And the sharks exit the preseason undefeated…

and nobody really cares. which is great.

First chance to see the team in person — once again, I miss most of training camp (only about 2 hours on the first day, before we headed out of town to Oregon) and most of the pre-season games. One thing I always tried to do at Apple was schedule some flex time so I could visit training camp, and one thing that always happened was something that came up and kept me from going. It became sort of a running joke after a while — so what do I do? Two years in a row, I schedule my own conflicts instead. go figure…

Doesn’t really matter.

The Sharks looked pretty good. They more or less manhandled the Flames, until they decided to ramp it down and coast. the game wasn’t nearly as close as the stats might indicate, the Sharks got bored as much as anything.

They did look pretty good to me overall, though. Setoguchi saw limited time, but impressed. Roenick didn’t see limited time, and looks, well, old and slow, and took a number of “old and slow” penalties. But then, Mark Smith, who signed in Calgary just before the game and is basically the roster spot that went to Roenick, didn’t impress, either.

I would not want to have been wearing a flames jersey within sight of Keenan after that performance.

Davison looks to be the 6th defenseman for now, with Murray 7th. I expect once Sandis is released from substance abuse, he’ll be signed to some minimal contract as an 8th Dman and we’ll see what happens. It may be a pity signing, or simply the Sharks giving an old friend a chance — but what’s wrong with that? Don’t forget that Sandis was Doug wilson’s partner in the first season before Sandis hurt his knee, and so there’s a lot of “more than pure hockey” going on here. And the Sharks have a soft spot for Sandis, and have a history of reclamation projects, both well-known and not so. Some worked out okay, some (Link Gaetz) didn’t, and some (Brant Mhyres, anyone?) were, well, reclamation projects.

Sandis’s problems started with the Sharks, a kid a bit too young, with too many responsibilities, acclimation problems, a bit shy and nerdy, frankly. He also was sort of a real-life lab experiement that helped the Sharks understand what it took to bring in european talent successfully for both the player and the team, and the team has strongly benefitted from that; perhaps just for that reason, the Sharks will give Sandis a shot, giving both sides some closure. And Sandis is still well-loved in San Jose.

(Sandis, by the way, has a really funky record on his resume: he scored the first goal in San Francisco Spiders history, as he was holding out at the time and signed a deal with the IHL team; then he went off and rejoined the Sharks, and if I remember properly, THEN went and scored the first goal of the season for San Jose, too…)

I’m probably the only person in the universe NOT particularly worried about San Jose’s defense. Yes, we lost Hannan, but to me, Hannan and McLaren were very similar players, and the entire defensive corps was way too “stay at home”; swapping out Hannan for Rivet, which is effectively what we did, improves the power play a LOT and increases the blueline offensive capability. Yes, we lose some defensive-defense, but we have plenty to spare, I think.

And Rivet can teach Carle and Plasic how to play as an offensive defenseman, a benefit we need. Honestly, Robb Zettler teaching offensive defense? Not gonna happen…

I think Davison and Murray as a time-sharing combo is a perfectly acceptable 6th dman. As long as Vlasic doesn’t have a bad year, we’ll be fine. And if Sandis brings something to the table, that’s a benefit. But I’m not sure I want Sandis to teach the kids how to play…

I will admit — I really like the new home jersey, and I wasn’t sure I would. I still am not sure about the logo redo (wasn’t broken, why fix it?) but it’s no worse than the old one, merely different. It’ll probably grow on me. But the epaulets instead of those black underarms? That looks pretty nice, actually, and I thought the orange highlights addded to the look, didn’t clutter it. So it gets a thumbs up for me.

Other changes in the arena — the new video board absolutely rocks. Absolutely. well done. As someone sitting near me said last night, “I found myself watching the board, even when the Sharks were in our end of the ice!” True enough, and we’re three rows off the glass. THAT good. A nice thing is that it’s a purely software/video scoreboard now, so it’s got a lot more flexibility for different events.

And they finally redid the sound system, which has sucked since the building opened. We can actually — god help us — hear what is being said over the PA in section 127 now, unmuffled and without legibility problems. Well done. So THAT is what Joe Eich sounds like…

They also replaced the boards a wrap-around system similar to those seen in newer building (gah, that building’s over a decade old; I remmber it as a hole in the ground); The effect is pretty nice.

And a minor thing I noticed — they’ve retuned the lights. In previous years, some of the lights were turned off for hockey games because they caused bad shadows or glare; everything got re-aimed and now all of them are used in games; it makes it brighter in there (about an F/stop, I’m guessing); add in the light from the boards (it’s no longer dark, even with the lights off) and it’s a much brighter building.

One thing the sharks didn’t do (oh well) was theatrical lighting like GM place does. If you want to know why that’s a nice thing to have? just think about the 20 minute delay before the first game in London…. Shuttered lights avoid that but allow you to dim them for effect, something vancouver uses to good impact.

And now it’s time to drop the puck!

first week back…

Man, it’s already wednesday, and I’m still unpacking. Had an interview yesterday, which I felt went well — I’ve had some real dog interviews for some reason, and I haven’t been happy with how I’ve been handling them, but this one I thought was more up to my expectations for myself. I think I’m finally hitting that point where I’m ready and interested in going back to work, and that may be part of it. We’ll see.

Later today, I got introduced to one of these mythical stealth startups through a friend, and for some reason they want my thoughts on the thingie they’re building — and I’m horribly curious about it because it sounds like a fascinating new technology. Not an interview, it’s really more feedback on their plans. Should be fun, and that’s the last I’ll talk about it because as far as I’m concerned, it’s an NDA thing, even though we haven’t discussed that. Won’t even mention the market segment right now. But if they’re doing what they seem to be doing, it’s going to make life interesting down the road.

And another interview tomorrow, which I’m looking forward to; an other really interesting opportunity. And I came back and poked at a couple of other companies and we’ll see if anyone pokes back. And I have some work to do on the technical review, and I need to get that done this week…

Of course it’s digging out time. Even with good and reliable wifi in the hotels (getting easier and easier), I made a conscious decision to sort of go darkish and actually take the vacation.

Took about 1000 photos over nine days and 2300 miles driven. Fall arrived in Portland at about the same time we did, so we hit a bit of rain, but nothing anyone who likes Portland is going to notice. We spent the grey and rainy day driving up the Gorge and visiting some of the falls, then out to the Dalles, and inland and back through the Hood area. Absolutely-freaking-gorgeous. Some shopping and the ritual trip to Powell’s on day 2, plus stops at Penzey’s Spices and Stash Tea, and we were happy campers.

We actually, after having set things up to stay near the Tri-max, didn’t use it, we limited downtown to Powell’s and drove in. But we did a fair amount of exploring down in Hillsboro and also in Tigard and Lake Oswego. Some nice stuff going on up there. As we drove past Orenco Station the first time, Laurie noted “hey! they’re building a new false old downtown!”

which is true, very similar in concept to our Santana Row, and very nice, actually. I like the mixed use retail areas when they’re done well, and this one (which also, for those in the Bay Area, has some extended housing areas like Rivermark does in Santa Clara) seems pretty nice. It also had a New Seasons market in it, which frankly, for all we talk about the bay area being such a foodie region, points out just how pitifully bad out supermarket setup is around here…

Then it was off to Astoria (actually, Seaside), where we based for a couple of days, and we headed up to Long Beach and Cape Disappointment for some birding and photography, stopped by Cellar on 10th and ended up having a nice long chat and leaving with 15 bottles of good NorthWest grape stuff, dinner at Baked Alaska (cemented itself as my favorite spot on the coast), but also a rather nice italian meal and Guidos and Vito’s downtown seaside. You gotta love an italian place that puts up a “no, we do NOT have pizza on the menu” sign! (grin)

Then a couple of nights in Newport, dinners at Las Cabanas (really nice Mexican, especially for Oregon) and a new place (for us) call Szabos, which can best be described as a roadhouse — a bar with tables and TVs with the USC game on it, but the food was far from an afterthought; we watched as the locals piled in (almost always a good sign), and I had some of the best damn fish and chips I’ve had in years.

We decided not to visit the aquarium, in favor of exploring — up Yaquina bay to Toledo, south to Seal Rock, north to Boiler bay; a good chunk of time up at Yaquina head, where the wind was so fierce it made my eyes water despite having glasses on AND binoculars covering them.

Birding was pretty quiet. Yaquina Head was as usual busiest, with Brandt’s cormorants nesting, some marbled murrelets, a non-breeding (white) pigeon guillemot that confused the hell out of me for a while, a couple of common loons, and the normal gulls, and over 100 surf scoters. Up in Yaquina bay I found a mew gull in among a flock of “usual suspect” gulls, and a young hooded merganser — pretty much the only duck of the trip other than a couple of small groups of mallards. Lots of stuff has migrated out; only saw two common murres, even up around Point Disappointment where they nest, but no shorebirds — the summer residents were gone, the winter ones haven’t arrived yet, even at shorebird strongpoints like seal rock.

No whales. Word was they were up around depoe bay, but we didn’t see them this trip.

Down at seal rock, I spent some time with a nice lady who came down to seal rock expecting, well, seals. And there were some — we found five or six in the water — but none actually on shore, and I could never get her to see them in the water using the binoculars, so I finally hauled out the spotting scope so I could set it up and aim it for her; that worked out great, because once I showed her what to expect, she was able to find some of the others on her own. At the same time, the local song and savannah sparrows were laughing at me and running every time I tried to get a look at them, and there wasn’t a shorebird in the entire beach area. ohwell…

As I get the photos posted, I’ll talk more about stuff. But for now, gotta go fight the bermuda grass again…

Backup Brain

Backup Brain:

For example, years ago, I got into a conversation with a couple of Apple employees about Gil Amelio, Apple’s then-CEO. I thought then (and still do now, although to a much lesser degree) that he was doing a good job, and said so to the Apple employees.

Their response:

“He doesn’t like us to call him Gil.”

“He prefers that we call him Dr. Amelio.”

I knew, in a flash, that Gil was not long for that job—if he didn’t understand that Apple employees needed to be on a first-name basis with their CEO, he was never, ever going to fit into the culture. That became the “one thing” I needed to know about Amelio to be able to predict just about everything he did with Apple from then on.

But this blog post was about Ray Ozzie and Microsoft, not Amelio or Apple. So, what’s the one thing that explains what Ozzie has (and hasn’t) done in the two-plus years he’s been at MS?

In my opinion, it’s this:

Ray Ozzie has never in his life,

—ever—

not once

—ever—

shipped software that an end-user wanted to buy and install on their computer.

No, Groove was not an end-user product, and I never heard of anyone run Lotus Notes by choice. Vista is just more of the same. Why should anyone expect something different from Ozzie from what he’s done for most of the last four decades?

Gil Amelio doesn’t get credit for many things he did right, against the combined weight of the installed fiefdoms and factions who weren’t interested in making the company succcessful, but instead were only interested in growing (or raping) their own piece of it. One thing Steve did when he came in was carry forward some of the things Gil started, and start shooting everyone who tried to tell him they weren’t going to do it Steve’s way because it wasn’t what they wanted… Once the pile of bodies grew large enough outside of IL1, the rest got the hint and either left or learned to keep out of sight…

But having said that — Gil simply didn’t get it. he was a “numbers guy”, and Apple needs — as much as anything — a cheerleader for the troops to rally behind. That wasn’t Gil. It wasn’t Sculley, either (he wanted to be a visionary, and everyone’s friend; he was, ultimately, not great at either), and the less we say of Herr Diesel, the better.

Amelio felt that what would fix Apple was process and structure — and he was right, to a point, in that Apple desperately needed both. But Amelio couldn’t provide the spark and inspiration, and that left Apple a healthier company, but one about as, well, intersting as Gateway — and Apple is nothing if it’s customers aren’t inspired and motivated. Apple as Dell is just as dead as Apple under Spindler, only nobody cares about it any more…

And without realizing it, Dori’s shed a light on the whole “Apple marketshare thing”, too. Because if you think about it, Apple speaks to the individual, and taht’s where it’s core strength is. Microsoft? it speaks to IT — and while you change the world by changing it for individuals, you sell zillions of units by selling it to IT. And change, and revolution — the cornerstones of Apple — scare the crap out of IT people (even, to some degree, Apple IT people….).

And that’s why just looking at raw unit numbers and saying Apple hasn’t improved market share is answering the wrong question: many of those units are in markets that Apple isn’t pretending to be part of. Do people look at BMW and ask why it isn’t taking away market share from Hyundai? Or better yet, from Mack trucks? Hey, they all drive on roads…

Is The NHL Ignoring a Concussion Problem? – FanHouse – AOL Sports Blog

Is The NHL Ignoring a Concussion Problem? – FanHouse – AOL Sports Blog:

That data point, and a whole lot more, comes from a story in yesterday’s Orange County Register written by Scott M. Reid. The piece is the first part of a two-part series on the subject of concussions in the NHL, and unearthed a number of other interesting facts and quotes from players and front office types from around the NHL. The study, sponsored by the Register, looked at concussions over a ten year period

This should be a must-read piece for all hockey fans…..

I talked to doctors involved with studying concussions in the league years ago, and I’ve been arguing for protecting the head for a while (see this piece from 2003, for instance) — and yes, the league needs to do more, but part of this is, frankly, a growing recognition of the problem and how to diagnose it. “Getting your bell rung” has been going on in hockey since forever, but there’s a lot of peer pressure and motivation to “shake it off”, and in the “good old days”, guys who couldn’t tended to get swept under the rug or left behind to cope as they could.

At least now, the doctors have diagnostic data and training and the authority to do something without easily being overridden by a player or cooach — assuming the player actually says something. Which they still don’t, far too often…

There are, unfortunately, conflicts between protecting the player and the hockey mentality — there are good people in the medical staff trying, but the “shake it off” world still holds a lot of sway here. it’s changing, but slowly, and we keep losing good players because of it — and a lot of the players are the primary problem that needs to be solved…

Acupuncture, real or fake, gets results in study

Acupuncture, real or fake, gets results in study:

Fake acupuncture works nearly as well as the real thing for low back pain, and either kind performs much better than conventional care, German researchers have found.

Almost half the patients treated with acupuncture needles felt relief that lasted months. In contrast, only about a quarter of the patients receiving medications and other Western medical treatments felt better.

Even fake acupuncture worked better than conventional care, leading researchers to wonder if pain relief came from the body’s reactions to thin needle pricks or, possibly, the placebo effect.

“Acupuncture represents a highly promising and effective treatment option for chronic back pain,”

Hmm. Very, very interesting, that the faux treatment is still more effective than the standard ones. Says a lot about how we treat back problems, no?

blog postings need an optional expiration date…

I’ve been doing a lot of work trying to re-architect my online presence (aka, beat these damn blogs into some kind of shape so they better represent what I want them to be and who I am — and so you can bloody find stuff by putting the stuff where it’s expected….), and one thing I’ve come to realize is that blogging systems need to implement an expiration date for postings.

Optional, of course. And I realize that some folks think that every page taht was ever posted needs to be posted for ever, and that URLs can never change — but get over it. Not ever happening, and frankly, shouldn’t.

take this posting for instance. Please. 30 days from now, who cares? The web would frankly be a better place, or at least less cluttered, if we all got our giggle out, and then my link to Global Nerdy goes away…

(okay, too much fun. the ads by google showing up on this page all are about finding or buying laptops really, really cheap…. online fences? nah)

In all seriousness, some stuff ought to be kept around and links are a lifeblood of identifying and sharing useful info, but there’s a large set of blog entries out there that are, in reality, transient. Will anyone really care two years from now that there were room available this christmas at yosemite? No, and in fact, that posting might just confuse someone looking for room reservations through Google or a search engine. So I should remember to go delete that sometime in the future.

When I started getting serious about Dare2Thrive, and realizing I wanted/needed to rearchitect my online presence (more on that sooner, or later… or whatever), I did some digging through my online “me” — there are over 3,000 individual postings, plus 2,000+ flickr photos, plus god knows how much (and I don’t want to know) in Google groups from my years on USENET or on various mailing list archives hanging out around there. tens of thousands of pages.

but even in the 5,000 or so pages I directly control going back to, oh, 2001 or so, my sampling shows that about 20-25% of them either point to something dead and broken (and therefore should be deleted or fixed), or are silly, or no longer relevant, or no longer represent an opinion I want to portray, or maybe a fact that’s been proven wrong.

Yet it’s all still out there. And blogs are great at helping you POST content, but lousy at helping you manage it. And we, as bloggers, are universally lazy about going back and fixing it once it’s in there (and I don’t blame us…).

One way to improve this would be to allow us to throw an expiration date on a posting. That’d be fairly easy for a site like Typepad: simply make it an option to say “kill this on this date, or N days from now”; when it goes pumpkin, Typepad deletes it for you.

Purely optional, but it’d give us that ability to say “this really is only of interest for a month….” — and that’d leave us with cleaner, easier to use sites and fewer garbage links for the search engines to spider and try to make sense of…

Expiration dates aren’t world-changing things — but they’d make things a little better, no?

(another thing I’ve been thinking on is how to track down and handle dead links. Maybe it makes sense to build a little link-tracker system and use it instead of direct URLs — could allow me some visibility into what people are clicking. I’ve looked at some systems to do dead link testing, and haven’t found one I like yet (suggestions?) — down this road lies serious analytics and reporting, though, so it seems to me this ought to be part of another existing package, like Google Analytics or Feedburner (which do the tracking parts, not the 404 testing part… sigh).

How do bloggers handle this, anyway? by ignoring the problem, right?

Dealing with information overload

Is FeedHub the answer to information overload? « Scobleizer:

I’ve been interested i this topic for some time. Right now I’m reading 848 feeds for my link blog in Google Reader. I’m way overloaded with feeds. Now, imagine I only had 10 minutes a day to catch up on my feeds, how would I do that?

Well, the answer up to now was TechMeme or one of its sisters.

TechMeme actually works great. Tracks thousands of news feeds and every few minutes it remeasures which ones are most important. Problem is that TechMeme only covers tech news. Its sister sites cover gossip, or regular news/politics, or baseball.

But what about 800 custom feeds that you hand picked?

There’s nothing quite like a vacation to bring this point home. It switched me from being a net browser, where I was more-or-less online more or less constantly and browsing my news feeds during those empty spots where I was waiting for something into someone who was offline most of the day, and coming back to the hotel room to find — 1200 unread articles. A couple of hours of plowing through later, it was a real education on just how much time “being connected” could cost. More than I want to spend.

So I spent some time the other night looking at not HOW MANY feeds I read (a bit over 400, the number I”ve generally been comfortable with) but that combination of feed volume compared to the value of the content.

And then I started purging. It’s now 350 feeds, and coming back after a full day on the road, the feed had about 450 articles in it; dropped about 12% of my feeds, but over 50% of the NUMBER of articles. It was actually pretty straightforward: look for the feeds with the largest number of messages and asking myself “when was the last time I got something useful here? and is it worth all this noise to find that?”

Sometimes the answer is yes — one of the busiest feeds was the TSN sportswire (not surprising), but looking at it I realized I didn’t need the TSN feed AND the ESPN feed AND the Yahoo sports feed, because they overlapped so closely, and TSN had the best hockey coverage.

But I also dropped feeds like Luxist; high volume (drives page views!), mostly pointers to other stuff, fun content, but — don’t really need it. This is, I think, a place where sites like Luxist and Engadget and Gizmodo are vulnerable: when people stop to think about how much content they post compared to the value of the content; being primarily farmers of information from elsewhere, they’re logical places to economize your time, unless they are farming a core interest of yours (I have kept Engadget for now, but to be honest, it was a close call; I’m still considering it. Places like Xbox360 fanboy went bye-bye, not because they don’t have good content, but — I’m just not that into them.

I also foldered my feeds not by topic (“tech feeds”, “gaming feeds”, etc), but by priority: “primary feeds”, “secondary feeds”, “free time feeds”, “flickr photos”. That way, if I’m in a hurry, I can just look at my “A list” feeds and leave the rest for later, or use “skim mode” in Google reader to cherry pick a few items and mark the rest read, or simply zero out the lower interest feeds and move on. I’m finding it can save me a hunk of time — which can be better spent creating content rather than trying to keep up with it. All to the good.

Maybe it’s time for folks to start thinking not about how many feeds they read, but how much time they spend reading them, and looking at which feeds are a good value at the investment of that most rare and valuable commodity: time.

You’ll note for the record that Scoble is still on the list, because he’s great at concentrating the larger data stream into a form to help me find the stuff I’m interested in. He is, in fact, a wonderful embodiment of what I saw as a new career path way back in 2003:

Chuqui 3.0.1 Beta: The commercialization of weblogs…:

the data miner — the person who either has a focus on a specific topic (whether it’s alternative music, nanotechnology, or science fiction) and who mines the data stream to supply content on that topic — not so much writing on a topic as acting as a filter on what’s written, much as a magazine editor chooses what stories to publish, and filters the submission stream into a magazine their subscribers want to read… (a third option, somewhat a variant of this second, is the “miner by request”, who’s specialty is finding what they’re contracted to find, but in this case, a weblog is more a marketing vehicle than a distribution tool…)

Of course, that model depended on micropayments, really, and the market moved to an ad-based model instead. Not bad, but instead of my paying someone like Scoble $5/mo or $10/mo to make it worth them mining the stream for my benefit, you have sites like Luxist and Engadget mining the streams, but twisting the content to maximize page views and effectively forcing you through their site (preferably repeatedly). Personally, I much prefer how Robert does it, because he’s more centric to his users, not his advertisements. Maybe he needs a tip jar…

(that 2003 piece actually builds on something I wrote even further back in 2001, but that link’s dead due to my continuing re-arrangement and I need to find and fix that. gah… but that re-organization’s another post in another category….)

I do wish the micropayment model had taken off; it’d make it possible for someone like Scoble to make some money off of what he does without having to turn it into the kind of model Engadget uses; and don’t think I have a problem with that — I don’t, and I’m actually going to be adopting some aspects of it soon — but it’s unfortunately a model that isn’t as end-user centric as it could be.

Mailing List Failure Modes

Mailing List Failure Modes:

O’Reilly mailing lists tend to grow until they include everyone, at which point a new list is created. Please let me know if any of our competitors join.

Does your company face or project mailing list bloat? Is it crazy to ask whether you have found any strategies that work?

Products aren’t the only things that suffer from “feature creep”. Just compare Word 1.0.5 and Word today.

What every product needs (and a mailing list is a product in its way — its content is the product) is a good product manager who has a strong sense of what the product ought to be, and a willingness to fight that creep, and pull things back into focus when it gets flabby.

How did a small, fast word processor turn into a large, slow one? One little addition at a time. If someone takes charge and commits to keeping the focus — you can minimize that.

or you can, of course, toss it out and start over, which is the mailing list equivalent of a refactor…..

7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails – O’Reilly Ruby

7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails – O’Reilly Ruby:

The answer is no.

I threw away 2 years of Rails code, and opened a new empty Subversion respository.

Then in a mere TWO MONTHS, by myself, not even telling anyone I was doing this, using nothing but vi, and no frameworks, I rewrote CD Baby from scratch in PHP. Done! Launched! And it works amazingly well.

It’s the most beautiful PHP I’ve ever written,

I’m glad someone else feels this way. I’ve looked at Rails a few times, and I certainly don’t see any reason to criticize rails — but I simply couldn’t see why people were so hot on it. It left me a bit cold, honestly. I could never generate much enthusiasm for it.

I look around the net, and when you look at large, scaled sites based on Rails, you find, well, Twitter. And it’s had its scaling challenges. After twitter? it’s hard to think of a site based on rails that’s “grown up” and thrived.

And since I’m watching the job market, I’ve been watching the job market for Rails. lots of “hot, stealthy startups (come be employee 3)”, not a lot of Rails seeming to have actually shipped and gone into production.

I keep getting the feeling that Rails is a great prototyping tool, something to get you to market fast something the geeks really like to play with; but I also get the feeling that for sites that need to grow up, they’ll end up re-coding in something else. Basically a fast prototyper for future J2EE work.

And, honestly, you can do all that in PHP, and in most cases avoid the re-coding.

So, having spent some time getting a first serious look at Java, I’m going back to PHP and Perl. And frankly, lots more jobs there than in RAILS land. It may not be sexy or new, but it works….

I do like the layer separation of MVC, and I’m going ot have to experiment with that in my next project, but that’s not RAILS, that’s something you can do pretty much anywhere…

the end of the Bonds era.

San Jose Mercury News – Killion: Let me grab my handkerchief:

If you were expecting emotion and sentiment think again. If you were expecting a Tony Gwynn-like farewell or a Cal Ripken-like embrace, sorry to disappoint.

The announcement came in typically, weirdly Bondsian fashion. Bonds was informed of the team decision by Peter Magowan during Thursday night’s game. Always the mercenary, he posted the news on his personal Web site Friday.

Within minutes of the posting, the scrambling Giants called a Friday-at-rush-hour press conference.

In the interview room there were three seats and three bottles of water and two participants: Peter Magowan and Brian Sabean. Bonds was not there for what should have been a sentimental moment but ended up being a clinical discussion of the surgical removal of No. 25.

And so ends the Bonds era, as it probably should. Not with a “final tour” and celebration, not with a stadium full of fans cheering one of the best players in baseball into the sunset, but with a press release and a press conference where the guest of honor(?) simply didn’t show, leaving his bosses to tap dance and try to spin Barry in as positive a light as they can — and finding it tough to do.

Is anyone really surprised? Because as good as Barry has been, and I’ll be the first to acknowledge it, he’s been a constant PR nightmare for the Giants and league, because he’s always believed that he deserves every accolade, and refused under any circumstance to reach out back to fans, to teammates, to the team or the league.

The top superstars have known they need to at least put on a show of reaching out to the fans — think Cal Ripken when he was more or less bodily assumed into heaven — but Barry? if jesus returned to earth to get his autograph, Barry would have him go though his agent. For the fans to want to connect to a player, the player has to at least put on the act that they don’t deserve all of the fanfare. Barry has always acted as if it was never enough; more than enough to put off many fans.

And so again, this leavetaking from the Giants won’t be a proper send off for Barry; he deserves more, he’s earned more — and yet we have to remember he orchestrated this. Something about Barry always seems to end up setting things up so he can walk away feeling bitter and disappointed about how it all ended.

And somewhere, deep inside, that seems to be how he wants it to be. He had everything going for him, steroids notwithstanding, to be the kind of player and person that owned the team and town and fans. Instead, we have this.

And if there are two things I would have guaranteed about this situation, it’s that (a) it was going to go down something like this, and (b) Barry will find a way to blame everyone else for it because we, his fans (and owners and teammates) don’t show him the proper respect, teh respect he earned.

Problem is, he only earned part of the respect he was due: the part on the field. His play is unquestionable. But he chose not to get involved with earning respect from others as a person, only as a player, and so he left a huge part of his legacy missing. He never seems to have figured out that the truly great players are both players AND people — just ask Tony Gwynn.

As someone who would fall into the “love watching him hit the ball, no asterisk (unless you put asterisks on a lot more entries), he is a scapegoat for a larger problem allowing other better-loved players to skate around the problem (but he earned that by being distant, whiny and pissy — but while I’d watch him play, I wouldn’t invite him to dinner” category of Bonds fan, I’m goin to miss watching him play, but not the rest of the mini-drama that comes along with Barry. That mini-drama that is always surrounding him, and never his fault.

And so it ends, not with a bang, but with a whine.

Frankly, as it should be. which is too bad, but it’s what Barry wanted. Why? maybe not even he knows. But he’d be a happier person if he figured it out, I think.

Who will be the first major (Google/Yahoo/Microsoft/AOL) to break ranks and apply a fundamentally new metaphor to email? « Great Falls Ventures

Who will be the first major (Google/Yahoo/Microsoft/AOL) to break ranks and apply a fundamentally new metaphor to email? « Great Falls Ventures:

A re-think of the email experience is long overdue. Think about how dated the email metaphor is. I remember (in the coal-fired world of my past), using MSG on the ARPANET as a kid almost three decades ago, and while the look and feel of email certainly has advanced since then, the limited metadata we had available back then to dream up new capabilities is, with little exception (tags and folders) the same as what we are operating with today (Date, time, sender, attachment data, routing data, etc.). In addition, the UI of email has effectively settled into the Outlook-derivative 3 pane design.

he’s probably right, but perhaps the reason this hasn’t happened before is because email just isn’t broken, that it works fine the way it is.

I’m not sure — and I’ve said this before — that email is being attacked by other systems. I think instead you’re seeing changes based on the fact that for a long time, all we really had was email, so we made all of our systems work based on email, even when they didn’t really fit the model well (“when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”).

So now, where email wasn’t a good base technology, merely the ONLY one, you’re now seeing functionality move away from email; but that’s merely going to leave email doing what it’s best at — instead of hammering screws….

SmugMug supports XFN & FOAF

SmugBlog: Don MacAskill » Blog Archive » SmugMug supports XFN & FOAF:

What does this mean for you? It means, hopefully, that SmugMug can play nicely with other social applications on the web. Your network of friends & family is now published in machine-readable formats so that other networks can do intelligent things with that data. How exactly this will happen remains to be seen, but there are lots of bright people thinking about it, so hopefully it’ll happen.

wonderful! (and in fact, I had just decided to move my high-end photography to Smugmug BEFORE hearing this… more on that later, but this makes me even happier about that choice

Voile et Vapeur – USENET meme

Voile et Vapeur – USENET meme:

From lauriemann via james_nicholl via pecunium: what is your earliest USENET post on Google Groups?

Mine is from July 21, 1983.

June 13, 1982, although I know there are earlier postings to be found…

That means I’ve been online AND POSTING stuff for over 25 years. If I keep at it, I might say something useful some day.

Chemical clue sheds light on winter depression – health – 19 September 2007 – New Scientist

Chemical clue sheds light on winter depression – health – 19 September 2007 – New Scientist:

The researchers studied 73 drug-free patients with seasonal affective disorder (SAD) and 70 people without the condition. People with SAD get depressed in the autumn and winter, and often go into remission in the spring and summer. So-called “bright light therapy” – where sufferers stare at brightly lit screens – can also relieve symptoms.

The researchers were interested in these patients’ serotonin transporter (SERT) – a molecule that “pumps” serotonin back into cells. SERT is expressed in blood platelets, so they drew blood at three points in time: in the autumn or winter (when patients were experiencing seasonal depression), after four weeks of light therapy, and again in summer.

They tested the platelets to see how much SERT was expressed there, and found levels were normal in both groups. They then measured how many times per minute the SERT would go to work removing serotonin, and here they found significant differences.

In blood taken during winter depression, SAD patients had significantly more removal events per minute than those in the healthy control group – about 350 compared with 200.

The process “is too efficient”, says Willeit. After therapy, in people who got better, the number of removal events declined. In those who did not improve, the numbers stayed the same. In summer, SAD patients’ removal events slowed to normal levels.

some interesting data on winter depression and possible causes and cures….

Tom Benjamin’s NHL Weblog: Good Night and Good Luck

Tom Benjamin’s NHL Weblog: Good Night and Good Luck:

The whopping ticket price increase is, to me, another indicator that a deal to relocate the team to the Anschutz Empire in Kansas City is signed, sealed and delivered. If team had to increase attendance to an average of about 14,200 customers a game to ensure revenue sharing payments and an ongoing lease, is it smart to increase ticket prices by 25%? I don’t think so either.

The season must be approaching, because the Tom Benjamin “life is a conspiracy just waiting for some tin foil” train is leaving the station… (but we love you, tom. honest…)

Here in the real world, of course, we’ll spin this a bit differently. The reality is that the folks in nashville don’t just need to draw 14,000 (per the lease), but at an average ticket price that’ll support the finances of the team. Leopold as owner tried to build an audience and then hope he could move the average ticket price to something close to league average. That didn’t work.

so now? it’s time to find out whether nashville can support a team, and at a price that’s actually financially rational. It makes no sense to build attendance at a price guaranteed to lose money. They’ve already tried that.

My take? I don’t think it’ll happen. Maybe for a year, maybe two, but I doubt it. and then they’ll move, which tom will use to justify his conspiracies as being correct, of course.

but the reality is, we don’t need conspiracies here. it’s simple: you price it at the price you need to get, and either the region gets on board, or it doesn’t. if it doesn’t, you move. But you don’t need a conspiracy for this — because if you price it and they do come, you still win.

But heck, standard, simple business isn’t nearly as much fun; no need for tinfoil, and where’s the joy in that?

The Battle of California: Sharks training camp Videopalooza

The Battle of California: Sharks training camp Videopalooza:

There are a lot of questions as the Sharks start training camp about who will be the backup goaltender behind Nabokov, which defenseman will play his way into the lineup after the loss of Hannan, and what the forward lines will shake out with Jeremy Roenick and several prospects vying for spots on all 4 lines (if you listen to head coach Ron Wilson’s interview above).

Playing a GM on the internet, at this early date I like Dimitri Patzold as the backup goaltender. Good size (6-0, 195), solid positionally, more experience as a starter at the AHL level. I think he is more NHL ready. Although German goalie Thomas Greiss may be more athletic and have a higher upside, he only has 1 season of hockey in North America under his belt. He will grow into his talent quicker with another season as the go-to guy in Worcester of the AHL. But this goaltending competition will probably boil down to who has a better training camp.

PJ Swenson does a bang up job covering the opening of camp for the Sharks. Given the continuing cutbacks in coverage in the traditional media” (Vic Chi is gone, and the Merc is now covering the sharks with Dave Pollack, who’s got a strong hockey background, with backup from Mark Emmons, but as I understand it, it’s home coverage only), I think PJ is the best “beat” guy in San Jose at this point. Between him and Dave we’re in good shape… You’ll find PJ here on Sharkspage as well as on the Battle of California blog.

Who will pick up Hannan’s minutes against opponent’s top lines is a question, who will fill out the 6/7/8 slots is another, but how will the Sharks address a lack of scoring or a lack of initiating offense from the blueline is a question that sticks out for me.

I think letting Hannan go was a fairly easy decision — he was very much the same style player as Kyle McLaren. By picking up Rivet late in the season and then re-signing him, you can argue (well, I am arguing) that what the Sharks did was upgrade from Hannan to Rivet — and go from a team that was overloaded with stay at home “shut down” type defensemen to one with a more balanced talent set; Rivet being with the team for an entire season will improve the blueline offense and hopefully the power play, but I also hope that given a year under his belt and tutelage from Rivet, we’ll see Vlasic also pick up offensively.

Davison and Murray are solid stay at home guys with an edge — the negative on both of them is they’re relatively slow skaters; Davison is better at compensating for that positionally right now, Murray is more of a physical presence and just scary strong on his skates. Laurie’s nickname for him is “you fall down now, okay?”

opening of training camp.

today was the first day of camp for the Sharks today, and I wandered down for a bit to take a look at what was going on.

you forget just how bloody big these guys are until you get close to them.

The practice seemed high tempo and spirited. I won’t pretend to have any deep insights for having watched cycling drills by half the team for about an hour. I’ll leave that to others… (grin)

I will say that the energy level seemed high, spirits were good but the players seemed very focussed and down to business. Very little horseplay and nobody seemed to be dogging it.

the “this seems, well, weird” moment: realizing that one of the coaches on the ice was Bryan marchment (along with Wayne thomas and Rob Zettler); it made me flash back to the old IHL and the Las Vegas Thunder, when we were down there for a couple of games, and ex-Shark Lyndon Byers was playing for them.

Byers was named assistant captain, and was asked to take a leadership role with the younger players. And he humorously mused about that in the newspaper with a “me? a role model?” quote.

I actually have a fondness for Marchment, as former readers of our Dallas Stars mailing list (now retired) might remember. For all his reputation and repeated suspensions (mostly earned, but towards the end, his reputation preceeded him at times), he actually could play some pretty good hockey.

The day San Jose traded for him, I stood up like many and had a big, noisy fit about on the list; I also have to admit that it took about two games watching him and isolating his game on the ice to realize what he brought to the sharks — above and beyond physical play and intimidation.

He was a good hockey player; and I admitted it. Dirty player? sometimes; so are lots of guys. Who’s a dirtier player, Marchment or Chelios? tough call. But mostly, I think Marchment’s game was not that he was trying to hurt guys, it was that he was playing the game his way, and simply didn’t worry about whether someone got hurt. That wasn’t his problem, his problem was getting the job done without getting himself hurt.

Of course, he did — I was watching the night he got concussed and went into convulsions on the ice. I don’t think I reacted as strongly to any on ice injury, other than perhaps Malarchuk (who was goalie for the Las Vegas Thunder when Lyndon Byers was the captain. small world — and the team had this young phenom named Bonk, who went on to become a first pick and a good, solid, third line center. For the record, at the time, I said he was a good mid-first round draft, not a top draft or top three. I guess for once I was right — and if he’d been drafted 12th or 15th, people would think Radek Bonk has had a good career; as a top draft, he’s been a big disappointment. be wary of getting what you ask for, and having to live up to it)

But I digress. Given camps are opening, I can. It means hockey isn’t far away, and the season tickets will be arriving any minute now… (seriously).

time to drop the puck!

Support journalism at its source

BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Support journalism at its source:

A commenter on Matthew’s blog gives him a real-life example: the AP picked up a unique story from the Nashua, NH, Telegraph and that’s what Google displayed — along with other AP clients’ versions — above the original story from the paper. Now I know that the AP has been sensitive to this in many cases; they’re not out to hurt their own members and clients.

Nonetheless, the Google deal does rob traffic, thus revenue, from the paper that invested in journalism. And that will not help sustain journalism.

There’s a piece here missing. The newspaper made the story available for syndication — they basically sold it to AP (and got paid for it being syndicated out and used; that syndication then also gave the story wider visibility, and one wonders if it’d been noticed at all if AP hadn’t syndicated it. But that’s not my point here.

Suppose I write a science fiction story, and publish it on my web site. It gets some readers, and one of them publishes Really Nifty Science Fiction Magazine. She buys it and publishes it on the Really Nifty Science Fiction Magazine site.

Now, should I complain that the people reading the story are doing it on her site instead of mine? That is, to me, the core of this question: if the newspaper wanted to capture all of the traffic itself, it shouldn’t have syndicated the story off to AP. It has that option. Once they do sell the rights off to syndication, they’re getting paid for the syndication, but they want the direct traffic, too?

Maybe I’m missing something (now that’d be a first), but this sounds like they want the syndication money AND all of the direct traffic, but isn’t selling the syndication rights really licensing this out to AP so it becomes the effective rights owner here? On the assumption, of course, that your share of what AP earns syndicating it to a larger audience is more than you’d get by keeping it yourself. If it’s not, stop syndicating!

This is one of those great little wrinkles that happens with things you can sell while still owning. But I think in this case, AP and Google are doing the right thing. License something into a syndicating stream that is doing the redistribution, and that’s the primary source now that should be referenced, because they paid for the right to do that as part of the syndication agreement.

Wired’s 100 Ways to Save Apple, 10 years later.

bbum’s weblog-o-mat » Blog Archive » Wired’s 100 Ways to Save Apple, 10 years later.:

Ten years ago, Wired published an issue of their silly ‘zine that claimed Apple was pretty much dead and listed 100 ways to save the company.

It was hilarious then– full of leadership-by-armchair-comittee style suggestions– and even funnier now. Wired has long been a sort of Mad Magazine of technology and this particular article is one of the funnier demonstrations. There are a couple of good points on the list and — as a friend pointed out — good leadership is about choosing the handful of right ideas.

I lost all respect for Wired — canceled my subscription, even — when they did their “The Web Is Dead, Push Is Here” issue. It was clear that the writer(s) either had no clue at all or where pandering to investors. Given that Wired Ventures had dumped VC into various companies pushing Push technologies, I still suspect the latter.

Thanks to FSJ for posting the article link and cover picture. I still have a copy in my files somewhere. The one issue I kept. It is an effective reminder that doing the expected is often the wrong answer.

Oh, god. that WAS ten years ago…

This popped up on digg a while back, and I made some comments at that time. My bottom line:

Chuqui 3.0.1 Beta: 101 Ways to Save Apple:

101. Don’t worry. You’ll survive. It’s Netscape we should really
worry about.

Ya think?

Now, seriously. The folks who dugg this into public view did it with a smirk. And I’ve done my own bit of giggling, but — there’s also a lot of good stuff in here, too. stuff that Apple ended up doing after Steve came back. So smirk if you want — could you have done better?

it’s really an interesting snapshot of a time and a place, no more or less.

and yeah, like bbum, I gave up on wired long ago.

Pro photogs protest plummeting prices

Pro photogs protest plummeting prices | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone:

In a press release issued yesterday, the Stock Artists Alliance (SAA), along with the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP), the U.K. Association of Photographers (AOP), Advertising Photographers of America (APA), Editorial Photographers (EP), and the Canadian Association of Photographers (CAPIC), expressed their worries that Getty Images’ “extreme competitive response presents huge risks to the image licensing business, and threatens the livelihoods not only of Getty contributers, but of professional photographers industry-wide.”

Welcome to the flip side of the digital photography explosion. There are now so many people able to take pictures good enough to join the market that there’s a glut of inventory and drops in pricing. Freelance writers know this one well, there are always more writers chasing publication slots, and so for journeyman work, it’s meant it’s been difficult to keep earnings in line with inflation.
Which is why now is a rotten time to try to break into professional photography, at least as long as you’re trying to break into the field in the same places as all these other people trying to break in. Unfortunately for photographers who don’t have the name that draws a premium price, this pricing squeeze isn’t going away, and isn’t going to be solved by protesting it (or by trying to pretend these hordes of new pros and semi-pros aren’t coming, or will go away…)