Should Exist
June 30, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Software
A craigslist for op-ed. Talk about a flow machine.
Where's the....
June 30, 2006 | Life
Went to iron a shirt for tonight's event. It turns out I don't own an iron and ironing board anymore. Put it on the list. I bet there's a bunch of stuff like that.
Update: Drove over there and the parking lot was surprisingly empty. Hadn't really considered the situation where I'd be one of three attendees, I was expecting more of a crowd. Parked in back and walked around to the front. Front door was locked. Looked up at the sign to make sure I was at the right building. Then David walked over, talking on the phone, and said, "Hold on—Hi!" And I said, "Cultus Arborum thing tonight?" And he replied, "That was a couple of nights ago. Wednesday. Do you want to sign our guestbook?" Sure, that's good, at least the trip wasn't totally wasted. Earth to Notio: Check out the date, dude. Don't guess. Notio spaceshot to promoters: Put the day as well as the date ("Wednesday, June 28, 2006") to assist calendar-challenged people like me.
Turns out I didn't need an iron after all.
Narrative Selection Bias™
June 29, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life | People & Society | Site Maintenance
Doug and I had an interesting exchange in the comments that's worth bringing to the front page.
I pulled a quote from a blog post and out of context the quote had a different meaning. A reader could get the wrong idea. So this is a formal disclosure statement that Notio is extremely biased. I am citing material that is interesting to me, possibly for reasons unknown, possibly unknown even to me. It's an interpretation, not an "objective" perspective. Essentially, you can't trust anything you read here.
Just thought I'd mention it.
An Absolutely Honorable Choice
June 28, 2006 | People & Society
But I will say it here, loud and proud. I work full-time for a living and I will continue working full-time for a living. I will work full-time for a living if I have children. I will work full-time for a living if my husband gets a $500,000 a year job. I will work full-time for a living if I win the lottery. On my death bed, I will probably wish that I spent more time at the office. And I think that's an absolutely honorable choice that I, as a woman, have no need to apologize for.
Moved and seconded.
Internet Economics 2006
June 28, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Software
Would you like to tune into a wavelength describing state-of-the-art Internet business models? If so, Jason Calacanis has what you want.
You see, Battelle's model is predicated on Rafat and Om deciding to stay in phase two or keep their relationship with Federated in phase three--which they are obviously not willing to do. That's why we canned the Federated Media /BlogAds model when we started Weblogs, Inc. We started out with the reveune share/repping model and Brian and I quickly decided that owning the IP/brands was a much better play. [Background.]
It appears easy to get $1 million to fund a web startup right now.
The World Now Has a Lot More State
June 27, 2006 | Products & Opportunites
Another good Paul Graham essay, recently delivered at RailsConf.
Almost everyone makes the mistake of treating ideas as if they were indications of character rather than talent-- as if having a stupid idea made you stupid. There's a huge weight of tradition advising us to play it safe. "Even a fool is thought wise if he keeps silent," says the Old Testament (Proverbs 17:28).
Well, that may be fine advice for a bunch of goatherds in Bronze Age Palestine. There conservatism would be the order of the day. But times have changed. It might still be reasonable to stick with the Old Testament in political questions, but materially the world now has a lot more state. Tradition is less of a guide, not just because things change faster, but because the space of possibilities is so large. The more complicated the world gets, the more valuable it is to be willing to look like a fool.
Filled with wisdom and funny asides. And good approaches to business.
Truly Making a Difference
June 25, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Governance | People & Society
Dave Pollard often gives detailed and passionate voice for my intuitive and information-overloaded thoughts. Today is no different.
So progressives need to acknowledge that, unless they devote most of their time and energy to activities other than electing and lobbying politicians, they will continue to accomplish nothing. Indeed, they will accomplish less than nothing, since in the meantime the corporate and political elite will be busy dismantling, rolling back, bribing their way out of, and circumventing laws and regulations, a much easier process than getting them passed, and enforced, in the first place.
I gave up on MoveOn et al a long time ago. Those organizations are good in the crunch-time of an election, but real change isn't going to happen there. And the Democrats are hopeless, look at the mess Bush is creating, in many—not several, but many different areas—and they still have no core to rally around. It's completely depressing.
The two big opportunities to make a high-leverage change are education and business. Help increase funding for local public schools. Help raise the literacy and numeracy level of our kids. Encourage parental involvement in education. Encourage deep study in science and math and music and art. Learn enough to make a direct contribution yourself. Consume less. Vote with your dollars. Start your own business or partner with a small team. Create instead of consume. Look at the bigger picture. Spend your time volunteering instead of shopping or watching TV. Engage in something outside your own self-interest. Make a contribution of time and mental energy, not money. Be the change you want.
Do all that stuff Dave tells you to do in his article, because he's thinking about this a lot more deeply than you or me.
Will Desktop Affordances be Useful?
June 24, 2006 | Products & Opportunites | Technology
Computer technology demos are always interesting, but sometimes you wonder if it would actually be useful in real life. And the opposite is true: Blogging doesn't demo well, people have a hard time understanding why, but it turns out to be valuable. This week's impressive demo is BumpTop, showing "physically-based casual interfaces and pen-centric interactions."
Well, it's totally cool. The seven-minute movie is worth your attention. It makes your computer desktop look archaic. But I tend to agree with Merlin that I'm not sure I'd use it for that purpose.
See, here’s the thing: once your computer (and your related world, writ large) has excellent indexing, search, and access via something like Quicksilver, this kind of “physical” interface metaphor starts seeming quaint, if not downright exhausting. I guess I just never find myself shuffling and re-organizing large numbers of files in a way that isn’t more than satisfactorily addressed with sorting, Smart Folders, icon views, and searching. I throw stuff into the most general piles I can stand, then let Quicksilver and Spotlight do all the heavy lifting. Maybe that’s me, but this seems like a recipe for non-stop fiddling.
Reminds me of David Gelernter's project called Lifestreams, which looked cool but ultimately hasn't taken hold. It was core research, however, so maybe something will come of it someday.
Notable Quotes
June 23, 2006 | Arts & Culture | People & Society
From this week's New Yorker:
Fine Tuning: Reassessing Radiohead
Radiohead has much in common with the Grateful Dead, including passionate fans who follow the band from city to city, trade bootleg recordings of shows, puzzle out the meanings of the band’s cryptic lyrics, and (in Boston, at least) dance badly while smoking expensive-smelling weed. But Radiohead’s main interest is not improvisation, nor do the band’s affinities to modern classical music and electronica mask the fact that its dominant syntax is pop. The songs mutate briskly, and are larded with hummable motifs. Even when Jonny Greenwood is fiddling with a radio and Yorke is ululating toward the great unknown, the band obeys an internal clock that arrests its elaborations before tedium defeats wonder. —Sasha Frere-Jones
Acid Redux: The life and high times of Timothy Leary
After his experience with Mexican mushrooms, Leary read [Aldous Huxley's] “The Doors of Perception” with excitement. This was a style of mystico-pseudoscience that suited him perfectly, a kind of shamanistic psychology delightfully immune to empirical challenges. As it happened, Huxley was then lecturing at M.I.T., and Leary arranged a meeting. They had lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club, which was, and remains, the unlikeliest venue in which to plan the future of a psychedelic movement. But that is what Leary and Huxley did. Huxley’s idea was that, if the world’s leaders could be turned on, the lion would lie down with the lamb, and peace would be at hand. The vision was appealing to Leary. It was, after all, simply psychiatric social work on a global scale, and administered not to convicts and juvenile delinquents but to the political, social, and artistic élites—much more fun. —Louis Menand
Comment: Name That Tone
The point is that mental and physical development never stops, no matter how old you are, and development is one of the things that make it interesting to be a being. We imagine that we change our opinions or our personalities or our taste in music as we ripen, often feeling that we are betraying our younger selves. Really, though, our bodies just change, and that is what changes our views, our temperament, and our tolerance for Billy Joel. We can’t help it. The chemistry has altered. — Louis Menand
Finally, an Innovation in Newspapers
June 22, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites
Great idea from Guardian called G24:
...which allows readers to download and print out a rolling version of the newspaper that is updated every 15 minutes. G24 is an eight- to 12-page PDF covering either general news, international news, economics, sport or media stories. The new product is aimed at the lunchtime and evening commuter market who may want an updated print product to read on the train or bus.
I would love it if my local paper published, once a day, a PDF of all the local stories and the op-ed/letters section. I would pay for it, or they could run ads. I dislike getting the physical paper everyday, throwing away the sports and classifieds sections, skimming the feature stores for the occasional piece that targets me, and only reading the local news. So I rarely buy the paper.
The Guardian is charging about $12 a month for the service. Before I looked that up I decided I'd pay $5 a week or maybe $15 a month for my local paper in this format. It turns out they charge $16 a month for a printed, delivered copy—so this would lower their costs dramatically (after an initial capital investment) and be a real win-win for both of us.
Choices Have Consequences
June 21, 2006 | Life
The title says it all. Was just thinking that every choice we make means some things are more likely to happen, and some things are less likely to happen. Yes, I have embedded a probabilistic worldview into that statement, but the important point is that we have choices to make and those choices have consequences both good and bad. And sometimes you don't know which way it will go, or even, which is which.
Beautiful Evidence
June 19, 2006 | Arts & Culture
My copy has arrived. Very bad for productivity.
Squeezing the Middle Class
June 16, 2006 | Governance | People & Society
An as-usual well-researched article from the Economist: The rich, the poor and the growing gap between them.
The one truly continuous trend over the past 25 years has been towards greater concentration of income at the very top. The scale of this shift is not visible from most popular measures of income or wages, as they do not break the distribution down finely enough. But several recent studies have dissected tax records to investigate what goes on at the very top.
The figures are startling. According to Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, and Thomas Piketty of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, the share of aggregate income going to the highest-earning 1% of Americans has doubled from 8% in 1980 to over 16% in 2004. That going to the top tenth of 1% has tripled from 2% in 1980 to 7% today. And that going to the top one-hundredth of 1%—the 14,000 taxpayers at the very top of the income ladder—has quadrupled from 0.65% in 1980 to 2.87% in 2004.
No surprises if you've been paying attention, but it's nice to have independent non-spun facts to consider.
[Local] Dairy Day
June 16, 2006 | Cooperatives | Life
Saturday is Dairy Day at the Co-op. Free food samples, hayrides, music, and big news this year: sunshine! I'll be there around lunch for an hour or two with my board member badge on. It's a great community event.
From the Mouths of Babes
June 16, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life | People & Society
What do 1st and 2nd grade students wish for? Mostly the same things you and I do. Excerpt:
- I wish thar was mor peas in the world
- I wish pepol wloud be treted farly
- I wish evey body could go to scool
- I wish to have more fun
- I wish everybody had food
Will make you laugh and possibly cry for the honesty.
Making Money on the Internet (cont.)
June 12, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites
Video blogging is hot. Robert Scoble is leaving Microsoft for PodTech.net (whose servers are so overloaded they can't even load a homepage).
And then, he mentions this:
Yesterday I was talking with Amanda Congdon, one of the co-founders of Rocketboom. Her videoblog is now seeing about 300,000 viewers a day. That's, what, a year or so old? Did you know that advertisers are now paying her $85,000 per week? That's almost as much money as I made in an entire year of working at Microsoft.
Rocketboom is pretty idiosyncratic—if they can make $85K a week, lots of other people can too.
Lunchtime Reading
June 12, 2006 | People & Society
As a service to my loyal readers, here is a fun instructional for your work-dodging moments this Monday. HOWTO make the perfect fruit salad and get laid, by Mark Pilgrim, as the Sarcastic Gourmet.
Love, Taste, and Sublime Dignity
June 11, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life
Grateful Dead keyboard player Vince Welnick died June 2.
When Jerry Garcia died, Vince was alone among us in his wretched sense of utter loss. He attempted suicide about six months later, thereby 86ing himself from any further creative interaction with what was left of the Grateful Dead. As a culture, we were never big on emotional vulnerability. Like a caribou herd, we had learned, over a long period of time, to leave our cripples behind on the tundra rather than risk the entire local genome. That's life, Dude. Devil take the hindmost.
It's likely that Vince, while not exactly disliked, was the fans' least-favorite of all the GD keyboard players. In his defense, he was stepping up just as Jerry was stepping down, and it's a rare show from those years that's worth listening to aside from archival investigation. But those few are hot. I suppose all this is just inside baseball, or the family's dirty laundry. But maybe it's important to know that for all the joy and light in the front of the hall, backstage was complicated and dark. Many in the audience thought they wanted to get backstage, but having been there once or twice, trust me, it's not what you want. What you want are the results, the output, the benefits, the feelings, the buzz, the tribe, the cosmos—but no one need visit the sausage factory. Maybe backstage was once expansive and puckish, but after the shady characters arrived around '77 or '78, you'd best keep your distance. Garcia told the assembly of concerned family and friends "I see you got your list out, say your piece and get out," and it was then a long slow decline, all the sadder since we watched it unfold before us, in slow motion over 15 years. [c.f. Boreal.]
In the aftershock of the tragic death of Vince, an amiable man and a fine musician, the Grateful Dead is once more a target of public disdain, fueled by passion and indignation. Its ethics and humanity are being publicly questioned on a deeply troubling level. Sic transit gloria mundi. Do I know the score? To a degree. But I'm not concerned here with either justifying or condemning the attitudes which make a group of musicians, who must seal themselves together in that intimate time capsule called a tour, make the decisions they do concerning who they want to travel with and why. It's not necessarily democratic and it's not always pretty. They choose what they choose for reasons as much personal as professional.
But what if what you read is only half true? What if events tally but the interpretation placed on them is wrong? What if events have justifying precedents and antecedents of which you are entirely unaware? Or, if aware, interpret by a code of valuation foreign to the situation of participants? Are you willing to throw over something you truly prize on the basis of hearsay? Listen - I know these people. They're bastards. Yet I find myself here trying to interject a little perspective into their public scorching because they're my bastards. They played the songs I helped write with love, taste and sublime dignity. You know what I'm saying because you heard it too.
A shelf of books could be written and still only lightly perturb the surface of who the Grateful Dead were, are, and why. A book must have a point of view and I submit there is none extant sufficiently wide and informed to do more than tease curiosity. That possibility probably passed with Ramrod. Think of something approaching your own life's complexity of nuance and multiply it by the number of characters in our scene, past and present, and put the spotlight of the world on it - see what I mean? There is an official Grateful Dead story, chronological highlights which are largely, and rightly, Garcia oriented, but no possibility of a comprehensive estimation. It wasn't a story, it was life.
I may personally believe the only answer is to continue creating one's art while being careful not to live beyond one's means, physically or psychically. Sure. But that's not what people want to know. What they want to know is: who's to blame? Not the music. If the music were to blame they wouldn't be asking the question in the first place. Play the recordings. I put as many clues there as I could. In a way, they are one long letter to the Grateful Dead. The tensions involved created art. I think that art lives. Go there for answers.
The rest of our lives will offer a parade of heros passing. Dylan, Phil, Bobby, Billy, Mick, Keith, Carlos, et al. God rest ye merry gentlemen. Please don't be sad, if it was a straight mind you had, we wouldn't have known you all these years.
Fire Dance With Me
June 11, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Cooperatives | Life | Travel
The CCMA party was held at The Compound in Atlanta. Weird place. Had fun. The tent had fans, but acted like a greenhouse, so it was pretty hot in there. The indoor area had A/C, but they left the doors open so it wasn't that cool. Really loud; hard to talk. Kind of a weird smell in there. Good dance band. There are apparently secret rooms that some people saw before the lockdown that had large beds and huge monster showers with five showerheads and stuff.
Reminds me of the Caravan of Dreams in Fort Worth, TX which had some odd rumors and secrets surrounding it for years—there were tales of rites and rituals and various Magik. Marla and I saw a memorable Horace Silver performance there in 1987. After the waiter stopped by a few times and we hadn't ordered anything, I called him over, put a $20 bill on the tray, and said, "We're not drinking anything but water tonight, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't get a tip." He was very happy at this, and offered to move us to a more private table in a darker spot with a better view. We took it, and he was able to put a higher-profile couple in the prime real estate we had been holding down.
Anyway, back here in 2006, the highlight at the CCMA party was a fire dance.
There were two performers, and they had several sequences. It was pretty fun, and they got a big response. I uploaded eight photos. Four of the photos are at standard shutter speed, and the other four are at eight-second exposures. And here is a low-res five-minute movie of one of their sequences.
The Difference Between Heaven and Hell
June 9, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Cooperatives | Life | People & Society
I'm at the Consumer Cooperative Management Association conference in Atlanta. This morning Peter Couchman from the Midcounties Co-operative in England (near Oxford) presented a (probably well-known) parable during his keynote address. I paraphrase:
There once was a highly developed Buddhist guru who had the ability to transport himself to any place in the universe. He decided to investigate Hell. Upon arrival he found a lush green valley with perfect moderate temperatures, beautiful flowers, clear sparkling water, and snow-covered mountains. In the middle of the valley there was a large table with every known delicious food available. But the people at the table were moaning and screaming in agony. All they had to eat with were six-foot chopsticks, and no matter how hard they tried, no matter what technique they used, they couldn't get the food into their mouths and it was driving them insane.
The guru decided to visit Heaven. When he arrived he found a scene much like the first. A beautiful valley, green and lush, with flowers, trees, and plants of all varieties. In addition, there was a similar table piled high with fantastic food from all over the world. The people gathered at the table were happy and joyful, laughing and talking. They had the same six-foot chopsticks to eat with, but instead of trying to feed themselves, they used the chopsticks to feed each other.
Mission Accomplished
June 8, 2006 | Governance | People & Society
The critics have weighed in on the Zarqawi news:
greg.org: Wow, if there was any doubt about where the contemporary art market is going, they were dispelled this morning at Christie's Baghdad, where the US Government paid a record-setting $286 billion--plus $240 for framing--for this portrait of the dead Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Billmon: The Pentagon Channel today announced the cancellation of its long-running reality TV series, The Abu Zarqawi Hour, saying tonight's special-effects extravaganza, in which Keifer Sutherland and a team of secret agents trail the terrorist mastermind to his hideout and call in a massive airstrike, would be the show's last.
The show originally piloted in 2003, and found a regular place in the Pentagon Channel's prime-time lineup in February 2004, replacing the widely panned sitcom series Mission Accomplished, now in syndicated reruns on Fox News.
Doubts about the show's viability deepened in April, after Washington Post TV critic Tom Ricks questioned whether the supposedly spontaneous reality show was actually being scripted by its producers.
Flashback from the history channel:
- Washington Post (April 2006): The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
For the past two years, U.S. military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicize Zarqawi's role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the "U.S. Home Audience" as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign.
Some senior intelligence officers believe Zarqawi's role may have been overemphasized by the propaganda campaign, which has included leaflets, radio and television broadcasts, Internet postings and at least one leak to an American journalist.
You can believe almost nothing in the media. Ignore it or satirize it, but don't believe it.
Mapping Dialogue
June 8, 2006 | Governance | People & Society | SoL
Fantastic 86 page research report on the fundamentals, forms, and usage of ten different dialogue approaches. [via Chris.]
Never a Still Moment
June 8, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life | People & Society | Travel
To give you a flavor of the multi-media nature of modern baseball, here is a short video clip of the national anthem from the game last night.
Notice the thin horizontal video screens over the third-base line (and presumably over the first-base line where we were sitting). The effect of these was to have motion in your peripheral vision at all times. This is where the hatchet icons marched, like the hammers in Pink Floyd's The Wall and where all manner of on-going stimulation appeared.
The video was shot with my still camera, and compressed by YouTube, so the quality is not up to reference standards, but I think you get the idea.
Home of the Braves
June 8, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life | People & Society | Travel
Thanks to my friends at CDS, I was able to enjoy The National Pastime tonight: The Atlanta Braves vs. the Washington Nationals at Turner Stadium in Atlanta. I uploaded 15 photos to Flickr.
There's so much to say, and it's so late to say it. Even though we were outdoors, watching a live event, it was unbelievably multi-media. The screen was huge and bright. In the photos, you can see the sun shining on the field, and it's brighter than the screen in my living room.There are cheerleaders now in baseball—someone said, "You gotta stick with the National League, they're more misogynist." Every moment of the game is branded—the Holiday Inn Instant Replay, the NAPA Cap Shuffle, fireworks coming out of a Coke bottle. I can't even begin to name them all. There were all sorts of behavioral conditioning—short snippets of songs that had specific audience responses, an electronic repeating tomohawk logo that ran around the horizontal screens in a chopping motion that cued the audience to make a chopping motion with their arms, etc.
It was a fun time, especially going with a dozen people, some of who were big baseball fans, and some of whom hadn't been in 10 or 20 or 40 years. The game itself was fairly pedestrian, with hardly any hits, but it had its moments of excitement and tension. It was faster-moving than I remember it, and I missed a couple of big plays just because I was exploring camera settings for a moment. The irony level was set to max pretty much as soon as we walked in the place (see the photo of the booth selling "The future of Ice Creme" for instance) and it was so American you couldn't believe it. I'd go again, especially with a better camera and an attitude to drink Budweiser in plastic bottles washing down a big honking hotdog and a $6 bag of peanuts. Who knows, I might even go for some cotton candy and a Sno Cone for desert.
[Update: Kottke & Megnut and friends attended the Yankees/Red Sox game at the same time.]
Walking in Atlanta
June 7, 2006 | Life | Travel
Flight from Boston landed early. Forgot to make reservations for the hotel shuttle, so rather than take a taxi I headed for the Marta subway. Helpful employee guided me to the stop I wanted, even calling a secret cell phone number to verify my destination and best stop.
Arrived at the stop and asked another employee which direction to head. "Left; three blocks...." Okay, 10:00 PM, downtown – Midtown N3 stop, for you locals – dragging my roller suitcase and oversized computer bag. Past the construction zone, past a monster gas station convenience store, over 8 lanes of highway, down a long hill, past student apartments, into a neighborhood, past the football stadium. Have I walked three blocks yet? At least I'm near Georgia Tech, which is supposedly my destination.
At around 10:25 I decided that I had walked way more than three blocks, and I hadn't seen anything close to a hotel and conference center. I took a left and headed into the campus. Eventually I decided I had no idea where I was, it was only getting later, and I was only looking more like a target. So I called the hotel. "Uh, I walked down Tenth Street for a while, and now I'm on Atlantic. How do I get to you?" First words: "Oh, wow."
Well, it turned out to be back on the other side of the highway. It was about "three blocks" from the Marta stop, but I wanted to take a left after two of them. Oh, okay. So he gave me directions from where I am to where I'm going, and I hike it over there. Remember that long downhill? It's just as long two blocks west. And it feels a little steeper going up, though maybe that's just my suitcase arm talking. Past the baseball stadium, over the highway again. Down a very nice side street and bingo, hotel appears. Relief. I walked about 45 minutes dragging about 75 pounds behind me. Bonus adrenaline boost from being lost in the city. Considered going to the bar and getting a strong drink, but decided to blog this and head for bed instead.
Tufte's "Beautiful Evidence" About to Ship
June 6, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites
Very interesting thread on complex bookmaking. Start around March 9 to pick up the recent info. He's self-published 1.2 million books since 1983, and the detail with which he prints these books is unbelievable. Highlights from the link above:
- We await a test printing of some of our color tints (e.g., hows does 2% yellow compare with 3% yellow?).
- We'll start printing April 25, with some 29 press OKs....
- On the first form printed, we'll set the color of the type (the density of the black used for the type, separate from the black used in images) that we'll be aiming at throughout the book. (The separate blacks for type and images allows independent adjustment of type and image while on press.) There remain some difficult color issues despite our pre-press tests and that is why we do all our own OKs. The press OKs will pretty much take all my time for the next 2 weeks.
- Form 6 is being "perfected" in the printing jargon, with both sides printed in one pass on a 10-color work-and-turn or perfecting press, so that in one pass of the paper through the 10 presses, 5 colors are printed on one side of the paper, the paper is turned over, and 5 colors are printed on the opposite side.
- Major issue now is the carton for mailing single books; the total weight of book and carton is just over 3 pounds, which is a substantial break point on shipping prices. We found a lighter shipping carton that works well to protect the book, but of course it is made in Switzerland.
The colophon should be fascinating. You can order the book here. My pre-order might arrive before I return home!
The Most Thankless Job in Tech Support
June 5, 2006 | Life | Technology | Travel
Tried to use the web without paying the $10 extortion tonight. No go; way slow. So I went to the upgrade screen and authorized the billing. But nothing changed—still super-super-slow, as billg would say.
So I called the tech support line, cringing all the way. Can you imagine a worse job in tech support than fielding calls from semi- to fully-clueless people paying $250+ per night at random hotels, trying to get their hopeless Windows laptops onto the web? People in airports and hotel lobbies regularly ask me, "Can you help me get the wireless working?" And I say, "Windows? Sorry, I use Mac, no idea. Would help if I could." The support guy was not totally clueless, but he was basically working from screenshots, and I'm running down ping speeds (1,500 ms!) and packet loss (35%) and MAC addresses, and sub-netted IP addresses, and he's not sure what to do with it all. The symptom presented as if the hotel network had cached my MAC address and was routing it through the old connection and slow equipment. The ideal "hit it with a hammer" fix would be to clear the router cache located somewhere in the bowels of the hotel. Good luck with that, Notio!
What worked was to plug in an ethernet cable, fooling the laptop into thinking the network port had changed, then switching back to wireless, which for whatever reason got things working again. At least it's not as bad as Minneapolis in 2004, when Internet service was provided by housekeeping. OMFG, that was scary, but worked out okay in the end.
Royal Sonesta Boston
June 4, 2006 | Life | Travel
Unlike the Hotel Marlowe across the street, the Royal Sonesta is not a particularly engaging hotel. It's essentially generic, if upscale. Yes, I'm sitting in an Aeron chair, but it's one of the cheap models that is only somewhat adjustable. And, as usual, working at a desk that is too high for typing. Confidential to hotel decorators: The age of lovingly writing postcards by hand is over. Give me something that is typing height for email and blogging, especially if you're going to put a $1,000 chair in front of it.
Anyway, all I really want to do in this post is make two complaints:
- $25 a day for parking. Why? "Real estate is too expensive to offer free parking." Really? The Hampton Inn, four blocks away, at half the price, offers free parking. The Sonesta should just say, "Because we can," or "Because most people staying here are on expense accounts and it doesn't matter to them."
- $10 a day for high-speed Internet. They have free wi-fi, but it's slow as hell ("good for email and surfing") , and so they upsell the premium service. How's that for price discrimination—offer a free crappy product to make me feel better about buying the overpriced product you've always offered. BTW, the Hampton Inn also has free high-speed Internet.
So why am I here and not at the Hampton? My friend Stephen told me about the Sonesta's "individual traveller" rooms, which are small, and next to the elevator, and about half-price. In-season that puts it at $139 (+$25 +$10 +tax). I wanted to check it out, because in the off-season it's only $99. These mini-rooms, which are plenty big enough for a few nights at a time, are more comfortable for about the same price as the Hampton. But with the $35/day additional fees, it's more expensive. The Hampton is a low-budget generic hotel, but somehow they get points for not being pretentious about it. The Sonesta is pricing-high and delivering-middle. I guess I prefer the price-low / deliver-low model better. Or better, the price-high / deliver-high model of the Marlowe, but I can't regularly afford that option....
Bonus link: If you're going to write a post card, make one for PostSecret. [via tip from Ashley]
