ivantohelpyou

Guess I just have a nose for champagne. I came to Cape Cod this evening, just as friend and fellow CMU troublemaker Benton Jones had an offer accepted for the purchase of a house right down the road from his Millstone Gallery in Brewster. Not a done deal yet, but exciting nonetheless.

Having arrived the day after An Event Apart, I quickly launched into a lecture on the sanctity of semantic content, using examples from Eric Meyer's CSS: The Definitive Guide to describe the serene beauty of Web standards. It clicked. Benton now knows what has to be done to punch up his site, as well as a site that he's helping some neighbors design for their kennel.

In the meantime, if you can handle the table-based HTML, you can still check out Benton's kiln-formed glass fused with metal.

Labels: art, travel

It's the blogger's dilemma, familiar to any journalist on deadline. Whether to go straight home, to the hotel room or to the business office of the hotel to write up a comprehensive review of that day's activity, or to trust in one's notes and anecdotal memory by following the crowd to the afterparty to make new contacts and friends, with the good intention of following up with promised coverage later. Last night I went for the responsible journalist option, but tonight I opted for the social track. And I'm glad I did.

Labels: blogging

An Event Apart
Boston, Mass.
March 26, 2007

Eric Meyer started the event with a presentation titled “Secrets of the CSS Jedi.” From the beginning, I was a bit cautious. From what I recall, in order to become a Jedi you have to fly to some swampy planet to face down your innermost fears, where if you leave before graduation you’re at risk of succumbing to [deep voice] THE DARK SIDE.

As much as I like the idea of web standards, if everyone on a Web design team has to visit a swamp to learn from a wizened Muppet, it will never sell in the corporate world. Companies don’t need standardization in results. They need standardization in training and equipment. Everyone wearing the same white helmets and body armor, marching in formation, blasters at the ready.

In Eric’s example, he was able to take an HTML page containing a few columns of numbers and then, almost entirely using CSS, he turned it into a vertical bar graph. The process took in the neighborhood of 70 to 100 lines of code. He then showed another version, also hand-coded, with a horizontal bar graph. Now what would it take to make a bar graph using Adobe Flex 2 with Charting or some other non-standard Web framework? Just a few lines of code, once you’re up and running. And if you wanted to turn it into a pie chart or plot it on a logarithmic scale? Change a parameter and you’re done.

So, which approach should the average Web designer choose: The theoretically pure approach with a steep learning curve but impeccable results, or the toolkit-framework approach that gets the job done at the expense of semantic clarity? Or is there a middle ground?

Jeffrey Zeldman spoke well about the importance of good copy, with many illuminating examples. One such example: Basecamp, which instead of prompting for "login," contains the prompt text: "Please log in first and then we'll send you right along." This enhances the brand image as a "fun and easy" tool to handle the "tedious, frustrating and miserable" task of project management. But one audience member pointed out that Basecamp operates as a private label service – in other words, if I want to use Basecamp to manage projects with my clients, I send them to ivantohelpyou.seework.com. Clients see my logo, but with Basecamp's "fun and easy" text. That’s nice, but what if someone wanted the login prompt to say, "Abandon hope all ye who enter here" or some other inspirational quote? Not so easy to do with a hosted service. Which means that the insufferably perky 37 Signals philosophy goes viral along with its software.

Jason Santa Maria went through design stuff while I answered client e-mails. I only caught a small segment involving dancing leprechauns.

Steve Krug promoted the concept of usability testing, including demos of how to use Camtasia and Morae from Techsmith. He may have also mentioned something about a book.

Andrew Kirkpatrick from Adobe spoke about accessibility. It was very code-heavy. My mind started wandering, and I started to wonder whether it would be possible to convert HTML to MIDI, so that a web page could be converted into a catchy tune with lyrics describing the content, and the rhythmic, melodic and harmonic patterns describing the structure and behavior of the site. You’d load a webpage, and the music of the spheres would fill the room; you’d say "pow!" on the downbeat to activate a link, and the music would segue into something new, something wonderful. If you saw me there, my eyes were closed so that I might have some sense of what it would be like to be blind; and if you saw me drooling into a puddle on the hotel banquet table, that was me simulating loss of muscle control. And that smell…never mind.

Dan Cederholm also spoke last month at WebDirections North, at a session devoted to microformats. This time, he spoke about color schemes, typography and favicons before repeating the pitch on microformats. But I wasn’t bored by the repetition – first, it’s an interesting subject, and second, it gave me a chance to listen to how he was saying it rather than what he was saying. He’s an effective speaker, taking what could be a dry topic and relating it in a just-folks, non-techie manner. Yeah, right, he doesn't remember what API stands for. And I think that IPO stands for India Pale Oil.

From my perspective, the main problem with microformats is that I’m too lazy to add them to posts like this one. Sure, it’s easy. But it means that I’d have to go through this very entry and mark-up at least six entries with hCard information, and it has been quite enough effort for me to do this write-up of day one. Maybe if ivantohelpyou gets an editorial assistant, I’d be on board with it. Until then, sweet dreams.

Continued coverage of day two...

Labels: ALA, blogging, NV07, Web 2.0, web design, Web Standards

I recently read (aloud, in an imitation Irish brogue) Jamie O'Rourke and the Big Potato, a parable of scarcity and plenty by Tomie dePaola.

SPOILER ALERT

When Jamie O'Rourke is forced back into the workforce after the injury of his productive spouse Eileen, he despairs of starvation and goes to visit Father O'Malley in the middle of the night to give his confession. But then he comes across a leprechaun making fairy shoes for a livelihood. Jamie shakes down the leprechaun for gold, but the leprechaun claims he's practically broke and instead gives Jamie a magic seed for growing the biggest potato in the world.

The leprechaun is true to his word, and indeed Jamie grows the biggest potato ever. He can't dig it up himself, and so he gets the neighbors to help him dig it up. However, the potato ends up blocking the main road into town, and so Jamie is responsible for moving it. To do so, he lets everyone take as much as they want. But with the abundance, everyone gets sick of eating potatoes. Then, when Jamie mentions that he's retained a seed to plant the next year, all of the villagers pay him to withhold production.

This story has the following morals:

1. If you encounter a defenseless common laborer, threaten to take his nest egg unless he gives you something you can use for sustainable competitive advantage.
   
2. Religious intent is a valid excuse for the behavior described above.
3. To become wealthy, flood the market with a mass-produced version of something that people could otherwise produce themselves, and that they must consume in order to engage in ordinary commerce. This will depress producer prices and result in government intervention favorable to your operations.
   

In short, Tomie dePaola has created a Machiavellian playbook for market domination under the economics of diminishing marginal cost, couched in the language of a childrens' book. Must-reading for MBAs everywhere.

Labels: books

I'm going to An Event Apart (Boston) on Monday and Tuesday.

The obvious reason is because I'm looking for wisdom from the rock stars of the world of web design. In addition, I'm also interested in seeing how the rock stars (with sold-out concerts and top-selling tech books) perform live.

Labels: web design, Web Standards

InformationWeek, TechWeb and Yahoo! News have picked up the SmallBizResource article: How To Revive An Old PC With Linux, and it's been a big hit. I've received e-mails from other people who regularly reclaim PCs, who have done similar experiments, who have suggestions for other Linux distributions to try, and who just want to say "thanks" for the idea.

My response to everyone: I'm glad to join the Linux crowd! And if you haven't tried it yet, what are you waiting for? Just find an old computer, erase it, and start trying various installations until something sticks.

Labels: linux

In Boston last week, I went to a thesis-writer's meeting for ALM students at the Harvard Extension School. I started taking courses in 2002, and in order to graduate by 2009 I only need to take two more courses and write a thesis. Before I can write the thesis, I have to get the topic approved by the ALM program director. This calls for a proposal. I finished my first draft of a proposal in mid-February. Between waiting for comments and doing further revisions and refinements, I expect that it'll take at least a few more months, or perhaps even the summer, to secure approval for the topic. Once I get approval, I'll be assigned to a Harvard faculty member who will act as thesis director. I'll then have nine months to write the thesis.

So far, I have taken several classes related to foreign literature (in translation). But I can only write one thesis. My field is talking dogs. Their history goes back farther than you might think. In fact, I have spent almost two years tracing the history of talking dogs throughout the ages. But that's too big of a topic for a thesis.

It struck me that coming up with a thesis topic has a few aspects in common with developing an idea for a startup business. The thesis proposal stands in for the business plan, and the Harvard faculty member represents venture capital. Just like a business plan, a thesis topic has to be focused, realistic, well-researched and with potential appeal to the people who will invest something of value, whether it's expertise, money or both.

It's not a perfect analogy. For instance, the program director remains unique to academia as a single point of access to the intellectual resources of the university. The thesis has to be letter-perfect before it ever reaches the desk of a Harvard professor. Plus, degree candidates are not allowed to cold call professors or do elevator pitches at the faculty club.

Eventually, I narrowed the focus of my thesis to a single short story by a single author. (More about this to come.) The point is that I had the opportunity to write about anything in the field of foreign literature and culture. My research interests brought me to talking dogs, and within that I found a single question which I will investigate and hope to answer. The question has enough heft to support extended study, but isn't so vague as to be dissolute.

By the same token[1], in order to successfully start a business, you need focus. You can't just say, "I can do either X, Y and Z" and expect to launch. Of course, it's good to spend time doing X, Y and Z to determine which avenue has the most promise, and what specific service within that would provide the most value. And that's part of what I've been doing for the past six months. I know a lot more about what I could be doing. Now it's time to pick something specific and run with it.
___

[1] Considering that you can't buy tokens anymore in Boston or New York City, do we have to start saying, "By the same MetroCard?"

Labels: literature, talking dogs

Another potential culprit for the subprime mess: the ratings agencies.

Fortune's Bethany McLean writes:

Janet Tavakoli, who runs Tavakoli Structured Finance, points out that AA-rated tranches of CDOs backed by subprime mortgage paper now yield far more than AA-rated debt backed by other assets - a sign that the market doesn't trust the ratings. "No one believes the ratings have any value," she says. Opined Grant's Interest Rate Observer: "We are willing to bet that the agencies assigned too little weight to greed, ignorance, and soft criminality."

The dangers of investing in subprime debt
Fortune, March 19 2007

The ratings agencies have the unenviable job of double-checking the work of an army of mortgage originators. If the incentives were appropriately set at the point of origination, ratings could be set on the macro level, based on economic factors such as the number of housing starts, interest rate trends and other wonky stuff. But now, they have to add another unpredictable variable into their economic models – the extent to which the pipeline has been stuffed with unsustainable mortgages.

So I don't blame the ratings agencies. Just like they should be able to rate corporate bonds based on their financial reports and stated sales figures, they should be able to rate CDOs and CMOs under the assumption that the underlying commodity meets a certain standard. The responsibility for making sure that mortgages meet that standard should be assigned to the originators and to the banks buying the loans.

Perhaps what the industry needs is an eBay-style rating system for originators. If an originator or lender ends up putting a more-than-average number of people into loans that fail, the secondary market may want to know about it. More public information and more transparency would be the right move.

Labels: finance, mortgage, wall street

Nice to see this mention of my former employer in the New York Times, in its reporting on underwriting technology in the mortgage market.

“Without the technology, there is no way we would have been able to do the amount of business that we did and continue to do,” Scott Berry, executive vice president for artificial intelligence at Countrywide Financial, told a trade publication, Bank Systems & Technology, in the summer of 2004.

Lynnley Browning, The Subprime Loan Machine
The New York Times, March 23, 2007

Here's the original article by Judy Ward.

And here's my take on the NYT article:

The graphic (right, from NYTimes.com) shows an assembly line of homes stamped with "Approved." The implication is that underwriting technology helped to foster the current problems with subprime lending. You might as well say that automated switchboards fostered crank calling, e-mail fosters spam, and so on. It's true, but not the most useful starting point for fixing the problem. There's nothing particularly virtuous about a process that takes six weeks and a ton of paperwork, compared to a 30-second credit check that incorporates the same data to get to the same result.

The article quotes Professor Nicolas Retsinas of Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies: “Before there was A.U., down payment mattered a lot. Where we’ve crossed the line in recent years is to say, we don’t need down payment.”

Yes, it's true that down payments don't matter as much as they used to, and it was the underwriting model that made lenders comfortable enough to extend loans to people without down payments. But I'm not so sure that's where we "crossed the line."

In the old days, a lender would hold a mortgage loan on its own books. Accordingly, the lender was risk-averse as a counterweight to the borrower. Neither the borrower nor lender wanted the loan to default, but it was the lender who was singularly exposed if that were to happen. Thus, the lender would tend to put the brakes on the borrower's aspirations.

In the current environment, the lender’s incentive is to originate loans. They're not compensated on whether the loan carries through to maturity, but rather to whether they can get borrowers to sign the contract. Both sides get a short-term "win" when the deal goes through, but the borrower's the only one who has to live with the consequences. The mortgage itself is sold into the secondary market and then pooled into collateralized mortgage obligations (CMOs). The CMOs are then broken into tranches of varying risk profiles. The investors holding the high-risk tranches are compensated for the risks they take, and so they are risk-neutral.

This topic can be difficult to explain, but let me try an analogy:

Let's say there's a 26-mile marathon. Most entrants have trained for the event and will have no problem finishing. Some will finish quickly, some will limp through given enough time, and others will drop out.

Suppose you want to place a bet on whether a single runner completes the race. If you had your own money riding on the outcome, you’d be pretty careful about it – you'd have to know his or her training history, past results and current fitness level, and you’d want to know what the temperature and humidity would be on race day. You’d take a pair of calipers to measure the racer’s body fat. And you’d want to know if someone’s lying to you. If they say they’re running 70 miles per week, you’d ask the neighbors just to make sure.

Now, suppose the organizers said to you, "Why are you betting on a single racer? It’s too risky! Instead, I’ll pay you $x for every person you can convince to enter the race."

Why would the organizers make such an offer? Because they don’t need EVERYONE to finish in order to make the numbers. They just need, say, five-sixths of the entrants to get through the race in order to maintain credibility as race organizers. You see, the organizers also operate a special betting parlor, where big bettors can wager on how what percentage of runners will actually finish. They make enough from the betting action to cover the minimal costs of bringing exhausted and defeated runners to the medical tent.

Eventually, you’d start to use the same calipers, the same neighbors and the same weather report not to disqualify people who shouldn’t be racing, but instead to tell potential racers, "Hey, you’re in about the same shape as so-and-so down the street, who ran a great race last year! Go for it!"

Bottom line: The CMO market pooled the risk but not the responsibility. The diffusion of mortgage risk across the capital markets is where we "crossed the line," rather than as a consequence of the enabling technology. Lenders were risk-averse, but now they are risk-neutral. Therefore, if there are negative externalities stemming from foreclosures by risk-seeking borrowers and their mortgage agents, we may have an argument for regulation to promote risk-averse decision-making.

-----

Some of my earlier coverage on the mortgage market from Bank Systems & Technology.

• Regulators Warn on Home Equity Lending – You can't say that the regulators were asleep at the switch. The current raft of problems was anticipated and expected.

  In a guidance issued by the OCC, the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, the OTS and the NCUA, the regulators found that "in many cases, institutions' credit risk management practices for home equity lending have not kept pace with the product's rapid growth and easing of underwriting standards."

• Online Advantage – Whatever happened to RESPA reform and the Guaranteed Mortgage Package? If regulators really want to clean up the incentive structure, this is the place to start. Put the incentives out there in the open, so that borrowers can better understand how everyone in the chain is being compensated.
• Open Skies – One of my first cover stories about the mortgage industry, containing an overblown comparison to airlines and a glossary of terms. It also talks about loan-level pricing, which will become more prominent in the emerging environment.

Labels: finance, mortgage, NYT, wall street

Just visited my uncle and his current project, UbU Clothing World Headquarters in Forty Fort, PA. The site, formerly a pickle, mustard and relish factory, has been converted into luxury lofts, a wholesale food distribution center, office space and soon-to-be retail establishments. It's coming along nicely, and it doesn't smell anything like a hot-dog cart.

For the past few months, I've been ramping up to build out the UbU Clothing website. It's a good deal for both sides – they'll get a quality e-commerce site, and I have the chance to get my hands dirty with developing for the Web. From last month's WebDirections North conference and next week's An Event Apart, I'll have received more than enough guidance from the leading voices in the industry to take it from the current "bare-bones" stage to a fully-functional Web standards design. In fact, the organizers of next week's event were asking people to send in links to their websites to be reviewed at the closing session. Me? Not ready yet. Maybe next year, fellas.

However, I hope to have a new and improved version up before the upcoming O'Reilly/CMP Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, April 15-18.

I like the idea of a blog as a to-do list with a public and verifiable deadline. It tells potential customers that you're a talker, a doer AND a writer.

Labels: travel, Web 2.0, web design

My cousin went with the Patch Adams posse on a recent "Humanitarian Clown Trip" to Venezuela.

Turns out that Patch is not a big fan of the movie that bears his name. Not only does he NOT wear a white coat ("It's not colorful enough"), but the Hollywood Happy Ending where Patch opens his own clinic was a fabrication. The truth is, Patch Adams and the Gesundheit! Institute needs your support in order to build a 40-bed rural community hospital in West Virginia. Please give generously.

Did I mention that I was an extra in Patch Adams? If you have the DVD (who doesn't??) you can make out a blurry blotch in the background in the library scene. I met that blotch.

Labels: good works, movies

Here's an article about how I turned Scooter's PC into a Linux machine.

Although the article makes it look like it all happened in a single afternoon, it actually took a few weeks to prepare the machine and to get around to the various experiments. Budget accordingly.

Labels: linux, small biz

Well, I didn't quite make it to the AJAXWorld conference today. I'll try again tomorrow.

However, I did make it back to Montclair, N.J., the subject of a recent post on Gawker. Maybe I'll start wearing my varsity letter jacket again.

Labels: travel

I'm heading to New York City tomorrow (Tuesday, 3/20) and will be checking out the AJAXWorld conference and expo. Stay tuned for impressions from the show floor.

Labels: ajax

• Made it to Boston with only an hour delay despite JetBlue having canceled all flights to NY-area airports, and Logan covered with snow.
• Big Dig seems almost finished, and they've taken down many of the barriers that had separated the North End from the rest of the city. It's almost possible to imagine what it's going to look like when the terraforming above ground is finished.
  
• Relatively quiet St. Patrick's Day with friends in the North End, although a few of us did a late stroll around the core of bars near Quincy Market to look at the drunk people. Kind of like a safari.
  
• Sunday, went to a parade party in Southie. I lived in Somerville for four years and sad to say, I had never even gone to Southie before let alone to the parade. More evidence of how Boston is a city of small neighborhoods. Anyway, I had a great introduction, plus a tour of the neighborhoods of Fort Point and South Boston.
  
• Met up with friends from Cambridge and Somerville, who have formed a support group for women breadwinners and the men staying at home (site to come). Society hasn't entirely adapted to this arrangement, they claim, and this Boston Globe article describes the disparate contribution to housework by women who outearn their husbands. Good thing Scooter doesn't read this blog.
• Went back to the old neighborhood watering hole. No trivia night and none of the regulars around. In retrospect, I'd have preferred to leave it in my memory as it was then, rather than as it was tonight.
• I had been giving some thought to coming back to Boston at some point. The way things go around here, it would probably look like a different city but feel exactly the same.
  

Labels: travel

You can be fired for having a blog. On the other hand, you can also be hired for having a blog.

So far, I've noticed the following after blogging for almost a month:

1. On a Google vanity search, my name appears higher than ever.
   
2. As a corollary to (1), I seem to be receiving more "hey what's up" notes from my past.
   
3. It's easier to write for deadline when you're writing every day, as opposed when you're only writing for the deadlines.
4. Notwithstanding (3), it would be difficult to keep up a blog at this pace were I not self-employed. Not because I couldn't find the time, but because I wouldn't want to convey the impression that I was more involved in personal projects than in the goals of my employer.
   
5. In conversations with real people, sometimes I start riffing on something I had blogged about previously and wonder whether that's a conversational crutch.
   
6. Similarly, during conversations now, I can't help but think about how I could turn the topic at hand into a blog post.
   
7. The question, "Do I want to blog about this?" may have affected my media consumption habits. I need good stuff to write about!
   
8. I've become acutely conscious about what I'm NOT blogging about. For instance, I haven't written about music yet, which is an oversight. And I haven't written about politics, because it's so obvious and I'm a coward.
   
9. It's liberating to write without an editor or even an editorial mission, but it can be discombobulating.
   
10. I'm having fun!
    

Labels: blogging

Acquired in preparation for a cross-country flight on JetBlue to a city threatened by snow:

The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006 edited by Dave Eggers

Rising Up and Rising Down by William T. Vollman

The anthology offers an amusing collection of short stories, comics and blog entries well-suited for the time between in-flight interruptions and biological upheavals resulting from the act of hurtling through space in a winged bus. I am looking forward to the Haruki Murakami story ("The Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day") along with savoring the 700 hobo names listed in the excerpt from The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman (a.k.a. "...and I'm a PC"), columnist for McSweeney's, which coincidentally is the publisher of Rising Up and Rising Down (7 Volume Set). The paperback version I will bring to the airport is but a pared-down 700-page version of the original, but it still contains Vollmann's Moral Calculus (description from the back cover) "a structured decision-making system designed to help the reader decide when violence is justifiable and when it is not."

On second thought, maybe that's not the best book to bring on an airplane these days.

Labels: books, travel

For the past couple of weeks I've done weekly roundups (3/1, 3/8), taking pains to link to all of the week's prior blog entries. This is a holdover from when I managed e-mail newsletters for Bank Systems & Technology. I'd write at least an article or two every week for the Website, and then send an e-mail to our list to let people know, "Hey, here are the articles we've written." The message would contain some kind of hook to tie them together, or at least a story to get people thinking about banking so that they'd be interested enough to click on the links.

Blogging is a different medium, but I still think the idea has some validity. Suppose you just want the "digest" version of this blog. You should be able to subscribe to the Atom RSS feed for the weekly roundup, and know that once per week, you'll get a blog entry like this linking to all of the other blog entries. Only problem is, I don't yet have an RSS feed for every category the way I should, so that doesn't work yet.

Even so, writing the roundup is a worthwhile exercise and hopefully useful for the reader.

Anyway, here's the roundup.

• Media: Scooter and I saw two movies: Zodiac and The Number 23. I also wrote about video game production as the new TV profession in "What about Brian?". All of these works operate in the cross-pollinated media metaverse, and have something to say about how media and message intertwine. "Zodiac" is a movie about a cartoonist who wrote a book about a killer who wrote letters to the newspaper about his crimes, which were publicized on television. "The Number 23" is a movie about a book adapted from comic books. And "What About Brian?" is a television show about making video games (as well as making babies). Doesn't anyone just tell stories anymore?
• World Events: Dogs are still winning the war of pigs vs. dogs, although pigs have apparently gotten a new publicist. The worms should look into getting a publicist as well.
  
• Business and Economics: My bearish sentiments were reflected in this link choice about the subprime mortgage market.
  
• Small Business: two blog posts were published this week on SmallBizResource: one kvetching about Outlook, and the other about Staples.
• Technology: My initial reaction to Google Reader and a how-to for using OPML files.
  

From this roundup, it appears that this week, you've been reading a media blog. In addition, this blog is still one of the only credible sources for world events from an interspecies perspective, reason enough to continue subscribing.

Over the next week, you can expect either a series of posts related to a carefully-constructed travel itinerary on the East Cast, or various grumblings about the weather, JetBlue and the vagaries of airline travel.

Labels: weekly roundup

The countdown to St. Patrick's Day begins.

At Fadó Seattle they have a digital clock. Two of them, actually, running about seven seconds apart. I was enjoying a Guinness nearer to the slower of the two clocks, and so I must have been facing due east.

Next stop, St. Patrick's Day in Boston.

Labels: travel

Just saw The Number 23. It's about a guy whose wife gives him a book about an obsession with the number 23. He starts reading the book, and begins noticing things that add up to the magic number. Letters convert into numbers which add up to 23 (e.g. NED: N=14, E=5, D=4; 14+5+4). Historical dates convert to 23 (9/11/2001 = 9+11+2+1 = 23). And so on.

Good movie fun. On the visual plane, you can play "spot the 23" in virtually every frame, and the numerology game also provides great diversion. Plus, there's a metaplot about the power of literature and storyteller, the writer's fantasy that a work of literature can "infect" or inspire others.

And then I started thinking – both my birthday and Scooter's birthday add up to 33. And my earlier blog post about The Number 23? It was written on 2/22/2007 = 2+22+9=33! And since that day, I've written at least one blog every day, and this is 22 days later. During this period, I've made 44 posts. 22+44=66, and 66/2=33!

Another reason to like this movie is that it almost - but not quite - has a talking dog. It's definitely a very communicative, hyper-intelligent dog, and the protagonist speaks to the dog as if the dog can understand exactly what he's saying.

I really only had one major problem with the film (and I'll try to be careful not to spoil the movie, but if you're really sensitive about that kind of thing maybe now's a good time to click elsewhere) The idea that love and rationality can cure mental illness is highly problematic. You can't just click your heels and wish away dementia, contrary to how it was depicted in the film. It wouldn't have hurt the film to have some good old-fashioned pharmacology, a little more Girl, Interrupted and a lot less cartoon insanity.

But what do you expect? This is the movies!

Labels: movies, talking dogs

Until today, I have been an Internet surfer.

Yes, I knew there were ways to streamline the experience, so that instead of hopping from site to site I could simply run one program that subscribes to RSS feeds from multiple sites, aggregating all of your desired content in one spot. And I've even tried several of those programs, in the following categories:

• E-mail client: Outlook 2007 includes built-in support for RSS feeds, and by default subscribes you to four Microsoft feeds. I added a couple additional feeds, which means that as these feeds are updated, I get extra mail. This has contributed to the large size of my Outlook database. Furthermore, having to check the feeds slows down the process of fetching and retrieving mail every 10 minutes or whenever I obsessively click the "Send/Receive" button waiting for incoming. This feature is only worthwhile for your top feeds, and only if you're positive you want to save the content on your own PC.
• Separate application: I remember downloading some program or another on the Mac to read RSS feeds. It worked fine, but it was another application to have to download, install, upgrade and oh yes, remember to launch. More often than not, I'd just go directly to the sites that I had fed into the feed reader. Plus, you couldn't take it with you.
  
• Firefox plug-in: A little easier to maintain, and it's in the browser. But like the application approach, it's not exactly portable.
  
• Website: I used Bloglines a few years ago, but it didn't exactly impress me from the user interface perspective. I tried it again this month and it didn't really look any different.
  

Today, after reading Robert Scoble mention his 577 feeds that he monitors through Google Reader, I figured I'd give the Website approach another try. After all, it's Google. Google Reader.

I spent the rest of the afternoon reading blogs.

Setup was fairly easy, and I've outlined the how-to below. It shouldn't take you more than five minutes. I would say that it'll save you time every day, but what's probably going to happen is that you're going to end up reading more than you'd ever thought possible.

1. Open a Google Reader account.
2. Find an OPML file that appeals to you. For example, you can download the "top 100" file from share.opml.org. For best results, right-click (Mac users, shift-click) on the XML button, and save the file to your hard drive, e.g. "top100.xml".
3. From Google Reader, go to Settings >> Import/Export.
4. Select the OPML.xml file you downloaded in step 2.
5. Press the "Upload" button.
   
6. All of the feeds in the OPML file will be loaded into Reader. At this point, you can start reading. However, I recommend the following additional steps, which will allow you to keep things organized if you load more than one OPML file into a single account.
   
7. Go to Settings. You'll see all of the subscriptions you've just loaded.
   
8. Now, you're going to create a new "tag" to contain all of the feeds in the OPML file. Pick any of the new subscriptions, and then use the "Change folders" menu to create a new folder, e.g. "Top100".
9. Select the "Unassigned" subscriptions.
   
10. In the "More actions..." dropdown menu, find your new tag. Assign it to the "Unassigned" subscriptions.
11. Go to step 2, repeat as necessary.
    

Using OPML files from Alexandra Samuel's blog, OPML.org and Startupping, plus a bunch of my own favorites, I quickly amassed over 300 subscriptions. (Soon, I'll post the official ivantohelpyou OPML file. Watch this space.)

Now, I can either hop from one source to the next, or just lie back and let the endless scroll of the Internet unfold before my eyes.

I no longer surf. Now, the Internet surfs me.

Labels: blogging, Web 2.0

The New York Times has been standing up for the little pig:

• Today, an editorial describes the horror of hog confinement operations for over 95 percent of the 60 million pigs in the United States.
• Yesterday, a science article pointed out the irony of the "unclean" pig in Judaism and Islam, since "it was humans who infected pigs with tapeworm, not the other way around." One species of tapeworm thus transmitted may have been "acquired either by [humans] eating each other or by eating dogs."
  
• Sunday, there was an article about a dishware set showing butcher's diagrams of cows, pigs, and (to put the carving up of those animals into context) dogs. (Link, third row from bottom.)
  

Let's recap. Humans once ate dogs and other humans, and this led to the transmission of tapeworm to pigs. Although some religious authorities placed the pig off-limits, this did not prevent the pig from becoming a prominent staple of the American diet.

Now, there are 60 million pigs and approximately the same number of pet dogs in the United States. The pigs live in metal boxes until killed for food, while the dogs generally live in safety and comfort.

And they say pigs are as smart as dogs? Not if you judge by recent results.

My advice to the dogs: Be careful. Free-range puppy may seem a shocking idea today, but human tastes are notoriously fickle.

Labels: NYT, talking dogs

Yesterday, Forbes.com picked up my Microsoft Outlook article (originally published last week at SmallBizResource and mentioned in this blog post) for their Entrepreneurs page. The last time Forbes picked up one of my SmallBizResource articles (about Rocky Balboa), I was interviewed for an article in the leading business daily newspaper in Portugal.

What opportunities will arise this time? We'll see!

Labels: Microsoft, small biz

So I'm sitting here writing an article about web design and trying to tune out this 21st-century version of Melrose Place that Scooter insists on watching called What About Brian?, but I just can't help but to get distracted by the addition of a new milieu to the traditional TV workforce.

The emerging cultural phenomenon of note concerns two of the main characters, and I don't remember their names and so let's call them Droopy and Scruffy, anyway Droopy and Scruffy founded their own video game company and now they work at a bigger video game company.

As far as I can recall, this is the first major network program featuring the creation of video games as a profession. Video games have now entered the television pantheon of aspirational occupations, along with magazine editors, doctors and lawyers. We've come a long way since Ralph Kramden, Fred G. Sanford and Alice Hyatt.

I've never worked at a video-game company, and so I can't say with any certainty whether the portrayal of the industry contains any validity. I'd guess "no." Maybe if Droopy and Scruffy were skinny, pale, neurotic loners with a penchant for quoting from comic books ("no, they're GRAPHIC NOVELS!!!") and a sex life based in Second Life, I'd be more inclined to believe it.

Douglas Coupland's JPod came closer to capturing the vibe of the industry as I imagine it. I don't have the book in front of me, since I read it at a public library in Vancouver in one of those,"Hey, I'm having a Vancouver experience" experiences. But I do recall that the protagonists of JPod were given the task of converting a floundering video game to appeal to 14-year olds by adding skateboards, spraypaint and various other patronizing elements like a talking turtle. Coupland's characters responded by sabotaging the game with Easter eggs that probably wouldn't be approved by management or the Entertainment Software Ratings Board.

WAB used a very similar plot device of a game being repurposed with skateboards, but that's where the similarity ends. In WAB, Droopy and Scruffy decided to scrap the skateboard game to pitch their own genius creation, a "Life Sucks" videogame that would have gotten shot down in 10 seconds in the real world by any manager looking for shelf space at WalMart and Target, or hoping to not get sued by Groening Incorporated.

The other problem with WAB's portrayal of the video game industry is that it too closely resembles the television scriptwriting business. Droopy and Scruffy are both "idea guys," who come up with unique characters, situations and ideas, which the sultry boss-siren then gets to decide whether or not to green-light. That's what scriptwriters for formulaic dramas do for a living. As for video-game makers, they live in a different world, bounded by physics models, artificial intelligence, platform choices, licensing rights and content synergy. It's not, "What new idea for a game can we devise?" but rather, "How can I make the reflection on the windshield show the character's death grimace during a grisly collision with an oil tanker in Burnout 9: So What, It's a Rental."

Hey, if I can check out Gamasutra from time to time, so can the writers for a prime-time television show.

Labels: books, television, video games

My latest SmallBizResource blog post: Staples, Listen Up!

Labels: small biz

Wouldn't you know it, but the day after yesterday's New York Times Insults Worms post, we had torrential rains that brought out real live worms on the sidewalk. Scooter picked them up and put them back on the grass. Ratt sniffed at them, wondering why we were messing around with something that obviously wasn't food. Scooter says that I stepped on one, but I believe it was like that before I got there and that even if so it was an accident.

It was a quick walk since it was still raining fairly hard, and overall as a group we rescued more worms than I allegedly smushed.

Labels: new westminster

Like worms that surface after a torrential rain, revelations that emerge when an asset bubble bursts are often unattractive, involving dubious industry practices and even fraud. In the coming weeks, some mortgage market participants predict, investors will learn not only how lax real estate lending standards became, but also how hard to value these opaque securities are and how easy their values are to prop up.

Crisis Looms in Mortgages
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON
The New York Times, March 11, 2007

Interesting comparison, but I'm not sure it's the most appropriate given the circumstances. Sure, the worms appear "unattractive" to you and me, but most people don't eat worms outside of reality television. If we were birds, the worms would be a wonderful treat after having perched outside on a tree branch for hours during the torrential rain. Worms are also good for the soil, and you can't say that about irresponsible subprime lenders, ineffective regulators, or anyone else responsible for the unfolding fiscal nightmare.

In fact, one could say that America's worms bore the brunt of the housing boom. Overinflated property values led to over-allocation of investment in the real-estate sector, which contributed to an excess number of housing starts, higher utilization of earthmoving equipment, and the greatest destruction of worm habitat this country has ever seen.

The worms deserve a better analogy. The rusty nails stuck in the blown-out tire. Loaded dice found at a raided underground casino. Politicians' names discovered in a madame's little black book. The dead body in the trunk of the speeding motorist. Sickness, disease or rot. Leave the worms out of it.

Labels: economics, finance, mortgage, NYT

Zodiac opens with a tracking shot from the inside of a car looking out of the passenger window while driving down a suburban street on the Fourth of July. Fireworks visible in the background, people in their yards gazing at the sky, smoking, doing just what people do on a hot summer day. A teenage boy approaches the car window. Who's in the car? Is it the killer? From the opening shot, you know you're in for a great ride.

Zodiac is quintessential David Fincher, bringing together in a true crime story the taunting serial killer from Se7en with the man-seeks-authentic-life ethos of Fight Club.

In Fight Club, Ed Norton's character worked as an insurance claims adjuster, running "the formula" on the cost-benefit of whether to order a recall for defective automobiles. For Zodiac we have Jake Gyllenhaal's portrayal of Robert Graysmith, an ineffectual editorial cartoonist for a daily newspaper, hovering around the news desk of talented, hard-drinking, hard-news reporter Paul Avery (played to type by Robert Downey, Jr.). The protagonists of both Fincher films represent minor cogs in the wheel of a larger machine that profits from the threat of death, one via insurance premiums and another through fearmongering.

Where the Ed Norton character responds to his ennui by forming the fight club, Graysmith grasps for authenticity by attempting to solve the Zodiac mystery, joining the "Zodiac Club" of cops and forensic experts. Like Tyler Durden's Fight Club army, the members of Zodiac Club seek each other out, exchange knowing glances, and break rules for the cause.

Unlike Fight Club, the members of the Zodiac Club are not single, disconnected men. They have children and wives, and their wives have a lower threshhold for sacrifice in the search for justice. They want their husbands free from the Zodiac obsession and the real danger it represents. Zodiac being a dramatization of a real event, it's a much messier story with human characters having depth beyond the symbolic. However, aside from Mark Ruffalo's portrayal of police inspector David Toschi, whose Animal Cracker-fueled performance changes registers at the drop of a clue from jaded to annoying to endearing to angry to conspiratorial, the characters tend to remain in a predictably monotonic range – Gyllenhaal plays earnest, Downey Jr. does world-weary, and so on.

Why? Because the movie enlists the characters into the service of describing a larger idea, that the system is broken. Killers walk free because justice comes second to the profit motive, because the organizations entrusted with the protection of society are engulfed in internecine turf battles, and the because the human desire for ease and comfort takes priority over solving yesterday's crimes that happened to other people.

At one point, Paul Avery chides Robert Graysmith for his interest in the Zodiac case and his desire to "do something."

"What did you do? Go to the library?"

Going to the library - it's more than most people care to do under similar circumstances, but not nearly enough.

Labels: movies

Pertinent to personal bloggers trying to communicate their own diverse interests, here's a useful article (via Arts & Letters Daily) that talks about how to write about obscure academic topics for a general audience.

The author describes the original opening passage of his book, and the dramatic confrontation with his editor that followed:

I had begun with a flourish, emphasizing the excitement created when a young curator at the British Museum first deciphered the Gilgamesh epic, with its seeming confirmation of the biblical story of the Flood: "When George Smith discovered the Flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh in the fall of 1872, he made one of the most dramatic discoveries in the history of archaeology." Sterling ran his pen along these lines, but instead of praising this bold beginning, he tapped the page and asked, "Couldn't you make this opening just a bit more dramatic?"

He was right. I had told the reader that George Smith had made a dramatic discovery, but I had failed to dramatize the scene at all.

Trading Up With Gilgamesh
By DAVID DAMROSCH
Chronicle of Higher Education, March 9, 2007

Hmm. Maybe I should rewrite this opening to this blog post.

I just had to find something. Anything, it didn't really matter, as long as I don't disappoint the regular readers of this blog – and myself – by failing to post something during a calendar day. The afternoon was passing quickly, tonight was movie night, and if I didn't act soon I might not get another chance. It had to be now or never.

And there it was, on Arts & Letters Daily, a link to an article about writing clear prose in academic expression. I quickly saw the potential, that the academic problem of appealing to a small audience might also apply to bloggers trying to interest a wide range of people in personal musings on various topics. "But hold on," I thought, "There's nothing in here related to one of the top Technorati searches! How can I possibly interest anyone in an article about Gilgamesh?"

And then I realized. You don't necessarily have to write about Antonella Barba, Youtube, Dell, Myspace, Clay Aiken, Matt Sanchez, Baudrillard, Captain America and American Idol to have a successful blog. All you need to do is introduce a connection to a topic that people may not have thought about before, and you'll do fine. Maintain the element of surprise. Don't let anyone know what's coming next.

"Just shut up and press the 'publish' button already before you give away all of your trade secrets," said Ratt. "Let's go for a walk."

I pressed the button, and the blogosphere was safe for one more day.

Labels: ALD, blogging

When I first read the New York Times article about the death of Captain America, my first reaction was to write a satirical open letter to the Public Editor of the New York Times:

Dear Mr. Calame,

While I am pleased that The New York Times has finally woken up to the biggest story of the year – government registration requirements for superheroes – I am nevertheless extremely disappointed with several aspects of the paper's coverage.
...

In the fictional letter, I would complain about the paper's bias in covering the superhero registration act, as well as paper's unwillingness to address the question of why Captain America was never promoted to the rank of Major despite decades of faithful service.

But then I realized that it would just be another in a string of recent blog posts attempting to wring humor out of a narrative heedlessly combining fiction and reality. For instance, just yesterday, I wrote about the auction of Star Wars and Dr. Who memorabilia as if those items had more than simply iconic power for film buffs, under the conceit that the fictional characters existed outside of the imagination. A variant of this idea overlays fictional constructs on real-life figures, such as the suggestion that Warren Buffett should create a Willy Wonka-style contest to pick a successor. Even the mention of the obituary of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. contained a gratuitous pop-culture reference to a fictional country from a Dilbert cartoon.

At best, these quips are good for a quick chuckle, but the approach has already begun to wear thin. Were I to go ahead with the Captain America post as originally conceived, it would cement the impression of this blog as a lightweight diversion with a formulaic approach. Considering the death of Jean Baudrillard, who "argued that mass media and modern consumerist society had built up such a complex structure of symbols and simulated experience that it was no longer possible to comprehend reality as it might actually exist" (Reuters, 3/8/07), I should consider at least a temporary moratorium on such blog posts as a sign of respect and to make a tiny contribution to the idea of regaining some semblance of authenticity in communications.

At least the suggestion that Microsoft operates a windowless private jet works slightly better on the level of both parody and critique, by creating a conceptual blend between the intuitive action of flying and the theoretical aspects of a software program. While it's sometimes hard to describe what's wrong with software, putting it into concrete terms can serve to illuminate the original idea.

Finally, in what was perhaps the most controversial blog entry of the week, I made an oblique connection between the increased risk of schizophrenia by the children of older fathers and the advanced age of the Biblical patriarch Abraham. This carries the unfortunate implication of an increased risk of mental illness in the families of both Hagar and Isaac, which by ignoring the basic theology of an all-powerful G-d, risks offending adherents of the world's major religions. Nor does the theology-based suggestion advance the rational discussion of the treatment and prevention of mental illness from a scientific perspective. In fact, the post could have negative clinical repercussions if it were to convince a male reader to father children at an advanced age in emulation of the Patriarchs, despite the empirical evidence concerning the all-too-real risks. In short, the blog entry was ill-consided and potentially damaging to public health. Although I respect the author's right to publish such nonsense about schizophrenia, it is my fundamental right as a reader to protest its inclusion in a family blog and to voice my strenuous objections.

Also, here's a bit of advice: Be careful about lying to the reader. The post about the "lying game" may serve to demonstrate what was good about the movie "Breach," but it nonetheless sows doubt in the mind of the reader as to whether you're a trustworthy source. In their economic model of the blogosphere (see InformationWeek coverage), Yale researchers Dina Mayzlin and Hema Yoganarasimhan write: "We assume that a blogger must be truth-telling in its posting of a news story. That is, a blogger who simply manufactures a story or makes up a sale will be severely punished by other bloggers and the audience."

Ivan, you've already admitted to lying to your audience at least once. Who's to say that you're not going to do it again? Keep it up, and people will most certainly go elsewhere for small-business consulting tips, sporadic coverage of the financial services market, and links to other references about blogging. My advice is that you stick to writing about your résumé. Or talking dogs. That dog "Ratt" you keep mentioning seems to have a good head on her shoulders. Let's hear what she has to say, and stop monopolizing the conversation with your readers.

Sincerely,

Ivan Schneider

Labels: NYT, talking dogs, weekly roundup

An auction house just sold Ol' Ben Kenobi's cloak for £54,000.

Which is a rip-off, because the original was destroyed during the explosion of the first Death Star.

The sale of Dr. Who's entire outfit for about £24,600 was a relative bargain, and scientifically plausible considering that Dr. Who had a time machine, most recently used by Pete Townshend et. al. to continue touring in support of their new album.

By the way, did you know that "The Who" was originally a problematic Google search? The words "the" and "who" are both considered "stop words," which were ignored by search algorithms. Now, if you search for a term that contains only stop words, Google will conduct the search. The results for "the who" – just as expected.

But Google hasn't yet figured out "The The" (search results here).

Labels: auctions, movies, music

In Chris Cooper's brilliant portrayal of Robert Hanssen in Breach, he greets the young agent assigned to him with an odd request: "Tell me five things about yourself, only four of them true."

Interesting game. Sure, you could list a bunch of innocuous statements, such as "My favorite color is blue," and "My favorite ice cream is pistachio." But that'll never teach you how to become a good liar, and it won't be enough to get people to believe something important as your lie. Instead, serious players have to come up with items that are at least as interesting as the untruth. You're trying to gain someone's trust to the point where they accept the entirety of what you say, and you can't do that by being reticent and withdrawn.

In coming up with the five things, you have to consider the following questions:

• What do you expect that your opponent will believe about you? The lie has meet a plausibility threshhold.
  
• What do you think your opponent won't believe about you? In order to divert attention away from the lie, you have to make at least one of the true items wild enough that your opponent will doubt that it's actually true, and pick it instead of the lie.
  
• What can you reveal safely? Remember, this is a game supposedly played by counterintelligence agents and Russian spies. As such, it's probably unwise to mention childhood traumas, crimes committed, sexual peccadilloes or other things that can be used against you. While it's tempting to put something scandalous and personal out there as one of the "true" items with the idea that your opponent will believe that you'd never admit to something like that, it's probably too high of a price to pay.
  
• Should the lie be something positive (e.g. "I ran the Boston Marathon"), or something negative? (e.g. "I was arrested for truancy.") Remember, your reputation can be damaged as much by a lie of your own creation as by an incautious revelation of something true.
  
• Knowing that your opponent knows the dynamics described here, how should you adjust your questions?
  

It's game theory fundamentals in action. In essence, you have to pick four items that skirt the edge of plausibility but that do not overly jeopardize your reputation, plus add another item that resembles the first four.

Anyway, I thought this would be a good exercise for a blog post. See if you can spot the lie.

• I was kicked off the high school chess team.
  
• I scored well on the LSAT.
• I performed at open mic night at a NYC comedy club.
• I am a thoughtful and considerate lover.
  
• I was an extra in Patch Adams.
  

If the correct answer jumps out at you, then perhaps you should consider a career in the intelligence services. Or you're my ex-girlfriend. Good luck!

Labels: movies

Just noticed that there's no post for Tuesday, March 6th. That's not exactly correct. There's no post that was STARTED on March 6th. In fact, the Warren Buffett's Replacement post was started on Monday at 10:30pm, put on hold for an hour or two as I did other things, and then finished and posted sometime after midnight on Tuesday. It's this Blogger software – by default it marks posts based on the time and date that the entry was created rather than the time it was actually posted.

I say this to explain to my loyal readers why there's nothing listed for Tuesday. Please accept my apologies, along with my assurances that in the future I will doctor the timestamps so as to make it look like I'm maintaining a steady and faithful correspondence with you, my worldwide audience.

So, you have all of this free time that you can check my blog? Shouldn't you be working?

We'll, here's another Time Waster. Enjoy.

Still wondering how Warren Buffett's going to pick his replacement at Berkshire Hathaway?

Despite this headline from TheStreet.com (Stockpickr: Seeking Buffett's Apprentice), he's probably not going to pull a Donald Trump by getting a bunch of photogenic twentysomethings to compete on challenges, with the winners sleeping on Buffett's couch and the losing team sleeping in the parking lot at Gorat's.

But maybe he should.

Personally, I think Buffett should aim even younger. No way the #2 billionaire in the world doesn't have a team of doctors making giving him at least another 20 to 25 years left to live. That's just about enough time to turn a street urchin into a world-class investor. He could put "golden tickets" inside of chocolate bar wrappers to find a random sample of youngsters, and then take the finalists inside of the Berkshire Hathaway factory. In turn, all but one of the children would be eliminated from consideration, say, by suggesting that executive compensation should be tied to company performance instead of personal performance, which would cause a bunch of Geico lizards to break into song. The last kid standing will get a full education in the Graham and Dodd school of value investing and eventually run the business when Buffett flies off in his great glass elevator.

That's the way I see it happening.

Labels: finance, insurance, wall street

Here's a nice pairing of articles from the New York Times. The first is about the collapse of the latest boom market, and another about the start of what might be the next boom market.

Just as the technology boom of the late 1990s turned twenty-something programmers into dot-com billionaires, and leveraged buyouts a decade earlier turned Wall Street bankers into Masters of the Universe, the explosive growth in subprime lending turned mortgage bankers and brokers into multimillionaires seemingly overnight.
...
Weakening home prices and rising default rates have rocked the subprime business.

Mortgage Crisis Spirals, and Casualties Mount
By JULIE CRESWELL and VIKAS BAJAJ
March 5, 2007

Party's over. Where's the next one? How about insuring coastal areas?

As most big insurers are cutting back coverage in Florida and other coastal states after a string of catastrophic hurricanes, Mr. Buchmueller has started a company offering policies that hardly anyone else wants to sell — and at as little as half the going rates.

...[And] recent start-ups have been structured to yield high profits as quickly as possible.

In Florida, a Company Finds a New Way to Sell Hurricane Insurance

By JOSEPH B. TREASTER

Published: March 6, 2007

Buchmueller only insures homes worth over $1 million, cherry-picking homes in the market that should hold up better in a storm. Shouldn't be long before others follow the lead.

Labels: finance, insurance, mortgage, wall street

Check out my latest SmallBizResource blog entry on what's wrong with Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager for e-mail marketing.

The fundamental flaw: Outlook 2007 doesn't let you customize the HTML in an e-mail message.

In other Microsoft small-business news, from March 19-23 the company will host a Small Business Summit featuring keynotes by Guy "No Longer an Apple Evangelist" Kawasaki , Julie "Baby Einstein" Clark and others. Sessions throughout the week focus on various aspects of running a small business, plus demos of Office 2007, Vista, and other upcoming products.

You can register for the event in Redmond, view the sessions through the Web, or show up at selected Regal cinemas or CompUSA stores to network with other small-business owners. Sign up by Wednesday for the chance to win a copy of Office 2007 Small Business or 10 hours on a private jet.

In keeping with the Outlook 2007 design strategy, it's a really special private jet. There are no windows in the cockpit, and the pilot and co-pilot can't actually see where they're going (at least not with their unreliable, non-standard eyes). But who needs eyes when you have user-friendly instrumentation panels designed for easier usage, and various controls and knobs covering virtually everything you'd ever need to fly a jet?

Labels: Microsoft, small biz

I just added a "my CV" PDF link to the ivantohelpyou.com home page, and recalled that PDFs require extra work in order to be considered accessible. In order to keep the phrase "blogs about Web standards" on my résumé, I have two projects ahead of me:

1. To make an accessible, non-PDF version of my résumé.
2. To write more blogs about Web standards.

There's nothing like posting your to-do list to the Web as a motivator for getting things done.

Here's a computer store where the "come on in" arrow on the sign points into the street.

Not sure I want them fixing my router.

Taken with a cameraphone.

Some good tips for how to get respect as an independent consultant, from today's New York Times:

• Give yourself a business name bigger than yourself.
  
• Get an answering machine message "that refers to the business, not the family."
• Be more specific than "consultant."
• Position yourself as an expert by talking about current projects and those just completed.
• Project a confident attitude.

The Lot of the Consultant: Explaining What You Do
The New York Times, March 4, 2007

Well, let's see. I'm confident and I talk about my projects all the time. I could stand to be more specific, and I could definitely use a separate business line. As for the name, I covered this ground already in a previous SmallBizResource post.

If you're interested in blogging, you might want to check out a podcast or two from the Northern Voice page on PodcastSpot.

Of those listed, I attended the following:

• How to be a Citizen Journalist
  Just take the picture, dammit. Journalism 101 for bloggers.
  
  
• MooseCamp: Vancouver Transit Camp
  Actually, Joe Clark gave a great presentation on this very topic at WebDirections North, so I'd recommend starting with him if you're interested in what transit systems can do to improve accessibility.
  
  
• Why Do We Blog?
  My favorite session of the event and the one that got me revved up about writing what you're reading. First, photographer Alex Waterhouse-Hayward talked about his daily blogging ritual and how it improved his writing. Then, conference organizer Darren Barefoot walked through the lifecycle of a blog, based on results of his survey of people who have started and stopped blogging. I'd recommend this podcast to anyone who blogs. At the very least, check out this bit of Scorsese-Hinkley trivia.
  
  
• MooseCamp: New Rules for the New Communities
  Wide-ranging discussion of what it takes to succeed as a moderater of an online community. Go to 25:40 for my pithy comment on the difficulty of keeping on-topic when anyone can join the discussion.
  
  
• Holding Paradox in the Palm of Your Hand (slides and audio)
  Hard to summarize but thought-provoking nonetheless.
  
  
• MooseCamp: Hacking the MotherCorp (CBC)
  My 2c: BBC Radio has a much more comprehensive service for accessing radio programmes – music, drama and commentary – that has aired over the past seven days. On the global Internet, the Beeb's the one to beat for English-language audio content.
  
  
• MooseCamp: Hacktastic Wiki Blogging
  Superhacker Luke from SocialText connects blogs, wikis, and his favorite word processor, vi, which he uses with the dvorak keyboard layout.
  D.NNR ,RPNE!
  

Labels: northern voice, NV07, podcast, Web 2.0

Research indicates that children of older fathers may be more likely to develop schizophrenia:

A study on schizophrenia found that the risk of illness was doubled among children of fathers in their late 40s when compared with children of fathers under 25, and increased almost threefold in children born to fathers 50 and older. This study was also carried out in Israel, which maintains the kind of large centralized health databases required for such research.

It Seems the Fertility Clock Ticks for Men, Too
The New York Times, Feb. 27. 2007

And they've been maintaining those records for a very long time.

• Genesis 16:16 And Abram was fourscore and six years old, when Hagar bore Ishmael to Abram.
• Genesis 21:5 And Abraham was a hundred years old, when his son Isaac was born unto him.

I wonder to what extent the risk increases when you hit 80 or 100.

Labels: health, religion

Sen. Clinton (D-NY), in a Feb. 28 letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, points out:

As we have been running trade and budget deficits, [countries like China] have been buying our debt and in essence becoming our banker.

Clinton then asked the Senate:

How can we negotiate fair, pro-American trade agreements--and ensure foreign countries uphold these agreements--when we sit across the negotiating table, not only from our competitor, but from our banker as well.

What to do? Somehow, I doubt that an "alarm bell" will help:

I supported legislation by Senator Dorgan and then Congressman Cardin that sounds an alarm bell when US foreign owned debt reaches 25 percent of GDP or the trade deficit reaches 5% of GDP. It would require the Administration to develop a plan of action to address these conditions, and report their findings to Congress.

In the 2006 Berkshire Hathaway annual report, Warren Buffett has the following to say about the lo