered a threat to Homeland Security. |
| | Not much recent stuff on the subject. Does there need to be? Just wondering. |
Funnier money
It's easier when the old guy takes off his hat
Happy Newer Year
| | to Australia. I heard on the radio there were no "rice riots" there. |
The business model beyond advertising
| | Which is why we need the next step beyond advertising: the one that's driven and paid for by buyers, not sellers. |
| | Thanks to Hugh for the 'toon. |
Not the mainstrem. The ocean.
| | Lots of smart nuggets in there. Here's one: |
| | Blogging is not overhyped. You may be forgiven for thinking so, as no day goes by without a story on blogs. But blogs are no fad. They are cheap and easy to do. And blogs fulfill that deepest of human needs as defined by psychologist Abraham Maslow: self-actualization. People write blogs because they want to know themselves and want to be known by others and because they want their lives to count. When a communications medium is both riding the Moore's Law cost-capability curve and tapping into a deep need, it's no fad. |
Underseen
| | I took a few shots of yesterday's sunrise while standing outside on an early-morning phone call. I was paying attention to the call rather than the camera, which is why the settings were off and they all came out small. Still, a pretty series. |
Saving the Net vs. Shaving the Net
| | Like I said, this isn't about having/not having a tiered Internet. It already is tiered. This is a battle over whether or not we have an OPEN Internet. The Ed Whitacre's of the industry want it to be a RESTRICTED Internet. A restricted Internet where they not only hold the keys, but where they're free to swing their swords as well. |
| | Exactly. Read the whole thing. |
Addendum
| | One more possible reason why AKMA and family get lousy FM reception: they're right next door to the WNUR/89.3 transmitter site, which is on the campus of Northwestern University. WNUR is 7200 watts at just 100 feet above average terrain. That means it's pumping a big signal sideways into everything surrounding it, including its neighbors in Evanston, overloading and splattering its signal all over the dials of lousy radios. Bear in mind that WBEZ, the desired signal here, radiates with less power from high on a building in downtown Chicago. If WNUA is too close, nothing will compete with it. |
| | See, on most of today's new non-car radios and receivers, resistance to strong-signal "blanketing" or "front end overload" is minimal. Old radios and receivers were much better at that. |
| | In fact, I'm willing to bet that this is AKMA's real problem. |
| | So here's a test: see if WNUA's signal appears elsewhere on the dials of radios that have trouble with WBEZ. Try balling up that little wire antenna, or otherwise making it shorter and less efficient. If WBEZ actually improves, or if WNUA is all that's left, chances are that "blanketing" is the problem. |
Fixing the future
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