A Christmas to Remember

I just finished shoveling the last couple inches of the light, fluffly snow that’s been steadily falling this past week. A perfect end to the best Christmas I’ve had in two decades.

Some highlights:

  • Having my immediate family all in the same room at the same time on Christmas day. This in itself made the day. To my mom, dad, sister, and Bob: Thank you for making the drive, for spending the time, for being together on Christmas. Let’s not wait 15 years to do it again.
  • Teknikal Diffikulties Advent Calendar Day 22: Happy Solstice[mp3]. While each piece of Cayenne’s Advent Calendar is enjoyable, this installment felt so perfect and comforting I stopped shoveling to appreciate the significance of the shortest day of the year.
  • Taking a day-long break from 5 months of heavy programming (in addition to podcasts, email, and the internet as a whole).
  • Jeremy’s fantastic home-made butternut squash ravioli on Christmas Eve dinner
  • Cooper making a bee line for the simple wooden train under the tree on Christmas Day.
  • Assembling Cooper’s new trike.
  • Cracking open a Wake-n-Bake Coffee Oatmeal Imperial Stout from Athens, GA’s Terrapin Beer Co. last night after the day was done. A tasty, frothy brew, paired well with 2 scoops of vanilla ice cream. Thanks Pat.
  • Only a single holiday-related dramatic incident that sorted itself out quite neatly once the moment passed.
  • As I write this, Cooper is sitting in the tallest snow bank in the yard. Content as can be.
  • The entryway shelf overflowing with holiday greetings, cards, photos, and letters.
  • Me: “Cooper, What does Christmas mean?”
    C: “Um…People come over.”

Ask Not What Twitter Can Do For You

After playing around with Twitter for nearly a year, I’ve come to an understanding with it.

The less Twitter does, the better.

In reviewing Jeremiah Owyang’s Twitter Wish List, I only agree with #2, a white-labeled Twitter for workgroup/company use. If Twitter doesn’t want that market, that’s cool. I know of at least 1 company that does.

The rest feel like they’ll turn Twitter into something it isn’t;

  • Supporting non-private groups is an easy hack – create a ‘fake user’, have everyone in the group direct messages via the ‘@’. (Twitter isn’t Jaiku)
  • ‘filtering’ for ‘fake users’. What does that even mean? (Twitter isn’t YFly)
  • Weather? – my tweople are great at giving the weather and traffic conditions already. They’re also great at pointing me to stuff to buy, things to do, and places to go. All without a formal structure for doing so. (Twitter isn’t Facebook)
  • Threaded replies implies rigidly staying on topic. Something that isn’t guaranteed in the messaging systems that have threading today (Twitter isn’t email or forums)

I’m a little surprised not to see ‘remove 140 character limit’ on the list. :p

My Twitter Wish list:

  1. Improved stability and API.
  2. Block search bots (Google, etc) from indexing.
  3. Become invisible.

In addition to that, there’s plenty of work to be done that keeps Twitter.

For example, I wanted a Twitter client that auto-expanded shortened urls and did something smart with the resulting file, so I baked it into Cullect.com.

Here’s an example:

Building My Religion.xml

“Religions are the longest-lived human institutions. They are more likely to survive war, disasters, epidemics and climate change than corporations or governments.” – Phil Wolff

Amen.

All the religions I’ve been exposed to are “monetized” via “because of” not “with”. That is, it’s free to attend a service, but the paraphernalia cost. Throw in extra special gear around annual traditions, some cool songs, and a passionate community and we’re talking a self-sustaining ecosystem.

Eternal life.

Historically, this was only within the reach of a few chosen individuals. Perhaps another realm the internet will democratize?

But if my documents (saved in proprietary formats) from a just few years ago won’t open on today’s technology, what are the chances they’ll open in next century’s technology?

This is why unsexy plain text and XML are the most valuable formats in the long view.

Everywhere You Want To Be

From a development standpoint, there’s huge benefit to developing applications in for HTML – if simply because the barrier to entry is much lower than other development platforms.

In addition, there’s no vendor behind HTML. In front of – yes. Behind – No. This means a website written a decade ago still loads in today’s browsers on today’s hardware. The same isn’t true of stack of desktop apps from the same time period.

From a maintenance standpoint – a developer today could crack open yesterday’s HTML page and figure out what’s going on. Or more importantly – vice versa.

Until fairly recently, browsers were limited to general use computer (desktops, laptops, handhelds). Now, TiVo, XBox, Playstation, any device with any kind of network connection has a browser.

Each one of those devices is a different context, each still has it’s own unique capabilities. Why wouldn’t I want a readable – if not writable – calendar, mail client, etc on each of them?

The differences between Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari are irrelevant once we start talking about having a productive, cohesive experience across all the devices I touch during the day.

Yes, this my sound like a 180° from my earlier positions. But it’s more of a clarification.

HTML as a presentation layer holds the promise of easy, write once, run everywhere development. Desktop applications with HTML at their core are very compelling from a number of angles (maintenance, development) but they’re still Desktop apps. That means they’re expected to be keyboard controllable, accessible offline, and dare I say – integrate with other Desktop applications in addition to the cloud.

RE: Blogger Sees Red Over StarTribune’s Lack of Citation

As if I didn’t have enough reasons to grumble at the STrib – a reporter doesn’t credit their sources. Coincidentally, on a story covering questionable ethics.

“Come on, Jackie. You called me about this on Thursday afternoon. We discussed the story, I pointed you to sources where you could find more info, including the email of one of the sources you quote. You told me you’d mention The Deets in the article.”- Ed Kohler

BTW – Ed’s story hit my radar first.

ELSEWHERE:
The Wege hauls everyone back to their own corner:

“Just to be clear, the Strib clearly screwed over Ed Kohler at The Deets, and he has every right to complain. My issue is with the piling on. Bloggers steal. Period. I try to attribute but I also have a two and out rule: anytime I give credit to a blog twice in one day, I’m entitled to steal any other links I like from them without giving credit. Others have different rules, but hardly anyone gives credit for EVERY link every day. If nothing else you don’t plug Atrios because you chose to read his take on today’s Krugman before going to the NYTimes and reading it for yourself.” – The Wege

“It’s Been 10 Years, You Still Amaze Me”

Today marks a decade of marriage for Jen and me.

Back then, I had no idea how dramatically our relationship would improve over the years. I didn’t know that we’d catch our stride 5 years in, nor how much easier that makes things.

Especially with the big stuff. All of which I owe to her.

Jen,
Thank you.
I love you.
More.

(oh, and yes, I’ve waited 4 years to reference the opening line from Wonderlicks’ ‘Right Crazy’)

Cullect.com – “takes the web2 out of feed readers and I love it.”

Arik Jones, one of the people I’ve asked to try Cullect.com for a week, wrote up his thoughts two-days in:

“Unlike Google Reader it doesn’t inundate you with useless UI elements….What I like the most about Cullect is the ability to recommend feeds and then being able to give friends a dead simple url. It takes the web2 out of feed readers and I love it.

Exactly what I’m aiming for. Thanks Arik.

As Arik mentions, if you can sign-in to cullect.com right now if you have: a Twitter account, an openid, a WordPress-based blog, or a Typepad/MoveableType-based blog. While you don’t need to sign-in to read anything within Cullect, after signing in, you can send interesting posts to Twitter or to your weblog. The activation process Arik mentions is just for creating a new group of feeds.

Book Still Readable – Decades Later!

“If you’d have told me then that by 2007 the state of the art would barely have advanced beyond that of 1998, I’d have wept openly.” – Dave Slusher

If you fell into a coma when Business 2.0 had a roller coaster on the cover and woke up today, you’d have one more reason to double check the calendar. Amazon’s $400 Kindle eBook reader was announced today.

It feels exactly like all the eBook attempts over the last decade; ugly form-factor, proprietary DRM format, read-only, vendor-controlled titles, customers nickel-and-dimed after paying hundreds of dollars.

In other words – far more inconvenient and annoying than the media form it’s attempting to replace. Oh, and it’s Moore’s Law compliant? No thanks.

“What happens to these e-books if Amazon, having lost money on the endeavor, stops producing Kindle readers a few years from now?” – John Gruber

Damn good question. Sitting next to my Mac mini is a stack of CD just as tall. Decade-old backups of work, a substantial percentage of which is un-openable due to proprietary formats from long extinct companies and products. Compare that to the bookshelves of hardcovers and paperbacks I’ve moved with me for nearly two decades – all still fully functional.

If I could freely load up the ‘library’ of PDFs I’ve collected over the years or queue up some RSS feeds into Kindle, then maybe UPS and USPS should be concerned.

Unless you’re an eBook collector, there’s nothing to read.