Our Google, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name..

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.

Google’s ways are strange indeed, for Google hath smiteth such con­tent as Chi­na found offen­sive to it. And ver­i­ly, we all, like Job, have suf­fered at the whim of Google and cried out “WHY?”

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.

Amen.

The Strait of WHERE?

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.

tech­no­rati tags:,

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Teutonic kilted tango-crazy yankee wiener pasta team

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. 

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Against the Day on Flight 949

Ice cream, in tubs, across the sky.

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.

It begins, fun­ni­ly enough, with a flight to Chicago, Con­tin­ue read­ing “Again­st the Day on Flight 949”

5 things you don’t know about me

DOH!

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.

Right. Jen and Lisa, you’re it.

How many olives to make a bottle of oil?

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.

How many olives to make a litre of olive oil?
In the US and Canada, the more com­mon bot­tle size is 750 ml or 25.4 Flu­id Ounces. That’d be 1031 olives, 35 min­utes to pick.



Electric olive rakeOn 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.

Con­tin­ue read­ing “How many olives to make a bot­tle of oil?”

America. It costs ya.

Faster cheaper moreI’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.

Wel­come to the Unit­ed States.

Geocoding Flickr photos & other idle occupations

Papaya. Hawaiian PapayaStretch­h­h­h­h­h­h­h­h­h­h­h­h­h­h­hh. 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.

–b

Zappa hangover…

zappa dweezilI 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.
Zappa Tash

Becoming Movie Literate with GTD

Wizard of OzJason Kot­tke wrote:

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. 😉

How Linkable is my post? Give me five more words…

Seen this? It’s a list of ele­ments which make a post link­able.

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!