BillSaysThis

Just in case you have odd results with the RSS feed or the webpage is unavailable or email bounces, it’s because after publishing this I’m going to switch the DNS from the current hosting company to our new home at TextDrive. Possibly you’ll be able to see this place at an alternative address, http://bst.textdriven.com, and send email to me at bill at the same domain (the whole thing including the bst part).

No big deal and any trouble will clear in a couple of days or less, as soon as the new DNS info (how the nice text web addresses get translated to the numbers computers know and love) propogates through the network. This is one of those instances where a strength of the internet can cause some minor problems

The pundit who would be Cringely loves, and I mean lurves in an unnatural way, to get in as many over the top adjectives and out of the stratosphere rhetorical devices as he can fit in the space of a column but today’s Paper War has to be a prizewinner even for him. Just consider this brief, two sentence single paragraph excerpt from the middle of the thing:

“This is more than another Akamai or even an Akamai on steroids. This is a dynamically-driven, intelligent, thermonuclear Akamai with a dedicated back-channel and application-specific hardware.”

Yeah but what’s he gonna do for next week?

I know this place has been quiet lately. Honestly there’s a lot going on, plus I was sick over the weekend, but mostly behind the scenes stuff. For example, I’m moving this site to a new hosting provider but hitting hiccups after getting put on a new, not quite shaken out, server and just trying to understand what’s happening has taken an excessive amount of time.

Also, I’ve mostly worked through the Rails book and have been obsessively reading the fairly active newsgroup to keep up with things. I even got some help last night from a couple of friendly, more experienced guys to understand how to do a form with a model that doesn’t connect to a database table. With the Thanksgiving holiday and a week off next month there should be something worth showing soon.

Finally, there’s all the fan mail. The life of an Internet superstar can have its downside. People expect that I’ll actually read their messages and won’t take a generic “the check’s in the mail” response. No, I have to go into the bank website and literally pay the bill. You tell me, is that any way to treat li’l ol’ BillSaysThis?

All in all, keep your fingers crossed. Think a positive thought. Remember to pour the beer down the middle of the glass. Keep on swimming.

James L. Brooks has made some classic films over the years including As Good As It Gets, Terms of Endearment and Broadcast News plus he’s a co-creator of TV standouts The Simpsons, Taxi and The Mary Tyler Moore Show! Adam Sandler, on the other hand, has not. Okay, some of his movies have been funny (The Waterboy, Happy Madison) and even a couple that are a step above the pre-teen level (The Wedding Singer and especially Punch-Drunk Love) but nothing of the mature, life-affirming nature of Brooks’ oevre.

So we didn’t run out to the cinema to fork over $10 each to see Spanglish when the reviews were, well, half-hearted at best and no friends gave positive (or any) reports. Watching it, though, made me wonder why it didn’t get a better response. This is more the story of a young, unwed Mexican mother trying to make a life for her daughter in a strange land than anything to do with Sandler, and Paz Vega does a superb job as the woman who doesn’t even speak English until nearly the end.

Vega gets tangled up in the lives of Type A mom Tea Leoni, the nearly Zen monk-like Sandler and their two kids. Leoni doesn’t work but needs help taking care of her smart but slightly chubby daughter Berniece, (barely visible, so hard to characterize) younger son George and alcoholic, faded, drunk but able to care and give the occasional bit of sage wisdom singing star mom (Cloris Leachman). Her own daughter, the same age as Leoni’s, cannot resist the lure of wealth so easily but is still the most well-behaved teenager I’ve ever seen.

Anyway, the plot is not so much the point here as the performances Brooks is able to bring out from the cast. Leoni and Leachman are no surprise, and Vega is experienced if unknown in the US (and gorgeous, like Penelope Cruz without the zero percent body fat), but Sandler and the kids are an unexpected pleasure. Particularly Sarah Steele as Berniece but also Shelbie Bruce as her Latina counterpart.

recommended

Congratulations to Scott “Laughing Squid” Beale on tonight’s 10th Anniversary Party for his off-the-beaten path hosting company. I’ve run into Scott a few times recently and he really represents the best of what underlies the San Francisco stereotype. Which are, after all, usually based on some distortion of reality and that’s what Scott is. He shows up at so many events, happenings and parties I wonder if he bothers to keep an apartment/house or just has a dresser and shower in the office! Always with a camera too. Happy 10 years, pal, and best wishes for many more decades of merging art, commerce and community. [tag: laughingsquid]

Had a great time last night at the Prime, stayed until 2:30! Huge crowd turned out and despite the chill we got a bunch of good demos and presentations. Big spread of food, of which I ate too much, and lots of alcohol including currently hot combination of Red Bull and Vodka but, uggh, I didn’t try it. David Weekly was a terrific and gracious host, he has a house that even I envy over in Hillsborough, and Scott “the Laughing Squid” Beale was again omnipresent with his digital camera so you can see many pictures of the night on Flickr. Many people spent much of the evening playing with code–it was a dev house, after all–though I barely broke out LittleSteven because for me the opportunity for conversation was much more interesting.

Pitches included:

• Andy Smith did a funny, if questionable, presentation on getting chicks with python
• Keith H showed us the very hot Zimbra mail system which won one of the shiny statues for most likely to earn a huge payday
• Drew talked about using RDF to organize and analyze his four-plus years of gas purchase receipts (later on he showed me a very different kind of webserver called, I think, Redfern which is implemented as an RDF store)
• Jesse Andrews (GreaseMonkey, BookBurro) on how to build your own Google Maps in 10 minutes with almost no code using the Dojo Toolkit
• The singularly-named Freeman on projects (PostMaNet) he’s supporting to bring intermittent connectivity to remote towns in India; we had one of those nearly-midnight nature of existence conversations beforehand
• The (recently aqcuired by Yahoo!) upcoming.org trio showed that being inside the Big Y is will unleash their creativity by giving them a wide palette of components to play with
• Chris Messina discussed the CivicForge project which I missed because, well, it was cold and I needed a break, but which did win another of the statues.

Can’t wait for the next House!

Paul Graham simply has a great way of saying useful things and The Venture Capital Squeeze is no exception. For sure the people going to SHDH5 tomorrow will be in agreement with his thesis, and many of them are essentially the people he’s writing about.

Another little technical concept checked off my list today with the help of Rogers’ very useful Displaying XML Data with PHP and his Simple-XML class. Want to see it in action? Easy enough, just click through to my Poetry page. In the previous iteration the list of poems that runs down the left was hardcoded into the page source and when I write another poem I need to edit it. In the new plan I cut all that into a new file, did a little search and replace magic and spinned it into an XML file. XML= cool, eh?

Mike Arrington (Microsoft Live Event – My Real Time Notes) does a decent job of laying out the details of today’s big news from Redmond. Interesting that BillG and Co came down to San Francisco for it, lion’s den and all that. In a year or two they may have something of real value though for now I think some of the hyperbole is overdone.

You know what I’d like first? Fix the software I already have. How is it that Outlook (accurately) marks messages as spam but Hotmail doesn’t? I use a third party tool to suck down the Hotmail into Outlook–MS used to let you do that directly but decided we should pay for the feature, yeah right–and most of the time Outlook’s spam filter pushes them to the Junk folder. If anything Hotmail’s rulebase ought to be fresher.

So Bill, do you really think what small businesses want is a free website with ads from competitors at the top of the page? Me, I’d just like what I’ve got to do what it says on the box.

I spent Friday night and all day yesterday at another of these semi-spontaneous geek raves, this time it was TagCamp. I decided not to bother trying to blog it in the moment as the conversations were for the most part more interesting than the sessions and others seemed to do a good enough job. A lot of good material and conversations. Nice free t-shirts from Odeo and SimplyFired (irreverent self-abusing humor from the SimplyHired crew) too.

You can see photos at, of course, Flickr too. So far there are only a few with a clear shot of me (at Ofer’s session, looking up at the speaker, hands in front of face, clapping, and way too early in the morning, getting rice, with Ofer, at the wrap session). Of course in several I’m blocked by Mike Prince of Mobido, an otherwise very cool guy, have the back of my head visible (1 2 3 4 5) or just show my blurry face ;). If this paragraph seems a bit big ego oriented of me, you just don’t know me well enough. LOL.

Sessions:

• Ofer, our CEO, gave a great session on the guiding principles behind RawSugar Friday night and through the rest of the camp I had a number of very positive discussions about our service.
• The most interesting session for me was probably Rashmi Sinha’s talk on Findability with Tags (she has a short version of her thesis in her blog).
• Learned that the open source Cocoalicious has a cool UI for working with your del.icio.us collection but is sadly Mac-only.
• Bill Humphries took notes on the Teaching Tagging session led by Marshall Kirkpatrick
• Bill and Holly Ward discussed ToeTag, but I don’t really see this project gaining serious traction. Nice idea but since most (all?) tagging services are free to taggers because the value to the service is in having the largest database it’s antithetical for them to participate.
• TagCamp official hottie Tara Hunt previewed Riya and showed it’s facial recognition abilities. Has possibility but doesn’t really grab me as is.

Conversations I want to remember:

• Kimbro Staken really knows his shit and has been with, and done more, startups than you can shake a stick at, plus he agrees with me on the inevitability that outsourcing will continue to hoover jobs out of America
• Mike Rowel gave me some insight into Ning and we compared our early beta experiences.
• Wes Maldonaldo (who came down from Seattle) and Parker Thompson (one of the principals of PlaceSite) gave me some hope for the younger crowd 😉
• Eran Globen has a very dark sense of humor.
• Buzz Anderson, Micheal Tanne (from Wink) and I chatted about playing guitar and how cool it is that Buzz gets to have his guitar in the office to help him develop Soundtrack Pro.
• Scott Golder, Thor Muller and I compared notes about being Beatles fans and how age makes for a difference–I’m 44, Mike Thor’s 34 and Scott’s 24 and apparently the further away from the time when they were actually making the music you are the more likely you are to have learned their trivia from a book. I’m not 100% sure that Mike was the ‘man in the middle’ of this part of the conversation Thor just dropped an email correcting my Swiss cheese-like memory.
• Thor Muller, one of the Ruby Red Labs crew, was there with Michael Bean to demo their just-launched neighborhood-oriented project Urbantic.
• Mainly listened as Tony Chang and Lee Iverson debated the impact a specific language has in program quality. I wish I’d known at the time that Tony is responsible for WebNote. Lee and Philip Jeffrey came down for the camp from Vancouver, where they are respectively a professor and master’s candidate at the University of British Columbia.
• Justin Kistner of The Portland Internet Company told me about an upcoming addition to his firms’ business model, productizing consulting projects through spinoff ventures, the first of which will be a standards-compliant shopping cart.

Mad props to Susie Wyshak, who did an awesome job of managing the logistics, and Rohit Kare for lending us the brand new CommerceNet office for the event; the turnout was much bigger than BarCamp, well over 100 people, and this space was more than ample for the crowd though we sure made a big mess. Next Friday night I get to geek out again, and Ts1 gets more me time, since I plan to invade the fifth SuperHappyDevHouse. Heeheehee!

One of the biggest chunks of driving I’ve done in a long time, that’s for sure, definitely the most since I moved to Cali in 1996. Worth it since we had a real good time and we lucked out when it came to traffic, with almost no slow zones except the few miles between Gilroy and 85 on the last leg home.

I got a few decent photos from the Hearst Castle tour though most suffered from the no flash rule or shaky from being rushed along problem:

• Long view down to the Pacific off the main terrace
• The big, really big outdoor pool with Roman temple facade
• Tall Egyptian goddess sculpture
• The medium-size guest house (which is of course bigger than 90% of American homes)
• A classic, 400+ year old hunter tapestry

We did go to Hearst Castle late Saturday morning. Weather was still chilly, low lying fog and the Pacific barely visible a few dozen yards to the west as we drove to the visitor center. That’s where you park, get your tickets if not arranged in advance (ours were part of the hotel package), buy souveniers and such. Behind the main building are the National Geographic theater, with an oversized movie screen, showing a very flattering 40 minute biography of William Randolph Hearst himself–no mention of Citizen Kane–and an exhibit hall.

That’s also where tourists load onto buses for the five mile ride up the hill to the castle. With all the switchbacks and narrow passes, and no guardrails to block off the wandering bobcats and zebras, I’m not surprised the cars are left at the base. The climb also took us over the clouds into bright warm sunshine.

The place is so big that four separate tours are offered, plus a nighttime highlight walk. We took the introductory “Experience” as TS1 had never been before and my last visit was around 1975. Simply awesome, you can use just about any adjective you like and not be far off. Construction took almost 28 years: planning began in 1919, after Hearst finally inherited the 360,000 acre family ranch from his mother, and ‘the first half’ of his mental picture was completed in 1947.

Julia Morgan was the architect who partnered on the vision that quickly evolved from a two floor, 32 room bunkhouse to a small, ornate village centered on a four story, 100+ room castle. Ceilings, wallcovering, furniture, grills, fireplaces and all sorts of artwork came from Hearst warehouses in New York, San Francisco and locally with instructions to find a suitable location, even if that meant tearing up a steel reinforced, concrete floor, terrace or wall. She must have had an incredibly strong personality and sense of self-worth to survive the project!

Most people will probably name the huge, illusionary indoor swimming pool as the highlight but, while I did find it fairly amazing, my choice would be the dining hall. The pool saw many more orgies, acknowledged on the tour with a wink-wink, but considering the guest lists the mealtime conversations would have had to beat even that pleasure zone.

My feet were the only happy body part as we loaded back onto the bus for the downhill ride where, sure enough, the clouds and chill were waiting.

Cringely likes to make big statements, things that seem obvious to him or his sources, and his latest column, Seeing Is Believing, is no different. In it, he calculates the huge amount of storage and energy that would be required to move to a GoogleOS-like world. Sadly, the essay commits the same type of error he so often makes: forgetting that technology doesn’t stand still. So I sent him a polite email on it, hopeful I’m not a bit too full of hubris:

Two problems with your analysis:

1. Disks get bigger every year or so, maybe not faster but consuming the same or less power, and when the holographic storage devices come online in the next few years the density will go through the roof.
2. Local storage is becoming a very possible technique through work done by people like Brad Neuberg. So possibly providers will be able to at least cache most likely to be accessed material on the user’s PC and avoid having to keep everything in immediate access speed network storage. Alternatively to this, people may use (or be given/sold cheaply and told to use) USB storage devices, particularly after holographic storage has gone through one or two generations of learning curve price reduction, with providers used mainly for backup.

Either or both of these near term changes pretty much reduces the problem you wrote about substantially. Since you’re well-informed and connected, one wonders why you didn’t address or include these points.

Just a test post form the Flock blog writer.

A day later: I’m sure in the very near future I’ll be flocking full time but for now there’s a bug with the blogging subsystem that’s too big to overcome.

So TS1 and I are in San Simeon for the weekend. We were hoping to go to San Diego but if you’ve checked the price of plane tickets lately you’ll understand that 400 miles of gas for Seven plus hotel (which we wouldn’t have had to pay in SD) is still less. This was the longest one day drive I’ve done in years but turned out to be not a problem; we left around 11, stopped in Soledad for lunch, and were at the hotel by 2:30. Yay, medicine.

Though it was nice and sunny in Mountain View and all along our drive, once we turned north on Highway 1 there were grey skies and low fog on all sides. Even though the Pacific was at points only a few dozen yards away the water was barely visible. Reminds me very much of the few weeks in 1996 when I worked in South San Francisco and lived in Pacifica–you hit Hickey Blvd. and the sunshine disappears like a black stage curtain dropping.

We were tired anyway and decided to take a couple of hour rest. Our package included dinner at one of a few local restaurants. We choose Mustache Pete’s, with a selection of meat-free pasta dishes, over in Cambria. Assuming there would be some stores to browse and window shop, with possibly a caramel latte for my sweetie, we headed over a couple of hours before dinner.

This was one of those times when assuming turns out to be wrong. Cambria is a tiny town and the main drag is fronted by art galleries, tchatchkie shops and real estate offices, with a few restaurants and bars. This was about six o’clock on a Friday night. Approximately four of the stores and several of the restaurants were open but not one of the coffee shops was.

People, this is a tourist town–there were no shoe, women’s clothing, book (okay, a couple of odd used/collectible book places) or office supply stores the length of Main Street! I’m not asking for Starbucks or Peet’s, just for some liveliness early on Friday. Essentially everything but the restaurants and bars were locked down by five p.m.

So we got a nice bit of soft exercise in, walking around in the chilly foggy air, and decided to head to the restaurant an hour early. As the place was less than half full, with most of the crowd a big fancy family celebration of some sort, the host was happy to seat us. He did have a big bushy mustache but turned out to be Neal and not the eponymous Pete. We had a good meal, very generous salads to start with vegetable lasagna and spinach stuffed shells in Alfredo sauce shared for the entrees. Other than a nice tip for the friendly waitress, no charge!

Still early but we decided to make an early evening, to get a good rest for the centerpiece of our trip, the Hearst Castle tour tomorrow morning. Sweetie’s never been and my only visit was in the summer of ’76. I hope to shoot a bunch of good photos tomorrow, maybe enough for a new gallery.

I’ve read 18 books (I just counted) in the last few months and enjoyed most of them but for some reason I can’t get myself to write the reviews. Possibly this post will break the logjamp, possibly not. In no particular order, here are the titles:

• Nothing But Blue Skies, Thomas McGuane, recommended
• Samaritan, Richard Price, barely recommended
• Summerland, Malcom Knox, recommended
• Star Trek: Ex Machina, Christopher L. Bennett, recommended
• Star Trek New Frontiers: Being Human, Peter David, recommended
• Star Trek New Frontiers: Gods Above, Peter David, recommended
• Star Trek: The Eugenics War, Vol. One, The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonian Singh, Greg Cox, not recommended
• Little Scarlet, Walter Mosley, definitely recommended
• The Sky Road, Ken Macleod, recommended (probably would be higher if I’d known before reading that this is the last book of a sequence)
• Cosmonaut Keep, Ken Macleod, Engines of Light Book 1, definitely recommended
• Dark Light, Ken Macleod, Engines of Light Book 2, definitely recommended
• Engine City, Ken Macleod, Engines of Light Book 3, definitely recommended
• Newton’s Wake, Ken Macleod, definitely recommended
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, J.K. Rowling, recommended
• Soothsayer, Mike Resnick, modestly recommended
• Oracle, Mike Resnick, modestly recommended
• Second Contact, Mike Resnick, not recommended

So there’s a summary of them at least.

For a movie from the director of About Schmidt and Election, and with the awards, nominations and critical acclaim it got, I expected a lot more of Sideways than I saw on the screen. If memory serves, some of those who agreed with me pointed to the Paul Giammatti character as someone with whom the critics would seriously self-identify and therefore rate more highly than, say, you or I would. TS1 agreed with me on this.

Very basic plot: Miles (Giammatti) is a failed novelist with a failed marriage but somehow still best friends with college roommate and modestly successful actor Jack (Thomas Haden Church) and the two head to Santa Barbara County wine country for a weeklong bachelors’ jaunt before Jack–who wants one last fling–marries a young hottie. Miles does know his wines, though, and Jack, well, Jack knows how to liven up a party. They meet and hookup with hot chicks (Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh) but Miles has trouble getting past his despression and Jack’s sleaze.

The four main characters all do reasonably good jobs though other than (perhaps?) Oh none seem to reach too far from their natural personality. The scenery is stunning but not surprising; compare it to Kenneth Brannaugh’s 1993 version of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and I think you’ll understand how a director can make more from the same general type of setting.

My core complaint is with director/co-writer Alexander Payne. All through the film I was waiting for the sly humor of Schmidt and Election and for some serious escalation of the dramatic tension but the best he managed was a faked car crash and a confrontation between Miles and his ex-wife after Jack’s wedding ceremony. Apparently the latter was intended as the last straw in Miles’ character journey but it just didn’t work for me.

barely recommended and definitely see the other two Payne movies first.

Ahead of the November 15 release of the 30th Anniversary Edition of Born to Run Amazon has the title track video (from the included Hammersmith Odeon concert DVD) on the front page today. Awesome to watch, I was mesmerized and reminded of why I fell so hard for Bruce’s music. This is primal Bruce, still skinny, fuzzy and honestly amazed at his success.

No acoustic guitars to be seen, no one but Bruce with a microphone and only the stylishly dressed Big Man pushing up into the spotlight. He’s wearing that wool knit cap, almost everyone except Max Weinberger has some kind of hat on, a gold earring and the scraggly beard. Springsteen was only 25 on the night of this concert! Man, this is one CD I’m jazzed to be getting on the first day, oh yeah!

(If it’s not on the front page, try this album page to see the video.)

[Follow up to this August post]

A friend asked me today “What do you think of Monster?” Perhaps my response was a bit long.

The reputation is that a lot of the postings are phantoms, placed by recruiters to get resumes for potential future assignments, by HR departments to satisfy requirements when an internal candidate is certain to get the job (or #1), by Monster itself to look good to applicants and recruiters, and unfortunately rarely result in a meaningful opportunity. Sorry.

My experience is that personal connections, either direct or through channels like Sun alumni, are the best way to get the next job. Second is to track postings on Craigslist (which charges $75/category a job is posted too, which I know because I just posted two, meaning there are probably few phantoms) and to keep checking the websites and blogs of companies that interest you, then find some way to get in touch with a real person (not including HR) at the company (e.g., Sun alumni, LinkedIn, or post comments to the blog to establish a minimal connection).

However, keeping your resume on Monster, HotJobs, CareerBulder and Craigslist and refreshing one of the every day (overall in a cycle) is also a good tool but going in the other direction. Make sure to use significant keywords in your resume, and that the keywords appear in the description of your previous jobs as much as possible rather than ONLY in some separate skills list.

Yahoo! is doing a lot of hiring and you should check their listings for matches. I know what you (ed.: my friend) say about bigger companies but from what I’ve heard and read on blogs (and seen on occasional lunch visits) it’s a good place to work.