DeWitt Clinton

After a few people checked in on me to make sure I was still alive, here’s an update:

Not dead, just busy. Travel, meetings, work, moving. Little chance to catch up on email, unfortunately. No new developments on the new project, other than the realization that perhaps the most important application that can be built on the infrastructure is a dynamic agent that can listen for incoming messages for a user and route them off to email, mobile, etc., based on preferences such as relationship to the sender, time of day, or urgency. It still comes down to the basic pillars of the new project — users, relationship, and notes — but it ties into existing technologies in exciting ways.

The tech community is definitely getting healthier again. The second coming of the internet is a big improvement over the first one. Not only are some of the business models more sound, but the companies themselves are actually learning to work with each other, not just doing deals with each other. I’m lucky in that I get to talk to companies both big and small every day and there is a new spirit of cooperation and mutual appreciation. Maybe it’s a west coast attitude, but I don’t remember things being like this back east.

People should stop blogging when they start sounding shrill. Or at least take a hiatus. It is important to keep the perspective that at the end of the day, no matter how many readers you get, you are still just blogging. (The same applies for real-world celebrities.) The whole notion of money-making around blogging is rubbish and inflated. (That’s not to say it won’t inflate some more, though.)

The time has come such that network connectivity should be considered a commodity, just like water, gas, electric, roads, and the postal service. Those services are effectively regulated, universally available, and reasonably priced. The government will need to step in here at some point, but the long-term advantages are huge. In metropolitan areas, high-speed broadband should be ubiquitous (fibre, etc). In rural areas it may take a government mandate to make it happen. But once it does, other services that should have been commoditized long ago, such as voice, television, radio, and mobile voice, will all be possible over IP for a fraction of the cost, and the headaches, that they are today.

On that subject, mobile voice quality, or even POTS voice quality, is embarssingly bad. VOIP apps like Skype actually do sound better than their land-line equivalent. This is pretty pathetic, when you think about it.

David Busch’s Nikon D70 Digital Field Guide is a must-read for anyone who owns a Nikon D70 SLR. It’s not that deep or detailed, but it covers the functionality of the camera so much better than either the manual does or than one could figure out easily on their own.

Downtown Seattle is very, very nice. Either I never noticed that when I lived up there 7 years ago, or there has been some major urban revitalization going on. San Francisco could learn a lot from downtown Seattle. (Clean, open late, pedestrian friendly, and safe.) We spent the weekend there and I would seriously consider moving back to the area someday.

At what point does championing the rights of the homeless and panhandlers in San Francisco start to have a detremental effect on things? Not only on society as a whole, but on the individuals themselves. Somehow I doubt that teenage runaways are really better off in the long-term when given that much rope to hang themselves. Is there some way to protect and aid those that really need the help, while keeping kids who still young and healthy enough to have opportunities in life off the streets? If you make it easy for teenages to be homeless and fed in a city, then a ridiculous number of kids will do it. And my personal experiences and politics inform me enough to know that yes, lots of kids will develop drug problems when given the chance to, and yes, those are actual problems (because certain drugs are absurdly addicting). There is “experimenting” and then there is getting yourself really messed up. If you are on the streets you are not going to be able to know when that line is being crossed. Not that this is all about drugs, either. My tendencies toward wanting a more socialized society still leave me thinking that able people should someone contribute back to the best of their abilities, and that no one is owed anything in life. Social welfare is a right that we have to collectively earn — it is something we strive for and can be proud of.

Any bets on which paper and/or Congressperson will be the first to call for impeachment? Between the unwinnable war/Cindy Sheehan, the Plame/Rove scandal, rising gas/housing prices, Guantanamo/Abu Ghraib, and WMD/Downing St., it can’t be long before some people start finding a political advantage in going on the offensive against the adminstration. Republicans are already saying that the war is hurting their re-election chances — and we all know how that can tear a party apart. How quickly will it snowball from there?

Simple command-line search is reaching its peak. The model of “type in a few words and get the best result back,” is almost at its limit. The new paradigms will either be adaptive (personalized to your behavior) or reactive (iteratively refining along multiple axes). Computer and algorithmic search will begin to look more like human aided search.

A9 just launched maps.a9.com — particularly nice in that it incorporates the BlockView photos. I will see if I can get a developer writeup of it on the A9 Developer Blog (which is not running that fast right now, I apologize). Also, OpenSearch 1.1 is in the pipeline — it tighens up a few loose ends and adds some new functionality.

Money ultimately corrupts any potentially cordial professional relationship between buyer and seller. Good luck ever going beyond mere civility with someone you are buying a service from (such as your landlord). Where are the people that would rather be decent than make an extra dollar (or keep the extra dollar in their pocket)? People in my generation have a nostalgia for a time we never knew (the 50′s, for example), in which we think “those were the good old days, before corruption, capitalism, and greed got the best of everybody.” It’s false, right?

On the topic of nostaliga, I feel it for NYC all the time. And on occasion, for Saturday morning cartoon theme songs and these glow-in-the-dark stick-on snowflakes that we put on our kitchen window at Christmas time. And for Calvin and Hobbes. Other than that, not so much.

Oh, except for certain sounds, shades, and patterns that I associate with the mid-70′s. Those are deeply embedded within me and will probably only come out on the therapist’s couch.

See, not quite dead yet.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 18th, 2005 by DeWitt Clinton and is filed under meta. You can bookmark this post at delicious. You can digg this post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.