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I’ll come back to this, but let me just say, do not do it for me – do it for the children.

I like books. I really like physical books. I like having them, I like holding them. I do not really like reading them all that much though. They never stay open in the same spot, it is hard to hold them with one hand, and if they are large enough – they take a toll on your back when you carry them on the commute. Let’s not get started on the pain of travel when you have to carry them. In bulk. On a trip. In the overhead space of an economy class carrier… Anyway – many people felt the same and we got these awesome ebook readers now. However, my inner snob is not satisfied – how would people visiting my home know of all these great books I pretend to read?

Ultimately, I want a wall the sort of looks like the picture above, but with my actual books. I have given up on publishers simply giving me the epub/mobi/pdf version with a physical book purchase. I know, I know – it would make too much sense to charge me an extra dollar so I do not have to sacrifice the convenience of electronic copy for the pleasure and security of a physical one. I am sure there are all sorts of complicated reasons why publishing industry chooses to punish its customers.

What I have not given up on is this – could someone make cardboard book covers I could get for the books I really wanted? It would be great if they licensed the original covers. It would be great if they had some new originals – but I could finally have the wall of books I own, to look at happily, as I sit in the armchair reading the amazon kindle.

The above is a bit of a joke, but I do find that having had shelves of books, visible books in the house has been great for the kids. Choosing from a list, or even a cover view on a tablet is not at all the same, as coming up to a bookcase and choose a book – seeing its neighbors, seeing its art. So, do not do it for me – do it for the children.

Organizer for Gmail | OtherInbox.

Disney, the largest publisher of children’s books in the world, sells 700 million items a year in 85 countries, said Russell Hampton Jr., the president of Disney Publishing Worldwide. …

The Spider-Man app will be released for the iPad, iPhone and iTouch for $6.99. Geared toward children ages 4 to 10, it includes interactive features, distinguishing it from e-books, Mr. Hampton said.

via Disney Releases Marvel App – NYTimes.com.

I suppose this is not very different from a regular paper-based book, but still, feels a little strange to give this as a gift to a kid. Will probably try it out this Chanukkah season.

On a side-note, did not realize Disney was such a big publishing house.

Related articles

• Disney Releases Marvel App (mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com)

From NY Post page 6.

Soviet School

The person from my old [old, old] life in Soviet Union I communicate the most with is not someone I was close with before. It is someone who I reconnected with, a little, because of the work I do in Russia and an accidental re-introduction by a business partner. All my, admittedly lame, efforts to keep in touch with other old classmates have not worked out.

I am not sure what this means other that you need at least two tenuous connections for even a minimal relationship to work. One is not enough, at least not if it is simply a shared history or geography than no longer plays a big part in your life.

Well before it was finished, the place already had a lot of texture

As weather channel was predicting 20′-30′ rise in water level during Hurricane Irine around NYC, I was thinking, would not it be nice to have a dam that would protect the city from just such a storm surge?

Just days ago I read about St. Petersburg, Russia finally completing its gigantic dam which is supposed to do just that. And since I am on a mini photo-kick right now, I figured I will post some of the pictures I took of the dam before it was a gleaming achievement of russian engineering.

Thanks to @bornmw for taking me there in the dead of winter.

Related articles

• Russia completes Soviet-era dam in St Petersburg (scientificamerican.com)
• Russia completes Soviet-era dam in St Petersburg (huffingtonpost.com)

tooth fairy by anne hazelwood

My Dear Daughter (DD) is very serious about collecting money. Right now it is for books, but that is not really important. In one of her musings she wrote, “I hope tooth fairy brings me $5, or may be $8, then I could buy the new books in the [her favorite books] series that are coming out soon.”

At first I was proud, “She is saving money for books!”, but a moment later I realized – that’s her plan – a tooth fairy will bring her the money.

My DD is still pretty small, but I am amazed at constantly seeing businesses and executives who are supposed to be running them having basically the same plan, hoping for a tooth fairy. It is not that they could not use the money in a good way, it is just that it is not a plan to works out after the first few years of your life, or your business.

There is no deeper point I expect to make. Nothing about how to get money from tooth fairy you need to have your teeth loosened and pulled, or that the money you get is not even close to covering the co-pay and deductible. There has to be a good metaphor in this somewhere, that’s all.

Related articles

• American Children Receiving Less Money From Tooth Fairy: Report (huffingtonpost.com)
• There is always a plan B (Steve Blank)

Related articles

• Movie Review | ‘Mia and the Migoo’: Seeking a Missing Father and Mending the Earth (movies.nytimes.com)

Take this quick survey for iChallenge and let us know.

I get asked to answer a lot of online surveys, and usually ignore them. Once in a while a product I like will ask me to fill out a survey – and I will agree. Most of the time I regret that decision and abandon the process somewhere, because the marketers are just being rude:

1. You are being rude to me – when you are asking too much personal information. I am eager to help improve your product or service, but not to the point of exposing my financial and personal history. If you would not feel comfortable asking your decidedly weird rich uncle for this information until you see his will – do not ask me.
2. You are being rude to me when your questions suck. Questions are hard to understand and scales do not make sense. Please remember – I am not playing sudoku or solving the Times puzzle. I am not interested in thinking hard so *you* get something out of it. The amount of time and money you spend designing the questions shows. Lack of the time shows even more. It is rude to waste my time because you could not bother thinking of phrasing questions that make sense.
3. You are being rude to me when you do not tell me where I am in the process. Today’s example, from American Express, did not have a progress bar. I did not know if I was almost done or not even close. Eventually, I just closed the window. It is rude to waste other people’s time.

I think the “weird rich uncle” is a good test subject. Do not send your customers anything you would not do to your rich uncle. Customers are fickle, and their good intentions do not last very long if you try to actively exploit them.

Related articles

• How Long Should a Marketing Survey Be Online? (hubspot.com)
• Are Your Respondents Suffering from Choice Fatigue? (questionpro.com)

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The people who sign up for the Lincoln promotion aren’t handing over their credit-card numbers: they won’t automatically start getting billed when the promotion expires in 2012. And they’ll also learn that if you’re not a subscriber, you get shown offers for a free subscription.

via Lincoln offers free access to the NYT | Felix Salmon | Analysis & Opinion | Reuters.com.

Would not the lesson of Salon.com be of preeminent value here? They started out as a free service supported by advertising, moved behind a paywall similar to one NYT is trying to implement, had a nice twist on the pay-per-article approach and now seem to have switched to an NPR-like model of user donations and appreciation (plus display advertising). Does not seem to be working out too well for them, but of course NYT is a much bigger brand with a much bigger (longer? deeper?) reach.

The nice twist Salon.com had, as I recall, was that you could have an advertising-free membership, but you could also get a daily pass by watching a 30 second video ad. I really thought that was a great idea. Seemed very fair to me, at least. The Lincoln move for NYT seems very similar, and I hope it works for them. Personally, I believe it will mostly work for brand association and recall, especially if they keep telling me that the daily dose of NYT will be brought to me Lincoln.

I am not sure what it means, for me personally, to be among the 200,000 most heavy users of nytimes.com. Does not feel like an achievement, but if that gets me a “free pass”, I guess that’s good for something.

Related articles

• Silicon Alley Insider: Lincoln Is Offering “Smarter” Readers Free Access To NYT.Com For The Rest Of The Year (businessinsider.com)
• The New York Times Gets It Backward (fool.com)
• How the NY Times Paywall Could Turn Out To Be A Success (wired.com)

Then I said, “Hmm, I have an intuition that if I looked at the historical linguistics of Māori, I could probably get a better fit. Nah, that’s too much work.”

Then I said, “Wait. Māori is a Polynesian language, it’s not hardly any work at all. The entire sound correspondence for the whole language family probably fits on half a page!”

via Māori Tengwar for DungeonWorld | Expositions on the Obscure.

If true – this is some nice and impressive work.

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I liked the beginning:

They gave her The Device when she was only 2 years old. It sent signals along the optic nerve that swiftly transported her brain to an alternate universe—a captivating other world. By the time she was 7 she would smuggle it into school and engage it secretly under her desk. By 15 the visions of The Device—a girl entering a ballroom, a man dying on the battlefield—seemed more real than her actual adolescent life. She would sit with it, motionless, oblivious to everything around her, for hours on end. Its addictive grip was so great that she often stayed up half the night, unable to put it down.

When she grew up, The Device dominated her house: no room was free from it, no activity, not even eating or defecating, was carried on without its aid. Even when she made love it was the images of The Device that filled her mind. Psychologists showed that she literally could not disengage from it—if The Device could reach the optic nerve, she would automatically and inescapably be in its grip. Neuroscientists demonstrated that large portions of her brain, parts that had once been devoted to understanding the real world, had been co-opted by The Device.

A tale of the dystopian technological future? No, just autobiography. The Device is, of course, the printed book and I’ve been its willing victim all my life.

via Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Will the digital revolution really change us? – By Alison Gopnik – Slate Magazine.

I just really like these two paragraphs, but then added some more ramblings below…

Firstly, all “greatest danger to our civilization ever” writings remind me a discussion before the “Device” was even invented. From “Phaedrus“:

“…you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

At some point I really have to wonder – so what if these things, devices and technologies, change us? Is not change the constant and stability an aberration? Seeking to preserve what we are only grasping to understand – incompletely and painfully naively as the past state of our existence seems doomed to failure – and for what? Is the seeking to preserve, catalog, keep from disappearing just a knee-jerk reaction for a people who are lost in their own world, and are afraid to lose what little grasp of reality they (I?) hold? I think at this point few people hold to any kind of optimistic promise of technology – to make our lives better, easier; yet we reap its benefits all the time. Technology has fulfilled much of its promises, but what people earn for has never been technology or its abilities. I think “experts” are confused too – conflating ease of accepting today’s technology as a given with transformation or change of some abstract human nature.

I happen to think that, by and large, human nature is immutable, or at least extremely slowly d/evolving. If it were not – we would not be able to relate to Gilgamesh or Noah, care about D’Artagnan and Luke Skywalker, and have any reaction whatsoever to Scarlett O’Hara and Snooky. And if so – then being able to call out Facebook or Skype for ruining the civilization is a little simplistic and pessimistic not about technology, but humans themselves.

I, of course, am extremely partial to this version of Skywalker – who might invent the next “Device”:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R55e-uHQna0

Related articles

• Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Will the digital revolution really change us? (slate.com)
• Keen On… MIT Professor Says Robotic Moment Has Arrived, And We Are Toast (TCTV) (techcrunch.com)
• Review of Alone Together by Sherry Turkle (fredbortz.scienceblog.com)
• Stephen Colbert Asks Sherry Turkle: What Is There To Live For Without Latest iPhone?! (VIDEO) (huffingtonpost.com)

Related articles

FoReal:FirstBlood for iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, and iPad Wi-Fi + 3G on the iTunes App Store.

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Seriously. I know I am overdoing it on the op-eds, but even without “fisking” the article it is another mish-mash of wishful thinking, half-truth, and plain inconsistency. The only thing I can conclude from the article is that N. Gregory Mankiw cannot be bothered to roll out of bed for less than $1,000. And that’s in a world with no taxes – must be nice to live there, or in Cambridge.

Suppose that some editor offered me $1,000 to write an article. If there were no taxes of any kind, this $1,000 of income would translate into $1,000 in extra saving. If I invested it in the stock of a company that earned, say, 8 percent a year on its capital, then 30 years from now, when I pass on, my children would inherit about $10,000. That is simply the miracle of compounding.

via Economic View – Higher Taxes Mean I’ll Work Less – NYTimes.com.

That’s actually a lot of miracles. Farther on, he concludes that because of tax breaks expiring his children would only receive $1,700-odd dollars before being subjected to estate tax — one affecting people leaving a few million dollars AND not availing themselves of a huge number of other ways of transferring property. What happens if tax policies (*cough* cuts *cough*) remain in place? He leaves $2,000 after 30 years…

<rant> Really?! Really?! We have this discussion from an Economics professor at Harvard about something that has nominal value of $300 and a present value of $30 (with 8% return he expects) or $90 (with 4% return) according to this present value calculator </rant>

Author concludes that this incredibly high marginal tax rate makes him unwilling to work and produce, presumably, similarly weak articles. Fine by me. Is not the whole point of being very well-off is to make this kind of decisions? Would he still work if he got paid more? Since, as a professor he understands that his tax *rate* would remain the same, surely he would not work for $10,000 a day, right?

Luckily for the rest of us, the few tax payers not in danger of being hit with the estate tax, or saving enough money to put our grandchildren through college – we can take the writing job, or the teaching one – if anyone would offer us one.

ps. I know this is not based on a current article, but I am clearing out my draft/desk drawer. Sorry.

Image by mdanys via Flickr

This is certainly one of the small issues that is so well-known, people have stopped talking about it long time ago. Specifically –  in one of our conference rooms we have an old Polycom phone. It is not too bad – as far as very old phones go – but even in the small room, everyone’s default voice level is raised to the level of shouting. That is terrible. Sure, you think you are just making yourself heard, but it is impossible not feel stressed and tired, on both sides of the phone, after screaming and being screamed at for an hour or two. As the meeting goes on - antagonism builds up driven purely by the emotion of screaming at your teammates.

Think about it – does your company expect you to SCREAM at colleagues working TOGETHER? Of course not – they just do not realize that we are hardwired to remember emotions and fall into patterns without remembering the reason you fell into the pattern in the first place. (my interpretation of pp. 276-278 of ‘Upside of Irrationality‘ by @danariely)

So office managers, and other managers, when you invest in cherry furniture, just leave a little money to buy some decent audio and video equipment – it will pay off very very quickly for your team.

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This is somehow surprising? Experts find that a grade of C or B- in High School predicts a similar or slightly lower grade in college… What would non-experts conclude, that a 65 in an NYC High School would correlate to an A in college? Now that would actually prove grade inflation…

Using data collected by state and community colleges, testing experts on a state committee determined last year that a 75 on the English Regents and a 80 on the math Regents roughly predicted that students would get at least a C in a college-level course in the same subject. Scores below that meant students had to often take remediation classes before they could do college-level work. Only 41 percent of New York State graduates in 2009 achieved those scores.

via Most New York Graduates Are Ill Prepared, Data Show – NYTimes.com.

A few times now I have started to draft an “outeducated” article and never had the guts and fortitude to finish it. I was not around for the “Sputnik moment” – a claim true for most of the people in the USA today – so I cannot gauge how good or bad education was in the 50′s and 60′s. My knowledge of that era is driven entirely by watching ‘Happy Days’ and ‘Grease’ – and those kids did not seem to spend too much time studying. (but they sure seemed happy!)

Bill Gross seems to agree:

“The U.S. is being out-trained, out-educated and out- maneuvered in the global competition for employment,” Gross said. “There are seven applicants for every one job that’s available and today’s report only reemphasizes that.”

The horror of this morning’s article is not just in expert’s “realization” that you need a B or C on a Regent’s exam to get a similar grade in college. It is in the fact that by getting a B in one of the weakest primary educational systems in a functioning world you still get a B in what is supposed to be a strong secondary/higher education system.

Related articles

• New York Graduates Poorly Prepared For College: Report (huffingtonpost.com)
• Most New York Students Are Not College-Ready (nytimes.com)
• Most New York Graduates Are Ill Prepared (ekonometrics.blogspot.com)
• Really? Preparing Children to Be Safe at College – NYTimes.com. Really?! (fridnet.com)

What’s the rush for an ipo for a well-capitalized company? Fear that the market isn’t going to be there…

Image by mrflip via Flickr

Thought this was interesting: Digital Swarm Behavior

In general, I keep waiting for a new set of paradigms for “everyone to be talking about” to emerge.

The candidates I hear about are:

• “social graph”, as in “facebook rules the social graph”
• “big data” – alright, this one is pretty much a common phrase by now
• “internet scale” – common in tech circles, but I think will make a jump into mainstream reporting soon

I also liked how the article was written, especially when compared to something like Is Your Enterprise Socially-Networked or Just Your Employees which was nearly incomprehensible, and pretty boring when actually parsed.

The latter was just… lame. And what’s up with capitalizing all Your Words In A Title?

ps. I am not sure what it is today with all the “” this and CAP that for me. apologies.

Related articles

• Book Review: The Smart Swarm (businesspundit.com)

So here are some themes I had thought of writing, but unlike my friend Lenny Zeltser – did not create a post every day.

• Technology does help to keep in touch. Sure human nature has not changed and we still have limited number of connections we can make to people. But keeping in touch has never been easier, and I know that is making a huge difference in people’s lives. I am having a hard time understanding what difference it might make in my kids’ lives, but I am sure it will be profound.
• I spent the last few months trying to be better organized. That effort paid off well, but only on small scale tasks and projects. For anything bigger than a short email or a phone call, a different approach to dividing/using time is really needed. Personally, I wish more techniques for “getting things done” were taught in school – instead of a lot of “teach to test” junk time is being wasted on.
• I have become very interested in “technology-driven businesses”. So my attempts to make sure the organization I work for is truly technology-driven have not gotten the results I hoped for – but that’s what 2011 is for!
• There are lots of stories about people losing their jobs because of technology. Descriptions of their jobs and experiences are fascinating, but the march of time and change is relentless. I am waiting for my own work to be looked at in same nostalgic fashion, “we had to look at output from memory in gc and use probes to determine values at different memory locations”.
• USA is being out-trained and out-educated has been a common theme in 2010. I have a lot of thoughts on whether it is true, and how I keep thinking this trend could be reversed. While possible, I am not optimistic that USA as a country is in a right place for such a major change. I am hoping I am wrong. Otherwise, “Super Sad True Love Story”-style future is coming fast.

That’s all for now folks. Got to buy some champaign and cognac. All set with scotch.

Came across The Shadow Scholar article in the Chronicle of Higher Education today. I cannot say I was disturbed by the article; one assumes these things happen all the time (and have happened since time immemorial). As in many similar online discussions, comments are the best part, my favorite was #341. (I would not be surprised if the country of the poster is Russia, but it does not really matter).

Any discussion of education for me really bogs down on the simple question – what is the goal – for particular society – of the education process. And it is a process in a system – with its feedback loops, homeostasis, and other systemic attributes- constantly seeking equilibrium and responding to stimuli and events. As long as the equilibrium of producing 100 degree holders in order to produce one actual degree-worthy candidate is satisfactory to our society, arguing about sharing blame between college administrators and professors is a bit besides the point.

A lot of highfaluting and important-sounding stuff gets written about office culture, team building, and other human resources buzzwords. I like to think that as much – or more – can be found in small clues left around by the people themselves. A desk with a pile of printouts covering 3 old laptops and 5 coffee cups on it tells you as much about the person as his resume would. At least as much.

But I digress. A similar clue struck me as I walked around offices a little  while ago, late in the evening. It was quiet – everyone had gone home and I had a thorny problem to solve. As I walked the office perimeter, trying to think, I realized that new carpet and paint brought out the wear-and-tear of the doors – specifically door handles.

When I looked at these handles, I actually knew immediately which offices they belonged to – and thought the amount of wear and tear on them made perfect sense given the occupants.

What’s my point? As people decorate and redecorate their offices, fight for team improvement and cohesion, alignment, productivity – they should not forget that in the end there are human beings sitting inside these offices. And so if they find a worn out handle on someone’s door – do not replace it, just quietly give the guy (or gal) a raise.

I do like to read this kind of Op-Ed. It makes me feel optimistic that one day, I too can write an Op-Ed with a 2nd grader’s grasp of history, facts, or reality and have it published in the NY Times. If it is still around by then, of course.

These days on Wall Street, around 50 percent of every dollar of revenue generated is paid out to its employees in the form of compensation. What other business on earth does this? None.

via Make Wall Street Risk It All – NYTimes.com.

That’s a strange point. The author makes it sound as if 50 cents per dollar of revenue is a LOT to pay out in salary costs, but it is actually a LOT LESS than what many other firms in the “knowledge” business pay. Certainly salaries consume more than 50% of the revenue in my part of the world – IT Consulting.

If the author is trying to say that 50 cents/dollar is LOW, then he is not helping his argument at all, nor is being clear about it.

His nostalgia (and tenure on Wall Street) for the good ole days of partnerships should have alerted him to the obvious fact that plenty of partnerships participated in bubbles and busts (see Depression, The Great). Salomon Brothers was a partnership in the 1980′s – did not stop them and more examples too numerous to recount (and research) come to mind.

I do not know why the author does not think people would simply move to Switzerland, or China to continue “being rewarded” or that the whole idea of “reasonable risk” is an oxymoron. I guess it is just too much to ask of a simple NYTimes Op-Ed.

Men in relationships with women who made about 75 percent of the men’s income were the least likely to cheat, said the study, which was released at the American Sociological Association’s 105th annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia.

via Men more likely to cheat on women with bigger paychecks, study says – CNN.com.

Seems to me that this is a pretty flimsy finding. Men are more likely to cheat if they make a lot more or a lot less money, and only “less likely” to cheat otherwise. So overall – pretty much cheating all the way.

On the other hand, these are results of examining,

married and cohabitating people between the ages of 18 and 28, who were in the relationship for more than a year. The study uses data from the 2002 through 2007 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.

So how much can we trust findings about children in a particular generation to hold across 28-34 and other age bands?

I was flattered, of course, that my daily updates actually became an example of what not to do in a couple of blogs. All the more reason not to do them.

//TODO: Find a twitter archival service

Suddenly, New York looks pretty good.

In case you just want to go straight into the visualization, click here – http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/visualizations/house-prices-to-income-ratio

It’s gotten to the point that if I can’t interact with content, I don’t want to consume it. When I read books, I underline certain passages so I can blog about them later. If I were reading on a connected device, I’d simply reblog on tumblr and be done. I don’t think I’m unusual in this regard but I do think I’m in the leading edge of behavior and that more and more people will feel this way.A VC, Dec 2008

Ditto. Take a look at books left over from old (100+ years) writers, scientists, people. They are full of notes on the margins. This type of interaction with text only stopped recently, perhaps because a lot of content consumption went one-way — magazines, newspapers, TV. An old notebook of my grandmother’s I recently found has pages written out from books she borrowed and found insightful but did not own to write directly in. My big hope is that next version of Kindle would provide some kind of a solution. It is possible that other readers already provide these capabilities and I am just unaware of them…

I see a lot of people also blogging as they read through a book – something this type of functionality would facilitate. Does the world really need people to post half-formed thoughts the moment they get an urge to share them? Probably not, but we already do (reading this post qualifies), so making this sharing easier is not going to make things worse, but perhaps encourage those for whom current means are too convoluted or complicated to participate in the discussion.

Finally – I just think it is cool, and is another round of evolution in web mashups and in letting people share their informatin how they want it, where they want it.

No. I wanted to think through, by typing, what it was that has kept me from blogging for a better part of 4 years. It was not lack of source material – certainly these times have an overabundance of that. There is an issue of time, of course. It is pretty obvious that to build a readership, posts need to come with regularity that is well-known to journalists, but not easy to maintain on IT guys’ schedule. It is also recommended to stick to a particular topic or set of topics in which one has expertise or strong convictions. That approach was lacking as well. I like to think by typing, and I am certainly not going to be maintaining 5 different blogs for a carefully segmented presentation of my world views.

What I realized, is that the few people whose blogs I actually read with any regularity where “reasonably smart guys” who put out whatever it was that they wanted to share. That’s it. Some of them I knew personally, some I did not, some I even mostly disagreed with. In all cases; however, it was something for me to think about, to talk to someone else about – and perhaps that’s what matters to me. So, I will make the fool out of myself – writing about things I know little about, as well as risking my professional growth by writing about thing I *should* know about, but perhaps do not.

I might even, seriously now, write a bit about my biggest development challenges – my kids. I am still not sure how far to go there. They will inevitably find this blog in a couple of years and I do not want them to be scarred/horrified/overly pleased.

Anyway, I probably have to write here, since my family and co-workers cannot take any more of my soliloquies.

xxx is a passionate advocate for HIV/AIDS

 I have no doubt that the person being honored is not enamored of HIV/AIDS and does not wish to spread it far and wide. In fact, it seems quite the opposite, that his life’s work has been to eradicate the disease and lessen the suffering it causes. I have seen a similar phrase applied to other causes such as “an active Breast Cancer supporter”… Has this phrasing become acceptable and understood and I am just behind on this?

It is amazing to me how fast we forgive and forget. It is taking Apple a week to undo over a year of hurt in not having an SDK and normal applications on the iPhone. Maybe they just wanted to take is slow and figure things out instead of rushing into it? But I cannot help but dislike the iTunes store.

 
 

I guess I will give it a shot and see how I like it.

 

Update: I was surprised by how easy it was to post from OneNote/Word to WordPress. The integration is actually very well done. I am sure it will encourage me to post much random drivel.

“Beginning Oct. 15, a monthlong discussion of “War and Peace” will appear in the online edition of The Times. The panelists will include Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times; Stephen Kotkin, the director of Russian and Eurasian studies at Princeton University; and Francine Prose and Liesl Schillinger, both frequent contributors to the Book Review. The moderator will be Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the Book Review. Readers can find the discussion at nytimes.com/books.”

from NYTimes Book Section

I suppose it would be too much to expect the times to publish the discussion as an RSS feed.

Update: There is, actually, an RSS feed for the NYT Reading Room blog, but the Times still is not ready to actually put full posts into RSS, just the abstracts.

So I was actually surprised that not one of these well-read people reads the excellent defensetech newsletter. For me, it is a fun way to once a month be amazed at what people do, and maybe should not.

“I don’t think I’m going to need iPhoto any more. I have fallen in love with Adobe LightRoom.

Joining the ranks of other DSLR snobs, I will henceforth shoot in RAW, not JPG. “

I have also been on a Lightroom tear for the last month or so. Few weeks ago I had a chance to really try it out during a trip, with a hundreds of [poor] pictures shot over a couple of days – and I have not been so impressed with photo software … ever.

Photoshop is awesome, of course, but it really does not do much for management of the photos. Adobe Bridge has been horrible for years, but I think its recent improvements (with Photoshop CS2) are negligible compared to Lightroom.
Adobe finally got the separation between shoots and collections which are obvious to photographers, but for some reason not to those who create photo management applications for them. Cannot wait until it is fully integrated into Adobe RAW/Photoshop and has more full-featured version control.  Ever since I started shooting RAW a year ago, I had problems with my old workflow and could not find a new one that worked. Lighroom finally lets me easily keep my initial files where they are, and create collections from each shoot that can be sent to family and friends, or merged into more specific  “portfolio” collections. Now I just need to figure out what to do with the 90GB or existing photos which are already stored according  to my old system…

Some of the nicer things about Lightroom compared to other systems:

• implicit understanding RAW and non-destructive editing workflows
• clean separation between shoots and post-shoot categorization
• transparent file structure — no proprietary databases I can not synch between my many backup hard drives and machines, at least as far as files themselves are concerned (not sure about keyword and other info)
• smart control for gauges, and still ability to just type in values everywhere
• fast – even for RAW (especially for RAW!)
• small touches that show understanding of the paranoid photographer’s mind. Such as the ability to immediately copy imported photos to another location as the import goes on. This creates a backup right away, even as files are been copied off the camera or memory card. Easy to do, but so many tools do not seem to get it…

A previous post on this site had a few comments about the different pieces of software I use. All of them have now been replaced with Lightroom.

We got a new computer.

Costco, the one store aside from B&H that has no problem separatng me from my money and uniting me with large amounts of various stuff. Mostly foodstuff[s], but not always. Like yesterday, I could not pass up a $499 for a G4 Mac Mini. Nicely loaded, for a mini, with the 3-year warranty, a wireless mouse and keyboard, and the superdrive. It is exactly the same at the >$1,000 one currently for sale at the Apple store, but 4-5x times slower. That should cover the discount, would not you say? However, when upgrading from a 1998 1st generation G3 running un-upgradeable OS X (10.15) due to its lack of a DVD drive, it is a nice upgrade. More importantly, it leads to the next paragraph which contains embarassingly youthful gushing.
Every time I get next to a Mac, I really wish I could just switch to one. How do they manage to make Windows-based machines look lame each time, I am not sure, but they do. It probably starts with a lack of poster-sized instruction sheet, continues with a 5 minute setup that discovers everything there is to be found in a pleasant and logical manner. It builds from there with fast and accurate searching, the iLife suite, and the general feeling that “things work as they should.”

I am not a huge fan of iTunes or iPhoto – as specialist applications for music or photography they lack a lot of features ,and are not particularly fast or comfortable for advanced use. As general applications that should come with your computer – they are marvelous. I have only spent a couple of minutes with iWeb to see that it again, manages to deliver 90% of functionality in an easy-to-use package. Sure, Dreamweaver had many of the same features for years – but who used it and when? Same can be said about iCal – the calendar program, and other programs.

I think Apple has finally pefected, or has come very close to it, the mix of building proprietary software for a core audience that it understands, closely controlling the user experience by providing the hardware to OS to application level layers, yet truly supporting open standards where it is important for power users. It took me all of 2 minutes to add my google calendar feed to the iCal application. It is important, to a critical segment of users, that underneath OS X is a Unix BSD foundation. Apple is able to walk the straight and narrow in giving its users standard power and easy of use in one package. In my case, the package is about 6.5″x6.5″x2″

And so I get worried about torrential rains with lightening that actually hits people, and heatwaves, but mostly I worry about power outages. I am sure there is a strong correlation between bad weather and power outages. As of this writing, the power is still out in parts of Queens, NY, St. Louis, Missouri. It was recently out in portions of California and UK. Most of the outages are due to inclement weather, so one would hope that as soon as a particular heat wave or storm subsides, the service goes back to normal.

Still, would not it just make a great beginning to a sci-fi story of how people came to think of power – to move things, to move themselves, to provide light and heat as a given, and the historical events in this post were some of the first signs (since august 2003 at least) of the inevitable collapse of the non-animal powered civilization? I am curious whether anyone tracks MTF (mean time between failures) for US electrical grid and distribution systems and makes the data public…

ps. and of course, there is someone with a fine paper on the topic titled “Complex dynamics of blackouts in power transmission systems” with the following statistics,

“…The average frequency of
blackouts in the United States is about one every 13 days. This frequency has not changed over the last 30 years. Also the probability distribution of blackout sizes has a power tail; this dependence indicates that the probability of large blackouts is relatively high. Indeed, although large blackouts are rarer than small blackouts, it can be argued that their higher societal cost makes the risk of large blackouts comparable to or exceed the risk of small blackouts…”

and the following chart showing the distribution of blackouts:

Obviously lack of Americans getting graduate degrees in science and math has been a topic beaten to death by every pundit out there. Examples of payscales for medical practitioners and laywers vs. scientists have often been used to explain the disparity. How about payscale for unionized workers?

The Post aritcle about the strike contained a table, missing in the online edition, listing the average salary for a “nuclear scientist” (however defined) at $32/hour or so. That’s around $65,000 a year. Nice, but that’s nothing compared to $80/hour for crane operators. Why would anyone want to get a math Ph.D when they could make twice as much money operating a backhoe or a construction crane?

I do not see why MIT math Ph.D is not going to be good enough for Simons’ office, but it is easy to imagine that there just are not enough MIT, Cal.Tech. and similar Ph.D’s awarded to feed the US Market. By contrast, someone like Pavel Volfbeyn or Alexander Belopolsky (discussed in the Simons article) with degrees from a Russian MFTI (MIT equivalent) cannot possibly make as much money in Russia as here (requesting 3-4 miliion per year), at least legally.

As any other self-respecting blog-head, I have a proposition. If indeed the demand for mathematicians and scientists is so great, their prospects so bright, then why does not Simons and other people who hire them give every US-born or -eduated Ph.D a 2 or 5-year contract to work in their firms. Let them make enough money to go back to being professors or high-school teachers. In fact, you could make it a condition. I do not know if it is going to change the reality of how many people can graduate from MIT and the like, and that other countries will have bright graduates from their countries’ top schools who will come to US to make their millions because they cannot do so in India or Russia or China. I do know that you are not going to get more people to study math when one can make twice as much money working for a union that would go on strike when offered a contract like this:

The workers, who run cranes, backhoes, compressors and other pieces of heavy equipment, earn $73 to $82 an hour, including benefits.

They’re among the highest paid blue-collar workers in the city.

They rejected an offer that would have given them 6 percent raises annually over five years, with a guarantee of no layoffs.

signing off…

Such things are always easy to spot, since there is a small crowd of tourists milling around, trying to photograph the landmark this way and that. So did I.

I get asked whether this is photoshopped. It is not. Strangely, I have had trouble finding its exact provenance on the net. I know the original fountain is called the Medici Fountain with a sculpture of Galatea by Auguste-Louis-Marie Ottin, but I could not figure out who put the “face” there, and why.

To gather search engine rankings I should now declare that there are 7 rules of blogging guaranteed to make you a success.

(amazingly google does not find any entrees matching that string. yet.)

I decided to list some of them, crossing out some which are out of reach for me personally.

1. Post pictures of scantily clad models
2. Insert yourself into the great debates of the day. It helps to put comments on other people’s sites.
   
3. Launch successful denial of service attacks against other bloggers
4. Provide inside informationabout cool gadgets or hard to get into gatherings
5. Write wittingly and confidently. Every day. Without stop.
6. Be rich and/or famous. At least a little. People will think you have something to say
7. Start early.
   

Naturally, I missed out on all of them. What’s left is a small collections of photographs which were not good enough to post for critique, so they must be good enough for a personal website; some random musings about my daily routine; and the fact that for now, no one can stop me from publishing, just like no one can make anyone read this.

As it happens, this approach has been exploiting quite a bit already, so I cannot even say it satisfied rule number seven. Still. Sometimes one just walks around with thoughts in his head, and what is the present for if not to contribute these thoughts to the collective data archive that will someday rise to rule us all.

cheers.

Sometimes, however, I feel like this whole Web thing might work out after all. I still (sometimes) get the same thrill from using Amazon as I did in 1996. Then it was the sheer exhiliration of ordering a real book through virtual ether. Now, it is the quiet happiness of a parent who can find and order four different books and have the receipt for it in under one hundred seconds and truly expect them to show up at the house in three days. Sure, I handed over all sorts of information to the good folks in Seattle. They have my birthdays, addresses, even credit cards. But then I can order four books in one hundred seconds (I warned you about deja vu) and go have tea after a stressful day.

Tomorrow is another one. See you then.

• I hope to gain publicity by mentioning names of other bloggers and well-known books
• I may transfer some of the better, IMO, posts from my other blogs here in order to fool readers into thinking I am writing new content
• I am a serial blogger-starter-upper. Every other time I have failed to post continuously, and have let the site die a slow, twitching death. (Actually, one of them is doing better the longer I do not post…) . I am hoping that I will have more luck updating my own website than I did unrelated URLs. Perhaps shame will spur me to more action.

I am new to WordPress, and hopeless in Web design, so I apologize for the look of the side-bar. I installed a nice template but then screwed it up by trying to customize. The “subscribe to feed” form is particularly heinous. The “LinkedIn” profile button is not much better.

Interests… Right, this is a personal site now… I am avery amateur photographer and so expect to see pictures of children, flowers, and streets. Or not. The photography page on this site contains some basic links for my photographs.

Welcome & Enjoy.