This week, on “Five Minutes With Harold Feld,” I cover handset exclusivity, my iPhone envy, and the inevitable “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” joke. Also, I want to point out the “schlumpy” is a fine look, thank you!
Stay tuned . . . .
Tales of the Sausage Factory:
My Thoughts Exactly:
Trying out the “Good Reads” site. Here's a review I wrote t'other day.
Gerald’s Party by Robert Coover
My review
rating: 2 of 5 stars
Coover takes a minimally interesting premise–a cocktail party right out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting as the setting for a send up of the classic Agatha Christie “closed room” mystery–and beats it to death. I guess the meta-joke is that just as the hellish party is inescapable and goes on forever, the book is inescapable and goes on forever. Fortunately, however, the book is escapable– you have only to stop reading.
Certainly Coover deserves some style points for verbal skill and unrestrained imagination. The book is finely crafted, in the sense of the interlocking stories & themes, the literary allusions & wordplay, etc, etc.
But it’s pointless and ugly. Why would I want to read a thirty page “joke” about a stopped toilet and skating over a vomit-covered floor? How much necrophilia is “enough” for one avante-guard novel?
It might have been an interesting and perhaps disturbing story at 50 pages. But at more than 300 pages, it’s just a bore.
View all my reviews.
My Thoughts Exactly:
Firefighter Porn
The work of the fire teams on the scene is very damn impressive. Especially gratifying to see how fast Tower 1 gets deployed (my truck is also called Tower 1). But it’s the work of the dispatchers that makes this video so extraordinary. Holy cow, that is some phenomenal work under pressure. Scary video, happy ending. About 7 minutes long.
Inventing the Future:
QRLs are not SLurls … but they play that role on the 'Net.
We’ve created ordinary http URLs that teleport you to places in-world in Qwaq Forums, Being programmers, we could not resist the pun of calling them QRLs. The most common uses today are:
- meet me here – telling someone where to meet, in IM, email, or calendar invite
- I was here – recording a history of where you were in a bookmark or some sort of audit trail
- go there – even if working asynchronously, you can tell people where to go to explore more from a Web page, blog, or wiki
Most programs will recognize http://… and turn it into something clickable that starts your Web browser if it is not already started. Our QRLs produce a page that displays instructions, which is nice if you don’t yet have the Forums client installed. But if it is installed, the page can automatically launch the client and place you directly at the designated location.
My Thoughts Exactly:
When I talk about the WASP threat, I'm not talking about White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. I'm talking about wasps!
First we find out the government is training wasps for ‘the war on terror’. Now we find out about radioactive wasps at “defunct” plutonium-enrichment facilities. (‘Defunct’. As if.)
How long before TERRORISTS hijack and marry these two technologies and we find ourselves ATTACKED by swarms of GIANT RADIOACTIVE WASPS possibly with toxin that predisposes us to CONVERT TO ISLAM???
I can see only one solution: put all wasps under administrative control of the Department of Homeland Security, and instruct the NSA to monitor all of their communications.
(P.S. Attentive long-time readers of Wetmachine may wonder why I, and not Gary Gray, posted this story. I can only respond that I don’t know. However, I did suggest it to him, and he did not pick it up. Does that strike anybody else as suspicious?)
Tales of the Sausage Factory:
The Last Day of (Full Power) Analog TV And Our Post Transition To Do List.
Well, here it is at last. Finally, more than 13 years after the 1996 Act created a scheme to transfer us to digital television by giving all existing broadcasters $70 billion (at the time) in new spectrum rights, the great day of reckoning is here.
Give the FCC and NTIA, especially mid-season replacements Acting FCC Chairman Michael Copps and Acting NTIA Administrator Anna Gomez, massive applause for seeing this through to the end. You guys rock! As one of your 300 Million taxpayer bosses, I’m telling you to sleep in tomorrow. Oh yeah, it’s Saturday.
Once you’re back on Monday, however, and assuming the world as we know it did not end, we have a few items left on the clean up list: Wireless Microphones, LPTV, the UHF Discount for Ownership, and Public Interest Obligations.
This post is dedicated to the memory of Libby Beaty, Executive Director of NATOA. A tireless advocate for the importance of local government and its power to protect consumer interests. Today, Libby tragically lost her battle with lung cancer. She will be sorely missed.
More below . . . .
Tales of the Sausage Factory:
My Weekly Five Minutes of Fame — I Explain the National Broadband Plan In Five Minutes.
We are starting a new feature at Public Knowledge called “Five Minutes With Harold Feld,” wherein I will take insanely boring complicated wonkery and make it mildly less boring. This week, I explain the National Broadband Plan and the comments PK filed last night.
Stay tuned . . . .
Tales of the Sausage Factory:
D.C. Circuit Affirms Inside Wiring In Fairly Broad Opinion. Terrestrial Loophole Next? And What About Time Warner's TV Anywhere?
While folks in the suburbs sometimes forget this, a lot of people live in what we call “multiple dwelling units” (MDUs) — which is a fancy way to say things like apartment buildings and condos. One of the problems for people trying to switch from one provider to another for cable (for example, from Comcast to RCN) is that a cable operator may already have an exclusive deal with the landlord to provide cable services to everyone in the building. Competitors asked the FCC to ban such practices. In 2003, under Michael Powell, the FCC refused to ban such exclusive deals because “regulation is always bad, mmmmkayyy.” In 2007, as part of Kevin Martin’s attack on cable market power evil vendetta against the helpless cable industry, the FCC reversed this determination and found that under Section 628(b) of the Communications Act (47 U.S.C. 548) it needed to prohibit cable operators from entering into or enforcing such exclusive deals because Verizon can’t sell FIOS w/out being able to offer triple play. Predictably, this was widely denounced by the cable companies and their cheerleaders as not merely unwarranted, but a violation of law and certain to be overturned on appeal.
Turns out, not so much. In fact, in a rather broadly worded opinion, the D.C. Circuit affirmed the 2007 Order. Indeed, the language affirming the decision opens the door to the FCC tackling other cable issues, such as the terrestrial loophole (which Verizon wasted no time in pointing out to the FCC). Mind you, it remains unclear at this point whether the new FCC will have any interest in cable market power or not.
Still, there are a number of important aspects about this case, especially its implications for the FCC to regulate Time Warner’s TV Anywhere strategy, aka “how cable operators plan to preserve their existing business model and fight off Netflix.” I discuss this in more detail below . . . .
Inventing the Future:
Places, Everyone!
Related to the URL addressing concepts discussed here, there is the question of how to denote places within a 3D world. I really like having names for these.
A typically engineering way to map out locations in a model is with coordinates. There are a couple of problems with this.
Numbers are generally pretty meaningless to users. I hate dealing in part numbers or account numbers rather than product and account names. Numbers just aren’t as mnemonic as a single name, and in 3D it takes a lot of numbers (six numbers of several decimal positions each) to describe the position and orientation you need to be in so that you can see something of interest.
Worse, a position and orientation are only interesting because of the things you can see and do there. If those things change (e.g., move, rotate, or change size), the coordinates for you to work with them are then different. We’re also interested in doing things in cooperation with other people. While it is true that unlike the physical world, several avatars can be in the same place, it is often cognitively and socially nicer to position a group of people around some item of interest rather than stacked up on top of each other.
Our client architect Brad Fowlow has led the development of several ways to address this by interactively or automatically creating a rather sophisticated set of named places from within-world.
My Thoughts Exactly:
A glimpse of The Eagle in flight
In my little illustrated novella The Pains, there’s an enigmatic character named Horatio Norton, better known by his nickname The Eagle. This character is partially based on the late Chris McKinstry, creator of the Mindpixel project. I never met McKinstry in meatspace, but had interacted with him a little on Kuro5hin, where we both used to hang out. He was just another bozo on the bus then, albeit one with a bit of a notorious history stemming from things he had done when delusional or upset–he had a history of mental illness.
In the time since he took his own life several years ago, his legend has grown somewhat. He’s been the subject of a story on PBS, there was a big article about him in Wired, and now some students at the Documentary Institute at the University of Florida are making a documentary film about him. It’s called The Man Behind the Curtain. The trailer is below.
My character The Eagle is not a pure cipher for McKinstry. The Eagle was also partially inspired by Christopher John Boyce (aka “The Falcon”), and of course I hope that I added some unique personality of his own. He isn’t a mere pastiche of these two fascinating, complicated men.
However, when I saw clips of the actual McKinstry talking, when I saw his actual notebooks, I was astounded to see how much the real McKinstry resembled the fictional character he had inspired. Have a look:
The Man Behind the Curtain – Preview from michael nichols on Vimeo.
