Author: lux

What She Said

Regarding the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords and so many others this weekend, my friend Laura is spot-on:

I don’t know if the shooter was inspired by the violent rhetoric coming from the Tea Party. I don’t know if he saw the gunsights on Palin’s map and it triggered a cascade of thoughts that led to his actions. I don’t know if the over the top statements about “watering the tree of liberty” and “second amendment remedies” made him think that shooting politicians is an acceptable way to resolve issues.

What I do know is that everyone who cheered or applauded or agreed with Tea Partier statements about second amendment remedies cannot say that they didn’t mean this. This *is* a second amendment remedy. It is a disgruntled citizen using a gun to bring about political change. If this is not what they meant, if they weren’t really calling for people to kill their political opponents, then they should not have couched the discussion in such violent terms. They should not have said that killing someone elected to office is an acceptable response to electoral loss.

Emphasis added. This is exactly the point. Words have meaning. People need to choose them carefully. Especially in a world where disturbed loners have access to guns.

About Love and Excellence

Riverside Church, NYC May 2002

I had a different blog post in mind for this weekend. I was going to write about the iPad & my experiences with it these past few weeks. Yawn.

Instead I want to write about someone who’s lying in a hospital bed tonight, but who is surrounded and hopefully lifted up by the love and prayers of not only his family, but hundreds of members of his extended family.

I spent 5 years singing in a choir led by Johannes Somary and they were some of the happiest times of my life. He seemed to me more like a force of nature than an actual human being at times, so strong was his personality. You always wanted to do your very best for Johannes, because that was what he expected. And he got it.

But what you got out of the work you put in for Johannes was so much more.

I learned not just to love choral music in my years with Johannes, but also about passion, and commitment, and about excellence. And also about leadership, although back then that wasn’t really on my mind.

My thoughts tonight are with him and his family, and hoping that although he is beginning 2011 in a very dark place, that the rest of 2011 will be a much better one for him, because the world without Johannes would be a dimmer, less musical place.

Passion for The Job

This morning, my collague John Nack wrote a blog post about the passions which drive his work pursuits, and the last line of that post struck a very deep chord for me:

the deep threat isn’t losing my job, it’s working on something for which I lack passion.

That goes right to the heart of my own career path. I’ve held jobs where I wasn’t passionate about the work that I did, and those are the jobs that grind you down and make you feel a little dead inside. It doesn’t matter if to the outside view they seem like perfectly good jobs – if you’re not truly happy to be doing what you do, sooner or later 1) it shows and 2) you pay a price.

Over time I came to realize that what I care most about is the interrelationship of people and technology. If I were more visually-focused, perhaps I’d have become a UI or UX professional, but I can’t design my way out of a paper bag. And tech for tech’s sake alone also does not interest me — it’s how people use their tools, what they do with them, and how they connect to each other that gets me up in the morning.

So here I find myself, after a long and sometimes convoluted road, in the extremely privileged position of working on something which I have a great passion for – and I get paid to do it. May we all be so fortunate.

Google TV: First Impressions

So last night, we added a Google TV device to the household. It’s a Logitech Revue, one of the three current gTV options.

Setting the Revue up is pretty simple. Power cable. HDMI in from your DVR or cable box, HDMI out to the TV (one HDMI cable is included). Wifi built in (or you can jack in an ethernet cable if you wish). The on-screen setup went smoothly, although the Revue did hang after downloading an update. needing a quick power off / power on to get things going again. You’re asked for a Google account, which isn’t a big deal but does create an issue for households with more than one Google user — whose account do you add to the TV? Or should you create a special gTV account to be shared by all? The hardest part was setting up the connection to your TV and DVR or other set-top box — you’ll be asked for the specific model numbers for each.

At any rate, eventually you’re all done and your new Google TV is ready to roll.

So what did I do first? Check out YouTube. gTV has something called “YouTube Leanback” built in as a custom channel – mostly music videos and content from key partners. You can also use the built-in Chrome browser to log into your own YouTube account and use YouTube just like you would on your computer (my choice). The Logitech keyboard / touchpad works well for navigating around the screen and I was quickly able to start watching my saved favorites in full-screen mode on our 46″ TV.

Performance was a non-issue. Of course, watching older, non-HD video on a big HDTV isn’t exactly a challenge, so next I gave Netflix a shot. After activating the gTV with my Netflix account, my queue came up on screen and I was able to dive right in. Performance was no different than what I get when watching Netflix streamed via my TiVo. [Side note, this is now device #3 in the living room capable of streaming Netflix to our TV. I really need to get streaming Netflix into other rooms of the house now.]

So far, so good. I don’t like basketball so I gave the NBA app a pass, nor do I have a lot of photos in Picasa so I couldn’t do much with that. There are some other apps (HBO GO, CNBC, Twitter, etc) I have yet to check out as well.

I’d like to see more apps on the gTV of course – for example, as a Last.fm subscriber it’s a little frustrating to see Napster and Pandora there but not my preferred streaming music provider. It will be a few months before there’s a healthy pipeline of new gTV apps, so I’ll have to be patient.

At this point, my main concern is — who is the target market for the Google TV? As The Spouse pointed out, people like us already generally watch TV with a laptop parked in our laps. We can search, Tweet, etc in the living room already. For that kind of user, the use-case would be in rooms of the house where you have a TV set up but don’t necessarily want to haul a laptop – like the kitchen or bedroom. Originally I was going to set the gTV up in the bedroom, in fact, but we have an older cable box and DVR in there and as such don’t have the necessary HD connectivity.

For slightly less geeky families, having a Google TV in the living room could be a big win — if they nail the user experience. It’s good, especially for a 1.0 version, but could be a little more friendly.

With US midterm elections this Tuesday, I’m really interested to see how well the web browser / TV picture in picture setup will play out – having Twitter and MSNBC on the same screen could be a lot of fun.

Thoughts on Visiting The UK

There was a time that I kept a detailed travel diary. It helped fill the time when I didn’t have a smartphone, MP3 player and/or Internet access to share impressions and fend off boredom when out on the road.

I don’t diary my travels the way I used to but I did want to capture a few personal impressions from my most recent trip to England.

London

William Gibson caught a sense of what it is to be a visitor to London in Pattern Recognition:

[Cayce] has no internalized surface map of this city, only of the underground and of assorted personal footpaths spreading out from its stations

It’s very true, certainly in my case. Getting around London is easy via Tube. Especially when you’re on a tight schedule and need to just get to your dinner, or only have a few hours to cram some sightseeing in, it really cuts back on the ability to develop a fully integrated sense of the city.

That’s not a complaint of course. And despite my lack of a mental map of the city, I like London a lot. It feels comfortable. Probably because although it doesn’t look like New York at all, both have a density and energy that I understand. And the fact that I speak the language (more or less) doesn’t hurt.

I managed to cram in a quick trip to the Tate Modern this trip. Seeing modern art when jetlagged to hell is a different experience. I found it a little easier to experience and appreciate some of the edgier works that I might normally dismiss with “is that art?” Even exhaustion didn’t make Roy Lichtenstein interesting though.

Brighton

Brighton

Several people told me that Brighton was like San Francisco. I’m not so sure. If anything, it reminded me more of the Jersey Shore, although with better food and architecture, and no reality show freakazoids. Spending four days working a conference isn’t the best way to get a good sense of a city though.

I did like what I saw of Brighton, and if I’m lucky enough to get back to Flash on the Beach next year I’d love to add on some time to see more of the place.