Wednesday, October 3, 2001

From around Ground Zero

Bummer what happened to this guy, but I think his photos are toast. If not, I'd be curious to hear why not. I beleive we're talking about flash memory here, no? Flush it and it's gone. [Thanks to Zemblog for the link.]

Follow up: he got them out.

The best get better

Duke (aka The University of New Jersey at Durham) has landed 5 of the top 30 college basketball prospects, including Randolph Shavlik, the #1 recruit in the country. When Mike Krzyzewski came to coach at Duke and piled up a so-so record his first year, I said "there's nothing about that guy that a blow-dry and a sense of humor couldn't cure." History and Coach K have since proven me fulla shit.

Mammon from heaven

A friend wrote me this not long ago:

For comfort, I turn not to corporate-speak, but the lyrics to the 1936 classic "Pennies from Heaven", written during another significant economic downturn: Cue the Victrola:

A long time ago
A million years BC
The best things in life
Were absolutely free.
But no one appreciated
A sky that was always blue.
And no one congratulated
A moon that was always new.
So it was planned that they would vanish now and then
And you must pay before you get them back again.
That's what storms were made for
And you shouldn't be afraid for
Every time it rains it rains
Pennies from heaven....

Eventrolling

Events are being cancelled all over the place, but two in which I'm speaking are rolling ahead as scheduled, which is most cool.

The first is the Consortium for Service Innovation Conference 2001 in San Diego next Monday-Wednesday. If you're in the customer support business, or care about the subject at all, check it out.

The second is the Linux Lunacy Geek Cruise, which departs for the Eastern Caribbean on the 21st for a whole week. There are still openings on that one too, I believe.

Yesterday redux

Wednesday is the biggest day of the week here, visitor-wise (tending to run about 4000 reads). It's also when I have the least time to blog, it seems (Craig's concerns notwithstanding, which they usually do).

Meanwhile, I've had a bunch of emails about yesterday's Post-industrial journalism piece, but few inbound links. (Hey, here's one.) Not sure why. Maybe because it was too long (it was two pieces I pushed together, actually).

But today I'm thinking what I wrote yesterday was the most important thing I've ever written. Might not be saying much, but hey: who else is gonna say it? So scroll down and see what you think.

Meanwhile, if you're looking for something shorter in the same vein, here's Hernani Dimantas from the discussion section here at the blog:

It´s the commom people time to talk. That´s amazing how easy is to communicate with the other people. We are the new system´s power. With no election (but who believes in elections???), no central leadership, and clue´s mind. We are not a weapon. We are the people... but free to have an opinion and talk about.

Hernani's blog is Mercado Hype.

Getting priorities back in dysorder

The Onion: A Shattered Nation Longs To Care About Stupid Bullshit Again:

...therapists are seeing countless cases of Sudden-Reality Shock Syndrome (SRSS), a disorder affecting those suddenly and violently re-grounded in the real world. Crisis and grief-counseling centers across the nation are offering therapy groups for those who need to discuss their newfound inability to care about mass-market crapola.

Shameless in Seattle

Craig today goes into Novell's snit-based lawsuit against Microsoft (a corporate habit that began after Craig left Novell):

While Novell's reaction makes it seem like Microsoft must have struck a nerve, the "cereal box campaign" is shamlessly lame.

Well, snit happens.

Perspective

I'm a big Peter Drucker fan. The old man is the Yoda of Business, and we're lucky he's still here to talk sense to us. Check out the latest interview with the guy in Business 2.0. One sample:

The Internet eliminates distance. That is its impact. The elimination of distance began with the railroad in England in the 1820s. The impact of the railroad was greater than that of the Internet, and faster. The inventors of the railroad did not see its potential. They built short lines, Liverpool to Manchester. The first ones to see the importance were the Rothschilds, who built the first long-distance line, from Vienna to Prague. And when the Austrian chancellor went to the emperor, who hated the Rothschilds but had to give his consent to this plan, the emperor just laughed and said, "Thank God, at last they're going to lose their shirt. We already have a stagecoach that goes from Vienna to Prague three times a week, and it is always empty." That railroad was sold out from day one.

But it is reasonable to expect that we have not yet really discovered what the Internet is best suited for. Mind you, the steamship was not a great improvement over the first sailing ships. Up until the end of the 19th century, most of the world's ocean freight was still carried by sail. What eliminated the sailing ship was that it takes several years to learn to be a sailor, while it takes 10 minutes to learn to shovel coal into the steamship boiler. The sailing ships died because they couldn't get crews and the steamship crews are unskilled. You need only a very few skilled people on a steamship. To furl and unfurl sails is highly skilled… But the railroad immediately created mobility, on the land, which had never existed...

The cultural impact of the Internet is far greater than the economic one. The important effect is on the middle classes in these half-developed countries. They don't see themselves as part of their economy, but as part of the worldwide developed economy. This may be the next development: the emergence of psychologically global middle classes.

The Lemur gets RANDy

It's astonishing to me that the W3C is even thinking about screwing with the patent-free virtues of the Web, but they are, and I like what the Lemur says about it. McCusker too. And Dave.

The continuing end of Education as Usual

Susan Kitchens responded to my Post-Industrial Journalism piece yesterday with a long and thoughtful piece of her own. She sources John Taylor Gatto, who is a veritable Yoda on the subject of education. I've quoted Gatto often in the past, and I'm glad Susan is helping keep it up. One sample:

...what struck me is the relationship between the underlying goals of the educational system and the methods we're using to think about and process and respond to 9-11—and the events preceding it.

Why are we used to trusting our opinionators? Is it because, deep down, we don't trust our own capacity to think?

I'll be Johnson. He's easier to pronounce.

Steve MacLaughlin in Saltire on The Writing Renaissance:

Bloggers like Dave Winer and Doc Searls have become the modern day incarnation of Dr. Johnson and Samuel Pepys.

Web of the dead living

If you have the stomach for it, here's the RAWA photo gallery of life and death in Afghanistan under the Taliban. That link from BlogHop. (Read through the "Dear Captain..." item at the bottom of the page.)