| Sunday, March 30, 2003 |  |
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 Chris Corrigan mentions how it is a bit strange when the content of a weblog suddenly changes because its author is in different circumstances. Like here I'm for a couple of weeks vacationing in Europe. My weblog looks the same on the surface, but suddenly I'm just writing about little towns in France instead of about systems and technology and the world situation.
When I'm traveling I really notice how my normal style of blogging depends on many factors than I normally don't think much about, and how I'm sort of lacking a format for blogging what I'm actually doing.
Typically I work at my computer many hours per day and quite naturally I browse a lot of information sources, so I can maintain a certain overview. And I seem to have peace and quiet to sit and philosophize about things, and it seems natural to talk about self-organization or alternative economic systems or other meta subjects. And I don't have a great urge to talk about my physical environment or what I actually do each day.
But if for example I travel, my mind is more on where my suitcases are, on what I'm getting for dinner, who I'm meeting, and how it looks where I am. Very different thing. Much more sensory input, but less abstract input, and much less chance to sit quietly and talk about any of it.
When I'm on the move, what I could use would probably be a simple mob-log technology, where I could post photos and short notes from a cell phone or something. And probably I'd prefer for that to go in a sidebar to my normal weblog.
It is obvious that there are different styles of weblogging. For some people it is simply recording what they do and think each day, and what they have for breakfast. For some, their postings are driven by what is in the news. For some, like for me I think, there is a certain meta thread that goes through what they want to talk about, even if the pieces might be sort of haphazard, and might or might not have anything to do with the 'news'. Some people manage to find a style that brings all of it together. Doc Searls says his weblog is simply that he answers his e-mail in public. Dave Winer seems to have a style where car trips and family matters work well on equal footing with technical issues and bigger meta issues.
For some people, the ultimate of weblogging would be to have a camera attached to your head that would record everything that happened to you. For others the ideal would be a news studio or newspaper editorial office with hundreds of incoming feeds that you can select from. Others again would prefer a quiet spot away from all disturbances, where they can sit down and write about what they think, all by themselves. I suppose I'd prefer a combination of all of those.
[ Diary | 2003-03-30 03:31 | | PermaLink ] More >
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| Friday, March 28, 2003 | |
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 The picture is from Albi in the south of France, which was nice too. But we've gone on to Denmark. It is my mom's birthday, 70 years, which will be celebrated tomorrow in the old Havarti farm estate. You know, where the Havarti cheese was invented.
[ Diary | 2003-03-28 09:35 | | PermaLink ] More >
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| Monday, March 24, 2003 | |
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 We spent the day in Foix in the Ariege Department, which is one of the most remote parts of France. As the tourist books say, everything moves at a snail's pace, but the setting is spectacular. You're in the foothills of the Pyrenees, filled with valleys and castles and caves and forests, with the snow covered mountains above.
[ Diary | 2003-03-24 23:27 | 0 comments | PermaLink ]
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| Sunday, March 23, 2003 | |
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It is usually when I travel I notice a lot of things that aren't working very well, particularly in terms of technological methods of communication, Internet access, etc. I usually have the illusion I can just take a laptop with me and stay in touch with things as normally. But typically there are always things in the way. The laptop is a different computer than I normally work on, so I usually don't succceed in bringing everything with me.
I picked this hotel in part because they said they had Internet connection in every room. I called them up and they said they had high speed wireless networking for an extra charge. I thought that would mean Wi-Fi. What it meant was that I could browse the web through the TV, using an infrared keyboard. That was the 'wireless' part. Otherwise I'm stuck with a modem dial up.
And this is when I realize that I appear the be getting around 2000 e-mails daily. Which takes about an hour to download. Mostly junk, automatic messages from servers, bounces from mailing lists, etc. At home it mostly gets sorted into folders and is largely invisible. Here I have to manually sort through everything, just to discover whether I actually got anything I need to deal with.
[ Diary | 2003-03-23 21:53 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 A good day, visiting Mark and Ronna who live close to the mideaval village St.Antonin. All very beautiful and idyllic. They're British ex-patriates. A splendid lunch outside in the spring sun, prepared with goodies from the market. Closest neighbors are a couple of kilometers from their house.
We also visited Montauban and Moissac.
[ Diary | 2003-03-23 21:42 | | PermaLink ] More >
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| Saturday, March 22, 2003 | |
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 Anti-war demonstrations in many places. This is the one today in Toulouse where I am.
[ Diary | 2003-03-22 16:42 | 0 comments | PermaLink ]
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 So, I'm visiting Toulouse with my wife and daughter. And in a few days we're on to Denmark. It is very nice here. A few travel obstacles, though. Our luggage didn't make it sofar, after a little misunderstanding about having to check in again in London. And then I had transferred all the money I figured we'd need for hotel and car rental to a particular credit card. And at the car rental desk I realize that the card actually was expired, and I must have not noticed when they sent me a new card. So, I had to jump through some hoops to be able to pay.
Toulouse is very pleasant, the center of town at least. Relaxed and charming for a big city. We were having lunch with Jeff Starrs at a sidewalk restaurant on a town square, with a band playing. And, it is always great to meet somebody one has known for years online.
Tomorrow we'll start looking around in the countryside and adjacent smaller towns.
[ Diary | 2003-03-22 07:53 | | PermaLink ] More >
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| Monday, March 17, 2003 | |
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 I'm flying to Europe with my wife and little daughter Thursday, for a few days in France and a few days in Denmark. Probably around the time when George Bush the Sock Puppet orders the bombers to start killing Arabs for peace and democracy. Not that it worries me overly much in terms of potential terror attacks, even though we're flying over London. Just interesting timing.
[ Diary | 2003-03-17 23:59 | 0 comments | PermaLink ]
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| Sunday, March 16, 2003 | |
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I had a great meeting with Britt Blaser over lunch today in Santa Monica. We're collaborating on developing Xpertweb, a peer-to-peer economic infrastructure. Britt met with Doc Searls yesterday, and it sounds like he's seen the light concerning the prospects for Xpertweb.
[ Diary | 2003-03-16 23:09 | 0 comments | PermaLink ]
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| Wednesday, March 12, 2003 | |
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When I was around four years old I was collecting the license plate numbers of taxis in Copenhagen. I had a little notebook in my pocket in which I meticulously would write down the numbers, many on each page, dozens of pages.
Later on I collected yoghurt containers. Not different kinds, but all the same kind, white with no markings. I think I had hundreds.
People do many strange things. Check out the Magnificent Obsessions site, and you'll see that the world is full of people obsessively doing baffling things.
[ Diary | 2003-03-12 23:59 | | PermaLink ] More >
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I almost fell for a Romanian scam on ebay. I could kind of use a recent Apple Powerbook, and my budget doesn't add up to buying a new one right now, so I was watching for good auction deals on ebay. And, unlike the rest of my family, I don't really shop on ebay much, so I'm not particularly a pro. A bunch of things weren't quite adding up, but I had for some reason decided to ignore it, until my wife looked at it and said it didn't look right. I didn't win the auction, but supposedly the winner had backed out and the seller was willing to sell it to me for several hundred less. I was just about to hit the button on a Western Union money transfer. I think what made me almost overlook the danger signals was that it was a person who wrote bad English, so it all sounded a bit fuzzy and ambiguous, and I guess I felt sorry for him. The ebay seller had a great rating and lots of positive feedback from previous customers. But the account was registered in Canada, and the item seemed to be in Spain. It was a very nice ad, which couldn't possibly have been written by the person I communicated with. But I would be safe because I'd not give him the control number for the Western Union transfer before after I've received the item and inspected it. Well, that's the way Western Union *should* work, but it doesn't. You can pick up money without any control number. When confronted with the inconsistencies in the whole story, the person at the other end wrote about problems with their account being hacked, so they're really sorry it doesn't add up, but hopefully it would be resolved soon, and really, in Spain Western Union was different, etc. And a couple of e-mails later, he was suddenly suggesting that I'd send the money to his poor cousin in Romania, as then I could send it password protected, which would make it really secure. Yeah, sure, I knew by then of course that there was really no computer. Apparently what happened was that a legitimate eBay user's account was hacked. Or, rather, there was a scam, of sending people fake e-mails, appearing to be from ebay, which tricked people into giving out their password. So, the scammer posted a couple of fake auctions in the account, until the legitimate user managed to get their account back. I exchanged some e-mails with that person too. It is a bit embarrassing that I almost fell for it, but at least that can serve as a warning for others. A bit of research on the web also showed me plenty of Romanian ebay scams, involving suggestions of such 'secure' western union payments, and plenty of suckers who fell for them.
[ Diary | 2003-03-12 16:38 | | PermaLink ] More >
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| Sunday, March 9, 2003 | |
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 One of my favorite places to go for a walk is along Mulholland Drive. Mulholland runs along the ridge of the Santa Monica Mountains separating the Los Angeles basin from the San Fernando Valley, where I live. So, you're in the middle of the metropolis, but can still be in what is pretty much a wilderness. And most people stay down there in the smog, so you can even sometimes walk for a little bit without meeting anybody else. These pictures are some I took today. This one is pointed South, towards L.A.
[ Diary | 2003-03-09 19:02 | | PermaLink ] More >
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| Wednesday, February 26, 2003 | |
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I'm getting tired of holding on to lots of domain names that I might or might not do something with. And so are some of the people I've registered domains for. Here's for example a list of domains expiring in the next week or two. If any of you want any of them, I can get them registered in your name cheaply.virtualfacetoface.com, presidentsdailybrief.com, visualsynopsis.com, vf2f.com, storyfold.com, hyperposter.com, portalofsubportals.com, metascans.com, e-mergings.com, skimandscan.com, thedailyoverview.com, interactivecircles.com, hypertheme.com, domaintemple.com, organicdomains.com, newagedomains.com, namesoup.com, gotsecrets.com, utilizers.com, noisemaking.com, universalprayer.com, sexandtaxes.com, zopedish.com Or, if you have business ideas for any of them, and would like to put some work into it, I might help you get going. I have many more as well. Domain speculation doesn't have as much potential as it used to, but at the same time, many people have a hard time finding good domain names.
[ Diary | 2003-02-26 15:23 | | PermaLink ] More >
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| Sunday, February 23, 2003 | |
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 It is a couple of years since I sold my motorcycle and started driving a car again. Don't have a good reason to wear a leather jacket. And I haven't had a cigarette for a year or so. I'm a bit afraid I'm losing touch with my more rebellious side. Well, I kind of have a need for balancing things out, because people too easily assume I'm just this nice, decent, boring guy, and they get shocked if I say fuck or something. Well, maybe I just AM nice and boring, and I just imagine myself being a rebel. I don't know. But as to the smoking, now being pretty much a non-smoker, I can safely mention that a fairly significant motivation for me to smoke was to protest the nearly total brainwashing of the American population on that subject. Nobody believed it when I was smoking, that it would be my small way of giving a raised middle finger to the media-driven American bourgeoisie. Yeah, a pathetic small finger maybe, but nevertheless. A vote for freedom. Mostly I smoked because I enjoyed it, and because the plusses outweighed the minuses at the time. Smoking is very addictive. I'd believe it is as addictive as heroin. Very hard to stop. And you smell like an ashtray and you've got to work harder to be in shape. I don't think anybody actually thinks smoking is healthy. But, well, it isn't healthy either to drive sports cars, or to skydive or to go river rafting or to walk around barefooted in the Amazon jungle. Messy, dangerous, and fun. There are a lot of things that make life more full, more exciting, more worth living. Many of those things require that one accepts the possibility of death. But in the United States, billions of dollars of advertising and millions of reformed smokers have turned smoking into not just another risky but pleasurable choice, like whisky and mountain climbing, but into the most despised plague they can imagine. No dignity left in smoking in the U.S. I got really tired of otherwise well-meaning friends and strangers who again and again would walk up to me and say, essentially, "YOU'RE GOING TO DIE!!!". Well, I know I'm going to die. The death rate is 100%, both for smokers and non-smokers. But many ex-smokers, who themselves managed to quit only by implanting their own minds with horrible pictures of imminent death and great suffering associated with smoking, actually believe that it will help others that they curse them whenever they see them smoking. I'm sensitive to such things, as I'm trained in NLP and hypnosis, and I know very well what great power there is in the things we tell ourselves and others, particularly the things we say like we really mean it, and that we say again and again and again and again. And the power of peer pressure and advertising. So, American smokers are mostly a miserable lot by now, apologetic addicts who need to sneak outside on the sidewalk like homeless outcasts. Disheveled losers without will power. Good citizens will grimace and cough when they're within 50 feet, and will take their children over to the other sidewalk.
[ Diary | 2003-02-23 23:59 | | PermaLink ] More >
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| Thursday, February 20, 2003 | |
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This is the front panel of an HP 3000 Series II minicomputer. Not a good picture, but the best one I could locate. It was my first hands on entry into the world of computers. That was around 1975-76.
I went to high school in Denmark where I grew up. "Holte Gymnasium" (the name of the school) wanted to be very progressive and top notch, so they had invested a considerable amount of money in this computer, which made it possible to introduce computer programming classes to students who wanted them. Most of the math & science types signed up, and a considerably smaller group stuck with it and became computer nuts. I was in the Fortran class. The other choice was Algol.
There was a whole room set aside for the computer. The CPU itself was like a small refrigerator, and its harddisk was about the same size. 10MB I believe. The way you started the computer was that you punched in several binary words on one of the sets of 16 lighted switches on the front. That formed the binary instructions to read in the boot loader. The boot loader, the program that would actually start the operating system, was read on hole punch tape. You know, a paper streamer with holes across, each column representing one letter. The program is read in, and it figures out how to load the actual system from the harddisk.
We didn't have any terminal with a screen the first year or so. What we used was teletype machines. Looks like an oldfashioned telex machine. A big electric typewriter. It could be used in online or offline mode. If you type commands to the operating system, it would answer by writing on paper. Or, you could sit and type in a program, which goes directly onto punch tape. And then you would go and insert the punch tape in the tape reader, type a command on the teletype to load it, and the computer reads it in. And you can then store it on the harddisk and run it.
Typically what we would run would be little programs that printed out multiplication tables or square roots or something. Seemed like magic at the time, when the alternative was to use a slid erule or look the approximate answer up in a book. And later we got into little games, implementing known algorithms for solving little matchstick games and that kind of thing. But then there was also the Star Trek game. A lively action game where you're the Enterprise hunting Klingons. The graphics consisted a little 10x10 square of ASCII characters printed out on the printer after each turn, showing what is going on in the current sector. Kids today would probably not be able to fathom how anybody could use hundreds of hours on playing that, but it was rather addictive.
One could reserve the computer in one-hour blocks after school. Every night the lights were on in that room way into the night, and it wasn't unheard of that somebody fell asleep there. There wasn't really more than a dozen or so people who really got into it, but they filled up the whole schedule. Myself and my buddy Morten filled up many slots. So did another aspiring programmer who went on to considerably greater heights with what he learned than I did. Anders Hejlsberg who was one grade below me, wrote what later on became the revolutionary Turbo Pascal compiler after he finished high school. And later on he was leading the projects that developed Borland Delphi, and Microsoft C#. I wonder what he learned on that teletype machine that I didn't learn. Maybe he went with the Algol class and spent less time playing Star Trek.
Anyway, I just wanted to mention some ancient history, since many younger people today are born after that time, and have a hard time imagining a world before 3D graphics and Internet connections. And they probably wouldn't think of finding great joy in producing page after page filled with square roots.
[ Diary | 2003-02-20 22:23 | | PermaLink ] More >
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| Saturday, February 15, 2003 | |
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 Nice event this evening in L.A. Chinatown. Actually the first face-to-face blogging event I've been to, now I think of it. Nice to shake Doc Searls' hand, and nice that he knew who I was and everything, him being pretty much the BlogFather. Xeni Jardin was the MC. Susannah Breslin of Reverse Cowgirl fame was the main motor behind this event happening in the first place. Her blog is an always entertaining read about porn and stuff. Mark Frauenfelder was there. The BoingBoing blog he created is, as it says, a directory of wonderful things, and before it was a blog it was a zine, and Mark was also involved with Wired. Evan Williams is the creator of Blogger, the most famous and used blogging program, with more than a million users, supposedly. He announced that his company Pyra Labs has just been bought by Google. And he demonstrated audioblogging by having an accomplice hold up his cellphone, which recorded what was being said and automatically posted it in a blog. Heather Havrilesky writes Rabbit Blog and is a journalist. Tony Pierce writes busblog and is a really funny 'normal' guy. Afterwards we hung out at Hop Louie's Pagoda. I met Allan Karl whom I just met virtually yesterday in Joi Ito's conference call. I talked for a while with Skip of eardrumbuzz who's doing very cool things with video sharing in his apartment building. All around a very pleasant evening. Except for that the pictures I took didn't turn out very well.
[ Diary | 2003-02-15 23:59 | 0 comments | PermaLink ]
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| Friday, February 14, 2003 | |
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Today I participated in a very enjoyable conference call / chat / blogger event arranged by Joi Ito and using infrastructure from the socialtext team. The theme was 'emergent democracy', particular as it relates to blogs. Joi called it a 'happening' which is quite appropriate as it happened in several media at the same time. We were on the phone, 18 people or so, from Japan, U.S., Canada, England, France, and maybe somewhere I'm forgetting. And we were chatting online at the same time. And we used a WIKI as a place to coordinate the information. I really enjoy that kind of conversation that happens in a multi-dimensional way, even if it is sometimes hard to keep up with it all at the same time. But it gives everybody an outlet, even if we work in different ways.
Some threads in the discussion were about what emergence really is. Is it like ants who collectively appear more intelligent than they do individually? Are we having conversations or are we creating structure? And we talked about tools. What tools do we have? What tools might we invent that better might allow useful democracy to emerge? And I guess that's mostly what we converged around. An intention to continue working on coming up with better tools and better infrastructure. And to keep talking about what it might be that we ought to do.
[ Diary | 2003-02-14 21:58 | 0 comments | PermaLink ]
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| Thursday, February 6, 2003 | |
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 I'm tired of being a hard worker, rather than a smart operator. I don't know where I picked it up, but I've for years had the strategy of a workaholic in denial. If I just work harder, and put in more hours, and I try to keep up with everything that is thrown at me, I'll be alright. And that worked fine for a long time. At some jobs I've had, people were puzzled that I could get so much done. But my secret was sometimes not much more than that I worked 80 hours per week, and they only worked 50. They slept 7 hours per night, and I managed with 5.
But it is also the choice between whether you're the guy who does the work, or the guy who makes the work happen. I've been a supervisor, and led and managed teams of people, but I've somehow managed to always keep the attitude that I was the guy who'd do the work. Like, for one large programming project, I had five programmers, but it was still me who came in Saturdays, and who took the work home, and who ended up having written 90% of the code. Several times I've been given the choice on whether I'd be the manager or whether I'd be the techie, and I usually chose to be the chief techie.
But where it goes wrong is in the knowledge work of knowing what exactly you're doing, why you're doing it, and what the best ways of doing things are, including who best to delegate it to. Just oneself working harder is often a pretty dumb approach. What has sometimes happened to me is that I've been so busy with my nose to the grindstone, that I didn't notice that everybody else around me got really busy jockeying for position, writing reports, making presentations, protecting their territories, covering their asses, gathering really good information about what they should or shouldn't be doing. And suddenly I realize I have 15 bosses telling me what to do, and I'm the only guy who actually works, and there aren't hours enough in the day to do what everybody wants. And I had spent zero time on maneuvering around and negotiating things, so I have no political leverage.
Recently there was this one part of a bigger programming project I just couldn't seem to get around to. It was writing a very efficient SMTP mailing engine in C. Normally I do PHP programming nowadays. My C coding skills were extremely rusty, and I sort of needed to study up on what to do, and how to do a multi-threaded program. And I kept saying that I hoped to get to it next week. And they were very patient, but after about a year of that, they figured it wasn't going to happen, and instead of using my system they went out and spent 1/2 million dollars elsewhere, on another system doing roughly the same thing as what I had written for them, but which had solved that particular mailing problem. And the ridulous thing is that the piece I needed could have been coded in about a month by an experienced C programmer. And if I had told them that I needed another programmer, they would have said "Yes, of course". But I didn't. I just tried to work harder.
Enough. Time for a different strategy. More with less.
[ Diary | 2003-02-06 16:35 | | PermaLink ] More >
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| Wednesday, February 5, 2003 | |
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 Today I received my Certificate of Registration for the service mark ORGSPACE from the United States Patent and Trademark Office. It's for the word, not the logo, and it is as applied to online software. For those of you who haven't tried it, it is a rather lengthy process to register a trademark (for tangible products) or service mark (for services). Took about three years, and a number of phone calls with lawyers.
So, what exactly am I going to do with it? I'm not sure yet, but the thought is that it is a brand to put on software I'm involved in making, which helps people organize their stuff. Like this NewsLog program. Even better if it happens to be a particularly brilliant universal, multi-dimensional system for storing any kind of information.
[ Diary | 2003-02-05 19:57 | | PermaLink ] More >
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| Thursday, January 30, 2003 | |
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Jon Husband suggested that Organizational Development would be a field where Ming the Mechanic might fit in well. And I think that's a good hint. I've always felt comfortable amongst OD people, but I didn't particularly imagine I could be one. Either I thought it would just be about staff training, or I figured I didn't have the right degree, or the right direct work experience to point to. But, indeed, both my interests, and my varied experience in different fields do sort of indicate I might have some potential for a role in helping organizations through change. Being a consultant would be what I'd be interested in, not working for some company's Human Resource department, which I'd have no interest in. I think I need to study up a bit on what it would involve.
Here are some links: Organizational Development Institute, Organizational Development Network, ODportal, Action Science.
[ Diary | 2003-01-30 23:47 | 0 comments | PermaLink ]
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