Monday, November 25, 2002

Consume this

Britt Blaser: This must be the place, which takes off from my interview by Lisa Rein at Creative Commons.

Witness to the destruction

My latest at Linux Journal: A Losing Bet: the Last Days of Comdex, Part 1.

Speaking of which, Jonathan has a breakdown of Fox CEO Peter Chernin's keynote at Comdex, which I missed. It's a great read, and very well researched. Go dig it.

Thank Jesse

For saving the skins, or the wallets, of Internet broadcasters in the U.S. My own theory: he did it (at least in part) for noncommercial Christian broadcasters, of which there are a great many. From what Deborah Proctor at WCPE writes on the station's home page, it looks like he did it for some locals too.

Whatever the reasons, it was a good move.

Nurturing nature

Watched The Crying Game again the other night on the telly. It's an outstanding movie that explores personal nature. Pamela Mack brings up that same subject in a post that points to a Louis Menand review in the New Yorker of The Blank Slate: the Modern Denial of Human Nature, by Steven Pinker. Here's another review, by Simon Blackburn in The New Republic.

Call me hopelessly new age, but I'm kinda with James Hillman on subject. He speaks of one's nature as a thing that "gains authority without office." (I kinda like the way blogging helps that gaining along, too.)

Seems to me we are products of both nature AND nurture (why argue about OR when AND is what you want?), and good things happen when we're gifted and giving with an amplitude of both.

Branches of coincidence

A few years ago I was rear-ended by a drunk driver. The song playing on the radio was Rick Nelson's "Travellin' Man."

Last month I found a favorite old watch — a square-faced Seiko Quartz Alarm Chronograph with a nice clean easy-to read analog face that also keeps digital time and date in a second window. My wife bought it for me in Hong Kong in 1990. After serving well for several years after that, the battery died and it came to languish in the bottom of the compartment between the front seats of the '87 Subaru wagon under a pile of pens, food-caked coins and other old-car debris. So I took it to a jeweler to fix up and install a new battery. I've been wearing it ever since.

In a plane from LAX to O'Hare last week, the guy in the seat next to me told me he had been looking for years that very watch. It's quite the desirable item, he said, and considered an antique. On a flight later in the week from O'Hare to Las Vegas, another guy getting off the plane stopped next to me and looked at his watch. It was the same one. He had never seen another. I told him about the first guy, who had been looking to find one. "I'll never part with it," this guy said. "It keeps better time than any other watch I've ever had." I just checked to see how far the watch has wandered since I set it to WWV last month after I got it from the jeweler. I reset the analog watch to local time several times on the trip, but hadn't reset it in a week. It's about two seconds fast. But the digital watch, set more than a month ago, is three seconds fast. Not bad.

Remedial literacy

I just shelved about a thousand pounds of books, including many I've been missing for years. There's something both reassuring and stimulating about a wall filled floor to ceiling with books. As a blurry background off to my left, they make me feel like I know more, somehow.