My assimilation is nearly complete. I love Chrome. I love Chrome. I love Chrome.
I love Google Calendar.
I love Google Mail.
I love Google Spreadsheets.
I love Google Analytics.
For this I am branded heretic among my pagan colleagues. They fear Google. They believe Google to be an angry God. And so I bear the mark of the Google Faithful.
But such blessings abound for those who stand fast in the radiance of Google! For we can turn our back upon the false God of Microsoft, who can not but grant a blessing without a rain of curses. And we can turn our back upon the forest god of Linux — whose blessings, while vast, are only available by installing an infinite regression of missing dependencies.
Google smiles upon us. Google peers into my heart and knows my needs. And truly, Google knoweth all.
We of the faithful shall walk through the valley of death, we shall bear being thrown to the lions. For unto Google is granted the kingdom and the power and the glory — the place where ask is answer, where knock is open wide.
The following paragraph catches my eye today from a Sea Shepherd press release:
According to the indictment, on the morning of September 8, the five men took two motorboats into the Strait of Juan de Fuca off the Makah tribal reservation at the tip of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula and harpooned the California gray whale.
OK, I’m a punctuation snob… But if ever there was a reminder of the importance of commas, this is it. You can scour the map, but you won’t find any place called the Strait of
Juan de Fuca off
But what a fine name it would be for a getaway destination.
Ik werk nieuwe met four colleagues y nos jefe, Francesca, in a squadra multicultural. Every one of us is desde paiese diverse, mate: a bloody scotchman, Un Italiana, eine Deutsche frau, un argentino, ein ¶sterreicher, and me, the Yank. It’s a fantastic combination.
Today we were comparing meeting routines for the Communications departments Martina and Oscar had run in other Greenpeace offices. Martina, from Germany, set up a two hour weekly meeting. Punctuality was mandatory, or you couldn’t attend. The agenda was carefully developed on a rotating basis by members of the staff, circulated beforehand, and time –policied to ensure a precise division of the meeting between one hour of update and evaluation and one hour of philosophical or positioning debate or brainstorming.
Oscar, from Buenos Aires, held his weekly meetings in a bar after work for a half hour sometimes, sometimes more, and sometimes followed by Tango dancing. Their creative process cooked with beer.
Both these offices have produced outstanding work.
So what are we to learn about best practice, and what are we, this global team, to take away as learnings from these experiences? We started with the single element common to both.
We shall meet weekly.
Beyond that, everything es una gran aventura, und ¼ber haupt.
Theo Jansen is a Dutch artist/engineer who makes these amazing wind-powered creatures that wander the beach near his native Delft. These may be walking exoskeletons, but their movement is so compelling — they trick my brain into thinking it’s tracking a living creature.
Air Canada 899 Heavy asks Scottish for a ride report on flight level three six zero. Scottish is busy getting an oceanic from Iceland for KLM 601, but United 949 reports three six zero smooth.
I am eating ice cream aboard said United 949 London Heathrow to Chicago, listening to the chatter on channel 9 of the in-flight audio programme. It’s an addictive little bit of eavesdropping that United Airlines provides “at the captain’s discretion” and I suppose there is some comfort for the uneasy flyer (and are we all not, admit it, uneasy flyers?) that as long as you can hear it, there’s nothing amiss that you’re not supposed to be hearing. It’s a stream of information about chop, flight levels, handovers, and radio frequencies. I can think of no rational reason why I find it fascinating, but I happily pass on the music channels that are chopped into decades and the movie choices (Happy Feet, seen it; Night at the Museum, nuh-uh) to listen to a bunch of pilots talking endlessly about the weather. This is how we pass the time, in a world without Google.
I also have with me for company an RLB (Ridiculously Large Book), Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon. Were it not Pynchon, I would never travel with a tome of this physical and intellectual weight. But it IS Pynchon, and given the need to occassionally stop, get your bearings, re-read, skip back to the appearance of this — where did HE come from — next of a dozen characters that have appeared in so many pages, or figure out how the narrative present of one first-person story has somehow morphed into a third-person history by a minor character who, wait, was actually the narrator a moment ago, well, it will be Christmas before I finish it if I don’t take these extended reading opportunities seriously.
John at Houtlust tagged Gillo and then Gillo tagged me in this game. I have to tell you five things you don’t know about me and then tag somebody else. It’s like a chain letter among bloggers. So here goes:
1. I was a Ham radio operator in high school (call sign WN2WFR) and so learned morse code. The first time I heard, on a crowded tram, a Nokia phone signal the arrival of an SMS with the tones dit-dit-dit dah-dah dit-dit-dit I smiled: I had been spoken to in a secret language by a phone, and I knew of at least three other vacuum-tube geeks out there who I haven’t seen in decades who would have had the same experience.
2. I turned down a spot at the Yaddo writer’s colony to spend an Emersonian winter in a cabin in New Hampshire. There was no electricity, no running water, and when the four wheel drive that the owner was loaning me froze in, I had to walk an hour and a half into town every week for supplies. I wrote some very bad poetry. I got very close to nature. My job was simply to be there, armed with .22 rifle that the owner insisted I have with me to protect his property.
3. Somewhere out there, I have a step-brother and step-sister that I’ve not seen since I was four or five, the children of my father’s first marriage. Their mother died, and my father somehow closed that chapter in his life and moved on.
4. There’s a few jokes in one of my favourite books, Gravity’s Rainbow, which I get but have never seen cracked in print. One is a riddle put at a fictional convention on brain function: “What did the cockney exclaim to the cowboy from San Antonio?” Steven Weisenburger, in his exhaustive and fabulous line by line analysis, “A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion” muffs it with a long etymological analysis of the word cockney, and a reference to an anal-erotic incident earlier in the book to guess that the answer is “I’ll be your rose from San Antone.”
What? It’s a brain function convention, remember?
The answer, obviously, is “Cor, Tex…”
Maybe you need to have spent time in England to get it…
5. I am a type A personality. (OK, those who know me, know this. I get impatient on my bicycle when someone in front of me going down one of Holland’s rare hills coasts rather than accelerates). What you don’t know is that I used to practice Zazen on a Zafu made by a friend who became a monk. I sat every day for almost a year, and really tried, but never succeeded in shutting down the internal monologue that seems to run 24/7 in my head. The only times I’ve ever caught a whiff of Satori have been on mountains, in forests, and at sea.
You gain a new appreciation of the olive oil you slather on your salad or cook your vegetables in when you know that every litre is made up of 1,375 olives that took 47 minutes to pick.
On Saturday I got to pick olives once again. Years ago, I lived on an organic olive farm in Umbria run by the then-retired chairman of Greenpeace, David McTaggart. Every year around harvest time, we’d start making the calls to folks who might like to volunteer to spend some time in the Italian sunlight (provided it didn’t snow) enjoy some good honest labor (from sunrise to sunset) and take advantage one of the few excuses you get as an adult to climb around in trees. We generally had plenty of takers for what was supposed to be a paid job, but which plenty of folks were willing to do in exchange for food and hospitality.
We didn’t mention that it could be miserable — if the weather was wet or you wounded your hands even slightly, or the ground turned to mush that sucked at your boots — or that you worked whatever the weather and the work was bone-achingly, muscle-pullingly, RSI-inducingly hard.
But when I see these folks today, what we tend to remember most is the good stuff. The incomparable light falling across the hills where Hannibal marched his army toward Lake Trasimeno, shimmering far below us in the distance, the taste of good coarse bread and Montepulciano wine, the sound of the wind and, here and there, the scent of truffles where a boar has pawed up a gourmet meal at the base of an oak tree.
So when I found myself in Rome for a meeting in the midst of the picking season with a Sunday to spare, I gladly volunteered to help pick at the old farm, which has passed into the hands of Domitilla Senni. The weather was stunning, the company good, and I really needed the kind of zen space that manual labour can get you into.
There was a new-fangled invention come to the farm. Now back in my day, we disdained even so much as the plastic rakes that were common among the seasonal pickers that came through, preferring the 100% organic-by-hand method and only allowing for the occassional glove when there was actual snow on the branches.
The talk of tree-shaking machines was always disdainful: something only no self-respecting olive farmer would do to a perfectly good olive tree.
But I wonder what my old boss, David McTaggart, would have made of the Electric Rake that we were using on Saturday.
Let’s start with the negatives. First strike against: it’s electric. They say it’ll go an entire day on a single charge, but still: it’s electric. It’s noisy. It contributes to climate change. Second strike: it ain’t organic. Among the millenia-old methods of picking olives, of which there are a few, a rotating set of plastic fingers on a carbon-fibre stick is not one of them.
I’m heading to the States next week for holiday.
Always great to see friends, but I’m already worked up, before I’ve even arrived, about one tiny little detail that says volumes about The American Way.
Regular readers will know I have issues with American foreign policy, Domestic security policy, Environmental policy, oh and a few thousand other minor items related to the way my country conducts itself in the world today. But the object of my ire today isn’t any of those.
It’s luggage carts.
Martha called yesterday, after heroically shepherding our two boys across thousands of miles of ocean in an aluminum tube (with one of them, at 22 months, big enough to not get a baby hammock but too small to get his own seat) and reminded me about the first shock that awaits people arriving at JFK from civilized countries, where the luggage carts are free.
It’ll cost you 3 bucks to put wheels under your suitcase. Oh and the money exchange is past customs.
There is no font large enough to express how INFURIATING I find this.
When you arrive at Amsterdam’s airport, Schipol, you walk into a spacious environment that was clearly designed by human beings for human beings. The carts are plentiful and free.
Arrive at JFK, or most US airports for that matter, and you walk into an environment designed for cattle. Narrow “keep moving” corridors, every inch of available space monetized with ads.
You want comfort? You want ease? You gotta pay for it, sucker. In dollars.
Because the deal is, a government doesn’t exist to improve the quality of life of its people. That’s your own goddam job. Pick yourself by your bootstraps and get with the program. You are nothing but a walking sack of money.
Stretchhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Today is a holiday in the Netherlands and I took the day off (well, most of the day, there was a story on GE Papaya and what it has done to the Hawaiian papaya market to post.) Other than that, a day of playing with the boys and pursuing idle thoughts and interests:
–I noted that saying “Hawaiian Papaya” out loud does funny things to your face.
–I put together a graphic for the “The debate about climate change is over” campaign and then decided it was obvious depressing and sucky.
–But I had fun learning how to create flaming letters in photoshop and twisting and distorting text. I’m officially nuts about Good-Tutorials.com
–Doon taught me the proper steps for the disassembly, cleaning, and reassembly of a B-Daman –Marth and I talked about installing a new pump and filter in the fish pond, but it was a cold and drizzly day and we moped out the window
–I added a daily update on news about squid to my RSS news feed.
–Finally found the article on building smarter to-do lists at 43 Folders which I originally read in Make Magazine. Whole lot of sense here.
–I geotagged some of my photos on Flickr so you can see the precise location they were taken.
–I set up a store over at Cafepress selling t-shirts and various items dedicated to irradicating apostrophe abuse
–I read a bit from my current book, a despairingly mediocre potboiler trying to be literature, Shadow of the Wind
–Went O boy O boy when I saw that Anthony Lane was reviewing the Da Vinci Code in the New Yorker, and cheated by reading it online rather than waiting for my copy in the post. Howlingly funny.
–I updated some of my Del.icio.us bookmarks –I downloaded the match schedule for the world cup to post on the refrigerator and was dissappointed to see that the luck of the groupings means a US-Iran game is nearly impossible, except in the unlikely event that both teams make the semi-finals. Ha.
–Tried to explain the World Cup to Doon. He wanted to know what team Beckham will play for, and what happens if he ends up playing against his own teammates. He’s not accepting that Dutch team Ajax doesn’t play in the World Cup.
–HawAIian PapAYa. HAwaiian PApaya. HawaIIan PapaYA.
–Right now I want desperately to figure out why WordPress’s Add URL link opens in a tiny unresizeable window that’s smaller than the fill in fields it contains and which clears the clipboard into which you’ve just copied your link. Agro-vating. Update: Fix for the window size problem found here!
–Noodled around a bit on the guitar, which I NEVER do anymore.
So all that was fun. Hope tomorrow’s weather is better so I can get some real work done.
I saw the debut performance of Zappa plays Zappa Monday night at the Amsterdam Music Hall, a show put together by Zappa son Dweezil and reuniting Steve Vai, Tony Bozzio, and Napoleon Brock from the old days, along with five perky young musicians who, to audition, had to transcribe the, shall we say, complex Zappa classics Black Page and Inca Roads and then play them on several instruments. A high level of musical talent would be an understatement.
What an astounding experience. I had to keep unsmiling my face so the muscles wouldn’t lock into a permanent and possibly career-threatening grin.
Steve Vai talked about how when Dweezil started showing an interest in guitar at 12, Frank said “show him some stuff, Steve, I don’t want him to grow up to be a mongoloid string-bender.” Well, he’d have done his Dad proud. Not the performer Frank was — he’s a sensitive and introverted kid, but his guitar work was impeccable, he clearly glued the band together, and his love of the oeuvre and the artist was obvious.
My friend Jenny, who once worked in the Music biz in London in the Beatles Era, turned out to be a total pro at the art of crowd navigation, and we ended up four bodies away from center stage in the highly packed house.
Midway through the concert I knew I was going to want to have an iTunes playlist made up of the pieces that were covered. But I also knew, with the certainty of one borg unit in a hive mind, that someone in the crowd was keeping track of what was played and would upload a setlist somewhere. I knew I’d find it, and I knew with some effort I’d be able to dowload each and every one of the Zappa originals, no matter how obscure. Last night I snagged most of them, along with the bonus 1977 King Biscuit Flour Hour concert.
At the moment I’m missing Pygmy Twylyt
Edchina’s Arf of you
Son of Orange County Trouble Every Day Token of my extreme
But I’ll find them. UPDATE: Thanks, Abhoria, for the tip on Zappateers.com — Gazillions of Torrents of audience tapes and bootlegs and more Zappa shows than you can shake a schtick at, including the only time I saw him live: Rome 1988 at the Palaeur. This internet thing is sooooo cool.
Film critic Jim Emerson compiled a list of 102 movies that you should see before you can consider yourself movie literate:
…they [are] the movies you just kind of figure everybody ought to have seen in order to have any sort of informed discussion about movies. They’re the common cultural currency of our time, the basic cinematic texts that everyone should know, at minimum, to be somewhat “movie-literate.”
At the time I read about this I was evaluating TiddlyWiki and a couple other Getting Things Done task list applications. So I created a Moviegoers Film Literacy Checklist [Firefox or other standards-compliant browsers only. IE won’t work!] as a little excercise. (I know, I know — there are glaring omissions and some questionable inclusions here, and you’re welcome to lodge your despairing shrieks of outrage in the comments)
It took about 3 minutes to do this in Next Action. What a great app. It’s Ajax, so it takes a bit to load but quick after that. The Bulk upload feature allowed me to take the Kottke list, strip out his “I’ve seen this” asterisks, and paste it as ASCII straight into a form field. As long as your actions are on a single line each, hey presto, they become Action items all ready for that childishly gratifying moment when you click the Done button and they vanish, with a satisfying fade effect, into your completed file.
[Update: I went back to Emerson’s original list and grabbed the html from that, which had links to Roger Ebert’s reviews of the films and, more importantly, film version dates. (Real buffs will know that it was obviously the 1922 version of Nosferatu that belonged on the list, but let’s make sure there’s no room for doubt!] I much prefer IMDB for my film info, but the beauty of this was the ability to simply cut and paste that sucker and drop it in with but a minimum of tweak.]
To make and keep your personal list of movies you’ve seen, you can click the tick boxes from the dashboard or you can go to Actions and click the DONE button on all the movies you seen. Then click on File, Save As in your browser and save the file to a local disk. (There’s no automated save, no server save, you must save locally!!!) This is the hardest part of learning to use Next Action — it looks like a web page, but it’s designed to be a local file — personal, not groupware. You can save it to a server if you like, but it’s handier to keep it on a thumb drive or PDA.
Once you’ve saved the file, Voila. Your personal life Movie list is ready to go, and you can add notes, add or remove films that you do or don’t think should be on the list, change colors, set due dates and reminders. It’s all html and javascript, so you can mod to your heart’s content. OK, now seeing 102 movies may not be the kind of project management that GTD or Next Action were designed to handle, but yowser, it’s a great illustration of how easy this particular tool is to use. I’m recommending it to my team at work. (And if you want to use a clean copy for actual work, there’s a handy “Delete all Records” button behind the About link.) But I’m not sure when I’ll have time — I’ve got 22 films to bitTorrent and see. 😉
I’m not sure why having a ten word title is important (do “Teaser titles” not work for others human beings, and I alone click on curious two word snippets?), I dont’ think EVERY blog entry should go to Digg (Digg is supposed to be tech only, and there’s a vociferous community of folks who snap at the heels of political bloggers). I DEFINITELY don’t want every blog to go to BoingBoing (BoingBoing posts are in a class of their own, and why would we want to spam people who do so much to keep us informed and entertained?), and I’m clueless why my page needs to include an animated ad or have “several javascript widgets.”
But there are some good hints in here, and I’m thinking of putting a version of this together for our crew and activists who blog.
Today’s post fails on several points. Do not, therefore, under any circumstances, link to this post!