This blog will be silent for a spell as we vacate, estivate and celebrate. Keep the Internets safe, everyone, and see you in about a week.
Give my regards to Bloggercon
I was on a panel at the first Bloggercon and led a session at the third. I missed number two, and I’m sorry to say I will miss number four, even though it is right here in my backyard, because my family is taking a long-planned vacation that week. (I seem to be an attendee of odd-numbered Bloggercons only.) Anyway, it sounds like it’s going to be a great event — sorry to miss it.
We’ll be off celebrating Father’s Day and a wedding anniversary and my birthday and the solstice, an abundant conjunction (or syzygy, a word I almost got to use in Scrabble recently!) of happy events; the week also marks the 20th anniversary of my move from the east coast to the Bay Area.
In 1986 I was a staff writer at the Boston Phoenix, writing movie and theater and book reviews. The prospect of moving to California had never been anywhere on my horizon. I thought of California the way Woody Allen’s character in “Annie Hall” did; it was a place inhabited by fecklessly superficial philistines who lived for their automobiles — a place where a native New Yorker like me could never thrive. I’d never been west of the Mississippi, and I had no idea that there might be some distinctions between Northern and Southern California. It was all new to me. San Francisco won me over on my first job-interview visit, and here I still am, unlikely to go anyplace else.
Crimson reminiscence
I decided not to schlep 3000 miles to attend my 25th college reunion which, shockingly, is happening right now. I’m not a big fan of such events and life is just too busy. However, the students currently running the place where I spent nearly all my time as an undergraduate, the Harvard Crimson, asked me to write an op-ed for the big issue they put out every year at graduation — known as the Commencement issue, because that is the name for the day-on-which-diplomas-are-granted at Harvard (which always has to name things just a little bit differently from the rest of the universe).
So I wrote something. It’s online now — a brief musing about the passing of the typewriter era, the transformation of media over the past 25 years, and a little political deva vu:
| The nuclear fears of my graduating class were never, thankfully, borne out. Instead we have lived to see arguments we thought were well-settled reopened, and lessons we thought were well-learned ignored, by leaders whose careers we thought were well-buried. (Didn’t Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld get voted out of the White House when we were in high school?) |
The Crimson’s Web site is pretty impressive, and it has done a great job of digitizing vast quantities of its archives back to the 19th century.
California court: shield law applies to anyone who gathers and disseminates news
The decision in the Apple v. Does case, in which I am proud to have participated in a tiny way (as signatory to an amicus brief), just came down, and it is a win for the wider universe of bloggers and other Internet-based writers and self-publishers.
See Lauren Gelman’s report. Here’s the ruling (PDF). Here’s a release from EFF. More after I’ve had a chance to read in full.
This appears to be one key passage:
| We decline the implicit invitation to embroil ourselves in questions of what constitutes “legitimate journalis[m].” The shield law is intended to protect the gathering and dissemination of news, and that is what petitioners did here. We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish “legitimate” from “illegitimate” news. Any attempt by courts to draw such a distinction would imperil a fundamental purpose of the First Amendment, which is to identify the best, most important, and most valuable ideas not by any sociological or economic formula, rule of law, or process of government, but through the rough and tumble competition of the memetic marketplace. |
Any judge who uses the phrase “memetic marketplace” seems to have immersed himself fully in the subject!
Back up a minute
I live in earthquake country. In 1989 I’d just moved into the first apartment I ever owned instead of rented when Loma Prieta struck, knocking down great chunks of plaster from our walls and instilling in me a healthy respect for the power of faults.
This has also made me religious about data backup, and I have recently been hunting for the best deal in offsite backup. GMail is okay for the occasional file but not spacious enough to be a full solution. There are all sorts of commercial services around, but the pricing tends to get awfully steep once you factor in the size of many years’ archives and lots of music files.
Jungle Disk, an open source front end to Amazon’s S3 service, looks like a pretty good deal, though. (Thanks, Metafilter!) Is anyone using it? I’m going to test-drive it soon and will report on my experience.
This relationship is so over
Ever wonder why you still get marketing calls even after you’ve signed up for the do-not-call list? There’s a loophole in the privacy law that allows companies that you have a business relationship with to contact you. Makes sense, in theory; customer service sometimes requires that a company be in touch with you.
Leave it to corporate America to drive a battering ram through that reasonable loophole.
Recently I received mail from Prudential Insurance, which used to insure my home until, I don’t know, Prudential ran the numbers and decided they didn’t want to be in the “property and casualty” business any more, so they sold that whole business, including my policy, to somebody else, who sold it to somebody else, who now insures my home. Prudential and I were finished as of November, 2003, and it’s hard to imagine any circumstance under which they might need to contact me. But if something came up that was actually about that policy, I guess they could.
Ahh, though, there’s more happening here: Prudential’s insurers don’t want to insure me any more, but their colleagues in the marketing division, which presumably rakes in millions selling a big list of names — including mine — to other companies, still wish to continue our relationship. In fact, this recent letter assured me, “the relationship you have with Prudential, which was established when the policy was originally written, continues.” And because Prudential and I still have this relationship, Prudential is obligated to send me a privacy notice, so I can, if I choose, opt out of their marketing calls and those of anyone else Prudential feels like sharing my name with.
So, basically, two and a half years ago, Prudential ended our relationship, and told me it didn’t want to have anything more to do with me. Now, after I’ve put the whole thing behind me and moved on, the company says, actually, we’re still having a relationship, and it’s up to me to break it off.
Maybe this amounts to good business, but I think the company really needs to see a therapist. As for me, if I ever hear from them again I think I’ll need to see about getting a protective order.
RIP, Jane Jacobs, urban visionary
I was lucky enough, as a high school senior in New York City in the mid-’70s, to take an elective course in “urban studies.” The course consisted of reading a bunch of real books, not textbooks, and talking about them. (Later I came to understand that virtually every college course, at least in the humanities and social sciences, proceeded along the same lines.)
I’ve forgotten all but one of the books we read. But the one I remember, Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, I remember vividly, for its calm, reasonable, and, to me, profoundly persuasive rejection of the Big Central Plans approach to urban design — which had previously made perfect sense to my 17-year-old mind. Diversity matters, Jacobs argued; people crave variety in their experience of their surroundings, and engagement with other people, and living cities offer people wide and varied opportunities for hanging shingles and rubbing elbows and delighting others.
Jacobs’ book gave me a lifelong, visceral understanding of principles that I would later see popping up in other, unexpected contexts, thanks to writers like Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson, and experiences I’d have in helping build one small corner of the online cityscape.
Jacobs died today at 89 [thanks to Kottke for the news].
Slow blogging
This past week, my minimal free time was devoted to: spring break for the kids; getting over a miserable cold; and continued work on edits for my book. Blogging recommences henceforth.
Buggy BART
People ask me what my book (Dreaming in Code) is about, and I usually answer, “It’s about software…” And, if their eyes don’t glaze over immediately, I’ll add, “…and why software is still so hard. Why it’s always late and it’s always breaking. Why we’re 50 years into the computer age and we still don’t know how to make it reliably.”
By this point, one of two things will have happened: either listeners will have nodded and smiled and said, “I know exactly what you mean!” Or their eyes will have eventually glazed over, after all, and they’ll look at me a little quizzically, as if to say, oh really? And why does this matter? What do I care?
I thought about those people as I passed through the BART turnstiles this morning, a little glazed-eyed myself. There, neatly by the attendant’s booth, lay piles of orange flyers under a “BART BULLETIN” letterhead. I grabbed one and read it on the escalator-ride down.
It was an apology for the screwed-up state of BART yesterday morning — which had seen half-hour delays and incorrect train-destination signs. How considerate! A mass transit system that apologizes to you! In my many youthful years of New York City straphanging, I can’t say I ever had that experience.
But this is the paragraph that caught my eye:
| BART technicians believe the delays were caused by new computer software that was installed over the weekend. The new software has been removed and the software that was previously in use has been re-installed. Although the new software was repeatedly tested before installation, it failed in the demanding real-world environment of a weekday morning commute. |
BART had botched a software upgrade. It had plenty of company in that experience, of course.
As C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup puts it: “Our civilization runs on software.” BART does, too. And understanding why software remains so balky — a topic I happen to find fascinating in the abstract — also has some everyday, pragmatic interest.
UPDATE: And how. I just tried to get on BART for my ride home this evening but could tell from the milling crowds outside the Embarcadero station something was radically wrong. Walked down the stairs to catch a garbled announcement on the PA: “We have closed the gates… no trains are moving… computer problems…”
I’m grateful for the consideration in illustrating my point, but I’d really rather just be on my way home!
Stop the presses! Blogger reviews books by bloggers!
Tonight Salon has posted my double review of Glenn Reynolds’ “An Army of Davids” and “Crashing the Gate,” by Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (Daily Kos) and Jerome Armstrong.
It was interesting to me how differently these leading bloggers used the opportunity of a book deal: Reynolds (Instapundit) waxes prophetic about the future of individual empowerment, while Kos and Armstrong narrow their gaze to a tight beam of focus on how the Democrats should proceed if they hope to regain the White House.
In my review, I attempt to relate their blogging styles to their worldviews. As for me, I enjoyed returning to the couple-of-thousand-word Salon format after a year of my own book-length labors, interspersed with short-form blogging here.