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A new chapter

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We’re back from our travels-with-children — in Monterey, marveling at jellyfish and otters at the aquarium and frolicking at the remarkable “Dennis the Menace” playground (who knew?), and then in Napa, camping at Bothe Napa park.

Now that I’m back at my desk, here’s my news: I’ve left Salon. The day before our vacation was my last day at the company I helped start up back in 1995.

There’s no Big Reason for the move, rather an aggregation of many smaller motivations.

We’d made considerable progress on the project that I was leading for Salon, but we were still a good way from being able to open it up to users, and that was disappointing. Meanwhile, I came up with what I think is an exciting idea for a new book project, and found myself increasingly drawn in that direction.

I still love Salon, and will be cheering it on from the outside. I remain, modestly, a shareholder, and I remain friends with my former colleagues. I hope to continue to write for the site occasionally. But I’ve worked at Salon for over ten years (roughly the length of time I spent at the Examiner). I’ve seen it from a tiny startup through bubble mania and bust woes and into maturity. It’s time for something new. Shaking things up at least once every decade seems like a reasonable schedule!

For you loyal Wordyard readers, I hope to provide a greater volume of posting. My energies are now going to be deployed in three directions:

(1) The new book. I’ll be writing much more here about it as the idea, and work on it, jells.

(2) This blog, which I’ve tended for six years. In addition to a more regular schedule for Code Reads, I’ve also got a couple of other ideas for more in-depth reporting and writing projects here that I expect to be unveiling.

(3) Freelance writing and speaking engagements. (If you’re interested in having me come talk — either about the themes of Dreaming in Code or other trends and issues in Web publishing, drop me a note at speaking /at/ wordyard.com.)

That should keep me plenty busy!

Travel week

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This is family week here — we’re off with the kids for a few days on a couple of short trips. Blogging will be light. Next week I’ll be back with some news about some personal changes and new projects.

The case of the disappearing Amazon reviews

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Dreaming in Code has sold particularly well on Amazon.com, which does not surprise me. Given the subject matter, the book was bound to appeal to buyers who shop online, and Amazon is the dominant player in the online bookstore market.

I’ve also been pleased to see the profusion of customer reviews on Amazon. As of about three weeks ago, we had 33 reviews posted. Most were positive, a handful were negative; either way, each one meant that some reader cared enough to take the time to post their reactions, and that meant a lot to me.

Then something weird happened about ten days ago. Suddenly, Amazon showed only 10 reviews. Two dozen reviews posted between mid-February and the end of June had simply disappeared. In the time since then, a couple of new reviews have joined the total, but the missing reviews have not reappeared.

I’ve been building Web sites long enough, and worked with software long enough, to imagine a variety of different scenarios for what might be causing this. Whatever happened, this is something that Amazon ought to be concerned about — these glitches are rarely limited to a single page; there’s likely sporadic data loss in multiple places. Amazon runs a gigantic Web service that a lot of people depend on. It has even recently gotten into the business of offering back-end data storage services (Amazon S3) to other Web companies and individuals. So I trust they’ll be pursuing this issue. They ought to have this data somewhere from which it can be restored.

I’ve asked my publisher to look into the matter. I also contacted Amazon through their bottom-of-the-page feedback mechanism. The good news is, I actually got a response; the bad news is, it was feeble — I think the customer-service rep. simply looked up the page, saw there were a dozen reviews, and reported such back to me. I could do that from the comfort of my home, thank you!

Amazon was one of the very first businesses to understand the value of what the Net industry now calls “user-generated content.” Customer reviews are the heart of its operation. The most basic compact between a Web service and its users is, “If you contribute something of value, we promise not to lose it.”

UPDATE Mid-afternoon Wednesday: The reviews appear to be back. Thanks, Amazon.
[tags]amazon.com, amazon, amazon reviews, data loss[/tags]

TV, phone, or computer?

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I was catching up on old Times Business sections over the weekend and this chart, accompanying an article about video for mobile devices, jumped out at me. It shows Forrester research that asked people in different age groups, “Which device do you most feel you could not live without?” The devices in question were computer, TV and cellphone.

Easy enough for me to answer: I watch almost no TV. (I know people have a hard time accepting this, but it’s true.) I have a cellphone but it’s a clunky old thing and I use it only for utilitarian things — parent/child coordination, business details. My computer, on the other hand, is my lifeline: Source of information, social networking tool, information store, creative device, and more.

So I just had another birthday — I’ve moved into that zone of the ’40s that can’t be considered anything but “late” — and I figured that this particular set of gadget-preferences must mark me as an incipient codger. Kids these days live for their cell-phones and think e-mail is something to use when they want to communicate with those over 30, right?

Hah! Turns out I have the techno-preferences of a teen. My profile matches that of an 18-26 “Generation Y” type: they’re the only ones to rank computer first, cellphone second and TV last. My own generational cadre (“younger boomers”) puts TV at the top of its list. The accompanying article is all about how ESPN wants to put video on phone screens. It quotes one exec of a “cellphone video network” saying: “For the younger generation, the mobile phone is their most relevant device.”

But that’s not what the chart shows! Isn’t the news here that, for the consumers of tomorrow, as for me, the computer, far from being a stodgy old thing, is the desert-island device?

PC World: Feel the love

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Many thanks to the kind editors at PC World for naming this humble blog as one of its “100 Blogs We Love.”

PC World recently made headlines when its editor, Harry McCracken, resigned to protest ad-sales meddling in the publication’s editorial side. He was later reinstated and the CEO he tangled with got kicked upstairs. It was one of those perennial showdowns between editorial and business that have always marked the magazine world — and now appear to be beginning to infiltrate the blogosphere as well. (In fact, here’s McCracken’s take on the FM “People Ready” controversy: “Journalists shouldn’t write ad copy.” Of course, there are bloggers who think of themselves as journalists, and many others who don’t.)

The PC World blurb said that my “take on tech, politics, culture, and the intersections thereof is often unexpected, and always worth reading.” I’ll try to keep living up to that description.
[tags]pc world, harry mccracken, blogging[/tags]

Google Reader gets amnesia

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I switched to Google Reader a couple of months ago when I got tired of Bloglines’ habit of forgetting my “unread” posts. Mostly I’ve been happy with it, after the brief period of culture shock.

Today, though, Google Reader suddenly lost my entire list of 100+ feeds. The only feed it still shows is one I added in the last 48 hours or so.

That’s the bad news. A bunch of other posts in the user forum make it sound like the problem is at least widespread, if not universal. The good news is that the Reader team got a post up immediately in the same forum, saying that they’re aware of and working on the problem.

Crossing my fingers…

UPDATE: That was fast. Appears to be fixed now. (Somebody plugged in the power cord — er, database!)

Nice speedy response, anyway. Ironically, this follows a recent post by Scoble about how lame the Bloglines plumber is, and how Google doesn’t need one because Reader never breaks…

[tags]google reader, rss[/tags]

Perfect iPod moments

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Steven Levy’s book about the iPod, The Perfect Thing, describes a transcendent moment the author experiences: In a funk one day in post-9/11 New York, with his iPod in shuffle mode, Levy hears the glorious opening chimes of the Byrds’ version of “My Back Pages,” and he has a Perfect Moment.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always loved that song, and would rather not wait for shuffle mode to surface it from my thousands of other songs. I continue to hand-pick my music, relying on shuffle only occasionally for novelty or distraction.

Still, iPod-fueled transcendence remains available even to us control freaks. This morning, for instance, I relieved a BART commute’s tedium by listening to the splendid live recording a fan made of a memorable Mountain Goats show I attended last month. (It’s posted here at the Internet Archive.) The set begins pensively with “Wild Sage’s” ruminations, makes its way to the equally melancholy “Get Lonely,” and then bursts into “Quito” — a defiant anthem of aspiring redemption and half-glimpsed rebirth. The song reached its visionary climax at the precise instant my train emerged from the tunnel into the morning Bay Area sun. Perfection! A film-editing wizard couldn’t have better synced sound and vision. I beamed; it made my morning.

It’s been a quarter century since the Walkman’s advent introduced us to the notion of provisioning our daily wanderings with a soundtrack of our choice. The iPod kicks this dynamic into a higher gear. (Levy ponders this and much else in his book; I covered his talk in Berkeley here.)

I’d argue that those of us who are not as shuffle-happy as Levy can feel a bit of extra pride: By virtue of our active personal DJ-ing, we become, instead of passive observers of serendipitous moments, more like coauthors of our own pleasurable juxtapositions. But either way, we’re having fun, and that’s what really matters.
[tags]ipod, steven levy[/tags]

David Halberstam, RIP

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The journalist, who died in a car crash near the Dumbarton Bridge here in the Bay Area, was 73. (SF Chron; Mercury News.)

I first read his 1972 masterpiece, The Best and the Brightest, as a curious teenager trying to figure out how and why our country was stuck fighting a war that could not be won on behalf of people who plainly did not want us to do so. It’s fair to say that the book shaped my view of U.S. foreign policy, and of the need to curb our government’s predilection for fighting unnecessary wars. Halberstam’s chronicle of the arrogance of power illustrated how the confidence of Kennedy’s Harvard-trained managers meshed with the cupidity of the Cold War military-industrial complex to produce the Vietnam quagmire. The title, in other words, was ironic.

In some of his later works Halberstam allowed his reputation as a Pulitzer-garlanded star to inflate his style. But The Best and the Brightest was taut and tragic. Today it reminds us that the “Vietnam complex” was not some debilitating national illness that needed to be shucked off; it represented experience of imperial power’s limits, hard-won through an ill-begotten war. How shameful that those lessons vanished from Washington so soon, and that another generation of Americans must once more seek the answers I found in Halberstam’s book.

UPDATE: This from Clyde Haberman’s Times obit:

William Prochnau, who wrote a book on the reporting of that period, “Once Upon a Distant War,” said last night that Mr. Halberstam and other American journalists then in Vietnam were incorrectly regarded by many as antiwar.

“He was not antiwar,” Mr. Prochnau said. “They were cold war children, just like me, brought up on hiding under the desk.” It was simply a case, he said, of American commanders lying to the press about what was happening in Vietnam. “They were shut out and they were lied to,” Mr. Prochnau said. And Mr. Halberstam “didn’t say, ‘You’re not telling me the truth.’ He said, ‘You’re lying.’ He didn’t mince words.”

[tags]David Halberstam, journalism[/tags]

Toward a Mac migration

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There are still three barriers standing between me and moving onto a Mac. Two are rapidly disappearing. (I was a Mac guy for years and shifted to a PC in the mid-’90s during Apple’s slump years, when the unreliability of the Mac OS and Mac hardware had me losing more data than I could stand.)

One is the availability of a true lightweight Apple laptop. Rumor has it that’s coming; it’s time for a Mac laptop that is slim, elegant and three pounds heavy, like the IBM/Lenovo X-class laptops I’ve been using forever. I’m sure Apple knows this and I can’t imagine waiting too much longer for such a device.

Second is the availability of a Quicken for the Mac that’s as good as Quicken for the PC. It seems plain that Intuit is never going to make this happen.

Third is that, for the moment at least, I’m still running my life and work with Ecco Pro, and it’s an old Windows app. There are modern Mac apps that do some of what Ecco does better than it does, but I’ve found none that does everything that Ecco does as well as it does, and it pains me to think of abandoning it.

In the age of Intel-based Macs it’s now quite easy to run Windows in parallel to your OS X. But Apple’s Boot Camp requires a reboot each time you want to go to your Windows app, and that’s a royal pain; Parallels doesn’t. But both approaches require that you spend $300 on another copy of Windows, and that’s an extraordinary amount to pay.

Last night I downloaded and tried out Crossover Mac, an application (based on the WINE project) that lets you run individual Windows apps from inside OS X (on an Intel-based Mac) without needing to install a second OS. The good news is that Crossover Mac worked apparently hitchlessly on Quicken 2005, which is one of a bevy of apps that Crossover officially supports. (I haven’t really pounded on it, and maybe heavy usage will uncover problems, but I’m impressed so far.)

So what I’m now wrestling with is: how to get Ecco Pro running under Crossover? The app is not officially supported (no surprise there!) and my “let’s give it a try anyway” install failed. Ecco is a solid Win32 application but it dates back to the mid-’90s so there might simply be too many archaic calls or idiosyncracies. I’d probably give up hope — but there are screenshots on the Crossover site of Ecco running successfully under Crossover/Linux. So I think there ought to be some hope here. I’m posting this largely as a beacon: Ecco Pro users! Crossover users! Can anything be done here?

I’m also pondering trying the Parallels route by using a Windows license from an older, diisused version of XP or Windows 2000; either of those runs Ecco perfectly. If I experiment with Parallels using this approach I’ll report on it.
[tags]ecco pro, crossover, parallels, windows on mac[/tags]

Broken Bloglines

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I’ve been happily using Bloglines basically since the service began. It meets my needs in an RSS reader simply and effectively. And RSS reading is now the center of my online information consumption.

I’ve never had a complaint with Bloglines; sure, it goes down for maintenance for a few hours every now and then, but I don’t mind. It is, after all, a free service. And I’d gladly pay a few bucks for a premium service of some kind if they offered one.

About two weeks ago, Bloglines inexplicably “updated” all 100+ of my feeds: in other words, it lost track of my “unread” posts and told me I’d read everything. This was a minor disaster, since my reading of feeds is somewhat sporadic. I know it wasn’t something I did by accident. The mishap followed a “maintenance downtime.” I assume somehow Bloglines lost the data.

I don’t know how widespread the problem was, but I was miffed. I was even more miffed when I couldn’t find anything on Bloglines itself talking about the problem, other than a few lonesome complaints on some sparsely populated support bulletin boards — complaints that had yet to be answered by Bloglines staff.

Under its founding management, the company had done a good job of maintaining its own blog and staying in touch with its customers. Now? If anyone’s minding the shop, there’s no sign. (The “News” thread in the customer support forum has zero posts!)

I returned today from a weeklong vacation and discovered that Bloglines seemed *yet again* to have lost my “unread post” tallies — at least, I’m reasonably sure that Boing Boing has posted more than 12 times in the last week!

Bloglines is now owned by Ask.com which is owned by Barry Diller’s IAC. Maybe that means it’s now just a small cog in a big faceless corporation. But if there are still people working there who care about their customers, it would be nice to hear something about these ongoing problems. And if it’s just me, or me and a small handful of users, then it would be good to know that too! Otherwise, happy as I’ve been with Bloglines, it will be time to start scouting out alternatives.

If other Bloglines users are finding these problems, or if you’ve seen other posts about this (since I’ve been away and now my feed reader’s busted, maybe I missed them!), let me know. I see Jeremy Zawodny recently complained about the service, though not about this particular problem.
[tags]bloglines, rss, feeds, feed readers[/tags]