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Good morning Chinese food fans! First some news.. James Gleick, in the NY Times, is inescapably connected. Doc is picking his nose with chopsticks. Doc stop doing that! "That's not the right metaphor," he explains. Guido van Rossum: "I've spent waaaaaaaaay too much time talking and listening to lawyers in the past year!" Dan Gillmor: "The gifted amateurs do more than create art in our world. They are also the true believers in politics and other fields. They do things because they care. We need them, and the Net gives them a megaphone the likes of which they haven't had before." NY Times editorial: "Consider the fate of the Bettmann archive, which began as a collection of images recorded on film smuggled out of Nazi Germany by Otto Bettmann and grew into a collection of 17 million historic photographs, now in the possession of Bill Gates. When Mr. Gates bought the archive, the plan was to digitize all its images. But the time it will take to digitize those pictures has proved to be longer than many of the pictures themselves will last, unless they are properly stored. As a result, the archive is destined for archival refrigeration 220 feet below ground in a limestone mine not far from Pittsburgh." I'm signing up for TV Turnoff Week, which isn't that big a deal since I haven't watched TV since Jan 1. I didn't know that Yahoo did server co-lo. Sjoerd Visscher has a new version of his OPML browser web app. "It should just work." Simon Fell's interop matrix is mostly green. I love that the Guardian has a weblog, but why don't they link to other weblogs in their left margin? Snookering  For me, today's another writing day. I got snookered into a quick project that should be a lot of fun. I'm writing the foreword to a book that I believe in. It's my second in the last year. I wrote the foreword to Joel Spolsky's book on software design that must be coming out any day now. I look forward (not foreword) to that, because we'll be citing Joel's book in the future. The same for the book I'm writing the foreword for now, which is a secret project that I can't talk about. 12:12PM, I've finished the first draft of the foreword. 1599 words. A productive writing session. 12:46PM, after an edit, 1654 words. Second edit, 1445 words. Starting to converge. There seem to be a lot of secret projects floating around right now. They're usually surprising things. If they come to fruition you'll slap yourself on the forehead and say "I can't believe those people are working together!" It's a thing to behold, eventually enough time passes, old animosities become less important, or the people change, or new people are in charge, history is forgotten, and there are reasons to make philosophies and software compatible, and that's what happens, again, given enough time. Healing. What a concept. Secrets. I hate them and I love them. I hate writing long-lead-time pieces, because I've never trained my mind to do them. As I'm writing a piece I wonder what will people say about this or that. I try to imagine a reader. Now when I'm writing real-time, as I am now, I know that as soon as I press Control-S, someone is going to read it. And if they have something to say they'll tell me. This is publishing at 800 mph. But if you've got a long lead time, as book authors do, it's much slower. Hey I'm a feedback junkie. I admit it. Can I break the habit? Yes. Do I want to? Hmmm. Speaking of junkies, Doc Searls is a self-acknowledged outliner junkie. He says he has a black belt in MORE. This makes me happy because (I know this sounds sappy but it's true) I write software for guys like Doc. What a lot of loops close here. I'm learning about Knowledge Management, which is a hot concept in BigCo consulting. I'm learning that Manila plus outlining is pretty close to the core of KM. I dream of an outliners convention. I want to get a bunch of them in a room and talk about the future. That's what's cool about outliner people. They have a clue about the future.  BTW, Doc says that Stewart Brand is an outliner guy. I didn't know that. People think I don't like BigCo's, hey sometimes I even think I don't -- but that's where the money is. They pay for software. Same old story. That was the upshot of the copy protection rebellion in the mid-80s. The software companies that survived were the ones who made products for people who pay. It sounds obvious, but sometimes the most obvious truths are the most elusive. Anyway now I have to go write my foreword. Please stop me from procrastinating!
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