Erehwon Notebook

10:30:15 PM Not much posting going on tonight, both because I'm tired from working all day (I'm doing some contract work), and because I'm just disgusted. I'm disgusted with myself for flaming someone on a message board when it wasn't really appropriate, and because I'm fed up with the hypocrisy of that seems to emerge around so many seemingly promising online efforts, the latest being weblogging.

Two-and-a-half years it's taken me to recover from watching a really promising effort in building an online community collapse due to hypocritical people not "walking their talk." I finally get engaged again, and it only takes a few months to run into the same sort of behavior. Human nature, I guess, but I'm so totally weary of it. It doesn't help, of course, that I pretty much provoked it.
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7:45:13 PM Update from this posting on the i-Opener. Slashdot is carying a story indicating that Netpliance has put an end to the practice of buying their cheap hardware and modifying it to act as a full-fledged Pentium-class system. They are also requiring the use of their Internet service now if you buy one. Frankly, I'm not sure what else they could have done to save their business model. They do seem to be open to commentary and discussion, but I can't really blame them for trying to salvage their plan, which they no doubt spent a lot of time and money on. It'd be cool, though, if they could figure out some way to also accomodate people who want to hack the device. I suspect their sales are going to seriously slack off, now.
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7:21:29 PM One of the coolest things about being alive today is that people read Science Fiction and then decide to make it real.
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11:37:40 AM Where's the outrage? I don't care how great the economy is doing, CEO compensation has become ridiculous. The fact that in many cases it continues to soar even when a company is doing poorly is even more insane. Apparently, boards, CEO's, and shareholders fail to appreciate the debilitating effect of senior executives receiving bonuses with one hand while laying off employees with the other. From personal experience, I know how this sort of behavior contributes directly to a company's "death spiral." Unfortunately, it seems like being a greedy bastard means never having to say you care.
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12:17:31 AM I don't know if this is true or not, but I had to laugh my ass of at the stroy of the Rocket Car.
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8:16:12 PM This, on the other hand, is far, far more frightening...
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3:44:51 PM Huh. Free-space lasers as a broadband carrier. Interesting, but as the article suggests, I see some real problems with weather. It'd suck to suddenly have your Quake ping times triple because of a rainstorm.
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11:43:59 AM I'm finding, as I go through this latest job search, that my attitudes have changed. My philosophy has all been one of "abundance mentailty," believeing that by working together, by sharing, people create a "bigger pie" and everyone benefits. I've never been one to believe that "looking out for number one" is a healthy approach to life.

I still believe that, but my career experiences over the past few years have shown me how difficult it is to be that sort of person in a world populated by self-interested, self-absorbed, selfish bastards. Too many will try and take advantage of you if you try and work collaboratively. Too many will smile and nod, and mouth the right words, and then knife you in the back so they can get theirs over yours.

A lot of people really respond positively to an abundance philosophy, a philosophy that seeks to be inclusive rather than exclusive. They like to be around someone like that. Unfortunately, many of them don't have a clue how to be that way themselves. I think this is the most disheartening part. A lot of people will wreck a good thing, not out of malicious intent, but just because they don't have a clue.

So, I'm at a bit of a crossroads. I don't want to really change who I am, or how I deal with people, but I'm tired of being taken advantage of. I have a family to worry about. I have my own goals to achieve, and I can't afford to have them co-opted so someone else can get theirs at my expense. I want to be "win-win," but I live in a "win-lose" world. I can't see myself selling my soul for success, like I've seen others do, but I can't be walked on anymore either.
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11:30:55 AM I made a few more changes that should result in the page loading a bit faster. Hopefully, these are all for a little while!
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8:12:11 PM Ouch. Corel is reporting a huge loss. The report goes on to say that this pattern will continue for another two quarters. Investors don't appear to be willing to wait for Corel's new Linux product line to get established and start showing revenues, either. This could possibly damage the Inprise merger, to boot.

Corel is yet another victim of the Microsoft juggernaut, albeit in not so blatant a way as Netscape was. Hopefully, they can find the time to emerge as a Linux company before the investors step in and destroy the entire thing.
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9:12:04 AM Well, it's definitely interview week this week. I have to head out in a few minutes to sit down and talk details with one company, I have a face-to-face with another company tomorrow, and a second phone interview with the prospect I'm most excited about on Thursday. I'm even getting calls on Sunday from people interested in interviewing me.

Moving seems more and more attractive. I'm generating a lot of activity in the Bay Area, which only makes sense, I suppose. The opportunities there are great, to be sure, but I'm concerned about the cost of living. Anybody out there have any feedback on this?

So, I kind of expect to be doing some travelling in the next week or so. I really wish Blogger would release their Palm VII app so I could post when I'm on the road!
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8:52:34 AM I'm fascinated by massively multiplayer online roleplaying games. Richer and more varied virtual environments are right around the corner, and as they arrive, I wonder what the impact is going to be on established forms of entertainment like television and books. After all, why just passively watch, when you can take part?

Linux Weekly News has a bit on The Worldforge Project, an open source effort in this area with incredibly ambitious goals. If they can pull it off, it should be amazing. They're talking about some pretty sophisticated AI in this thing. Something that looks even more promising is Neverwinter Nights from the same folks that created Baldur's Gate.
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8:39:25 AM Not a bad concept if you just want to use Linux, and can't be bothered to tinker with applications. I'd have thought this would have received more mention in the press.
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8:33:14 AM I can't say I agree with Jon Katz and his take on books and e-books in this article, but I do think he's got a point about interactivity and not the distribution medium being what's important. Maybe not today, at least 100%, but certainly in the long-term. In ten years, digital distribution will be ubiquitous, so the differentiators will need to be something more than whether an item has "e" tacked onto the front of it or not.
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8:04:49 AM A good article by Nick Peterely at LinuxWorld about Linux on the desktop and as a home OS. Good reading for those unsure of what can be done with Linux in a home environment, or who are looking for pointers to applications. His setup is nearly identical to mine here, except I don't run game servers.
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10:17:54 PM Bookmark management has always been a huge pain, and is even worse now that I tend to operate across several different systems, browsers, and operating systems. It's even worse ewhen I have to travel, and find myself using someone else's system. The more bookmarks I acquire, the worse it gets. Unfortunately, most of the bookmark management tools I've used leave a lot to be desired. Either it's too hard to add new bookmarks, or too difficult to access the ones I've saved, or they only work with a particular browser or OS. Backflip seems, at least initially, to have answered nearly all my complaints. I was impressed to see instructions for using it with Unix on their setup page, which leads me to believe that these guys actually have a clue as to what "any computer" really means (unlike half of the other new web applications out there, which seem to think that "any computer" is limited to "any computer running Windows 98 with IE 5").

Backflip is a true web application. It's platform independent. There's nothing to download. If you can fill out their form and drag a link to your bookmarks, you're set. Even the advertising is unobtrusive.
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7:17:37 PM I really do wish I could use mozilla as my daily browser. Gecko is so much better at rendering HTML than Navigator's renderer! Unfortunately, at least in the Linux version, bookmarking still sucks and there seem to be some javascript problems with Blogger. Guess I'll grab today's build and see how much better things are.
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7:14:14 PM The change-over to CSS is done, and it does make a big difference. Not only do things look cleaner across browsers, but the whole mess should be easier to manage now. Not having messed directly with CSS for a few years, I'd forgotten how much could be done with them. Kudos to WebMonkey for a quick refreser course!
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2:03:26 PM Well, I finally cleaned things up around here. Mostly functional changes and a few cosmetic ones, like adding named anchors for each post and cleaning up some font size stuff. I have got to go back and re-learn CSS stuff. Linking to a style sheet would make things a good bit easier and quicker.
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10:22:17 AM Welcome to Spring! I can tell it's Spring because it isn't as cold and it's been raining the past three days straight. The weather wizards has been prognosticating a drought for the Midwest this Spring, but you can't tell that from here: I have standing water in the backyard. It'd be a great thing if one of these guys would just come out one day and say "We don't have any more clue than you do what the weather's going to be. Sure we can take a good stab at tomorrow, but in a week or a month? No way! It's a chaotic system folks, and even though we have all these computers and shit, an emu can fart in New South Wales on Tuesday and by next Thursday it'll be raining frogs in Chicago, when we said it'll snow." Hey, I can dream, can't I?
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10:17:02 AM Here's an update from Saturday's bit on distance learning and net-based education. I corresponded this weekend with Vicky Phillips, the author of the Salon article I mentioned, and learned that she is CEO of a distance learning consulting company called geteducated.com. There's lots of good material on their site on this subject, and links to other useful resources.
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12:40:38 PM Here we go - the new mayor of Indianapolis is gonna make sure we don't have problems here like they have had in other parts of the country, by banning video games. Wonderful Indianapolis, where the Republicans are fascists and the Democrats are Republicans...
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12:46:33 AM Not much posting Saturday afternoon and evening. I played Baldur's Gate for several hours. What a great game! I'm still not tired of it after a few hundred hours.

I picked up a 3M Precise Mousing Surface mouse pad with a gel wrist rest today. These really are the greatest mousepads around, and my wrist was really starting to bug me, so the gel pad is a huge relief.
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GeoURL

Friday, March 24, 2000

Thursday, March 23, 2000

Wednesday, March 22, 2000

Tuesday, March 21, 2000

Monday, March 20, 2000

Sunday, March 19, 2000