ryan.freebern.org

Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions:

One small difference in our reaction [to the 1989 San Francisco earthquake] was that Julie, near tears, sat staring at the set, wondering out loud if her husband was still alive, while I was rather horrified to discover that I was worried about how this would affect sales of the book. This made me feel just great about myself, as you can imagine.

Tobias Buckell likes the idea of taking his computing environment with him wherever he goes, but doesn’t want to carry a full-sized laptop. The post and discussion there is regarding various ways to package up your OS, frequently-used apps, and home directory on a thumb drive or an iPod and whenever you need to use a computer away from home, you just boot using that portable data storage as your drive.

I’ve spent some time thinking about this, and I think it’s just a stopgap measure. Right now laptops, while portable, are generally bigger than most people want to carry everywhere with them, and PDAs or UMPCs are really too small to effectively use for anything other than simple computing tasks. I want something that provides the full functionality of a laptop with the portability of a PDA. Carrying your personal stuff around with you and booting into it is all well and good, but what would really be most useful is an unobtrusive wearable computer that, when activated, can function just like a desktop. With a head-mountable display device that looks to the user like a full-size monitor, a tiny chorded keyboard/mouse that can easily be manipulated with one hand, and an iPod-sized CPU/battery/flash drive combo to do the processing, you could easily take your entire computer with you. None of this rebooting other computers to use your environment, or attempting to type on a tiny fold-out thumb keyboard.

For more information in this vein, see the wearable and life_recorder tags on qumbler.

What do you do when your brain is totally stuck on a great idea, but you’re afraid you’ve subconsciously stolen it from someone else?

I bought Tobias Buckell’s book Crystal Rain recently. The cover depicts people in flying blimplike wooden ships, swashbuckling fearlessly. I haven’t read it yet, as I’ve been working my way through Dave Marusek’s “Getting to Know You” first, but in the meantime my brain has been pondering the whole flying-ships thing, and has invented the basic underpinnings of a watery world with steampunk flying ships. It’s the sort of thing where as I’m drifting off to sleep, I’ll think “Hey, that’s how the ships fly,” or I’ll wake up and think “Ooh, I know where they can get an energy-rich fuel source for their steam engines!”

So I’m a little upset that this world my brain is busy thinking up in the background is going to turn out to be way too similar to the Crystal Rain world, and I’ll feel like I’m just ripping Buckell off if I actually write anything in it. What do I do? Forge ahead and hope it turns out different enough? Give up on it until I’ve read Crystal Rain, hoping that his world will turn out to be significantly different and mine will still be usable?

And if I do read Crystal Rain, I’m afraid I’ll end up wanting desperately to appropriate Buckell’s cool ideas into my own, thereby turning my work, effectively, into unpublishable fanfiction. I don’t want that to happen, since I want what I write to at least be something that an editor would consider buying, and fanfiction definitely doesn’t fall into that category.

Maybe I’ll give up and write a vampire story set in the future on a jungle planet, or something.

This steam-powered walking robot makes me happy. Lego’s programmable robotic parts are lots of fun and very popular; someone should make a sell a big set of erector-set-like parts designed to make use of steam power, with various sizes and shapes of boilers and engines, and nifty little spinning valves and steam whistles and stuff. I’d love to play around with making my own steampunk-inspired gadgets, but I don’t have the metalworking equipment or know-how.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who doesn’t care about the Oscars this year. In 2006, according to this page, there were 354 movies released. I saw 9 of them in theatres: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, X-Men: The Last Stand, Casino Royale, Borat, V for Vendetta, The Illusionist, A Prairie Home Companion, Marie Antoinette, and The Notorious Bettie Page. Of those, I didn’t enjoy Borat, I was unimpressed by Marie Antoinette, and I thought The Illusionist, Dead Man’s Chest, and The Last Stand didn’t live up to what they could have been. The two movies from that list I really loved — Prairie Home Companion and V for Vendetta — didn’t get any Oscar nominations. So, meh.

I don’t have a lot of movie-watching time, but I do like to keep on top of the stuff considered really great. Which movie released in 2006 that I haven’t seen do you think is really worth seeing?

The best way I’ve found of getting into good habits is making a schedule for them and sticking to it. I go to the gym every two days (unless I’m out of town or something) like clockwork, and by doing so I manage to keep doing it regularly. In the past, I’ve scheduled two hours of writing time first thing in the morning three days a week, and I got a lot of writing done that way. These days, I’m making myself read for at least half an hour a day so I can try to get caught up on my book backlog, and it’s starting to do the trick — I’m plowing through books pretty quickly. I schedule my next haircut immediately after getting one done, so I know that, four weeks later, I’ll be obliged to come in and get it done.

The things I don’t schedule are the ones that sit around not getting done for weeks on end. I don’t vacuum carpets as often as I should, since I have no schedule for it. I get way behind on watching the TV shows I follow, since it’s tough to find the time.

These good habits have a net positive effect on my life, because when I do them (each individual time, and overall) I feel better about myself. I’m proud that I’ve been exercising regularly for a month and a half, and swimming fairly regularly for a couple years. I’m happy when I write, even if what I write isn’t something I’m terribly proud of.

But developing good habits (like exercising and writing) is really time-consuming. I already feel like my days are packed, and then fitting in an hour of working out or two hours of writing just makes me wonder what I’m going to have to give up to get it done. The weird thing is, it doesn’t seem like I am giving anything up, actually. Somehow, I manage to do these productive activities and still find the time I need to do my day job, read the blogs in my aggregator, and keep the house in a state of, uh, controlled chaos at least. So maybe good habits aren’t really as time-consuming as I think. Maybe their positive effect drives me to be more efficient in the other areas of my life, which almost means they’re actually creating more time for me.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel busy!

I installed this WordPress OpenID plugin this morning and played around with it a little. While the installation was fairly smooth, I couldn’t manage to get it to work in what I considered a sensible fashion. I’m sure if I spent an hour or so fiddling with it I could figure it out, but to me that means the plugin needs more work. Fiddling shouldn’t be required.

The first problem is that while I could make the OpenID login form appear above the comment box on a post, if I typed my OpenID URL and a comment and hit the submit button, it would log me in but bring me back to the (now empty) comment form, and my comment would be nowhere to be seen. If I’m given a login box and a comment box, it ought to perform both actions.

Second, once I had logged in with my OpenID identity, the “Logged in as” text that appeared above the comment form was ugly and I couldn’t easily figure out how to style it. It would be nice if the plugin options included text boxes that let me directly enter the styles for the various elements that it adds to my pages.

Third, and this is more a complaint about the WordPress architecture, I don’t like that my administrator login and a low-level commenter’s profile page both have the same URL and look nearly the same. I think the commenter’s profile page should be a totally separate file that I can lay out and style however I like.

I’d love to enable OpenID support on my blog, but these issues (especially the first) are deterring me.

Here is a poll conducted between February 2 and 8, 2007 that shows that Democratic candidates are leading Republicans by a significant margin when it comes to who people would vote for in the upcoming Presidential race.

Among all adults, Senator Clinton is the clear front runner. Fully 45 percent would consider voting for her compared to 37 percent for Obama, 29 percent for Giuliani, 28 percent for Edwards, 26 percent for McCain and 26 percent for Al Gore.

So the sure-fire way for Democrats to win this election? Don’t say or do anything, at all, until next November. Obviously people like you a lot right now, just the way you are. Saying and doing stuff will only serve to potentially give people a reason to change their minds. You might accidentally misspeak and make people angry, or say something ambiguous that the Republicans can spin against you.

I should be working for the DNC.

Why aren’t more cars equipped with in-dash USB ports these days? They don’t need to do anything datawise, just provide power. Then we can all use our MP3 players in the car without needing a cigarette-lighter power adapter.

Mark Cuban can be a bit of a jerk when it comes to sports, but his grasp of technology is quite solid. In a post today about the future of personal computing, he speculates about the (very real, in my opinion) possibility of a Google OS, and during his meanderings, makes this point:

Google can put some beautiful HD content out on their servers, and it will be perfect.. until it gets to the peering points, at which point it loses all its priority and becomes just another packet. Which is the downside of net neutrality. Google can’t buy their way to having their packets given priority, so those who expect big bandwidth video to the home from Google Video… as both Google and I mentioned in this post, it aint gonna happen the way things stand today.

So how long until Google gets into the broadband ISP market? It seems like the next logical step in the progression. Provide online alternatives to the most common desktop apps, attempt to become the number one information storage and retrieval provider, and then make the connection directly to the consumers’ homes — and here’s where Cuban’s speculation comes in — and give your data packets higher priority. Don’t disrupt your customers’ gaming sessions or streaming internet radio, but when they want to watch a YouTube video, make sure it plays smoothly without interruption if at all possible. By encouraging its broadband customers to use the Google services (because they’re faster and more responsive) you can increase ad-views and pass the profit along as decreased broadband costs to the subscribers.

I can easily see a point in the near future where starting your computer means booting into a Firefox-based desktop environment, where very little of your data is stored locally — heck, base the system on a few high-capacity flash memory chips, decreasing the power consumption and size and startup time — and practically everything you want to accomplish can be done online — hopefully, for safety’s sake, encrypted and securely. (If you haven’t seen YouOS, it’s a big step in this direction.)

While Google’s evilness is up for debate, for the most part they seem to be doing things right. I’m not quite ready to give up my Linux and local storage, but I can easily see a point in the future where I could be.

Right now, when someone posts comment-spam to a blog and it is identified as such, their IP is blacklisted, so that blog and any other blogs that share a blacklist with that blog no longer accept comments from that IP. Whoop-de-doo. This isn’t working. If a spammer can’t post to blog A, B, or C, it just ignores those and posts to blogs D through Z. The punishment doesn’t deter them at all.

When an IP has been blacklisted by a given number of blogs, why not disallow that IP from visiting any sites at all that you control? Have a server-level check of the RBL or whatever, and instead of serving them the page they requested, redirect them to a malware-removal tool that they can run to remove spamware from their system.

“Hey, looks like your computer’s been sending spam. If you’re doing it on purpose, go die, jerk. If not, download and run this handy tool to remove the spam-sending application from your computer. And while you’re at it, run this free antivirus and install this firewall.”

Sure, blocking a spamming IP means one fewer hit to your site, and if you have advertisers that could translate into fewer ad dollars. But that hit isn’t necessarily a consumer’s eyeballs, anyway, right? It’s probably just the spamware.

Obviously there would be complications. The tool would have to generate a code to prove that it’s been run on the system before the IP would be un-blacklisted, or something. But if it could be done in a sensible and workable way, this could really change things.

While I haven’t seriously spent any time shopping for a house, I occasionally do look at the real estate listings for my area just to see what’s available. Every time I do, I am struck by how pathetically uninformative and frustratingly closed-off the information is. The multiple listings service does an okay job letting me search on one site to get listings from lots of different realtors, but the resulting hits, which offer no street address and a couple tiny, grainy photos, are hardly enough to let me know which ones I’d actually want to spend time looking into.

My brother once told me that if people actually knew what a house was really like before they bought it, no-one would ever buy a house. There’s definitely some truth there; the more time I’ve spent in a place, the more little problems I’ve come across. But like he said, every house has its share of problems. Nothing’s exempt, and the best that you can hope for is that you notice the problems early enough that you can deal with them before they become major.

So right now, the housing market in this respect is almost entirely in the hands of the sellers. If you can hide the bad stuff well enough that potential buyers don’t notice it on a walkthrough, you can unload your old shack for more than it’s worth and saddle the new owners with the cost of fixing things up. And I’m not talking about major stuff here like dangerous wiring or shoddy plumbing — any half-decent home inspector will catch that before the sale is final. I’m talking about the little stuff, the fact that the molding is loose around the livingroom doors, or that the shower head is always getting clogged, or that whenever the weather’s warm you get dozens of houseflies from who-knows-where.

So, as a buyer, what’s to be done? We need some way to work together, share information about these houses that goes far, far beyond the handful of vague datapoints in an MLS listing. We need to take photos of the excessive wood-rot around the windows, the cracked linoleum behind the toilet, the gaps in the flooring that the seller is trying to hide behind his armchair, and let each other know about it. We need to do what we can to level the playing field by sharing what we can find about properties for sale and, in doing so, attempt to reveal their true values.

We need a social real-estate information sharing portal. A site that lets us say “See this listing? The actual address is 123 Main St. in Somewhereville. I went there and took two dozen photos — here they are. And you know how the realtor’s photo makes it look like an idyllic wooded lot? Yeah, they’re not showing you that it borders a busy road and has a mosquito-filled swamp a hundred feet behind it.” We need to post what we saw, what the owners told us, and what we thought, in order to let other potential buyers know exactly what they’re getting into.

Tenants can use it too. “I rented this property for two years, and let me tell you, unless you’re ready to be saddled with twenty grand in renovations it’s not worth your time.”

And eventually, if enough people share information about these properties and do their best to show the world what the properties are really like, sellers will learn that it’s in their best interests to be up front about stuff. When you decide to sell your house, you log onto the info-sharing site and say “it’s not perfect — here are the problems — but there’s lots of good stuff, too.” When people see that you’re being honest, they’ll be much more willing to work with you to reach an equitable agreement.

And then people will know what the houses for sale are like, but be able to make an honest comparison, and will still be willing to buy them because they’ll really know what they’re getting into.