Wednesday, October 19, 2005

There are hotels in New Orleans taking reservations for later this month. I had a thought that I might travel there for a few days, with a camera, to see for myself what's going on. I wonder how crazy that idea is.  

I got a demo of Sphere today, and have a password to access the test site. I haven't had a chance yet to formulate an opinion about it. They're going to be at the TechCrunch BBQ on Friday night, where, btw, I will keynote. Yes, it's kind of strange to have a keynote speaker at a BBQ, but these are strange times! (And strange is gooood.) 

The Unofficial Apple Weblog found a copy of a 1985 email from Bill Gates to John Sculley on my site, but they didn't find the context. Here it is. I had seen the memo in a book by Jim Carlton of the WSJ. I asked if anyone knew where I could find a copy of it on the web, in a postscript to this October 1997 piece. Microsoft's PR firm sent a copy in response, and I posted it, in this piece. It is a fascinating slice of history, for more than one reason. It shows that Microsoft and its PR firm took blogs seriously as early as 1997. I think they got blogs before Scoble did, if you can believe that. And interestingly, these days, I don't get briefed as well by them as I did almost ten years ago. 

Hurricane Wilma will turn toward south Florida on a path to Camden in time for PopTech.  

Scoble will be my guest in Berkeley early next week. I bet that means there will be an East Bay geek dinner, maybe two.  

On this day in 1998, Jon Postel died. 

Sylvia Paull wonders where the women were at Web 2.0. 

Mike Arrington picks the top five venture capitalists who invest in new web companies.  

Rex Hammock: "No Joi Ito?" 

11:30AM: I installed another 500MB memory on my iBook G4. Good news, it didn't miss a single keystroke in the last sentence. It does fall behind (something no 2005 Windows machine does, sorry guys, just reporting the facts here), but whew, it's much better, so far, knock wood, praise Murphy, I am not an attorney, etc. 

Alex Barnett: 7 reasons 2006 will be a big year for OPML. 

Apparently I went on a train ride today in Italia with my friend Paolo. I bet we were sitting in the smoking section. (Postscript: I'd lose the bet. Paolo says Italia has quit smoking.) 

Lots of email on the bit below. I'll try getting some more memory for my iBook G4. I don't even know how to pop the lid on one of these babies. (Turns out popping the lid is easy. There are tabs to the right of the Esc key and to the left of F12. Squeeze them both at the same time and the keyboard pops off.) 

A step by step guide with pictures to upgrade RAM on an iBook G4. 

Chris Pirillo chooses uTorrent over Azureus as his Windows BitTorrent client. 

Five years ago on this day, a dinner with Ed Cone and Brent Simmons yields a story about transcendental money. It's funny because Brent now is much closer to having TM (he may actually have it, I don't really know) and Ed, after writing the Wired piece he was researching, went on to be the founder of the Greensboro blogging community, which has become so powerful that it can now host a conference (which I just participated in, at the same time Brent was making his TM). It seems the three of us may be in a common eddy in the River of Life.  

Amyloo questions the math in my post about morons and idiots on mail lists and wikis. She makes some good points. Charles Cooper cites it as gospel. 

Can you go 18 hours without food? 

I went for colonoscopy number two yesterday, the first was five years ago. From this point I'll be a regular at the surgery center. Not much to say about it, the procedure itself takes 20 minutes, and you're so pumped with sedative that you don't even notice it, except at first it's a little painful.

They say the worst part is the prep, and it's pretty gross and takes a long time, but you can do it, and I don't think it's really the worst part, which is the moment when they tell you if they found anything. But for me, even that's not so bad. I've already been through the worst of that, three years ago, and survived. Maybe someday the news will be "There's no treatment for what you have, settle up your affairs." Then, I hope I can do it with the grace and humor that Warren Zevon showed, singing "My ride's here."

One thing that was great was that all the doctors, nurses and attendants, except for one, were women. I never felt so cared for, and totally enjoyed all the attention. And the one guy there, an orderly who wheeled me out, was one of the happiest guys you'll ever meet. No surprise there.

Again, I noticed that people who spend all day every day helping others have the best jobs in the world. I think humans were designed to help each other, and when that's all we do, we're happy.

Programming on an empty stomach 

I rented a bunch of movies, but only watched one, Spanglish, which I enjoyed a lot. I'm a sucker for romantic comedy, and this one is funny and sweet and the main characters are a ton of fun, all of them, and there are lots. I guess I knew I'd like it when I saw that it was directed by the same guy who did As Good As It Gets, which is one of my all-time favorites. I also rented Motorcycle Diaries, which I'll watch as soon as I finish my mid-night posting.

You'd think programming without any food might be a bit hard, given that programming is accomplished by shutting out all real-world distractions, and a grumbling stomach and a mind thinking every moment of raiding the fridge, or driving to Togo's, would make it hard to focus on the ones and zeros, but not so, it turns out. I did some great work while fasting and making quick runs to the loo.

All this programming made me realize that I need a faster machine. This iBook G4 isn't really fast enough for email and it totally sucks for programming. Mac users like to say that CPU speeds on the Mac aren't comparable to those on Windows, but they should try Windows sometime. The machines are so much faster. Which is to say that an entry-level Mac is unacceptably slow. It literally misses keystrokes while I'm typing. Makes creative writing a slow process, and makes programming more error-prone (which is the last thing you need).

Regardless, I like the user interface enough that I'm willing to throw some money at the problem. Not sure if I should buy a desktop or a new high speed laptop, and I really like the iBook form factor, it's rugged and attractive. But the machine is ridiculously slow.