Fiat Lux

We're home.

Jet lag kicked me in the butt all week and I've gotten less than 6 hours sleep a night since leaving San Mateo. I swear, going to NYC messes me up worse than going to Europe does, despite the much greater time difference.

In addition, there was a time when I liked flying, but these days, flying has all the glamor of a Greyhound Bus ride and I hate it. I still like the "being somewhere else" part of travel as much as always, but I can't say how much I wish we had better options for getting there.

I'm going to try to fight off going to sleep for a couple more hours so that I don't wake up at 3:00AM, but I'm not really coherent enough to blog on anything else right now.

Birthday edition.

Not mine (that was last month).Gimi turned 3 while we were in NY.

Sadly, Kathy Sierra has decided to shutter 'Creating Passionate Users' and do more thinking about when or if she will return to blogging. As much as I honor her right to choose her own course, I can't help but feel that this sucks, because the people who drove her away are going to consider that a 'victory'. And that is not how it should be.

Damn.

On the advice of friends who are in the beta, I just pre-ordered two copies of Lord of the Rings Online.

I really, really hope it doesn't suck.

So in the wake of the Kathy Sierra situation, Tim O'Reilly has created a draft of a Blogger's Code of Conduct.

Frankly, I don't see why deciding to moderate one's comments is such a big deal. We all do it already in order to mitigate spam; this is not all that different. It doesn't need badges and it doesn't need a long, painfully worded Code.

Here's mine, from December 2005:

I reserve the right to remove any comment left on this site, for any reason or for no reason at all. I pay for the web hosting; I get to decide how my disk space and bandwidth are used. However, I do not edit comments; that seems unfair. If they do not get tossed into the bit bucket, they remain as their authors wrote them.

I see no need to change that policy. I support the rights of free, anonymous, and/or pseudonymous speech online. However, that doesn't give you the right to say something I don't like on my dime. Don't like it? Go over to Blogger or Vox or Wordpress and get your own site. Problem solved.

UPDATE 1:50 PM:

Tony Hung gets it absolutely right:

Bloggers don’t need a code of conduct, because it isn’t the content of blogs that are in the question. What’s being called into question is the cowardly personal attacks that are sent by email, and left in the comments sections of blogs.

And if that’s really the issue, then calling for a Bloggers Code of Conduct is pointless.

A month or so ago, I posted a blog entry noting that I was having a problem with comments vanishing when I posted to Wordpress blogs. Thanks to the kind operator the Burbed blog, who listened to my complaints and took the time to do some testing, I finally have an answer to why my comments were vanishing into the aethir.

Apparently, my 'handle' of Fiat Lux is classed as 'definitely spam' by one of the common Wordpress spam filters (presumably Akismet).

That's moderately annoying, since I'm rather fond of that phrase.

Because it's looking like it's going to be a long, dry summer around these parts. And that's not good news:

More than 2 million Bay Area water users could face mandatory water restrictions this summer if they do not cut back on consumption now, the head of the San Francisco Public Utility Commission said Wednesday.

The Sierra snowpack -- the major water source for people in San Francisco, parts of the Peninsula, the South Bay and southern Alameda County -- is less than half of what it should be for this time of year. As of the beginning of the month, the snow pack was at 46 percent of normal.

[snip]

Officials will look at the measurements at the end of May and make a recommendation on mandatory restrictions for San Francisco's 2.4 million users, said Susan Leal, general manager of the city's Public Utilities Commission.

Mandatory restrictions could mean reducing consumption up to 20 percent. Customers who do not comply could face fines or have their water turned off.

From the archives -- Tommy decided to make a nest for himself in a comforter that had been left out following a guest's visit.

So I was checking out rev2.org's list of the Top 10 Most Successful Web 2.0 Startups to Date this morning, and noticed something interesting: Not one of them has IPOed or announced plans to do so. All of them have either been acquired by Web 1.0 companies (several of whom did IPO) or are still privately held.

The other interesting thing is that there's no mention on the list of whether any of the companies is profitable (or was before acquisition). Wikipedia, being a non-profit, is off the hook there, but what about the others?

You'd think that after all the craziness in the last go-round, this time, any real definition of success would include some amount of actual profitability, but maybe I expect too much.

UPDATE 4/15 In comments on his site, rev2's Sid clarifies:

Since most Web 2.0 companies are private and don’t release any information at all on profitablity and revenues (with the exception of perhaps YouTube which we have some data on) I decided to leave that out. While I realize that’s one of the important things in terms of ‘most successful,’ Web 2.0 is really more about ‘who can get acquired for the most money’ than ‘who can make the most money.’ That was Web 1.0, and those companies are now the ones who are buying these.

Having lived through Web 1.0, I seem to recall it was all about the "eyeballs" and about IPOing as fast as possible, not about profitability, but hey, maybe old age has clouded my memory.

The local CA radio stations didn't start reporting on the Virginia Tech massacre until after rush hour, so I didn't find out about it until I got to work. Watching the death toll increase over the hours while trying to get work done was pretty sucktastic.

There's really not much I can add to what's already been said today, other than the observation that Chris Rock was right:

Gun control? We need bullet control! I think every bullet should cost 5,000 dollars.

One of the victims at Virginia Tech was Liviu Librescu: A holocaust survivor.

Liviu Librescu, 75, a senior researcher and lecturer in engineering, was a Holocaust survivor. He had immigrated to Israel from Romania with his wife Marlina, also a survivor, in 1978. He was an expert in aeronautics at Tel Aviv University and the Haifa Technion before moving to the United States in 1984.

...

According to media accounts quoting students, Mr. Librescu and the class heard shooting in a nearby room. The students said their professor blocked the door to prevent the gunman from entering while some students took cover underneath desks and others leaped out from windows.

זֵכֶר צַדִּיק לִבְרָכָה וְשֵׁם רְשָׁעִים יִרְקָֽב׃

With everything else going on this week, the news of Kitty Carlyle Hart's passing is likely to pass unnoticed, and that's a shame. She was the kind of woman the world needs much more of.

She was known for her grace and charm, but by her own account she was slightly eccentric, a trait she treasured because she believed it gave her a lot of leeway.

She practiced singing every day, exercised every morning (and was the first to tell anyone that she had beautiful legs, which she did) and believed that discipline was the key to life. In her last decades, she became a popular lecturer. She often told her audiences, “With a soupçon of courage and a dash of self-discipline, one can make a small talent go a long way.”

...

“I’m more optimistic, more enthusiastic and I have more energy than ever before,” she said just after her 79th birthday. Energy, she said, came from doing the things she wanted to do.

“You get so tired when you do what other people want you to do,” she said.

how can a mentally ill person walk into a store and buy semi-automatic guns with no questions, background check or wait period but an average "joe on the street" can't walk into a drug store and get a couple of drugs to ease post nasal drip without having to show proof of i.d. and getting their name, address and phone number put on a national medication database to make sure that they don't buy more within a certain time period.

something is really freakin' wrong with our society.

Yes. And it's our complete refusal to deal with mental illness in anything resembling a sane fashion (pun intended). Either mental illness is a joke, or it's not "real", or it's a sign that the person is not to be trusted. There's almost no middle ground.

And then to make matters worse, people who dare to speak up and talk about their struggles with mental illness do so at the risk of losing their ability to earn a living. It's small wonder that the few who do generally wait until they're rich enough, famous enough or respected enough that people are willing to overlook it. Someone less rich or successful who is open in the workplace about their illness risks losing any ability to further their career at that (or any other) company -- the ADA notwithstanding. That's a really good reason to keep your mouth shut and let the stereotypes perpetuate.

Recently, we started using Basecamp at the office to manage some current projects. It's working out well for some things -- to-do list management and assigning tasks, for example -- and it's certainly easier to use and has a much faster learning curve than Microsoft Project. Yet I am also very frustrated by the limitations -- trying to actually edit a document in their whiteboard means giving up a lot of functionality that I take for granted, for example -- and this was compounded by some server-side outages I ran into while working. Each outage was relatively brief (a minute or two, maybe), but it was no fun to be kicked out of flow and brought to a complete standstill each time they happened. I eventually finished the document in MS Word and dropped the finished text into the whiteboard, rather than risk further interruptions.

In short, as far as I'm concerned, this aspect of Web 2.0 is not as great as it's cracked up to be. And according to Wired's Michael Calore I'm not the only one who feels that way:

In general, I found that the browser is perfectly suitable for a variety of daily office tasks -- e-mail, writing and editing stories. I also lived through several technological breakdowns that had me pounding my desk in frustration, wondering what the hell I had gotten into.

Yep, that sounds about right.

But there's more to this than the purely personal issue of having to unlearn years or even decades of computing habits. What frustrates me the most about the whole Web 2.0 'the browser is the application' paradigm is how essentially unoriginal it is.

A lot of very talented and dedicated people are spending countless hours (and investment dollars) solving problems that have already been solved, and in some cases, solved very well. Look at TurboTax, to pick a handy tax-week example. It's a great, absolutely best-of-breed application. How much time and treasure did it cost Intuit to port TurboTax to the web? What new stuff could they have done with those people and that money instead? We'll never know.

What I would really love to see is people spending all that time, talent, and money on solving the problems that have NOT been solved yet. Search technology, for example. We've made some big strides in text-based search (although there is still much do do there too), but searching around graphics, video, or audio is lagging far behind. Or if you want to focus on web-based technology, can someone please come up with a cross-platform web conferencing system that doesn't suck? Or, as Bruce Schneier pointed out in another Wired article, how about solving some of the security issues that still plague the computing world?

Wouldn't it be great if Web 2.5 were about solving new problems, instead of re-solving the old ones?

What is a lolcat?

The funny folks at I Can Has Cheezburger? have the answer. Or they would, if their server hadn't gotten Digged into limbo. Luckily, they'll be back soon, and better than ever, on a new server.

The pet food fiasco gets worse: Pet Foods May Have Been Intentionally Poisoned.

Imported ingredients used in recalled pet food may have been intentionally spiked with an industrial chemical to boost their apparent protein content, federal officials said Thursday.

That's one theory being pursued by the Food and Drug Administration as it investigates how the chemical, melamine, contaminated at least two ingredients used to make more than 100 brands of dog and cat foods.

...

Chinese authorities have told the FDA that the wheat gluten was an industrial product not meant for pet food, [Stephen Sundlof, the FDA's chief veterinarian] said. Still, melamine can skew test results to make a product appear more protein-rich than it really is, he added. That raises the possibility the contamination was deliberate.

As I said to a friend today, I'm not quite ready to start feeding the cats organic raw foods only. But if the news on the pet-food front gets any worse, I might just do that.

And maybe it is time to start rethinking how much "industrial" food we buy for the household humans, as well.

Two things that jumped out at me this morning:

1) Glenn Greenwald's piece on the new WMD conspiracy theory currently making the right-wing rounds. Here's a hint: any theory which requires the complicity of hundreds if not thousands of government workers on all parts of the political spectrum is utter BS. Doesn't matter what theory you're talking about, that's just basic human nature.

2) This excellent video (slightly NSFW, profanity):

Only yesterday, I was saying maybe it is time to start rethinking how much "industrial" food we buy for the household humans, as well.

Well, what a difference a day makes. By way of Litbrit @ Shakes' place:

It was only a matter of time before this happened: melamine has been detected in the feed and body fluids of pigs meant for human consumption, and California authorities have issued both a quarantine and an advisory to not consume pork from at least one farm; others may follow, since the tainted feed was also shipped to New York.

Yes, it's only one farm, and one that does not resell pork, so maybe this is Not That Big A Deal. But how much more of this stuff might be out there, unreported?

This issue of where our food comes from is not going to go away soon.

Here's some of the most sane writing I've seen on the subject:

It is not possible to for an average person to live a reasonably prosperous North American (or even European) lifestyle and reduce their footprint to one planet by themselves.

This point is worth pausing on, because so much of the green marketing BS around us tells us that the planetary crises we face are our fault, that it is our responsibility to fix them and that buying products which are marketed as "green" will fix that problem. The myth of individual lifestyle responsibility is so strong, most of us don't even comment on it anymore. But in many ways, it's a lie. What most needs to be changed in the world are the systems in which we are all enmeshed, and we ourselves, acting alone, are almost powerless to change those systems. To do that, we need better information, stronger connections and new ways of thinking.

Oh so true. Replacing your lightbulbs or recycling your cans is great, truly, but what's really going to turn this planet around is not what individual people do in their own homes, it's what happens in the factories and the oil refineries and in the boardrooms of companies across the world. You want to see real change? That's where it needs to happen. Organizations like Forest Ethics get that. Some others don't.

Go, buy some new CF lightbulbs today if it makes you feel better. Just don't mistake that for an action that's really helping the planet.

I've been meaning to blog about my commute for a long time. I drive 33 miles each way to my current gig, and frankly that's too far. About the only times I really enjoy my commute are sunny mornings like today, because when the weather is nice, the ride along the upper part of Highway 280 is really lovely. (Highway 280, if you're not familiar with the SF Bay Area, is an interstate that connects San Francisco and San Jose. It's more or less the neglected step-child of Highway 101, a north-south artery that runs all the way down to Los Angeles.)

At any rate, if you must commute, Highway 280 is a good commute to have, especially the part before you hit the more urbanized South Bay. Lots of green rolling hills, fields, even some cows as you pass near Stanford. This wiki link helps show what I mean but that's far from the prettiest scenery you pass on the stretch from San Mateo down to Cupertino. Still, it's a long commute, and even on a good, no-traffic day I'm in the car for 45 minutes each way. On a Friday night, it can take well over an hour to get home. And for a minimum of 4 months each the year (more if I work late a lot), I'm driving home after sundown, which means all I see is tail lights, not hills and trees.

What finally got me to write about the commute was this piece on commuting in the New Yorker. This is me:

Roughly one out of every six American workers commutes more than forty-five minutes, each way. People travel between counties the way they used to travel between neighborhoods.

And here's the corollary:

“I was shocked to find how robust a predictor of social isolation commuting is,” Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, told [the author of the article]. (Putnam wrote the best-seller “Bowling Alone,” about the disintegration of American civic life.) “There’s a simple rule of thumb: Every ten minutes of commuting results in ten per cent fewer social connections. Commuting is connected to social isolation, which causes unhappiness.”

...

The source of the unhappiness is not so much the commute itself as what it deprives you of. When you are commuting by car, you are not hanging out with the kids, sleeping with your spouse (or anyone else), playing soccer, watching soccer, coaching soccer, arguing about politics, praying in a church, or drinking in a bar. In short, you are not spending time with other people. The two hours or more of leisure time granted by the introduction, in the early twentieth century, of the eight-hour workday are now passed in solitude. You have cup holders for company.

Not that I'm all that into soccer, churches, or bar-hopping (anymore) but those are just examples to illustrate the point. True, you can chat on your cellphone while you're in the car, but that is not very safe, and not much of a substitute for real social activities anyway. For example, I can't count the number of events I've passed on because they start in San Francisco at 6PM, which would mean having to leave work by 4:30 at the latest in order to get there on time.

If you'd told me 10 years ago what my daily commute would be like today, I would have laughed at you and called you a fool. Funny how things change. Many of the changes in my life since then have been for the better, but this one .... well, not so much.

On a purely personal note, this sucks:

This weekend will be the last time riders can rent horses from Claremont Riding Academy to take on Central Park's bridal path.

The academy is the oldest continuously operated stable in the country but decreasing ridership and increasing development on the Upper West Side is forcing it to close.

That business has been in my mother's family for many decades. It's sad, sad news that the end has come.

UPDATE 4/24 The news that Claremont is closing is mostly a NY story, but Pravda, of all places, has picked it up too.

I'm still pretty bummed about the news. I know everything comes to an end eventually, and that 100+ years is a really great run, but that's cold comfort.

And in tonight's "wow, this is cool" news -- a potentially habitable planet has been found Out There in space.

Now all we need is a way to get there within something resembling a human timeframe and find out if it really is what the scientists think it is.

And the melamine contamination problem spreads to more parts of the American food chain: More animals got tainted food.

What irks me is that the only thing the politicians seem to be responding to is that "OMG terrorists might put something in our food". Which is true, but it's not the immediate threat. How about the fact that potentially lethal industrial-grade chemicals are being dumped into our food supply RIGHT NOW? Shouldn't that be enough of a reason to take action?

This is a start:

[Congressional] Democrats say they will introduce legislation that would permit the FDA to force mandatory food recalls -- a power it now lacks -- and increase funding to hire more inspectors.

Hopefully this President will actually sign such legislation.

One thing we did this weekend was to head over to Whole Foods and attempt to do all our weekly grocery shopping there. We've gone there before for specialty items, but never tried to do our 'normal' grocery shopping. And with the exception of one item (some Aquafina flavored water that Scott really likes) we were able to do so, and we came home with several bags full of organic, non-big-brand food for the house. A few items matched the prices we would pay at a conventional grocery store (like pasta and tomato paste), but most items were a little more. Some few were double the price of their 'conventional' alternatives. For example, we skipped buying and meat or chicken -- with boneless chicken breasts going for more than $6 a pound in the "sale" bin, the price was too high.

Although we have a bunch of nice, "safe" food in the house, I don't feel particularly good about our shopping trip. It's no secret that the food shopping options for poor people are worse than the ones for more well-off ones, but Whole Foods and their higher prices seems to raise the bar even further. As amazing as Whole Foods is, the people who really need the added benefits of a healthy diet are the people least able to afford their prices.

You shouldn't have to be well-off to be able to have access to safe food. And you shouldn't have to scare the government with the terrorism bogeyman in order to get them to do something about the safety of the nation's food supply.

Tommy guards Scott's knapsack, and his stack of unread copies of PC Magazine.

Now that the dust from grad school has settled, I've realized I miss learning new stuff. So, I'm going to look around for a digital photography class. I took one short class on SLR photography some years ago, but have pretty much given up on using my SLR ccamera. I'd like to learn how to use my digicam better.

One of the rituals of spring, when I was growing up, was putting all the outdoor furniture back out onto the terrace at my grandparents' summer home. In a time when central air was much less common than it is today, being able to relax outdoors, shaded by trees and a cool afternoon breeze, was an important part of keeping cool.

Forget Memorial Day -- the day we hauled the glass-topped table and its matching (and uncomfortable) metal chairs, the more comfortable blue plastic chairs and recliners, and the little side tables for holding drinks and snacks out from the basement, around the yard, and up onto the terrace, then cleaned it all off and arranged it into the familiar pattern, was the day the "season" really began.

I live in an apartment now, a long way from that Connecticut house which now belongs to my parents. But some things don't change. Today I took a sponge and some Windex and cleaned off my terrace furniture in preparation for the warmer months to come.

Tonight, I'll sit outdoors and drink a glass of wine. Life's good when the days are long.

I bow in humble thanks before the Goddess of Commuting that my commute doesn't go anwhere near the utter mess that's been made of the East Bay / Bay Bridge. And it didn't even take an earthquake, just one fool in a tanker truck.

[Highway] 580 at Interstate 80, located near Emeryville [looks] to be completely destroyed. The tanker explosion caused the upper deck of a connector ramp to collapse onto the lower deck, according to a California Highway Patrol dispatcher.

Interstate 580 is closed approaching the Bay Bridge, according to the dispatcher.

The dispatcher said eastbound Interstate 80 to eastbound Interstate Highway 580 collapsed after heat from the tanker explosion on the westbound Interstate 580 at Interstate 80 rose and melted the upper roadway.

The East Bay in general has sucktastic traffic; this isn't going to help any.

This was the scene in San Mateo this morning, on my way to work. $3.45 a gallon for regular gas.

I could drive a mile or two out of my way and save about a nickel a gallon, but for where I live, this is an average-priced station, neither top nor bottom of the pack.

In short, it's now costing me $7 a day in gas alone, just to drive to work.

I think I might have hit my change point when it comes to gas prices.

UPDATE 5/2 It's gone up a couple of cents more since I posted this.

I've researched mass transit options, but CalTrain + biking the 3 miles from the CalTrain San Jose station would be $11.50 a day and roughly double my current commute time. Plus there's no shower in the office, so if I broke a sweat on the ride to work I'd be gross and yukky all day.

*sigh* This stinks.

One bit of good news is that my boss seems to be open to the idea of me working from home at least part of the time.