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Friday, August 24, 2001
Partial URL Theater 
| | I just clicked on a URL in an email. I was split between two lines, so only the fist was active — and incomplete. Here it is. What comes up for me is a bottom frame that's full of an ad for my ISP. I'm just kinda wondering ... why? This isn't a bad thing (I think they're good guys who ought to advertise a bit, frankly). I just wonder if it's something everybody gets, or just me, for some reason. |
| | The whole URL, for what it's worth (and it might be a lot for Duke Fans like Buzz Bruggeman and myself) is here. Finally, a Duke blog. |
Under destruction
| | This site is gonna go through some changes: a new format by Bryan Bell, who also does Dave's & Craig's sites, among too many others to mention. |
| | But before we roll over, I want to give a huge thanks to Mike Donellan of BlackHoleBrain, who did the incumbent design. I've come to like that design, and I'll miss some of its virtues, especially its wide-open white spaces, uncrowded by other stuff crowding in from the sides. Yet, as we know, some of that kind of stuff makes for a better blog. |
| | So the main reason for the design change is structural: I moving the blog to a news item format, which features both day and department views. I'm also moving the calendar to the top, putting my blogrolling list on the main page and adding search (yesss!!!). And, as a side effect, my RSS channel will no longer suck, which I know Glenn and many other complaining readers will appreciate. |
| | When they come up, let me know what you think of the departments. We can change them any way we like. |
I have to do this.
Credit where overdue
| | The several of us involved have gone back, done the social archaeology, and realized that proper credit for the term "blognosing" goes to Craig Burton. He said it. Not me. Or whoever. Or whomever. |
Stinking clearly
| | Looks like I won't get that camcorder I ordered — at least not in time for LinuxWorld, which I'll drive up to on Monday. |
| | Because the credit card company denied the charge. |
| | And why did they do that? |
| | Because there was "unusual activity" on the card. |
| | And what kind of activity would that be? |
| | "Mr. Searls, did you place an order for $1300 on the Internet earlier this week?" |
| | "You denied the charge because I placed an order on the Internet?" |
| | "Yes. But now that we've spoken you can tell them to go ahead and we'll approve the charge." |
| | "That's no help. I needed it tomorrow. They close at five. They're in New York. It's six in New York. They don't work on weekends, so they won't be able to ship it until Monday. I need it in San Francisco on Monday, and they won't ship except to the address on my card, which is in Santa Barbara. The whole deal is screwed. I am not happy about this." |
| | "What's so unusual about ordering something on the Internet anyway?" |
| | "But that's why the camera company called me to confirm the order yesterday," I said. |
| | "I understand. That was our mistake. We screwed up." |
| | So now we were in customer-always-right territory. Maybe the guy took a look at the activity on the card (about the only one I use, which I do for almost everything) and realized that I was not a good customer to lose. I don't know. In any case I won't have the camera in time. In fact I'll probably cancel the order and make a more considered purchase later under less pressure. |
Array of hope
| | Having a laptop with an 802.11b wireless connection (aka "wi-fi," which I believe stands for "wireless minus funding infrastructure") has put me in a state of rolling epiphany. If my Titanium were a car, it'd be leaving tracks of smoking rubber all over 3-dimensional space. |
| | Then there was hanging out in more and more places that quietly featured 802.11b access, often without even knowing it. Then I filled my own house with the nifty little waves, making it possible for me to work on the Net from the bathroom, the yard and (no kidding) the roof. |
| | Then there was Jabbercon, where they didn't provide any wireless connectivity, but a guy from Disney showed up with a wi-fi box, "just in case," he said — thus enlarging the event's context from a room in Keystone Colorado to the whole damn Net. It was amazing and inspriational, because I'm going to do the same thing at LinuxWorld Expo next week. |
| | Then there was yesterday, when I stepped off the plane in San Jose, sat down in the first chair I could find, and got on the Web over the airport's Wayport system in a matter of seconds. Suddenly no airport will ever be the same. That's why I now fault United Airlines for not yet providing the service in their expensive and convenient Red Carpet Clubs. As a member I promise to give them crap about the matter at every opportunity until they do. |
| | It's disappointing to me that pay-for-use wi-fi (like WayPort and MobileStar provide) is rapidly becoming the wi-fi norm, when it should simply be a ubiquitous service. It's more pay phone than cell phone. |
| | But, as it happened, I was on a mission of employment yesterday in San Jose, doing a consulting gig for Arraycomm, a very interesting company founded by Marty Cooper, who fathered the cell phone when he was at Motorola. |
| | I don't want to flog the company here, but I do want to say that visiting them yesterday for the first time gave me the sense of what we really want, and that wi-fi may forever fall short of providing, which is to be on the Net wirelessly everywhere there's a cellular signal. |
| | Arraycomm's technology treats you to maximum personal bandwidth by constantly maximizing cellular signal strength at the point in space where you happen to be. This is done by applying computing intelligence to the combined signals of more than one antenna at a time. Although more antennas might help at both ends, it's mostly a matter of applying the right software at the cell site. Meaning it's within reach just wherever there are existing cell sites. And we're talking about throughputs of up to many megabits here — whether you're sitting at Starbucks or riding in the back seat of a taxi. |
| | Which means the "last acre" may be an easier problem to surmount than the "last mile." |
A bit close to work
If markets are conversations, what's gossip?
| | Steve MacLaughlin is a thinker and a Hoosier whose work has appeared in Fast Company, USA Today, the Indianapolis Star and, most signficantly, his own blog: Saltire. That's where he's taking a lot of what we talked about in Cluetrain and running off in very thoughtful directions. |
| | That's what's happening with his essay "The Viral Economy," which offers a creepy corollary to some of Cluetrain's ideas, such as "markets are conversations" and "networked markets are getting smarter faster than most companies." Steve looks at the viral nature of networked information and offers some very interesting ideas about how — as I read it — we get stupid faster too. |
Nuts
Pigflog
| | Just noticed that KPIG does real well in the ratings. The two stations ahead of it have relativelly huge signals. Which gives us livid proof that it's possible for a commercial radio station to do very well with an offbeat format (my favorite description of KPIG is "mutant cowboy rock & roll") in which every fifth ad is a joke and the jocks choose all the tunes. |
| | Small as it is on the Earth (compare and contrast facilities here), KPIG is one of the widest and prettiest MP3 signals on the Web. |
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