Eli sez, “This Czech designed pinhole camera is made from carefully cut out and constructed paper (needs to be stiff and lightproof). The name comes from the Czech word for pinhole (dirka) and a pun on Nikon. Uses 35mm film. Remember that you’ll want a long exposure for a pinhole camera.”
From [Boing Boing]
Foldable 35mm Cameras
January 8, 2004 by
Creative Commons
December 30, 2003 by
If you are a creative individual (and most everyone bothering to read this blog is) then you need to know about the Creative Commons.The Creative Commons is the creation of Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford School of Law, Harvard Law School, and many others, that allows people to license their works in ways that actually make sense. You can create something, be it text, music, video, images, etc. and then pick out a Creative Commons license that makes sense for you; options for licensing include granting all rights, granting all non-commercial rights, or combinations thereof. It’s sort of the creative equivalent of the GPL/Open Source thing software developers have been using for their projects, and I think much good can come of it. Check it out.
I’m Married!
October 30, 2003 by
Well, it’s finally done! Actually, it was done on Sunday, and I’m just getting around to writing about it, but that’s a good thing, believe me!
The wedding was a huge success… nearly everyone we’ve spoken with has agreed that the ceremony was the right length, the food was delicious, and the cake was one of the best they’d ever had. There were a few snafus, which is to be expected, I suppose. We had some family issues that were hard to deal with… a crisis here, some hurt feelings there… none of which were intentional, but I suppose that is the way it goes. You can please some of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people… I’d say overall we were pretty successful.
I slept the best I’d slept in months on Sunday night… the relief of having all the wedding planning pressure over was incredible. Then we took a few days off to just be with each other, which was very nice. We’re going to shoot for our honeymoon over the holidays… it’s hard to get away when you’re both starting small businesses! But we’re both as happy as you can be!!
One Day!
October 25, 2003 by
24 Hours from now, I will be in the middle of my wedding ceremony. And yes, I am nervous as hell! However, I’m not nervous about the actual marriage part. I’m worried that I’ll be late to the boat (we’re getting married on a yacht on Lake Michigan) or that the cake will be messed up, or that the flowers won’t be there… and about standing up in front of 120 people!
It’s been so much work planning this wedding, and dealing with all the problems that crop up along the way. My friend Kate said, “A wedding is a terrible way to start a marriage” and now I know what he meant! If we could go back to March when all this was set in motion, I think now we’d elope.
But I guess tomorrow it will all be over, and that will be a big relief, and I will be very happy!!
Insert Bad Shaving Pussy Pun Here
July 7, 2003 by
Moving in with your partner often means duplicate things: CDs, books, kitchen gadgets, and even living creatures. But unlike having an extra toaster, you can’t just give your extra feline friends to the Salvation Army. And so it came to pass that Kristyna and I shared our living space with not one, not two, but four, count ’em, four long haired cats.
Not only do we have four long haired cats, combined, they pretty much cover the entire visible spectrum of fur. Alex is black and white, Simon is “shaded” silver. Stella is a tortie, and Emily is a calico. Black, white, grey, silver, brown, red. There is no surface in our house nor clothes in our closet which do not bear visible cat hair of some kind.
Last summer, we had heard of a technique which could not only help eliminated stray hair, but also those hairballs that are so pleasant to step on in the wee hours of the morning on a bathroom run. As a bonus, it would also help the cats cool down. That technique is the “Lion Cut”. Now, if you haven’t seen a formerly long haired cat who has been “Lion Cut” let me assure you, it will inspire fits of laughter. The poor cat is shaved pretty much to the skin all over, but with some hair left on the lower portion of their legs, a tuft of hair at the end of their tail, and of course, their “mane”. Needless to say, three of our cats hated their new do, and one (Stella) loved it.
Well, humor aside, the other benefits of a shaved pussy quickly became apparent; we did indeed see fewer hairballs, and magically, only some of the surfaces in our house still showed cat hair! Clearly, the Lion Cut was worth the $50 per cat we had spent.
Summer past and winter came. We let the cats keep their natural hair during the colder months, but then spring came, and in Chicago, lasted about 3 days before we plunged into summer heat. It was time: shave the cats.
This time, however, the economy wasn’t do well (it still isn’t, as the time of this writing, may your reading find you in better times). So money was tight, and the cats needed to be shaved again… so I announced to my fiancé “You know, $50 per cat seems awfully steep. How hard can it be to shave a cat? I have some good clippers, and it would save us a ton of money.”
My fiancé looked up from her computer and said, “What?”
“I’m going to shave the cats myself. It’ll save us $200!”
She responded with hysterical laughter.
A little miffed by her lack of confidence, to the bathroom I went and set up my little cutting station in the bathtub. I had my clippers, my kitty shampoo, my towels, etc. all ready to go. Now for the cats.
The first cat was our oldest, and our grumpiest. Surely, I thought, she will be the worst. So I started with her. She growled and whined, but overall, was a pretty copacetic kitty. I was able to do her underside, and even the dreaded “potty cut” without too much trouble. When I was done, I washed her, dried her, and sent her on her way.
Thinking the worst was over, I grabbed my little angel, Alex. Okay, he’s hardly a little angel. He’s a co-dependent, jealous beast who pees on my bed if I come home smelling of another cat. But he also likes to play in the shower when I get out and takes a bath okay, so I figured he would be easier.
Ha.
I got Alex when he was a kitten and, because I don’t believe in it, I had never had him de-clawed. Normally, I put Soft Paws on him, but he had a few missing as I started to shave. Big mistake. It didn’t take long for me to realize that Alex was going to be trouble. It might have been the growling, but I suspect it was the blood coming from my arms that really clued me in. I tried to reason with him, “It will be over sooner if you cooperate. It doesn’t hurt, see? When we’re done, I’ll give you a treat.” But Alex was having none of it. What took me half an hour with Emily was taking well over an hour with Alex. But I persevered. Soon he was shaved and we moved on to the bath. By this time, I was about as wet as he was, drenched in sweat from all the kitty wrasslin’
I though the worst was surely over. After all, Simon and Stella were both much smaller than Emily or Alex, and they were pretty good natured cats. I think the heat was making me delirious, because it slipped my mind that one of our nicknames for Stella is “Squirmy Girl”.
Perhaps you’ve heard of Hell Hounds? The beasts that guard the gates of Hades? Well, let me introduce you to one in disguise, she takes the earthly form of a cat, and her name is Stella.
She growled, she hissed, and worse, she bit. And she did this all while writhing and squirming. Greased pigs are easier to hold than this cat. She would alternate between trying to bite me and bite the clippers. After an *hour* of wrestling and clipping, wrestling and clipping, I had her one-half shaved… trying to hold her was like trying to hold a ten-pound water snake… she’s lucky I didn’t have a bench clamp handy. And I was extremely lucky that she had been de-clawed. Had she not come into my life minus claws, she would have surely eviscerated me there in the bathroom.
I was more determined than ever to complete the job. I was soaking in sweat in our hot little bathroom, I was bleeding from many scratches, hair was *everywhere* and she was only 3/4 shaved. She was howling, twisting, and snapping. Beware the Jabberwocky? With jaws that bite and claws that catch? Fuck the Jabberwocky. Beware Stella. It was a standoff. She finally escaped my grasp and stood at the door, staring me down with the fires of hell illuminating her eyes.
Well, she’s still only 3/4 shaved. I just had to give up. She was the last. Our youngest kitty escaped the ordeal altogether. I had not the strength to go on. And I still had to give her a bath.
Licking my wounds, I managed to give her a bath. Or at least to wet her hair down and get rid of the clippings. When she was done, she shot out the door and I collapsed on the bathroom floor.
Never, never, never ever again will I bitch about paying someone else to groom the cats.
AT&T Broadband: Shareholders, listen up.
August 4, 2002 by
Listen up AT&T and AT&T shareholders. Apparently, this is AT&T’s idea of customer service. Well, this is one AT&T customer who will be leaving AT&T as soon as I have a choice: bring on the deregulation and competition is what I say.
I have cable television, but it is mostly a bonus; what I really depend on is my cable modem, because I make my living developing for the web. Yes, I have an office, but projects sometimes require extra work at home. Okay, they almost always require extra work at home.
I am also moving at the end of August. This is an important bit of information, because…
In my typical, over-prepared manner, I called AT&T Broadband last week, to schedule the transfer of service for my move on 8/31. No problems there, I got an appointment right away and all was well with the world.
Then, on Monday (8/12) I returned home to find I had no connectivity, and my cable box was displaying an “E5” error. Odd. So I called AT&T Customer Service, and after some file checking, the rep discovered that they had messed up the transfer of service date, and I’d been cut off about three weeks too early. Of course, since it was too late in the day to send someone out then, I would have to wait until morning for my service to be turned back on. I grumbled a bit, but the rep assured me that come Tuesday morning, at 8am, my service would be restored.
Tuesday came… and Tuesday went. When I got home from work on Tuesday (8/13) my service was still not restored. I called AT&T once again, and this time the Customer Support rep informed me that the window for service was 8am- 8pm, and since it was only 6pm, my service would be restored within the next two hours. I was skeptical, but I relented. 8pm came and went. My service was not restored.
I called the Customer Support line once more, again, since it was now past 8pm, I was told, “There is nothing we can do until tomorrow.” The Customer Service people were friendly and professional, although not terribly helpful. But they assured me in their calm soothing voices that they would make a note in my file, and that Wednesday, definitely Wednesday, my service would be restored properly. Sometime between the hours of 8am and 8pm.
Let me digress for a moment to explain here, that when they disconnected me, they did not need access to my house. They disconnected me at the “outside drop” according to one rep, so fortunately, I did not have to miss work.
However, another rep informed me that there was a note on the work order for Tuesday. Apparently, when the line tech came out to restore my service, they found that the “outside drop” was located in a locked box. A locked box owned by AT&T mind you, but apparently a locked box the line tech didn’t have a key for. Now common sense and good CRM would dictate that the line tech would return to the CO, find said key, and then correct the problem, making the customer happy and fixing what was a company error in the first place. Not AT&T. Their CRM manual apparently reads “If the Outside Drop Box should be locked and require a key, fuck that customer and move on to the next.”
So now it was (is) Wednesday. I arrived home from work at 5:45pm, and sure enough, I still had no service. I knew this was not a good sign, so I immediately called Customer Support. They were oh-so polite, and oh-so professional, and oh-so completely unable to do a single damn productive thing. The work order ticket was still open they said. The service should be restored by 8pm.
“Can you have the local service center contact me to verify that?” I naively asked.
“Um, no. Well, I can send them an e-mail and tell them to call you, but I don’t even have a contact number for the local dispatch,” replied the hog-tied Customer Service rep.
Yes, page two from the AT&T CRM manual apparently reads, “Do not, at any time, empower employees to properly escalate problems, or even give them access to simple internal company contact information.” It would have been easier to find Osama Bin Laden than to find the goddamn local tech service dispatch.
Between the hours of 6pm and 8pm, on Wednesday, August 14, 2002, I called AT&T Customer Service every 15minutes on the dot. I experienced no long hold times. The customer service representatives were all polite, sympathetic, and professional. They all took my information, yet again. They all sent an “electronic notice to local dispatch” telling them to call me, ASAP. They were all completely an utterly powerless to offer me any real solution to my problem, or actually get my service restored.
So 8pm came and went another day. And as of now, I have been without cable television and cable modem service for more than 48+ hours, all from a mistake the company made in the first place. I guess I just don’t “get it” because I would have expected AT&T to make fixing my outage a priority, since they caused it in the first place! But apparently, AT&T doesn’t give a rat’s ass about me, my (large) payments to them monthly, or retaining customers who always pay their bills on time.
Well, I can only say this to AT&T: competition is coming. And when it does, I will be the first to jump ship. I will be a loud, loud voice, advocating anyone over AT&T to my friends, family, business colleagues, and anyone else within earshot on the train to work. And I’m gonna post this to my weblog. Just not from the comfort of my own home.
An AT&T Update
When I awoke this morning (8/15) of course my service was still not restored. I waited until around 9am (I am a dreamer, aren’t I?) and then placed a call to AT&T. The phone representative was once again polite and utterly useless. They assured me that the work order was in, and just to make certain, they also promised to have a supervisor call me back at my cell number. They lied.
AT&T Update Two
Having not been contacted by anyone by noon, I decided to call again. I don’t think the front line phone reps at AT&T could be any nicer, and how they manage to pull that off when they are, apparently, completely and utterly unable to actually help customers in any real way at all. I was once again escalated to a supervisor, Christy, who assured me that she would call the local dispatch herself, and call me back personally, at my cell number in the hour. Let’s not all hold our breath…
AT&T Update Three
Well, true to her word, Christy returned my call, and informed me that she had spoken directly with the local dispatch, and that my service would be restored today. The proof is in the pudding. Will I post my next update from home? Again, I’d like to say yes, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
AT&T Update Four
Well, Christy may have called dispatch, but apparently, dispatch doesn’t like her anymore than they like me. I arrived home at 5:30pm, still no connectivity. So I dialed up AT&T yet again (I have the number memorized now). Just to give you an example of how much I have been on the phone with AT&T in the past four days, the operator knew who I was. Yes, the operator at the AT&T customer service call center remembered me.
Again, she assured me it was no problem. I was in the system. By 8pm I would be channel surfing and web surfing. Ha! Six thirty rolled around. No service. I’m nervous. I call back, and this time I speak with Jason. Jason is a very helpful guy, and he escalates me to another supervisor, Mia. He assures me they will call back as soon as they have once again spoken to dispatch. I wait.
No call.
It’s now 7:30pm and we are once again perilously close to the dreaded 8pm daily cut-off. So I call back. The operator puts me back in touch with Jason, who indicates that Mia is on the phone with the local dispatch right now. Holy smokes! Could the end be in sight? There is a light at the end of the tunnel… and it’s the AT&T train, barreling down on your ass!
Jason comes back on the phone, and, guess what? AT&T will not be able to make it out to my place tonight! You have got to be kidding me. I explain to Jason, amazingly without using any profanity, that 1) this is AT&T’s mistake for disconnecting me erroneously on 8/12. 2) They missed their appointment to restore my service on Tuesday, 8/13. 3) They missed their second appointment to fix the problem on Wednesday, 8/14. And finally, that it was now Thursday, 8/15, and he was informing me that they were about to miss their third appointment in a row.
Needless to say, I was very, very angry. I asked Jason what he thought AT&T should do to compensate me for my lost time and the complete nightmare this has been in dealing with them. I’d been told before by reps that it’s AT&T’s policy to give a $20 credit for missed appointments. You know what, and listen closely AT&T: twenty dollars doesn’t mean shit to me. What means something are the four evenings I have now lost while being on the phone with AT&T all night. Four evenings I could have been productive on some of the projects I’m working on. Four evenings I could have spend with loved ones. So here’s the deal, AT&T, roll the twenty into a real tight little roll, and shove it up your corporate ass!
I explained to Jason that my time is very valuable, especially my free time after work. He sympathized and promised 1) that the problem would be solved tomorrow, Friday 8/16, and that 2) he would personally monitor my account, and call me at 10:30am tomorrow to discuss how AT&T might compensate me. Well, once again, I’m being asked to take the word of a company that has outright lied to me on multiple occasions. How they think they are going to compensate me I cannot even begin to imagine.
Now, do you want to hear the ironic part??? So, I have to get on-line to do a little work before I leave town this weekend. I get in my car to drive over to my girlfriend’s house… as I pull onto the expressway, what do I see? You guessed it! An AT&T truck! Well, actually an AT&T mini-van, but one with a ladder and a man at the wheel who looks suspiciously like a line technician.
*sigh*
AT&T Update Five
Friday. 10:45am. Still awaiting Jason’s promised call. Still no service.
AT&T Update Six
Friday. Noon. Still awaiting Jason’s promised call. Still no service. But, on the bright side, I just signed up for Direct TV. I will be cancelling my AT&T cable very shortly.
AT&T Update Seven
Fortunately, I was out of town most of Friday and all day Saturday. That helped me from going insane in dealing with AT&T. However, when I returned on Sunday, my service was still not working. I called, and fortunately, the line people had been to my outside drop and re-connected me; all that was needed now was to reactivate my account. The customer support representative did so in about 10 minutes, and behold: I was once again watching bad television. Not that it mattered, with the Tivo, I really hadn’t missed the television part much, it is the cable modem outage that is really hurting, and get this: continues to hurt! That’s right… I still do not have cable modem service.
The phone rep explains to me that they “only do the tv part” and that I will need to dial a different number for the broadband portion of my fiasco. So I dial, and after the Tier One support person is unable to help me, I am escalated to Tier Two. Doug, the very friendly and helpful Tier Two technician explains to me that, yes, my cable is back on, but unfortunately, because my modem has been off-line so long, it has been de-registered. I about crap my pants on this one… I mean, really. Now I am faced with waiting for them to re-register my cable modem, because it was out for so long, because they erroneously disconnected me in the first place. I’m going mad.
Doug explains that if this were a weekday, he could get on-line to the database people and have me fixed in a jif… maybe a half-hour. But since it is Sunday, the best he can do is send off an e-mail (of course, they can’t even give me a trouble ticket number, because, I have to be in the database for that. Idiots.
Who built this CRM system for AT&T? Anderson Consulting???!) So I am now going to be without cable modem service for one week.
AT&T Update Eight
So, first thing today I call the friendly folks at AT&T Broadband. Since the rep yesterday explained this was an easy fix (just re-adding me to the database so I can once again register my cable modem) I’m in a cheerful mood. I should know better, I really should.
Again, I go through the script with the Tier One support in order to get escalated to Tier Two (this is perhaps the stupidest customer service model I’ve ever encountered). But this time I’m greeted with some shocking news. This time, the Tier Two representative explains that the best she can do is send another e-mail, but that it might take 3-5 business days for them to get around to adding me to the db, because of their backlog. Holy fuck. That’s all I can say. I explain that I’ve already been down a week… and that it was AT&T’s fault in the first place. Well, she says, they can send someone out to my house, since the line technicians can call the database people directly. But that option will probably take a week, and I would have to be home during the appointment.
Ahem. Allow me to reiterate my rant to AT&T here: You mean to tell me that all that needs to happen to fix my problem is to re-enter my account information in a database, and that while a line-technician can call the database people directly and make it a priority, the customer support organization has no way of contacting those same database people in order to get my problem fixed????? Yes. That is how fucked up AT&T is. Is it any wonder we have service at all?
Of course, I’m livid, and so I demand to speak with a supervisor. He confirms, that indeed, AT&T’s organization is fucked up beyond belief, to the point where the customer support people are basically powerless to do anything be send off e-mails asking for these things to be done, but with no power to ensure that they actually get done, or that anyone there gives a rats ass at all.
So here I am, still without cable modem service, which is what I really cared about in the first place, waiting for some random DBA to add my information to the database, and hoping that she or he finds the e-mail that customer support sent him as being compelling enough to bump me up in the queue.
Can you believe this shit? AT&T stockholders, are you listening? I hope you aren’t counting on this company going anywhere. I am canceling my cable television service, I’ve already ordered DirecTV. And the only reason I haven’t dropped the cable modem is that there is no other provider in the area… rest assured, as soon as there is, AT&T will no longer get my business.
The Rest of the Story
Well, AT&Amp;T finally got my cable modem back up and running, and then a mere week later, I moved into my new place. The DSS people were Johnny-on-the-spot when it came to their installation appointment, and I’m now an incredibly happy DirecTV subscriber. The picture quality is astonishing compared to the crap-ass (that is the technical term) image I got from AT&T. I couldn’t be happier.
On the cable modem front, since there is no other provider in my area, I had to go with AT&T for my broadband, even though it caused me great pain. A few days after my modem service was restored at the old place, I got a call from a very apologetic corporate representative. They basically fell over themselves trying to make it up to me, and they got me an early appoinment for the install at my new place.
Now, if you’ve read this far, then this should come as no surprise to you: AT&T missed their installation appointment at my new residence! Yep. Amazing, isn’t it?
However, this time since I was dealing with a corporate rep, they rescheduled right away, came out and got it working in no time. Squeaky wheel, I guess. So I do now have working cable modem broadband access from AT&T. And they credited me for the outages and missed appointments. But I can tell you this, there is such an opportunity for competition in this market it’s scarey. And I’ll be one of the first to jump ship from AT&T as soon as there is a choice.
Bus
December 19, 2001 by
There is no cool factor on the bus.
I live in the city. I work in the city. This means that I have three choices for getting to and fro work each day: drive, train, or bus.
I could drive. I don’t live all that terribly far from work, it’s almost a straight shot by car. When there is no traffic, in fact, it’s about a 10 minute drive. In the morning, however, that stretches to about 35 minutes. And I can’t exactly park at a meter downtown all day, which means that for the privilege of driving my own car to work, I would have to eat $18.50 each day in order to park. Needless to say, I don’t drive to work.
I could take the train. There is an “el” stop very close to my home.
Unfortunately, the stop downtown isn’t so close to my office. The train has the distinct advantage of being fast. There are limited stops, and between stops you aren’t subject to the whims of traffic, making it a most expedient form of transit. The train also has the added bonus of “cool pretend play grown-up” factor. It’s much easier to pretend you’re a hip young urban dweller in a movie on the train. You can pretend there is a camera focused on you as you gaze wistfully out the window, or shyly smile at the cute girl sitting across. So sometimes, almost always after work (because I’m a lazy slug in the morning) I do take the train.
But usually, I’m another slob on the bus. See, the bus stops about half a block from my front door, and I’ve timed it so that if I walk out the door at 8:15, I can catch the bus, and walk into work sometime between 8:50 and 9:10. Yes, there is that much variation. You see, the bus is really no better than your car, in fact it’s far worse.
The bus stops every other damn block to let a bunch of other slobs cram their asses down the isle and into the seats.
The bus gets blocked in traffic by the asshole double parked outside Starbucks who ran in to get his double tall mocha-chino latte skinny fat fuck asshole drink.
The bus can’t run red lights.
The bus is smelly, and gross, and doesn’t even have a stereo like your car.
There is no cool on the bus. When it’s cold and raining (as it was this fine morn) the windows of the bus fog over. So you can’t look wistfully out the windows. Not that it matters, you know there is no film crew filming you looking wistfully out the window of a bus.
It only goes downhill from there. At least with the train, you have your time in the station to adjust to the weather. If it’s cold and rainy or snowy, you get a bit of respite from the elements, and time to acclimate to the new indoor climate. Then, the transition to the warm train isn’t so bad. But when everyone gets on the warm bus, crowded together, they sweat steamy sweat. It condenses on everything, and it makes you feel like you’re in a sauna, which makes you hot, and then you sweat. So there you sit, hot, sweaty, stinky, and you can’t even look out the damn window.
Then the bus lumbers down the road. It stops every 150 feet or so, to let even more people on, so it just gets hotter. And if I don’t give up my seat for the older ladies who invariably get on my bus with a shitload of shopping bags, well, then I feel like a right bastard. So I always seem to find myself standing, swaying to the rhythm of the bus (and it has all the rhythm of an epileptic disco), sweaty and miserable.
And why? All so I can go into work, the last place I really want to be at 9am.
There is no cool factor on the bus.
Addendum – December 20, 2001
I used to live in the Bay Area (San Francisco) and people there are always complaining about the state of the city bus system, MUNI. To hear them tell it, you would think SF was the only major city with a crappy mass transit system.
Well, at least they don’t have to wait for the damn bus in Chicago weather. This morning I went to my local stop at my normal time. There I waited. And waited. And waited. Then, I spotted the dreaded number 56 lurching it’s way down Milwaukee. And what should I spy with my keen eye right behind it? Yes, another #56 bus. And another. There were no fewer than four buses, leapfrogging their way down the street.
sigh
Terrorism and America
September 17, 2001 by
The events of last week here in American left me completely speechless. It has taken me several days to even comprehend what has happened and to begin to come to grips with my feelings. I’ve been very disappointed at the reactions of several Americans, from the cowards who have seen fit to take the law into their own hands and attack innocent Arab Americans, to the intellectual elite, such as Noam Chomsky, who have implied that this attack was somehow justified and deserved because of America’s foreign policy in the Middle East. I’m sickened by both of these reactions, as I am by the greed and indifference of hotel chains and gas station owners who raised their prices, to gouge a wounded and disoriented American public.
These morally repellent individuals will need to live with their own shameful behavior, but to the terrorists who believe that there is righteousness in these actions I offer these words of advice:
Those who would attack America over ideological issues demonstrate a profound lack of understanding of the resolve of the American people and the way American society does (or does not) function. We are a diverse people from many countries, cultures and religions. That diversity was well represented in last week’s attack, in which thousands of Americans needlessly lost their lives. Those who perished were European Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans and Arab Americans. Those who perished were Christian, Jewish, Buddhist , Hindu, and Muslim. Also among the victims were the citizens of England, Germany, Russia, Japan, France, Australia, and over 40 countries who had come to America to work, live, vacation, or conduct business.
America is not a homogenous culture. In fact, we can rarely agree on anything. More often than not we are a dysfunctional family, mixing like oil and water, rather than the great American melting pot. Although our citizens may often isolate themselves into smaller, homogenous communities, there is nothing which forges a bond among family like enduring great tragedy, and this last week has done more to unite the American people, people of all races, creeds and religions than it has to divide us on issues of foreign policy.
As a frequent vocal critic of the policies of the United States government, I cannot imagine, nor ever conceive taking the lives of tens of thousands of innocent people in order to make a political point. The greatest freedom America affords its citizens is the right to disagree with our leaders and to express that dissent. More can be accomplished to win the opinions of the American public with advertising dollars and rhetoric than can ever hope to be achieved with violent out lashes against our citizens.
For all the millions of dollars funneled to terrorist organizations for ideological causes, greater service would be done with the American public by purchasing advertising, lobbying congress, and funding political campaigns. Images on public television of Israeli troops firing on crowds of innocent Palestinians might have changed American minds. Images of Palestinians cheering over the bloodshed of American citizens has damaged the cause of Palestine and Islamic groups more than any single event in human history. The terrorists who committed these dastardly acts were clever in their execution, but unbelievably stupid in the belief that this would alter American policy, or win the American people over to their cause.
By nature I am a pacifist. I have never supported or condoned violent retribution, and in fact, believe that retaliation for the sake of vengeance would be wrong. But the voice of terrorism was heard loudly and clearly last Tuesday. For many years, we have tried to broker peace in the Middle East to no avail. The language of peace seems unknown to these groups, and therefore, I honestly believe it is time for the United States to speak directly with the organizations which would slaughter the innocent, and we should speak the only language they seem to understand.
To the terrorists of the world, and the countries which support them, imagine the internal conflict faced by a peaceful, civil disobedient citizen of the United States such as myself in reaching this conclusion. I would have been one of the first citizens in the United States in the hear your point of view and listen to your arguments. Now, I can no longer hear anything in my ears but the ringing of explosives and the screams of my people.
The Bobby Knight Controversy
September 10, 2000 by
I am a resident of Bloomington Indiana and a former student of Indiana University. As such, I’m disappointed by everyone involved in all of these alleged incidents surrounding Coach Knight.
I’m ashamed that a coach with the experience and track record of Coach Knight can’t own up to his bad temper and seek counseling or help when it is clear to even the most ardent Knight supporter that he has an anger management problem. It saddens me to see him tarnish his legacy at IU with these continued outbursts.
I’m ashamed of the Knight critics who use his every word and gesture as an excuse to pony up to the media and see themselves on television. They don’t really care about the students. They care about hearing themselves speak.
I’m ashamed of the Knight supporters who threaten students with bodily harm simply for questioning the coach’s behavior. Support Knight by talking about his record, or his graduation rates, or the positive things former players say. Threatening students for speaking out is unconscionable.
I’m ashamed of Indiana University President Miles Brand and the trustees of Indiana University. If Knight should have been removed, it most certainly should have been over the alleged choking of a student and a player, not over a lecture on respect and manners. If Knights actions and behavior have cast a dark shadow over our peaceful town and school, Brand and the trustees have done nothing effective to handle these situations.
In the press conference announcing Coach Knight’s removal, President Brand cited a number of incidents that he said showed a pattern of behavior inconsistent with the “zero tolerance” policy. I would expect the President of a major university to understand the definition of “zero tolerance”. “Zero” tolerance would imply that any indiscretion by Coach Knight should have lead to his removal. If the policy were truly “zero” tolerance, by Brand’s own admissions today, he should have never progressed this far.
Truth be told, I will miss Knight; but I am glad he’s gone. I’ll miss him as a coach, and what he has done for the basketball program and young men he’s coached over the years at IU. He’s brought Indiana some great championship moments, and he’s helped many students graduate and get proper educations, which is something that can’t be said for many college coaches.
But I’m glad that finally, people will be able to talk about Indiana University and Hoosier Basketball without making it a cult of personality about Coach Knight. And I’m glad that I won’t continually have to apologize to family and friends for his behavior when they ask me about life in Bloomington.
I would have hoped that Coach Knight would have left a legacy of great Hoosier basketball, not one of scandal. And I would have hoped that Miles Brand would have acted as the leader the position of university president demands, not by cowering, backpedaling and only now owning up to his duties.
If the only way to repair the tarnished IU basketball program is by dismissing Knight, I also think that President Miles Brand should resign as well. He’s demonstrated that he never really had the best interests of the students in mind, or he would have enforced the “zero” tolerance policy when any of the incidents on his press conference list occurred, not just when an incident went public. What Brand demonstrated today was that the university didn’t really have a zero tolerance policy about Coach Knight: the university really had a zero tolerance policy for public scandal. If Knight’s actions are inconsistent with the professionalism we expect from our coaches and leaders, then Brand’s actions are inconsistent with the leadership expected of a university president.
I can only hope that in time, Indiana University can put all of this behind us, and be remembered for what it is: a world class University with several outstanding academic schools and a school with a great basketball legacy.
Most of all, I hope that sports fans and citizens around the country understand that Hoosiers love basketball, and that we are not all foul-mouthed grandstanders or duplicitous administrators concerned only about public relations. Not every supporter of Bobby Knight is so blinded by rage that they would threaten the lives of students who might actually have legitimate complaints about the Coach and his conduct. And not every critic of Knight and his actions is a media hound only seeking to further their own agenda of hate against a man who has been a great coach. Most of the Hoosiers I’ve met are decent, hard working, good people. Please don’t let the actions of all of these sordid characters influence the way you view our state, our universities, or Hoosiers.
Open Source Everything
August 25, 2000 by
Today a friend of mine and I were discussing some of the cool new things that we’d like to develop and got into an interesting discussion about the nature of work, what it means to be creative, and how it might be possible for creative people to make a living in the new economy.
You see, we’ve both lived and worked in the “Silicon Valley” start-up environment, and to be honest, neither of us cared for it much. At the risk of sounding hopelessly backward, we value our friends and our family more than our options. We’d both rather spend a lovely Saturday having a barbeque with our friends than having a catered lunch as repayment at the office for sacrificing a weekend.
So we left the valley, and we left California. Where we are doesn’t really matter now, because it’s immaterial to our business. We write software, it sells very well, and it makes us a good living. We sell it on the web and our customers are all over the world. They can reach us by phone, fax, e-mail, the web, and even traditional mail. It’s not hard to reach us, and it’s not hard for us to communicate with our customers. And yet, with this (albeit small scale compared to a tech IPO) success, we still have time for our friends and our families, and feel like we are living good lives that are separate from our work.
But I would hate to give you the idea we are slackers, far from it. We like to create, and we are always coming up with new ideas we’d like to work on. It’s been my experience, having studied theatre and fine arts in school, and ending up in technology, that software and hardware developers are some of the most creative and inspired people that I know. What drives them (indeed, us) to create is as diverse as what drives all artists to create, and it often has nothing to do with money. That would be hard for many marketing wonks and MBAs to fathom, but really, I don’t know many engineers who do what they do simply for the money. In fact, I know more than a handful who would do what they do regardless of the pay. Now, don’t get me wrong, these are very intelligent people, and if some VP whose contributions are all filtered through a focus group is getting rich, then the engineers who designed the thing in the first place deserve a cut!
But all too often, the creators get marginalized. What started out as a truly visionary idea goes through so many focus groups and marketing studies that the end result is a often a far cry from the original inspiration. I’ve seen a number of really great, awe-inspiring ideas be lost in organization churn, or obliterated by “mass market” ideals. This always makes me sad, not just for the developer who loses their baby, but for the loss of the idea itself.
Another way great ideas are destroyed is by the whole “venture capital” process itself. Take a look at great companies with great products. Then try to find how many of the original creators or innovators are still around after going through a few rounds of VC. Not very many. Most will be replaced by a stronger management team in the blink of a stock ticker. Those that manage to stay on in a role are often turned into dead weight, as a mouthpiece, or worse, relegated to some obscure management position designed primarily to keep them out of the way. The percentages of ownership that are retained by the creator of an idea is actually pretty sickening. In an article in Business 2.0, Jim Clark points out that the most common mistake entrepreneurs make is over-valuing themselves. What??! Have you heard such non-sense? I guess that’s true in the new e-conomy. Fuck the innovators; the only people who count are the ones who grow market share. Look, I understand the value provided by good sales and marketing people. However, when company founders end up holding less than 10% of the equity in a company, I think that’s pretty crappy. Hell, if you ask me, anything less than 50% is pretty crappy. What a way to be paid for you innovation: loosing control of your company. Yeah, yeah– 10% of a 50 Billion dollar company is better that 50% of a 5 million dollar company. But come on! How much money is enough? And is that money really worth giving up control of your vision? Your idea? And watching your idea become just another mediocre product in the already rotting pool of dead .coms?
After all, it’s not just the innovators who suffer when VC enters the picture. The innovations suffer too. Many great ideas are turned from something truly creative into just another B2B, P2P, B2C solution. Focus groups can provide valuable feedback, but then again, too many cooks’ over analysis of market trends can lead to bad choices and compromises in the product development cycle of a new business.
So the process of building a business in America today leads to the destruction of the innovator and innovation. How can this be changed? How can the creative still manage to create, retain control over their ideas, and still eat?
What could possibly be our salvation?
Open Source.
Everything.
Seriously. I think it’s an idea whose time has come. Now stop laughing. To anyone skeptical of open source reading the article: I’m serious. To any open source advocates reading this article, I think you’ve only scratched the surface of possibility. Open source doesn’t mean free, it means open, and in the end I think it can benefit creators and business interests alike.
I think we should open up everything. Everything. Software. Hardware. All of it. Why? Because it’s good for you. It’s good for me. It’s good for us. And it’s good for the market.
But the market gods cry! How can we make money! How can we protect our “industry secrets!” Why do I care? Why do you care? And why did we get all secretive in the first place? Usually, secrets exist to protect bad products. After all, if no one else can make the same product better, your market is protected. That’s why I think open source has many people on the run; open source might actually provide consumers with choice in the market, and give them access to superior quality technology. Man, in that world, there are a lot of bad companies that stand to go under.
So how does anyone make money with open source? The creators and the companies retailing products? Here’s how everyone can make money: producing innovative things people want and like. So now let’s talk about specifics with an example.
I’m a media junkie. I take in as much media, be it television, radio, the net, as possible. But I’m also a mobile guy. I’m always on the run, and I certainly don’t bend my schedule for television. I want to be able to watch Nova when I want, damn it. Not when my local PBS station airs it. And speaking of which, I might want to watch it on my computer in the office, over the network, on my lunch break. Why not? There’s no real reason I shouldn’t be able to do this.
So, let’s say I get a real itch to have this kind of “media convergence” and I decide to do something about it. I go and I build a machine for my home, based on Linux, that can capture video, encode it and make it available on the Net via my DSL connection. Let’s call this my “Convergence Box”. Cool. I need to write some software to make this all seamless, so maybe I write a web application for scheduling the Convergence Box, and some other software for selecting shows to view, stream it, etc. etc. Now, all of this is some work, and I think it’s pretty valuable. Evidently, so do companies like Tivo and Replay TV (even though they still lack some of the cool features of the Convergence Box, like networking).
Well, now that I’ve gone through the trouble of building this box, I think I’ve got something pretty cool, I show it to some friends, and they want one two. So what are my options? I can:
1. Build it for them. Hey, I don’t have the time.
2. Start a company to build these things. Sure. And go through the hell of subjugating myself and my idea to MBAs and lose all of the cool functionality that was why I built this thing in the first place.
3. Sell it to a company direct. Yeah, if you have the connections, sure. Go for it.
4. Give my friends the plans & software. Hey, my friends are smart. They can make it themselves, and they get a cool box out of it, and I get credit. Neat deal.
In fact, the whole project could stop right there. I don’t have to do anything with it. I created it on my own, I own the idea, and I didn’t do it to get rich. I did it because its an idea for something I needed or wanted, and no one sold it, so I had to build it. But I know that many times, if it’s a product or something I want, chances are someone else wants it too.
So, let’s say I take this Convergence Box and “open source” it. I publish my plans on the net, with a license that effectively says “For personal use, all these plans and software is free. If you want to use it for business, write me.” Yeah, it might cost me a little to have a lawyer review this license, but regardless, that investment is pretty cheap.
Now anyone on the net can build my box if they want to. A great idea is shared with a community of people who can take something cool, build it, use it, extend it in any way they see fit. I like that. I personally think it feels pretty good to share. We all get a cool new toy, and those with the time, knowledge and parts get to build and use my good idea.
But what if a company decides this is a product who’s time has come? What then? Well, easy. They license it too. In fact, this is the best thing a company could possibly do! After all, I’ve done the R&D. I’ve built the prototype. I’ve established a market. Now, they could license my plans, for say a nice royalty, and everyone is a winner.
The company can take my idea, maybe make it more efficient, maybe dumb it down for the mass market, and they walk away with a product they can sell to the mass market of people who don’t want to tinker with hardware and software (and that’s a pretty big market). They can even remove features that might get them into hot litigation. Whatever. They are free to do so, and I still get paid and make money from the base idea. All of the technophiles who want a feature-rich, custom machine, well, they get what they want too, from my open source license. Let’s face it, those people aren’t eating into the company’s market at all, they wouldn’t want the dumbed-down mass market version anyway. If anything, letting these people use it for free is like an investment in community development: everyone wins.
“But hey!” you cry, “there’s nothing to stop another company from licensing the idea too! So who protects the first company’s interests?” Well, okay. Let’s take a look at that. We have two companies, Company X and Company Y. They both want to make the “Convergence Box”. Fine. Why not? There’s a good chance that the market is big enough for both of them, and that my extending the base features established in the original idea, they could actually develop different markets. One might even have a machine that would appeal to those tech savvy buyers out there.
But even if Company Y wants to make a similar product to Company X, they can too. People can then freely choose between product X and Y, and base their decision on minor issues, like say, customer service. Now each company has a reason to build a good product, because the better product will win in the market. What could be better for the consumer? And people who don’t mind technical info and want a supped up version of the product get to build one themselves for the costs of supplies, all thanks to open source. Technological innovation reigns supreme, the market economy does it’s job, and we all share. The company making the best spin off product wins the market, and the developer gets to eat! What could be better?
Now, I realize this idea is not without flaws. Greed always complicates matters like this. But I offer this little diatribe as encouragement to those of you out there that are tired of seeing good ideas go to waste. For innovators who are tired of seeing their ideas compromised. For developers who want to create, but want to eat. For companies with the vision to really adapt to a new economy, and not just want to slap an “e.com” to their name. This a chance to do some real outside-the-box thinking and profit. I think there are enough of us out there that we will survive. And if I’m right, we’ll prosper. And if I’m wrong? I’d rather survive on my terms than compromise my ideals to survive on theirs.