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From a distance Dan reports good things from PC Forum. This is the first time I've missed the show in a good ten years or more. Back when I left the agency business in the early Nineties I cut my budget back gradually to just the best — and most expensive (far as I know) — event. Last night while I watched the Oscars my heart was out schmoozing with Dan and other friends old and new on the Lagoon Lawn under the cool Arizona sky. This morning it pained me not to hear Esther Dyson tell some laggard, by name, to sit down: a traditional grace note on the opening chord of the day's first session. Good theme too: Define Yourself. Here's what I'd contribute to that conversation if I were there: Who you really are is what you can't redefine. You can change your name, your business, your mission, your methods, your ownership, what you make and sell — pretty much everything. But you can't change where you come from. Your life, whether you're a business or a human being, is anchored somewhere. Your vector points forward from there, no matter how far you've already moved. For instance, Steve Jobs comes from Art and Apple comes from Steve. Nordstrom still comes from shoes. H-P still comes from those two guys in a garage. Definition therefore requires respecting first purposes. Even if you don't have a dead white guy on the wall in your foyer, there's a ghost whose spirit still drives your company forward. Don't cross it. The peerage increases Just got a call from Ted Shelton, Senior VP and Chief Strategy Officer at Borland (brief bio Microsoft needs to position itself as understanding the future of computing and communicating this to non-technical people. Thus the description of .Net becomes all about what you will be able to DO with .Net and not about what it IS. The problem is that all of these great things that you can DO with it are what the developers are going to go and write -- and they will be using lots of different tools to create that future, not just Microsoft's. Here's a marketing axiom for you: If you can say what it does easier than you can say what it is, it isn't anything. It has no classification. It's a species alien to the Linnaen taxonomy that every topic needs if its nouns are to be understood. Likewise if you default to a buzzphrase rather than a noun. A spreadsheet is a spreadsheet. Not a "numerical matrix." Ted has some great stuff to say about Tip Jars too. Hope he can forgive me for missing his post on that subject to my own blog three months ago. Your witness, counsellor Jeffrey has an unusual learning style. His main interest appears to be in holding opinions, which he equates with being Right. So he seeks information that allows him quickly to issue an opinion about the subject of inquiry, for however briefly the inquiry lasts. It usually isn't long. Once he's ready, he brooks no further instruction, much less correction. His job, like yours as an instructive adult, is to issue opinions that are defensible largely on attitudinal grounds. This is an old Searls family trait, by the way. We all work to resist it, some more than others. But it's surreal to parent a 4-year old boy who sounds like my father — or worse, a strange ombination of my father and an argumentative attorney. Jeffrey argues everything, and defends his position in an emotiional state Paddy Chayevsky perfectly labeled (in the movie Network) "adamantine."
He said "Watch! You do it like THIS!" He then took a rock the size of an orange and threw it underhanded high in the air. It landed about ten feet away with a big plop in a retreating wave. "See?" "That was good. But you need—" "No! Watch!" He did more or less the same thing, again. "There." "But it didn't skip." "Yes it did." "How?" "Watch." He did the same thing again. "There." "Okay. Let me show you again, and you tell me the diff—" "No!" "Huh?" "You do it my way." "I like doing it my way. I think you'll—" "Look!" He threw a rock as big as a shoe. It landed in the sand, well short of the water. "That's skipping a stone?" "You have to throw it up." "Maybe you do. But if you're skipping stones, they need to skip." "That skipped." "I didn't notice." "That's okay. Watch." He continued to perfect his technique. "Are you interested in learning how to skip stones like I do?" "I already know." "Okay. I'm going to go ahead and skip stones my way." "NO! Do it my way." "Why?" "I'm doing it right." "You mean you don't want me to skip stones my way? " "I want you to do it my way." "But I don't want to do it your way." "My way is right. Watch!" "It's getting dark. Let's go walk on the wharf." "Good. I want a cheeseburger." "What if there isn't a cheeseburger out there?" "We'll see." There was, of course. Terrible one, too. On Saturday, while we were driving up to the Bay Area, we had a couple more conversations of the same sort. At one exasperated point I said, "Jeffrey, if you had a choice between being right and learning something, which would you choose?" His face became grave and determined. He looked me square in the eye and said "I am simple, and I am right." I could't help laughing. "What's funny, Papa?" "I just can't believe how stubborn you are." "I know. I told you so." He'll be fine, I'm sure. Not sure about his old man, though. Being instructive is another Searls trait that's hard to repress. Dave nails it Hailstorm, he says, is Microchannel. Worse, it's OS/2. Good in many ways on feature-oriented basis, but, as Walt Whitman put it so well, "demented with the mania of owning things." Speaking of hail Tom von Alten has tranlated Microsoft's Hailstorm press release from MicrosoftTalk to English. Good stuff. Lost Weekend Joyce took the train up to San Jose early Friday morning. I worked a full day then picked up Jeffrey from his new preschool (which he loves — a first), and then ran around packing stuff into the car at home, office and camping supply stores. Packed, repacked, got Jeffrey to bed waay too late (he put up effective resistance — the kid does not like to sleep), and finally got to bed at 1am on Saturday morning. Got up at 4 to shower and finish packing for the trip up to Morgan Hill. Got that done by 5:15 and had Jeffrey installed in the back seat by 5:30. After a long wait at the nearest McDonalds (Jeffrey wanted an "McEgg Cheeseburger Sausage Sandwich"), we were on the road in the predawn gloom at about 6:00. Our destination 300 miles up Highway 101: Jeffrey's cousin Patrick's birthday party at a Gilroy roller rink, then camping up on Mount Madonna celebrating a brother-in-law's 40th (context: Joyce is the oldest of 8). The forecast was for rain, "gradually spreading southward." After stopping frequently to clean up spilled orange juice and take the occasional pee, we got to Morgan hill about 10am, and hung out until the party. I was going to pick up Joyce at the train in San Jose while Jeffrey played around while learning to roller skate. I stayed at the rink long enough for Jeffrey to skate without looking like Woody from Toy Story, flopping around all over the place. Joyce had called: she missed the train and I needed to pick her up at the station in Redwood City, near our old house, which she was fixing up for the open house crowd on Sunday. She and I went back by the old place one more time, then all the way down back past Gilroy to the campground, where Jeffrey and his cousins were already tearing up the woods. I'm figuring I'd put on about 500 miles by now. On three hours ' sleep. I set up the tent, even though it was missing many pieces (shoulda checked, but no time). The new air mattress (a big puffy queen-size thing) made the floor sort-of solid, almost compensating for the absence of frame members overhead. We got a nice fire going, cooked up a pile of food, and gradually began to move more and more of the tables and activities under the big canopy somebody brought in case it rained. The drizzle started a little before dark. By about 8 it was raining steadily and some of us were walking around wearing black plastic bags with holes cut out for head and arms. By 9 the water had puddled up throught he redwood duff on the forest floor and it was raining hard. I looked inside the tent and saw there was no way this was going to work, and began to haul as much of our stuff as I could back to the car. Soon the rain was so heavy and steady that there was no way not to get soaked just walking 50 feet. My loafers were totally soaked and muddy. I couldn't see through my glasses, which were covered with rain and steam. The flashlight illuminated more falling rain than any intended subject. Joyce, blessed by an umbrella, finally got Jeffrey emplaced in the car. I gave up on the tent and everything in it, which I believed included my shorts and my wallet — which was... somewhere. Maybe the ground, looking like yet another wet brown leaf. We left around 10, watching the rain bounce off the road and the hood of the car. It had turned to hail. Most of us had left, but nine inlaws and cousins were huddled in one big tent. Some were walking to their cars, parked up to a mile away. We stayed at the local home of one wet inlaw couple. I felt like paradise . The next morning the sky cleared and we were getting ready for breakfast at another inlaw's local restaurant when Jeffrey decided to climb on top of his mom while she bent over on the stairs putting clothes in a bag or something. She had just set her tall cappuchino on the top of the stairs. All I heard was "No, Jeffrey, don't! No! NO! Oh NOOOOOOOO!" The coffee was now pooling and dripping down the entire staircase, soaking into the brand-new white carpeting. We spent the next two hours cleaning that up. Or trying. A professional is due to come Monday and see if the damage can be undone. The unhappy campers showed up gradually over the next several hours. One of them brought our tent in the back of a trailer, collapsed around the air mattress, wet as a fish. We packed all of it as-was and eventually headed back home. We got in around six, went to the local DoubleTree and set up Jeffrey with the laptop so he could play Mr. Potato Head while Joyce and I watched the Oscars — a family tradition hard to pursue at the apartment, since we have no TV there. To our amazement, Jeffrey was good the whole evening. The TV was immense, and we were almost alone in the place. Now I'm back in the office with the usual excess of stuff to do. Oh, and in the middle of all this, our offer on a house in Santa Barbara was accepted. Here's hoping the old place sells. Looking for a dramatic contemporary with decks off every room, walls of glass and spectalular views of the whole Bay Area from high in Emerald Hills, only 20 minutes from SFO? Lemme know.
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A couple days ago we went for a walk on the beach, which is a stone's throw (even with my weak shoulder) from our apartment 
