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Thursday, February 11, 2005
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 Thursday, February 11, 2005
started 2/10/2005; 8:49:49 AM - last post 2/12/2005; 1:57:17 AM
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Doc Searls - Thursday, February 11, 2005 
2/10/2005; 12:49:49 PM (reads: 6770, responses: 3)
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Travelling man 
| | Dave reports on his meeting with the News-Record in Greensboro, which was my hometown newspaper for some of the many years I lived in North Carolina. Actually, it was two papers back then. I lived there that long ago. His next stop is Chapel Hill, my last home town in NC (I moved to Silicon Valley in '85). Maybe some old friends (to pick two of many) there can show him why theirs was the hardest town I ever left. |
| | Is Crooks Corner as good as it was way back then? If so, highly recommended. |
Leveraged clues
Rules of the road
| | Took me way too long to get here yesterday: six hours from Santa Barbara to Del Mar, which is north of San Diego. The odometer says it was about 200 miles, but that includes several short but time-wasting side trips to find a Starbucks. |
| | And the user clicks on the "e" to see the next map in that direction, don't give them a map that only shows stores from the last search... |
| | Show all the stores on that map. Or at include a button that says "generate list of stores in map area" or something like that. |
| | After seeing the second map, above, I did a search for Lake Forest (there are lakes? there are forests? in southern Orange County? who knew?) and came up with this map... |
| | Which was helpful. They actually do provide close-up maps of locations, which have names like "MacArthur & Main, Irvine". Unfortunately, I was doing all this over a cell phone bridge at sub-dialup speed, so waiting for a map to form on the screen was like watching paint dry. |
| | Now I'm up early at the hotel (a Marriott Courtyard), which kindly provides free broadband, to which I've attached a Wi-Fi base station, to netify the three laptops I've brought with me (two Linux, one OS X) — I'll be talking about laptops at the Desktop Summit this afternoon. |
| | It's a nice enough place. There's a desk with an office chair; although the chair is cheap and the desk is too high. And it has a motel-grade wall unit for HVAC, rather than something central with a thermostat. So ventillation is noisy. |
| | The shower isn't bad, which is saying something. Searls' 9th Law says There's something wrong with all hotel showers. The shower head is too low, or doesn't work right — such as when it "saves" water by atomizing it, so the best it can do is bathe you in a kind of steam that achieves room temperature by the time it reaches your ass, even if water coming out of the shower head straight into your bald spot is hot enough to strip wallpaper. The controls have a cryptic UI or require the hands of a safecracker to operate. The water temperature changes without warning. The curtain wants to hug your body for no reason, or allows a gallon of water to escape and soak the floor. Worst, of course, are the bathrooms with fans so loud you can't hear yourself think; or, in my case, listen to podcasts bridged from laptop or MP3 player to FM and played on a portable radio. |
| | Anyway, kudos to Courtyard for breaking that law. Except for the fan. It's loud, but at least I have the choice of leaving it turned off. |
discuss
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odograph - Re: Thursday, February 11, 2005
2/12/2005; 1:18:52 AM (reads: 1516, responses: 1)
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You gave a great talk. I think I developed kind of a pessimistic feeling for the pace of the Linux desktop over the course of the week. I'll have to let that pessimism settle and see how real it is.
I stayed at the cheap option (the Del Mar Motel) and had a great time. I could walk out onto the beach and then do a loop down the coast and back through town. Fantastic. Fantastic enough to play hookey on Wednesday afternoon and enjoy the town. Starbucks was a short walk up through the park. It was pretty much your basic motel, but with a good hot shower.
Of course the train crossing (and train horns) were pretty close, but that must made me laugh. It was classic, and I can fall asleep anywhere.
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Denise Howell - Re: Thursday, February 11, 2005
2/12/2005; 5:57:17 AM (reads: 1544, responses: 0)
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You can of course sip wifi at our pad any time you're doing this drive again. Just call from the 405 so I can get the milk a-frothin'.
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Doc Searls - Re: Thursday, February 11, 2005
2/13/2005; 5:34:53 PM (reads: 1914, responses: 0)
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Well, we overestimate in the short term and underestimate in the long.
Linspire 5.x beta loaded perfectly into the little laptop I brought with me (a Via-based no-name), and worked without a hitch as well.
And I was very encouraged by what I saw at Linspire's offices: a QA routine with about 20 laptops with Linspire 5 being burned in and tested. Gave me the fuzzies.
I think Linspire is the company to watch. They're highly focussed, and unencumbered by the agendas that burden all the major hardware OEMs.
Train story...
When we moved to Santa Barbara four years ago, we took a place near the beach that turned out to be about 150 feet from the railroad. The first night a freight train came trough at 3:10am, blasting the horn seventeen times (I counted). My wife and I looked at each other with a wtf? expression, and steeled ourselves for more of the same, which came several more times the same night. And the night after that. By the third night we were sleeping through it.
Now, up on a hillside overlooking town, the same train is less loud, but no less (or more) noticeable. Living in SB means living with freight trains roaring through all night. And it doesn't matter. Almost amazing.
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