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Tuesday, January 15, 2002
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 Tuesday, January 15, 2002
started 1/17/2002; 1:38:48 AM - last post 2/11/2002; 5:57:26 PM
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Doc Searls - Tuesday, January 15, 2002 
1/17/2002; 5:38:48 AM (reads: 6231, responses: 7)
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Floating for perls 
| | Even more enjoyable is the Geek Internet Cafe in the Library after the sessions, a true geek chat room, that often does not close down until 5 am. There is a wonderful Internet culture going on aboard this cruise, a relaxed low stress web ecology that is a pleasure to be absorbed in. The "conversations" are concurrent live verbal circles of dialog and Internet communications to sources off of the ship. |
Living up to his nickname
I am Zeus, god of thunderlinks
| | I was just looking through the referer logs for some OS X stuff when I ran across a single inbound visit from Girlrepair.com, one of the most artfully personal blogs (and home pages) on the Web. There I found this in the January 6 entry: |
| | i was plowing through the server logs midday yesterday and i came across a single referral from doc searls weblog. i had a peek around the site and rather enjoyed myself there. what i didn't realize until about half an hour later is that if you get mentioned on doc's site, you get hits. massive amounts of hits, sometimes up to six uniques a minute. such things make me happy. |
| | Kind of a blog pong game, no? Makes me happy, too. (Just wish he had his permalinks working, so I could point to the day in question, but: whatever.) |
Beauty is in the blog of the beholder
| | In a parallel life, I'm a photographer. I don't do as much as I used to (even though I have all these fantasies about organizing everything digitally, since I certainly have the means — and the stockpile — if not the time); but I'm always noticing good work. |
Hear here
| | Paul is going to be on the radio tomorrow. Also the webio. His subject: copy-protected music CDs, the idea behind which is to subtract value. I suggest he ask the audience for a show of hands (or mice): How many of ya'll want CDs you can't copy? |
| | Here's one of my favorite lines from my wife, who is the smartest businessperson I know: never bet against your customers. |
Fun with Google
| | Inspired by Crackmonkey, let's mark today as a baseline for "denial of civilization" as a rallying meme against the mass market spam attack that's going on right now. (current Google count: 3) |
| | By the way, I just did a search for something in my inbox, and found myself in the midst of more than three thousand pieces of spam that I never saw before because they were dated in the past. My current inbox only dates from November. All these came in with dates from 1946 forward to dates in 2001, but earlier than whatever the dates were when they arrived. In other words, all of them got auto-sorted out of sight by Eudora when they arrived. They arrived old. Amazing. It was like opening a book to find it filled with termites. |
Zip your sleeve
| | After a guy lost his tool in a urination accident (women may not know this, but guys will pee on anything, including high voltage cables), Russian doctors grew one on his arm. (Link from Romenesko's Obscure Store) |
Help me! I'm being filterrrreeed....
| | Sometimes we don't even know what the hell we're getting into when we drop a one-liner on a newsgroup or something. I did that yesterday when I called the spam storm in our email boxes a "denial of civilization" attack. |
| | RageBoy put the acronym together this morning... |
| | Is Topica making money? I gotta wonder. Maybe somebody should archive this list elsewhere before it's too late. |
What would you buy from this guy?
| | Since we're on the subject, here's one reason why I'm glad I quit the ad biz a long time ago (even though, frankly, I often enjoyed the hell out of it). Some of what this guy says makes sense, but it's still the same old top-down stuff. It reminds us that the only difference between pushy advertising and pushy salespeople is just the medium. (Got that link from RageBoy, by the way.) |
Relemurations
For the birds
| | Blue jays are the smartest birds. At least around here. A couple weeks ago we put up a bird feeder outside our kitchen window. So far the only birds that have found it are the blue jays. Actually, they're western scrub jays, but I'm from New Jersey, and they look like blue jays to me (or, in my native vernacular, "some kinda fuckin' bluebird"). |
| | Somewhere around here I have a parody of a bird guide I wrote a thousand years ago. The only entry I remember is the "nut-crested bloodwrench." |
Nice blog, eh?
| | My friend Bill Stratas lives in Toronto, where he's a local marketing and cultural force. I've been wondering when he'd join the blog revolution, and the answer is: now. He's on Radio and making it rock, too. |
CQ CQ CQ
| | Tony Collen has a whole blog — Ham Journalism — devoted to its worthy subhead, Exploring independent & amateur journalism on the Web. |
| | Though a young guy, Anthony is an old hand at ham radio. And he draws some interesting parallels between his old passion and his new one as a journalism student at the University of Minnesota— and as a blogger. |
On the other head...
| | In OS X I don't need to go into a panel and tell the machine whether or not I'm connected by Ethernet or wireless (even though there is a panel for just that purpose). I dunno how, but: it just knows. |
Bvvvt...
| | I've discovered one shortcoming of OS X on laptops: it cuts battery life in half, or worse. And the grace period after the low battery warning can be measured in seconds. |
How did she get so good so fast?
| | Happy birthday to Jennifer Balderama. She's 25. That's younger than our three oldest kids. And 20 years older than our youngest. Somehow we got three generations out of two. |
What hath clues wrought
| | Wealth Bondage is so full of stong shit I'm almost afraid to go there. Samples: |
| | Without hypocrisy, all we would have are Brands and the Flag. |
| | TheÝSioux worshipped the Buffalo, from whom all goods flowed: needles from bone, blankets from the hide,Ýthreads from sinew, pemmican from the flesh,Ýceremonial headdress from theÝhorns, fire fromÝdried dung. So, we worship the Market. |
| | As a kid we used to go down to the dump on Saturday night and shoot rats with a bb gun.ÝFrom there it was a short step to thrashing clients for a living. |
Uh oh
| | Received a fancy package today from Cox Communications, my ISP, announcing the company's new Internet services, which presumably replace what they used to resell (or still do — it's not clear) from Excite At Home. They even show the package here on their support page. It's full of consumer-oriented stuff about email and browser settings. But I don't use the supplied email address. In fact, I don't even know what it is. Searls.com, with its mail server, is hosted out of my old ISP, Xo. |
| | Anyway, all I need to know is if I need a new ID for the router's relationship with the cable modem. Doesn't look like it's an issue. It's DHCP all the way. |
| | Anyway, if I suddenly go dark, you'll know why. |
discuss
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Bernie Dunham - Re: Tuesday, January 15, 2002
1/17/2002; 9:49:31 PM (reads: 2253, responses: 6)
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Larry Wall is conducting his Guru session in the Half Moon seminar room aboard the Holland America Veendam, speaking about developing PERL 6 while being unemployed. The Geek Cruises PERL Whirl seminar at sea is in the closing stages of the all day sessions at sea, as we cruise to the Bahamas after spending a day in St. Thomas and St. Johns. On Friday there will be a series of morning sessions before the conference is concluded. The Internet Cafe is on the deck above us, but with three CISCO Aironet 350 access points frequency hopping across the ship, we have 11 mbps connectivity in the main seminar rooms. Many attendees brought access points for us to test aboard this wireless Internet Beta. The 3COM access point works almost as well as the CISCO Aironet, with almost the same range. I have even rented out my extra 3COM 802.11 adapter cards, because the CISCO access points are configured to accept non-Aironet 802.11 and 802.11b adapter cards in repeater mode. We tested a Dynalink access point as the root AP in the Internet Cafe one night, because there is a price difference of almost $1000 with the CISCO APs. Unfortunately, the Dynalink did not have the same range as the CISCO equipment: three signal jumps with the Dynalink APs would not provide access to the seminar rooms on the deck below the Internet Cafe. In the Library and Card Room, the Dynalink would provide 11 mbps access, but the difficult part of working this metal environment is bouncing, reflecting, or jumping the signal from deck to deck. It is rewarding to see a dozen lap tops tuned on during a session as attendees multitask during the lectures. Even more enjoyable is the Geek Internet Cafe in the Library after the sessions, a true geek chat room, that often does not close down until 5 am. There is a wonderful Internet culture going on aboard this cruise, a relaxed low stress web ecology that is a pleasure to be absorbed in. The "conversations" are concurrent live verbal circles of dialog and Internet communications to sources off of the ship. We discovered the Bermuda Triangle of Internet access today, something Jay in the Internet Cafe says happens every cruise at this area of the sea: due to proximity to the Equator, the solar flare activity disrupts radio communications, and the Internet transmission fade in and out, often times for hours. The signal seems to have stabalized now, but I was warned that signal disruption can continue into the late evening. We are changing rooms for the next Guru session, but since roaming is turned on, the wireless connectionw will carry over into the next room. Neil Bauman said that the wireless LAN will absolutely be set up for the MAC cruise, and that I will start the site survey arrangements as soon as this cruise is concluded. The Titanium laptops work great with the CISCO access points (IEEE 802.11b WIFI), so all of the MAC users will have a simple configuration (join geekcruise).
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Doc Searls - Re: Tuesday, January 15, 2002
1/17/2002; 10:46:44 PM (reads: 1219, responses: 5)
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Great report. Thanks again, Bernie.
By the way, the deal with the equator has less to do with solar storms than with the directional proximity of geosynchronous satellites to the Sun itself at mid-day. El Sol is rather bright with RF noise as well as light. So, when your dish is pointed at a bird in space and the Sun slides across the same view, it kinda crashes the party. I imagine solar storms don't help, either. In any case, there was no unusual solar activity today. Or all week. See: <http://www.sec.noaa.gov/SWN/>. Other sources: <http://solar.physics.montana.edu/YPOP/ProjectionRoom/latest.html>
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Bernie Dunham - Re: Tuesday, January 15, 2002
1/27/2002; 8:50:30 PM (reads: 1241, responses: 4)
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I accepted Randal's research online about the solar activity. Your analysis sounds good too. I should have emailed the professors in in Aricebo to get their opinion before posting an explanation. The Digital Seas' Internet Cafe manager, Jay Skill's, noted that that area of the ocean had the same problem on every cruise.
This was about the most fun I have ever had working in my profession.
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Doc Searls - Re: Tuesday, January 15, 2002
1/27/2002; 11:49:08 PM (reads: 1425, responses: 3)
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I hope what you worked up will leverage in future Geek cruises. And thanks a bunch for sharing your adverntures with us!
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Bernie Dunham - Re: Tuesday, January 15, 2002
2/11/2002; 8:58:54 PM (reads: 2910, responses: 2)
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February 4th Digital Seas arranged for me to board the Holland America Volendam, the ship that will be used for MAC Mania. Although the fiber optic to ethernet connection had not been prepared, I was able to complete the wireless site survey. Geek Cruises is expecting 130-150 people to attend MAC Mania, which cruises out of Vancouver to Alaska May 27 - June 3. While in Ft. Lauderdale for the site survey, I also arranged to complete a wireless Internet site survey aboard Royal Caribbean's Voyager of the Seas. Last July I completed a WLAN site survey of the sister ship, Explorer of the Seas on the same weekend I was surveying the Maasdam, which was used for LINUX Lunacy in October. The Voyager of the Seas is the largest cruise ship in the world (as are the sister ships in the Voyager Class). Almost three times larger than the Maasdam, I will be booking some cruise seminars July - September for a project somewhat different than Geek Cruises, yet similar enough we (MOUStech.NET, LLC) have partnered for the wireless projects together, a great example of non-competitive altruistic business alliances. I am planning on arriving early in Vancouver for MAC Mania to survey the Holland America Ryndam, which will host LINUX Lunacy, cruising to Mexico from San Diego, and then surveying the Holland America Amsterdam, which will host JAVA JAM in Alaska. The Amsterdam is the flag ship of Holland America. Although not every Geek Cruise will offer the wireless Internet access, those cruises that book enough conference attendees to pay for the up link will get the service. The geeks at LINUX Lunacy deserve a great deal of credit for helping Beta test this entire concept of wireless Internet access at sea, because it could have died at birth if we had not pressed Digital Seas to get the Internet access on PERL Whirl in January. The geeks from PERL Whirl did a great job of finishing up the Beta testing so that we can offer the service, starting with MAC Mania. (Apple always seems to do things first...)
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Doc Searls - Re: Tuesday, January 15, 2002
2/11/2002; 9:09:05 PM (reads: 1790, responses: 1)
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Very, very cool, Bernie. You deserve huge credit too. I just pointed to your post on the blog, and to Mac Mania and Linux Lunacy too (where I am not yet listed as a speaker, though I should be).
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Bernie Dunham - Re: Tuesday, January 15, 2002
2/11/2002; 9:57:26 PM (reads: 2021, responses: 0)
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Before I met Neil Bauman in Palo Alto during the winter holidays in 2000, where my oldest daughter, Maitreya, attends Stanford (she graduated from MIT), I had completed two Royal Caribbean site surveys aboard first the Sovereign of the Seas (September), then the Majesty of the Seas (October). This whole idea for wireless Internet and WLANs for Geek Cruises was worked out over lunch in Palo Alto, just before Neil left for another cruise vacation with his family. I was using BreezeCom 802.11 equipment aboard the Royal Caribbean ships to set up a WLAN for the training classes I was creating for Virtual eTeams.NET, one of the companies I have started (the other is Global SEAtech.NET). The Virtual eTeams project wanted to use cruise ships as the backdrop for teaching collaborative computing, as well as how to start virtual corporations compossed of mobile virtual teams. Neil just liked the idea of the geeks at his conferences having wireless access of any type. At first we tried to get Dell to sponsor the Red Hat Linux Server side of the project but apparently Dell has forgotten what it is like to be a start up company: what we were doing was cool but too small for sponsorship. We were able to get Cisco, although we were passed down from corporate to a channel partner, Excalibur, to partially sponsor the wireless side of the LINUX Lunacy Beta project by providing the Aironet 350 equipment on a trial basis: "If this is not a practical service, you can return the equipment." The Cisco sponsorship was more important than the Dell sponsorship, but it was Dell that linked us up with the proper partners.
Just Cruisin' Plus in Nashville has been getting me on board Celebrity and Royal Caribbean ships for the site surveys in preparation for the cruise seminars MOUStech.NET, Global SEAtech.NET, and Virtual eTeams.NET will be sponsoring this summer aboard the Voyager class ships.
From the very beginning of my projects I had some PowerPoint slides of books that are must read for the virtual team concept. Your "Cluetrain Manifesto" has been a part of our business plan ever since we started working on this in early 2000. What we are trying to do is not business as usual.
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