Saturday, November 29, 2003

On this day four years ago, Manila shipped. 

NY Times review of CBS movie on the Reagans. "Anyone eagerly anticipating or dreading a hatchet job on the 40th president is bound to feel confounded." 

Paul Boutin wrote the most concise FAQ on The Broadcast Flag so far. Thanks! 

New header graphic. As with the previous header, a road in the western US, heading off to infinity. I took this picture on March 10 of this year, on the first day of my cross-country drive, and wrote about it on March 19. "It's got all the elements." Here's the original picture, before cropping and enhancement and adding the title. I added it to the list of header graphics. 

This is the product I was looking for earlier this year. Ultra-portable MP3 player, radio, voice recorder, that can record radio. Under $200 for 256MB. USB port interface. On the other hand, I'd like it better if the same features were available in a 20GB hard drive-based unit.  

Note to John Palfrey -- wouldn't it be great if this site had an RSS feed. And this one. It's funny how I had to go to Calif to clarify my mission in Cambridge. I now get it. We're meant to string virtual wire through all the campuses and to work with any group that wants to work with us. It's remarkable how compact and manageable the Stanford campus is compared to ours, which is spread all over the Boston area. We need connective technology more than most campuses. So it's getting clearer. The first stage was getting a blogging initiative going. Second stage is to upgrade the campus network to do syndication and aggregation. And at the same time, of course, string wire to our friends at Stanford and MIT. As we used to say and stil do -- Bing.  

Halley: "Isn't time to stop holding back, and by stepping up to it, make one of these guys electable?" Amen. I found myself falling into the electable trap, when a Kucinich rep approached me at a party on my just-completed trip to California. I really don't like Kucinich, I've heard him interviewed on the radio, several times, and I think he's sleazy. That's just my impression. But if you go look at his policies, they're actually pretty good. But instead of saying "I don't really like the guy," I said "He's not electable," and thereby broke one of my own cardinal rules. At this stage it doesn't matter if someone is electable or not. We should be discussing issues now, investigating, digging, before we cast our votes next year. Any candidate that exposes issues worth talking about is doing his or her job very well. 

I just got an alert from the National Weather Services's RSS feed for Massachusetts. "A band of snow showers across interior Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire." Where did the snow come from? Partially from "plumes of lake-effect-snow from western New York climbing over the Berkshires." It's not snowing in Boston yet, but it feels like it'll start any minute. I just got the chill walking outside. This is the beginning of winter. 

Still sick this morning, but better. Pumping Vitamin C and Echinacea. Alka-Seltzer Cold Remedy, tastes terrible, but works wonders. Reading the latest Michael Crichton novel. I'm sure technically it's nonsense, but it's a good story. A good clue that it's nonsense is that he completely botches his explanation of recursion (a procedure that calls itself). Why don't they have technical reviewers of these books, before publication, so at least he could get the basics right and people could learn a little while reading a fun story.