Month: April 2008 Page 2 of 3

I can’t remember how I ever came across The QC Report but I’ve been reading this blog off and on for awhile. Although my kids are grown now, there’s a lot of stuff here that I can relate to. It’s written by Quinn Cummings, who first came to the world’s attention as Marsha Mason’s little girl in the movie version of The Goodbye Girl.

Cummings is not in the movie business anymore. She’s the inventor of the HipHugger, a handy sling for carrying babies around and is now the president of the company she founded.

So that’s the backstory — child actor, middling career, gives it up, has a kid, forms a company, starts a blog, etc. While all that is interesting, I wouldn’t keep reading her stuff if it wasn’t good writing. And it turns out that Ms Cummings is a heck of a writer.

In this post, called Shouting Across the Divide, she starts off with her breezy, conversational style, which is all about the trials and tribulations of a modern, 30-something Mom and her friends. In this case, it’s all about the fun finding a parking space at the daughter’s ballet lesson.

For five minutes at the top of every hour there is a frantic movement of women hustling their leotarded girls out of classes and into cars, using their stained Starbucks napkins as semaphore flags to indicate that they will be more than happy to surrender their parking space as soon as they find their sunglasses, adjust their seat belt and pop in a DVD for the kids. Otherwise, we all drive up to the front door, eject a child, and wander off into the neighborhood to trawl for a parking space. Sometimes after fifty futile minutes spent driving around the block we just drive back to the front entrance and pick the kid up. I don’t understand why more mothers aren’t diagnosed with vehicular bedsores.

But soon the tone changes and this light account of a dance lesson becomes an exploration of the mystery of the Mother/child bond.

Every time we let our children walk away from us, we’re practicing for the time they do it for keeps. And every time we let them go out into the world, even for a short time, some part of our brain thinks “No! Not yet! There’s no way she knows enough. I know for certain I haven’t taught him enough. Did I teach her the eyeball-gouging trick if someone tries to kidnap her? Did I get him to tolerate citrus fruit enough so he won’t die of scurvy? Did I impress upon them how unspeakably fragile I feel when I think about them doing something self-destructive? Does she know how I have never loved anyone on earth the way that I love her? Come back. Come back.”

But the thoughts flash by in less than a millisecond and all our brain registers is “Remind him that his book report is in the outer pocket of his backpack.”

As I mentioned at the beginning, I’m not sure how I stumbled across The QC Report. That’s one of the delights of the Internet – you never know what you’ll find when you click on the next link. I like the blog and I like the backstory. I’ll keep reading and now maybe you will too.

Link

Technorati Tags:
Writing, Quinn Cummings, The QC Report

I admit that a lot of things about the online world are a bit hectic – maybe even chaotic. The more involved you get, the more you can get swept up by hype – Do this! Do that! Look at this!

Since I am easily distracted, I can have trouble getting my work done when there are a lot of other things going on. And as the web has grown to include so much more than just words on a screen, like music and video, the distraction factor has grown considerably.

So I’d like to step back, take a deep breath and tell you about a site that I visit often — especially when things are getting a little hectic.

It’s called Interesting Thing of the Day.

Almost every day (usually about 3 times a week, actually) Joe Kissell (author of Take Control of Mac OSX Backups – one of my favourites) or his partner Morgen Jahnke, (the well-known introvert) offers up a well-researched essay on something interesting. They’re always well written, usually thought-provoking and always…well…interesting.

Like this one, for example. Although Silent Retreats: a different way of listening first appeared on July 4, 2004, it’s still as refreshing to read and ponder today as it was then.

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, one of the main characters is an alien named Ford Prefect from a planet near Betelgeuse. Although he looks, talks, and acts more or less human, there are many things about earthlings that puzzle him, such as the fact that they seem to talk all the time—even if only to repeat the obvious. Over the course of several months, he comes up with a number of theories for this behavior, one of which I found particularly insightful: “If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working” (p. 49). I’ve frequently noticed, on the one hand, that many people like to surround themselves with sound all the time (making their own if all else fails); and on the other hand, that contemplation is a foreign and uncomfortable concept to most of us. An increasingly popular way of overcoming the sound habit, at least briefly, is to go on a silent retreat.

How’s that for an opening paragraph? I like the way it leads into the subject of the day, which is a bit about the history and the benefits of not talking.

The topics presented can be almost anything. Just recently, they’ve had a few stories with Canadian content, featuring the Alberta Tar Sands, Saturna Island here in BC and the Athabasca Sand Dunes in Saskatchewan.

They site doesn’t have flashy videos, but they do have an audio option, so you can have the Interesting Thing of the Day read to you, if you prefer that. I recommend signing up for the RSS feed, so you can enjoy them whenever they’re released.

I like the site and the stories and I admire the work that Joe and Morgen put into it. You can find out more about some of their other work right on the site. Be sure to check out the FAQs for a chuckle and lots more info about the blog.

This is an intriguing site, featuring hi-def views of San Francisco’s financial district, Fisherman’s Wharf, Telegraph Hill, Russian Hill and Nob Hill San Francisco as viewed from across the bay in Sausalito.

I’ve linked to the page that gives you the timelapse series from yesterday (it’s a large file, so it might take awhile to load) but you can also choose from other views once you’re there.

I love the way you see the tide come in and out and the fog rolling in near the end of the day is spectacular.

Link:

I’ve been a paid subscriber to Salon for many years. And all in all, I figure it was worth it. When they launched Salon Premium in 2001 to stave off bankruptcy, they were looking for supporters and I was happy to oblige. But over the past year or two, I’ve found that I’m not reading the site regularly and so paying the $30 yearly fee for Premium access just started to seem like an expense I could do without.

So when Salon recently sent me a reminder that my subscription was about to expire, I decided not to renew. At the bottom of their note to me, they have this line:

If you don’t plan to renew, we’re very interested in understanding why. Please take a minute to drop us a line — we take your feedback seriously:

Best regards,

Sam Porter

Salon Premium

So, since they asked, I sent them this note.

Hi — I’ve been a subscriber for many years, but I’m not going to
renew this year. I get my information from all over the web. I have
hundreds of RSS feeds in my newsreader and there is rarely enough time
to go through them all. While I have enjoyed Salon and appreciate the
good stuff it offers, it’s just not worth it to me to continue paying
for something I’m not using any more.

Unfortunately, they don’t seem to take the feedback they get quite as seriously as they claim. Because the emails have kept on coming, each one warning me that I’m about to lose out and also inviting me to tell them why I’ve decided not to renew because, after all “we take your feedback seriously.”

But here’s what’s really interesting…and something I hadn’t remembered until today.

One year ago, I went through the same process. Here’s what I sent to them back in March, 2007:

Hi there — I’ve been a Salon subscriber for a number of years but I’ve decided not to renew this year.

I work in the information business as a communications consultant and I spend most of my time online. To be honest, I go through so much information on a regular basis that I just don’t make much use of my Salon subscription. In the past, I’ve paid for it because I really support the kind of quality work you do.

But this past year has been a tough one for me and my business. I’ve relocated across Canada and the costs of setting up a new location, and making new connections in a different city, mean that I need to reduce expenses wherever possible.

I currently have over 800 feeds in my RSS newsreader, as well as more than 50 podcasts that I listen to regularly. In a world of information, I simply don’t “need” to pay for your content.

If things improve, I may re-subscribe, but for now, I’ll get my news (even if not your unique vision) elsewhere.

I’ve checked my records, but I can’t find any record of my having paid for my Premium subscription last year. But it appears that they didn’t cut me off, as they were warning me they would.

So, we’ll see whether my subscription finally does get cut off this year.

But there’s a lesson to be learned here for companies. If you tell people you’re listening to them and you put it in writing, then you should make sure that your systems are actually set up to receive comments and react to them. It appears that Salon hasn’t really paid much attention to what I’ve been telling them for over a year now and if I were once inclined to support them, I’m less inclined to do so now.

While I’m sitting here hoping for some kind of divine revelation about the meaning of life, I came across this post from our good friend Lee Hopkins, in the “Adelaide Hills” of Australia. He posted this to his blog and I can’t resist passing it along, just in case you don’t read him regularly.

As someone who has been known to suffer technology envy on occasion, I certainly can identify with this:

Three naked women were sitting in a sauna, two were in their mid-twenties, one was in her forties.

Suddenly there was a beeping sound. One young woman pressed her forearm and the beep stopped.

The others looked at her questioningly.

“That was my pager” she said. “I have a microchip under the skin of my arm”

A few minutes later a phone rang.

The second young woman lifted her palm to her ear. When she finished she explained, “That was my mobile phone. I have a microchip in my hand.”

The older woman felt very low-tech, but not to be outdone she decided she had to do something equally as impressive.

She stepped out of the sauna and went to the bathroom.

She returned with a piece of toilet paper hanging from her derriere.

The others quite naturally raised their eyebrows and stared at her.

“Well, will you look at that!” the older woman exclaimed. “I’m getting a fax!”

Via Link

A (virtual) friend, Darren Barefoot sent out a call to the blogosphere to help send his wife, Julie Szabo, to the Olympics, thanks to the power of SEO (search engine optimization.)

A couple of years ago my wife Julie started a figure skating blog. She’s got a particular purpose in mind for this project: she wants to get media accreditation for the skating events at the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver.

One way to do this is to write the most popular figure skating blog in the world, according to Google. She currently sits in the #2 spot.

The goal is to get her up to the top spot, and I need your help. If you’re so inclined, please link to Julie’s blog with the phrase ‘figure skating blog‘. Collectively, we ought to be able to boost her up to the top spot, eh?

Darren and Julie have just moved to Victoria after spending a year living in Malta and Morocco.
So, to help the cause, I’m going to send you to her figure skating blog, Boot and Blade, where she’s got a post called “Eight of the Worst Falls in Figure Skating.“

It’s sort of a “reality TV” meets “America’s funniest home videos” sort of thing.

One caution though – not for the squeamish!

Here’s the link to Julie’s blog.

Technorati Tags:
Figure, Skating, Blog, Julie Szabo

OK campers, since the weekend is upon us (and especially for those who aren’t interested in the Final Four) let’s consider the question:

Is Copyright Cool?

Good question Dave, I can hear you thinking, nodding your head in approval.

So what’s the answer?

Not to be coy, but the truth is — I’m not sure.

I think it is, but I’m not sure it’s crossed over to the mainstream yet. But it is getting closer to doing just that.

If you’ve got the time, I’m going to point you to a couple of videos of speeches by two very smart people – one American and one Canadian – talking about copyright issues in the US and here in Canada.

Larry Lessig

The first is by Larry Lessig, a professor at Stanford, credited with creating the Creative Commons license and a well-known advocate for copyright reform. (Although he’s now turned his attention to corruption in US politics.)

He spoke at the TED conference in Monterey, California last March. Lessig is a terrific presenter, as this blurb from the TED website attests:

Larry Lessig gets TEDsters to their feet, whooping and whistling, following this elegant presentation of three stories and an argument. The Net’s most adored lawyer brings together John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights, and the “ASCAP cartel” to build a case for creative freedom. He pins down the key shortcomings of our dusty, pre-digital intellectual property laws, and reveals how bad laws beget bad code. Then, in an homage to cutting-edge artistry, he throws in some of the most hilarious remixes you’ve ever seen.

Watch the video here.

Michael Geist

The second video is by Michael Geist of the University of Ottawa, who is probably Canada’s best-known advocate of copyright reform. He’s been waging a very public campaign to highlight some of the threats posed by possible changes to Canada’s existing copyright rules.

He spoke at Toronto’s Osgood Hall law school and they’ve posted a video of his presentation, which you can watch here.

While these two perspectives on copyright law may not answer the question of whether the issue is cool or not, they are definitely worth watching. They might even inspire you to consider getting more involved with the issue – or at least consider the implications of some of your own habits or those around you.

The issue of intellectual property rights, and their distribution and usage is critical to the future of our “information age.” We should all be aware of what’s going on so we can decide whether what is happening is correct.

These two guys are worth listening to.