I feel safer already

Two weeks ago I flew to San Francisco to undergo* training on the new Microsoft SharePoint 2007 (MOSS). I got into SFO, collected my luggage and took a shuttle to the hotel. When I opened my bag, I instantly noticed that things were amiss. And the "Items may shift during flight..." warning was not to blame.

As I slowly took things out of the suitcase I noticed more and more amiss, for instance the toiletries bag is a small internal bag that snaps into the top of the case, and it was detached and buried in the other stuff.

I wasn't worried about anything being stolen as I hadn't taken anything valuable. Though I was genuinely puzzled it occurred to me that maybe the cargo monkeys had chosen my bag to rifle in a search for valuables to steal.

But finally at the bottom of all the stuff, and apparently tossed in after the stuff had been extracted but before it was replaced, was this charming little card from My Government.


*If it seems like I'm unhappy about this Microsoft bundle of bits, it's because I am. Learning a Microsoft program is like getting brain surgery to rewire one's neurons so as to not think so logically or brilliantly.

hot summer, cool music

One reason I like living in Santa Monica is the free summer concerts on the Pier, the Twilight Dance Series. This summer we get some acts that I know and like: David Lindley, Queen Ida and Los Lobos (!). Also playing for the 10 night spread are some names I don't know, but the genres look fun. Every Thursday evening starting 7:30 PM.

Thou Shalt Keep Right...

The Vatican has issued the 10 Commandments for Drivers. Personally, I think it should start:
1. Thou shalt keep right except for passing.

Surf

Finally got back in the ocean yesterday after a couple of months. A colleague from the European office is here for induction training, and another mutual colleague recommended she contact me to get some surfing lessons.

No problem! It's much easier to motivate myself to go out when I'm helping someone learn to surf.

Surf was about 2-3 foot windswell, even though the CDIP shows a substantial NW swell offshore. The wind was about 5 kts. from the NW which bumped up the sea surface a bit but not too badly.

We got into the water about 5:15 PM, and there was nobody else out. This was good, as it gave me some time to teach P. some of the techniques of using a bodyboard. Within half an hour there were about 5 guys out on standup boards, but I was getting more and better rides. (The advantage of a body board in small sloppy waves...)

We'll probably go out again this afternoon, and are planning to go out again tomorrow afternoon.

Fast Food = Bad News

Following on Morgan Spurlock's movie "Super Size Me!", recent scientific research provides more evidence that fast food is bad for mammals. Report in Science News.

Polynesian chickens

Science News has an article reporting that recent research seems to show that chicken bones dug up in a Latin American site have the same DNA print as chicken DNA from Polynesia. This seems might be significant evidence that the Polynesians travelled to Latin America between 600 and 2,000 years ago.

There are some dissenting archaeologists, but this is pretty interesting if it is eventually confirmed.

Road Trip for SharePoint

I spent the past week (Sunday night 3 June to Friday night 8 June) in San Francisco doing a one-week training class in the new SharePoint 2007. I learned a fair amount, but I'm certainly not overwhelmed. Whelmed is more like it.

It is useful, but Microsoft has made it too complex for most people so I don't see it getting the kind of use they hope for. Furthermore, they've made significant parts of it compatible only with Windows and Internet Explorer. More specifically, they've built wiki and weblog functionality into it, but to use the formatting options you have to have Win/IE. It won't work with Firefox or Macintosh, unless one types in raw html.

I guess its MS' way of putting the world on notice that we are still expected to use only Windows and only Internet Explorer.

Back in the water

I think the last time I was in the water was about 6 weeks ago when I went in the SMC pool and swam about 350 yards. I've been down to the beach virtually every weekend day morning, but the surf has been small and sloppy windswell - typical for late spring. (Check the CDIP for SoCal.) It's currently about 1-2' from the NW with a 10sec interval; in other words it's slop.

It's hard to get out when the surf is like this, but then I don't get any workout. If I'm going to get back into diving and surfing condition for the trip to Central America though, I've got to get some serious water time.

So today it was back into the pool at SMC. I got in about 500 yards (pathetic!) before my shoulders were seriously tired and I was noticeably out of breath. No problem though, it's the first day back and tomorrow I'll do a little more.

A Day at the LA Concours

I went to the LA Concours d'Elegance today with M. It was fun and entertaining for awhile, though I'm not as dedicated to the cars as I was a decade or two ago when I was trying to eke out a living as a photographer (shooting cars, amongst many other subjects).

This time I took some car pictures, but wasn't trying so hard to get really good pictures of the cars. And I didn't even attempt any detail shots. Nowadays I'm just looking to get people pictures, and I may have gotten one or two this time.

I shot a number of photos of M. as she was pretty excited getting car pictures. But I also saw one or two interesting people that I photographed. I can't add the pictures just yet though, as the camera is at home and I am 500 miles away in San Francisco, getting ready to go to SharePoint Administrator training early in the morning.

Much else happened today that I may write about tomorrow evening (if I remember). It's midnight now though, and I've got a 6 AM call.

Web 2.0 and JPL (Part 1)

Today at work we had a 3 hour presentation by JPL's CIO, CIO (emeritus) and a system architect talking about JPL's current and future plans for Web 2.0 implementation. It was pretty cool inasmuch as I knew 99% of what they were talking about, and the 1% thing I didn't know (a children's social networking site) I was able to add an observation* to that was very insightful and he hadn't thought of before (despite its tremendous significance).

It will take a few days to write th full summary, and then some more time to condense that into an executive summary. And I may not be able to post it here (for obvious reasons).

*He briefed us on the children's social networking sites Club Penguin and Webkinz. I hadn't heard of either, but neither had anybody else in the room. It turns out that these sites get much more usage per person-visit than such sites as MySpace or Second Life. After everybody absorbed that information I commented that "When these get mashed up with One Laptop Per Child, then things will really begin to happen".

from Microsoft to Google?

My first real, good, and real good, PIM was Claris Organizer. I bought it at 1.0 and upgraded every time I could. It was - then and now - a very good piece of software for tracking personal information, and especially for linking calendar events and contacts. When Steve Jobs rejoined Apple one of the things that happened was Claris was killed as an independent company: Filemaker was spun off as an independent and Organizer was left to die. It was shortly sold to Palm, who halfheartedly supported it. It was still Palm Organizer, and was okay but getting old and in need of update. That was at least 6 years ago. Palm made one minor update to bring it up to OS X compatibility, but it was essentially abandoned. I stuck with it as long as I could, but eventually it just didn't work well anymore with the OSX operating system.

At that point I had to move all the information out of Organizer and into something else. I had worked with Now Contact, with Chronos, and with the various Apple software solutions. Nothing was as good, even though Organizer was no longer sufficiently functional.

But in 2004 Microsoft finally revised Entourage enough that it became a very good personal information manager, in addition to being a very functional email client. (Note that it is also a useful news client, so long as you restrict your usenet use to nntp://microsoft.public.*)

There are a few problems with Entourage though. First is that its database is fragile and can break so severely that one can lose a substantial amount of data. Microsoft does not provide any tool to fix or diagnose the database. (In typical Microsoft fashion, they maintain that it is a proprietary and so the customers cannot have any tools to work with on the broken part.) Another problem with Entourage is that it works best as a standalone, almost completely ignorant of anything else on one's computer. Granted it has extensive AppleScripting capabiltiy and there are some fairly capable scripters out there, but the scripts simply don't provide sufficient bridging to the rest of the operating system. (This analysis ignores the pluses and minuses of Entourage when it links to Exchange server.)

Don't get me wrong - Entourage has more data fields than anything I've worked with aside from a custom database. But it is a challenge to get anything in or out, and it is especially difficult to use with anything else (other email, GTD, calendaring, contacts, etc. programs).

Fortunately, it is fairly easy to work with. So when the time came to finally extract my information out of Organizer I chose to move the resulting dirty data into Entourage for cleaning up. I made a project out of all the contact data and laboriously went through all the contacts to eliminate duplicates (would have been nice to do that programmatically!) and fix the data that was broken in the transfer. As I had over 750 entries, this took awhile. I finally finished it a few weeks ago (down to 610 items), and now it's time to make another decision.

I want the information to be available to any of my computers - preferably from the net but at least from my HAN. Entourage simply doesn't recognize that. So I have to move the data either to my gmail account or to Apple's Address Book and then build and configure a server.

Getting the data out will be easy, but getting it out in some form that is easily transferrable will be difficult. I'll have to look for some tool to ease a move to Google. Alternatively I could move all the data to Address Book and iCal, but frankly those two are just too simple. Even Sbook is better than Address Book, and that was built by one guy on his own time.

Also, the latter means I'll have to manage a server. I can do that - and it will provide some other useful services - but I've got better things to do with my time.

I'll study the problem and practice it a bit and see where the study leads me. More later.

Work Stories: Web 2.0 and an Internet Titan

I was scheduled this morning to show Steven W. (in the Cambridge office) how to use Adobe Connect for collaboration and screen sharing. Duck meets water. Sheesh. After less than five minutes he diverted me from the script and we took off in all sorts of directions. First diversion was "let's put down the phone and try the audio conferencing". I hadn't used it before so we sort of stumbled around a bit, but shortly got it working and didn't use the phone for the following hour and a half. The audio cut out a few times - predictably when we switched layouts - but we figured out how to restore it. He's probably the best user in the company now besides me and Chris, and I'll have to continue practicing with him to keep up.


In the mid-afternoon I had to give a presentation on collaboration and associated techniques technologies, and social implications and ramifications, i.e. Web 2.0. I based it on Tapscott's business theory of wikinomics and included many of my own observations. It was a success inasmuch as we (Chris and I) didn't get thrown out of the room. We didn't get a go-ahead either, but at least we planted a seed.

After that I went straight to a "retirement" party for Bob Anderson. Bob didn't really retire, in that many people of his stature and seniority don't really retire from there, they just go to 1/3 time and move to adjunct status. He'll retain a shared office, a phone line and his email address and will probably continue to do occasional project work, but he won't be in the building regularly anymore.

the toll to date

Another month has passed since last post. Three weeks after that post (on 30 March) I got word that Tom, a good friend of nearly 35 years, died on 21 March. And I'd also been deeply concerned over another friend who I'd learned in January had had unprecedented brain surgery to remove a cyst. She survived, but barely. The first three months of 2007 have been challenging, thus the dearth of posts.

a terribly bad and sad day

No posts in a long time. On February 18 my father died. I was with him in the hospital room. I miss him a lot.

SCALE 5x, Day 1+1

Went to SoCal Linux Expo, Day 1 today. The first thing I noticed - and kept noticing the same thing over and over throughout the day in various presentation sessions as well as on the show floor - was the proliferation of Mac laptops.

In fact, I think there were more Mac laptops than any other single model of laptop. In all there were more non-Apple laptops (HP+IBM+Dell) than Apple, but not by much. And if you consider that those non-Apple machines were running some version of Linux, usually Ubuntu (or, in a few cases, Windows), while most of the Macs were actually running OSX, then there was more OSX in general than any other OS.

I went to SCALE 4x last year, and 2x two years before that. At 2x I think I saw 2 Macs, and one was an old TiBook that was running Debian. Last year at 4x there were a few more, but nothing like this year. And just as significantly as the hardware was the OS. And a number of the people were actually presenters who were presenting to a crowd of (supposedly) Linux people using OSX and Keynote. And there was not a peep from the audience. Not a single word or sound of complaint. The OS was accepted as a "fellow traveler" as it were.

Most interestingly were these two.

Jean T. Anderson, a committer on the Apache Derby project was presenting "How to Particpate at the ASF" from her MBP. Now, she actually flipped from OSX into Parallels where she was running Linux and then presented from Open Office's presenter program. But for the entire :90 minutes of the presentation preceding I watched her working furiously on something, and that was in OSX. She actually went to the podium and attached her machine in OSX, and then flipped over to Parallels. (That got an "ooh, aah!" from some of the crowd.)

Today I saw Patrick McGovern present "Leveraging the IT Community", which was really a presentation about his company's very cool server/network monitoring application. The company and the application are both called Splunk. He presented this server monitoring application (actually it is a server log search application) from his Mac laptop and from Keynote. He used some cool transitions (though the basic template was rather plain, and the content was heavy on words and light on graphic enhancements). But again, the audience didn't even peep.

I've been reading that the *nix IT community has more and more been taking to OSX, but this was the first time I got to see it up close and personal. I guess I have to admit to feeling some personal vindication and validation of my choice of preferred OS. And there's no question that while OSX has been moving more toward the *nix community, it's also true that the community has been expanding to include OSX as a member of the common platform.

More later about Day 1 and Day 1+1 and the presentations and exhibits. Of course tomorrow is Day 2 and I'll be going to that too. Will see how much I can actually get posted up.

New journaling application

I kept going back to viJournal and trying to make it do what I wanted, or to learn how to work with it to create the results I wanted. Eventually though I just could not do some of the simple things I wanted. (How about two entries on the same day but under different times without a circuitous workaround?)

At the beginning of this month I was in San Francisco at MacWorld 2007. We speakers got a few complimentary gifts, including Mariner Software's MacJournal. I validated the license code last night and have started using it just this morning. Already like it much more, as it is very customizable.

It also publishes directly to Blogger (as does viJournal), so I'll probably use that too in the future and maybe post more to this space.

Dark Cloud for the Silver Lining

We've been hearing for months and as much as a few years now about how supercharged the economy of China is. Apparently it is not enough to absorb all the college students needing jobs when they exit university.

A tide of more than 30,000 students with polished résumés and high hopes surged into a job fair here [...] After years in which graduates were ensured of a good job in the fast-growing economy, the number of degree-holders has outstripped the number of jobs, and the guarantees have evaporated.

The Rigors of Professional Journalism

As a long time resident of Los Angeles, I used to be an avid reader of the Los Angeles Times. In fact, I grew up reading it during the period under Otis Chandler when that newspaper became world class. I am grateful to the paper of that era for the education it gave me.

I am sad now for the depths to which the newspaper has sunk.

I could go on at length about the problems in management and content, but let me make just one example now. For many years one of the Times' travel writers has been Susan Spano. Ms. Spano was not one of my favorite writers, but then travel writing doesn't usually have the weight of other sections of the newspaper so her fluffy, poorly crafted pieces that included little to no observational insights about her destinations did not matter much.

A few years she apparently talked her editors into letting her move to and work from Paris. Ah, what a deal. I could be persuaded to write a few blog posts a week and a travel piece once a month or so if I got the opportunity to live in Paris as a writer. One might expect that giving an aspiring writer the chance to work in Paris would produce something - better quality in writing or at least enthusiasm about the place. But one might be wrong.

I long ago stopped reading Ms. Spano. When I saw she had some pieces about France I began following her ramblings again, but her writing had not improved. I suppose I could say I was disappointed, but that wouldn't be right because my expectations of her were already so low that there was no room to disappoint. Or so I thought, until now.

In the few years that she has been living and writing in Paris, her output has seemed to increase in frequency but decrease in quality. Today's blog post though is utterly devoid of redeeming qualities, and is a superlative example of what an absolutely talentless reporter and journalist this person is.

After about three years of living in Paris as a writer, she posts the plaintive question to her readership: "Who is Marianne?"

Actually, let me quote her from http://travelblogs.latimes.com/paris/2006/10/two_people_who_.html

"Does anyone know why France is called as Marianne? Who was she anyway?

It strikes me as perfect that the country is known by that name, while American is Uncle Sam.

Uncle Sam and Marianne should get cozy instead of wrangling over genetically engineered food and how to handle the nuclear threat posed by Iran."

I had to post a reply. I'm not proud of it, but neither am I ashamed of it. I feel a bit disgusted that I am actually wasting thirty minutes of valuable time writing about this, but it is truly a shame that the Los Angeles Times, formerly a great newspaper, continues to keep this person on the payroll when it simultaneously cuts more and better writers from its home offices and bureaus.

Here is my reply.

Is this a serious question? And from a purported reporter who has lived in France for - what is it now - three years? A five second trip to Wikipedia will tell you that Marianne is the symbol of the Revolution, and it will tell you ever so much more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marianne

I find it uttely astonishing that a journalist and reporter has to ask this question of the readership. I doubt that a French reporter would have asked the same question about Uncle Sam after living in this country for three years.

I guess it's not just American schoolchildren who are ignorant and uninquisitive.

And from what I have read elsewhere, this blog does not print comments that are less than favorable, so I guess this comment is likely to die in cyberspace.

Quelle irony, that this should be my fifth post to the Euphoriac blog and it should be such a pathetic thing.

But the truth of the matter is that Spano is known to not post critical comments to her blog, so I wanted to get this comment on the record in a place where she can't sweep it under the rug and I can have some small proof that she has been called on her utter ignorance and lack of reportorial capacity.

First entry in viJournal

2006

Sunday, September 17

First entry in viJournal is just a test to see how it works. Downloaded and installed v1.7 into /Applications and wrote the author (Jeremy) an email asking about whether to install to /Applications or ~/Applications for best use on multiple machines by a single person but multiple accounts. Will see what happens as I save this (and how he replies).

A nice thing about this application (viJournal) is that it will automatically post to a weblog space on either LiveJournal or Blogger. So I'll test that too.

One curious coincidence... The programmer of this software is a writer in England, and also a techie. Just after sending the email to him I started on my next task - sorting through Science News posts - and looked at a book review by Ivars Peterson about Scarlett Thomas, a writer in England who has just written a book about crypto and therefore incorporating mathematics. Not much of a coincidence, but there it is.

CPSLO takedown

I have taken down the details of the proposed reconstruction of OSX infrastructure as the client has apparently lost interest.