A look at HP's upcoming Slate, via Wired GadgetLab:

Now, I'm an avid Flash-platform developer, so it should come as no surprise that Apple's refusal to support Flash on its iPhone and iPad platforms frustrates me; it's largely why I've never picked up an iPhone, one of several reasons I've chosen not to wade into the waters of iPhone development, and primarily why you won't catch me buying an iPad next month. This Slate device interests me, though. Sure, it's an iPad clone, but the iPad, a tablet PC, doesn't really seem all that revolutionary, either. And of course, it (the Slate) runs Flash and AIR, which is great. But I'm not here to evangelize the Slate. I'm saying that I think the Slate, and devices like it, will push Apple to support Flash much sooner than it would have had it not decided to build the iPad.

Tablet PCs like the Slate and the iPad are, it seems, a good deal more PC-like than phone-like; using one feels considerably more like using one's laptop than cell phone. So it's no great leap of the imagination to presume, then, that users will probably expect their tablets (Slates, iPads, whatever) to behave more like their PCs -- to do as much, or nearly so, as their laptops or netbooks do now -- than their cells. Slate users, for their part (the Slate runs Windows 7, incidentally) are bound to be more satisfied with their experience in this respect.

But iPad users, I'm guessing, are going to feel the absence of Flash much more acutely than iPhone users do today -- and I think that'll actually put pressure on Apple to support Flash on the iPad, lest it be forced to continually explain its (primarily financial, and I think customer-antagonistic) reasons for not supporting Flash in the first place. The iPad already looks like a crippled, if quite pretty, netbook. Denying its users the option to run Flash only serves to cripple it more.

So it seems there are three possible outcomes to all this: (1) that users don't care -- they're so enamored with their iPads and iPhones that the Flash exclusion just doesn't matter to them enough to keep them from handing over their cash; (2) that users get wise and simply stop buying iPads and iPhones in response to Apple's rejection of Flash; or (3) Apple grudgingly concedes and begins to support Flash, first on the iPad, and then, ultimately -- in a great big blowback of irony -- on the iPhone. I don't usually go in for technology predictions, because I tend to suck at them, but in this case, if the tablet phenomenon catches on (and I actually think it will, thanks largely to the Kindle and the iPad), I'd bet on the third scenario -- at least the iPad part of it. If folks start buying tablets in good numbers, I do think we'll see Flash on the iPad relatively soon.

Place your bets....

Via Seattle Beer News, a look at one of several pub crawls within walking distance of our home here in the Greenwood/Phinney Ridge community of Seattle.

After about 6 or 7 hours of walking and drinking, the more intelligent members of the crawl convinced me that it was time to call it a night. We had tentative plans to include Pillager’s Pub, the Baranof (every crawl should have a dive), and even the Pub at Piper’s Creek if we wanted to add another longer walk. But, hopping on the #5 to head back home was the smart call, and I’ll live to crawl another day. The six bars we hit was really just about perfect, and with the 2 to 3 miles of walking our sobriety was still pretty well in check. Overall, these crawls are making me a bit jealous for the lucky people that get to live in these neighborhoods.

Indeed.

Of those mentioned, I'd say Naked City Taphouse is probably my favorite, mainly for the quality of the beers and the privileging of quality beers in general; when you sit down, you're handed a laser-printed beer menu indicating the selections currently on tap (generally 20 or so, if memory serves) and, in muted type beneath each line, which are queued up to replace them. Most of the selections are local, a few even brewed on-site. Always excellent. (Their home-brewed rauchbier is fantastic.) I had the pleasure recently of sitting down for a couple of drafts with the owner and his wife at a friend's get-together, after which he led us all on a brief tour of the newly built brewing facilities. A great place -- and easily the finest Web site I've ever seen representing a watering hole. (I mean come on: What other bars can you name that offer Twitter streams and RSS feeds of what's on tap and up next?)

I'd probably add Prost to the list as well -- many fine, fine Belgian and German beers to be had there, along with excellent sausages, sauerkrauts, cheeses and mustards; Rebecca and I love to pop in there from time to time -- and second the mentions of the Snowgoose, 74th St. and the Barking Dog, which is only about a hundred yards from our house, and which serves one of the best hamburgers I've ever had in my whole entire life.

Have I mentioned how much we love it here?

From Vimeo, via The Morning News -- a nice little documentary snapshot:

Nick Bilton, at the Times, addresses the question, with a little help from Tim O'Reilly. I like what O'Reilly (who recently ditched his iPhone for a Nexus One) has to say on the matter:

Ultimately, Mr. O’Reilly said he made the switch because he found the wireless service to be less expensive. And he liked that Google’s Android platform was more open to developers than Apple’s iPhone ecosystem.

That, my fellow Internauts, is what it's all about. The iPhone is a beautiful device, but it's too restrictive, plain and simple. The Nexus One has its problems, as Gen 1 devices so often do, but that's to be expected (and why I haven't bought one myself); what's important is that comparable alternatives are finally beginning to emerge, and that'll force Apple to either open up its platform and add a little transparency, or start ceding ground to the competition.

I've resisted the iPhone mainly for that reason -- because it offers pretty much no flexibility whatever. It's practically bound to a pricey AT&T contract, doesn't fully support Flash, doesn't support Java at all, and its app store requires me to pay Apple a hundred bucks just for the privilege of building apps in Objective-C -- a language almost nobody uses but Apple -- and then cross my fingers in hopes that my app, which could take months to build, might be so lucky as to be approved by the all-powerful App Store demigods. Oh, and I'd have to buy a Mac, too -- one can't develop iPhone apps (legally, anyway) on anything but a licensed Mac OS. Don't like it, Nunciato? Tough. Suck on that.

Android, on the other hand, is way more open: it runs plain ol' Java, which millions of developers (me included) already know, it builds nicely with Eclipse on all three major platforms, and developing for it doesn't cost me a penny. I can build and deploy apps to my heart's content, then reuse the knowledge I gain elsewhere. So, let's see: closed, expensive and risky, or open, free and predictable? Hmm. Lemme think....

Locking down the iPhone ecosystem will, I think ultimately, turn out to be a major mistake on Apple's part; it was only a matter of time until alternatives would begin to emerge, and folks would start realizing the hidden costs of carrying around such a pretty little device. Personally, I'm waiting -- not for Apple to change its ways, because I don't think that'll happen (although it'd be great if it did), but for the Nexus One to stabilize, and for the Android universe to expand a bit. Then, maybe, I'll bite. For now, though, I'll stick with my iPhone wanna-be. It's far from perfect, but it works, and it doesn't pretend to be more than it is.

I'm generally not a huge fan of DHH -- he's a brilliant guy, to be sure, but he's also arrogant as all get-out, and if you know me, you know I'm no fan of arrogance, particularly when it comes to my fellow programmers -- but on the subject of Web applications and their so-called "monetization," the 37Signals partner is dead-on as far as I'm concerned:

It's not rocket surgery. I mean it's really just that simple three-step idea: You have a great application, you ask money for it, if people like it, they'll pay, and you profit.

A great little video (~30 minutes) lifted from YCombinator's 2008 Startup School. I attended in '06, myself -- fantastic learning experience.

But I do wholeheartedly agree: I pay happily for a number of Web applications that add value to my life: Flickr ($25 annually), Vimeo ($65 annually), Mozy ($20 monthly) -- it's not a huge list by any means, but it's something, and I've bought a number of software applications in my day, too, ranging everywhere from twenty bucks to several thousand. If you build something worth paying for, people will pay for it. Simple as that, really.

And as an aside, I love that he compares the odds of any one of the event's attendees creating The Next Facebook (as opposed creating to a modest, profitable business) to being victimized by airline terrorism. It's a tad crass -- what else would you from DHH? -- but also statistically sound.

Anil Dash on Facebook and the social Web, from a recent interview in The Morning News:

I think the most practical and pragmatic first step is for people to get educated. If I said, “I’m going to come by your house, survey all of your personal data, rifle through your files, and share some parts of what I’ve learned with whomever pays me the most money, under terms that can change at any time to be even more in my favor,” you’d kick me out without even thinking twice. If I said, “But wait! If you let me do this, I’ll reintroduce you to people you hated in high school, and let you play with virtual farm animals!” you’d probably be beating me while I was on the way out. But that’s the exchange we make with Facebook every day.

I’m not saying there’s no value in it, I’m saying there are 350 million people who don’t understand how much they’ve given up control over the most valuable part of their identities, and they’ve sold short their futures online without even getting paid.

Once you get educated, get your own web site and your own email with your own name on it, that you own. Someday very soon you’ll be able to be just as connected as you can be with Facebook and Twitter, but on your own terms, and that’s when we’ll see the real value of today’s real-time social networks. Right now we’re all constrained by the fact that we’re sharecroppers.

For me, aside from the exceedingly rare gem (to wit: a recent video clip posted by a gradeschool pal, in which all of us gradeschoolers sang songs and played ukeleles -- that was quite a find, indeed), or the odd status update announcing the birth of a new baby, or colorful sociopolitical rant, Facebook has become a gigantic waste of time and energy. Like Anil, I'm not saying it has no value, because it does have some -- but I am saying it has very limited value, and probably costs us all a lot more, in a number of ways, than it gives back.

Nick Carr elaborates on the idea here.

I have to apologize in advance for this, for it might make you out-and-out gag, but as a little experiment of sorts, I've decided to start a new series: Olliesounds (or, if you like, Sounds of My Son -- a bit more fitfully cheesy, I think). Since we all seem to spend so much time taking pictures of our kids, or videos, imagery basically, I thought I might try something a little different: audio clips.

We spend a lot of time using our eyes -- looking, watching, scanning, snapping -- but we don't spend all that much time really listening anymore, and the sounds babies make in particular can be pretty awesome, to say nothing of the sounds of the rest of our mundane lives. So I plan to record more of both of them, and to share a few as well, just to see where it leads.

So, as they say, without further ado, here we go -- installment one: a one-and-a-half minute clip of my kid taking a snooze. Enjoy.

Olliesounds I: Napping (~1:30)

Today's New York Times reports on a question that's been bopping around in my head lately:

The chief executives of several major airlines said this week that they have been in constant contact with officials of the Transportation Security Administration, which oversees security at the nation’s airports, discussing the best ways to provide more safety on planes while keeping passengers’ comfort in mind.

They acknowledge that the procedures have to be unpredictable to be effective. But they also say that the unpredictability could push travelers to avoid airports at all costs.

They say consumers’ perception of the inconvenience while traveling may even hurt the industry more than travelers’ worries about another bombing attempt.

“I don’t think people book away because of fear,” said one executive, who agreed to speak candidly about the industry’s concerns only if he was not quoted by name. “I think they book away because of inconvenience. If it means three hours in line at an airport, they aren’t going to take their trips.”

For my part, I can say that's definitely true: I won't fly anymore unless I absolutely have to, and the primary reason is the TSA. Last year, Rebecca and I took the Pacific Surfliner down to Orange County to be with my family for Thanksgiving. It took two full days to get there, then two full days to get back, but there was almost no security whatever (which I found, paradoxically, both relieving and irksome), and it gave us a far different experience of travel: you take your time, you read a couple of books, you sleep in, watch a few movies, meet new and interesting people at the table three times a day, and watch the world go by as you do it. Air travel, by comparison, becomes stressful the moment you set foot in the terminal, and doesn't let up until you come out the other end. But it wasn't always that way: you used to be able to walk into a terminal, walk onto a plane, meet your family at the gate, and actually enjoy yourself for a while. Air travel used to be almost luxurious. Not anymore. Now, it's a fucking privilege, pal, and if you're going to give anyone any lip about having to take off your shoes, ditch that bottle of "non-secure" water, or drag your out-of-shape ass through the full-body scanner, well, you'd better be prepared to tell it to the judge. Sir.

Salon's been reporting on the lunacy of the TSA for some time now -- as with this little gem of a tale, told by a pilot, about the hassle he endured while trying to smuggle a life-threatening butterknife through a TSA checkpoint:

So, together with a throng of exhausted passengers, most of whom are rushing to catch connections, I'm funneled into the grimy, dimly lit checkpoint. I hoist my luggage -- my black flight case, my backpack and a roll-aboard suitcase -- onto the X-ray belt, then pass through the metal detector. Once on the other side, I'm waiting for my stuff to reappear when suddenly the belt comes to a stop. "Bag check!" shouts the guard behind the monitor.

The bag she's talking about turns out to be my roll-aboard. A second guard, a mean-looking woman whose girth is exceeded only by the weight of the chip on her shoulder, comes over and yanks it from the machine.

"Is this yours?" she wants to know.

"Yes, it's mine."

"You got a knife in here?"

"A knife?"

"A knife," she barks. "Some silverware."

Indeed I do. Indeed I always do. Inside my roll-aboard I carry a spare set of airline-issue cutlery -- a spoon, a fork and a knife. Along with packets of noodles and other small snacks, this is part of my hotel survival kit, useful in the event of short layovers or other situations when food isn't available. Borrowed from my collection of airline silverware (some of us really have such things), it's the exact cutlery that accompanies your meal on a long-haul flight. The pieces are stainless steel, about 5 inches long. The knife has a rounded end and a short row of teeth -- I would call them "serrations," but that's too strong a word. For all intents and purposes, it's a miniature butter knife.

"Yes," I tell the guard, "in the side pocket. There's a metal knife in there -- a butter knife."

She seems to ignore me, then clumsily unzips the main compartment of the suitcase and begins rifling violently through my things.

"No, not there," I tell her. "It's in the side pocket."

"I know what I'm looking for."

"But if you're looking for the knife, it's not in there. I told you, it's in the side pocket."

"Show me!" she orders.

I pause for a second, allowing a small, potentially explosive nugget of annoyance to fizzle out before proceeding. Then I show her the correct zipper. "In here."

She opens the compartment and takes out a small vinyl case containing the three pieces. After removing the knife, she holds it upward with two fingers and stares at me coldly. Her pose is like that of an angry schoolteacher about to berate a child for bringing some forbidden object to class.

"You ain't takin' this through," she says. "No knives. You can't bring a knife through here."

It takes a moment for me to realize that she's serious. "I'm ... but ... it's ..."

"Sorry." She throws it into a bin and starts to walk away.

"Wait a minute," I say. "That's airline silverware."

"Don't matter what it is. You can't bring knives through here."

"Ma'am, that's an airline knife. It's the knife they give you on the plane."

"No knives. Have a good afternoon, sir."

"You can't be serious. This is the craziest thing I've ever heard of. Besides, I carry that knife with me all the time."

With that, she grabs the knife out of the bin and walks over to one of her colleagues, a portly fellow with a mustache seated at the end of the checkpoint in a folding chair. I follow her over.

"This guy wants to bring this through."

The man in the chair looks up lazily. "Is it serrated?" he asks.

She hands it to him. He looks at it quickly, then addresses me.

"No, this is no good. You can't take this."

"Why not?"

"It's serrated." He is talking about the little row of teeth along the edge. Truth be told, the knife in question, which I've had for years, is actually smaller and less sharp than the knives currently handed out by my airline to its first- and business-class customers. You'd be hard-pressed to cut a slice of toast with it.

"Oh, come on. It is not."

"What do you call these?" He runs his finger along the minuscule serrations.

"Those ... but ... they ... it ..."

"No serrated knives. You can't take this."

"But sir, how can it not be allowed when it's the same knife they give you on the plane!"

"Those are the rules."

"That's impossible. Can I please speak to a supervisor?"

"I am the supervisor."

It's not even surprising -- we've all been there; I once lost a cherished cigar lighter myself, on a flight to Phoenix, because some TSA lackey, upon clicking it several times in an unsuccessful attempt to light it, confiscated and discarded it (fucker) because he couldn't determine -- since it wouldn't light -- that it wasn't one of the kind not allowed on board. "Wait," I said. "Let me get this straight. You're throwing it away because it doesn't work?" Indeed he was, and there it went, into the trash with all the others. Nevermind the logic -- logic's got no place in the TSA. Only rules. Rules, and the mechanized, uniform application of them.

I could rant for hours on this subject -- my poor wife can attest to that. And while I'm definitely not the activist sort (I talk, sometimes shout, but then I generally just cast my vote -- flyers, etc., aren't really my thing), I did mention to someone recently that if there were one political cause I could actually get behind and spend my personal time and emotional energy pursuing, it'd be for the flat-out dismantling of the TSA. Why? Because in a word, it's stupid. It's broken, I hate paying for it, and it's never worked, anyway. Indeed, I'm of the opinion that it couldn't work, even if it were somehow "overhauled," because its entire existence is based on bad, GeorgeBushian logic, and has nothing whatever to do with security, anyway.

The TSA has always been a political, not practical, response to 9/11. It hassles us at checkpoints not because of penetrating insights on security or some brilliant breakthrough, but because politicians handed it power. Specialists in security didn't invent the TSA; the Bush administration imposed it on us. So we might hope the incoming president would abolish this absurd agency.

Yes, absurd. And incompetent -- so astonishingly incompetent, in fact, as to have failed to counteract precisely the sort of terrorist act that gave birth to it in the first place.

[Amy B. Zegart], author of “Spying Blind: The C.I.A., the F.B.I., and the Origins of 9/11,” said she was especially disheartened that the near-miss last week was, once again, on an airplane.

“This is textbook Al Qaeda 2001,” she said. “They tried to hit the hardest target we have, the one on which the most money and attention has been spent since 2001. And yet we didn’t prevent it.”

The moment we plug one hole, terrorism can simply push through another; buses, subways, trains, as I mentioned, cruise ships -- none of them are guarded with anywhere near the zealousness of our precious airplanes. Most, indeed, aren't guarded at all. (And why is it that an air-traveling citizen is so much more valuable than a train-traveling one? Hm?) Nevermind that little notion about what terrorism is intended to do -- namely to alter the behavior of its target. In our case, quite clearly, it's already done so: the TSA's mere existence, not to mention our paying for it, both with our taxpaying wallets and with the trying of our patience, in seven hundred million installments annually, is evidence enough of that.

But I don't have to rant, because unless you're insane, or an aerophobe, you agree -- at least in part. You hate taking off your shoes, too. And your belt. And toss your keys into the dog-food bowl, please. And your cell phone, yeah. And don't forget to remove your laptop (sometimes, not always -- but yes, today) so it can be examined by one of our trained professionals with absolutely no idea how it works, anyway. And please, ladies and gentlemen, please remember to take out your little Ziploc bag containing your one-dollar toothpastes, mouthwashes and shampoos, which you all so kindly purchased effectively by government mandate, so we can glance briefly at the labels to determine they're not filled with explosive materials, which we've all been trained to identify by sight. Yes, if you're like me, which is to say at least partly human and generally accustomed to living in a free-ish society, you hate having to pack all this shit so strategically the night before in order to get through the line as expediently as possible, only to fail, spectacularly, once you actually get there. Maybe you don't hate it quite as much as I do, but you hate it -- at least a little. You hate it because you know how worthless it really is. Because you know the TSA's never actually caught a would-be terrorist in a security line. You know quite well that the TSA, which costs all of us, you included, billions of dollars annually, you know all it's ever really done is stand there, obstructively, waving its white-gloved hand, between you and your final destination.

There are, of course, two fundamental flaws in TSA's screening philosophy: The first is that it considers everybody who flies -- the old and young, fit and infirm, domestic and foreign, pilot and passenger -- a potential terrorist. The second is a foolish fixation with the tactics used by the terrorists on Sept. 11, and the subsequent fixation with weapons -- particularly knives and other sharp objects -- rather than the people who might use them. TSA will not acknowledge that the success of the 2001 attacks had nothing to do with the hijackers' ability to sneak weapons past airport security. For one thing, even a child knows that a sharp object as lethal as a box cutter can be fashioned from virtually anything. But more to the point, the attackers were exploiting a weakness in our mind-set -- that is, our expectations of how a hijacking would unfold, based on numerous earlier incidents -- rather than any weakness in airport security. The element of surprise, not box cutters, is what took control of those four aircraft. And even before the first of the twin towers had fallen to the ground, that element of surprise -- as well as the box cutters that went with it -- was no longer a useful tool. Paradigm over.

So I choose not to. When I can, anyway. Sometimes, of course, you have to. But flying, for me, has become a necessary evil. All because of the TSA.

And it's a shame, really. Because in trying to look like what a good president's apparently supposed to look like, by setting up the TSA as a reflex action to 9/11 sans long-term consideration, George Bush essentially stabbed the global airline industry squarely in the chest, and not with a butterknife, either -- with an axe. It'll survive, of course -- we all gotta fly sometime -- but not without a long, serious, painful rehab. And not without our collectively having at least something to say about it, which I'm pleased to see happening, in little rants and choosings-not-to like this one, and others like it, finally, now.

Doh! In working on a few photo-related enhancements to the site yesterday afternoon, I seem to have overlooked my RSS feeds, which appear to be suddenly clogged with gunk resulting from various loadings and reloadings of test data. Apologies for the confusion. I'll try to get things cleaned back up this morning....

Articles like this one always get under my skin.

On the rumors of Microsoft forging an exclusive deal with News Corp., the writers deduce the following, prejudging the concept of a deal as though it stood somehow in violation of the principles responsible for making the Web what it is today (thanks, presumably, to Google):

The Web’s explosive growth has been driven, in part, by the open playing field it represents for consumers and businesses. These discussions could encourage major technology and media companies to start picking sides — essentially applying the cable TV model to the Web.

A deal on a large scale would create a new set of barriers for users to navigate and would represent an enormous risk for the News Corporation or any news site. More than 65 percent of all search inquiries in the United States are made on Google, and removing links from there would lead to a big drop in traffic. Bing handles 9.9 percent of domestic searches, according to comScore.

That's just ridiculous. It's called network neutrality, kiddies -- not site neutrality. Exclusive deals abound, everywhere, on the Web as well as off. What's being discussed between Microsoft and News Corp., to the extent anything really is being discussed, is surely nothing more than an agreement preventing Google from displaying News Corp. content on its News microsite, in exchange for displaying it on Bing's. Users would, I'm sure, continue to be able to access News Corp.'s deliciously fair-and-balanced content on any number of News Corp.'s sites.

Google's dominance in the search-advertising market isn't good for anyone but Google, and Murdoch, much as I happen despise the guy as a political force, is actually right to complain about Google stealing his company's original content. It absolutely does. It steals news content and then muscles that content's creators into taking it and liking it, lest they lose the referral traffic Google sends them by linking to that content in its original form.

Fight on, Microsoft! Make 'em work for it, I say.

From The Economist: an interesting few minutes charting fertility rates and population trends, over the past several decades, among countries of various economic profiles.

Somehow, unbelievably, it's been a year since we moved to Seattle, and somehow, unbelievably, I managed to avoid Discovery Park -- a lush, huge park a couple of miles from our home in Ballard. We finally made it there last weekend. Beautiful place, great little hike. Reminds me again just why we chose to move here.

More snapshots of the afternoon on Flickr.

Awesome little video courtesy of my good friend Sara. Had to share.

On the nascent Facebook exodus, from the NYTimes:

The disillusionment with Facebook has come in waves. An early faction lost faith in 2008, when Facebook’s beloved Scrabble application, Scrabulous, was pulled amid copyright issues. It was suddenly clear that Facebook was not just a social club but also an expanding force on the Web, beholden to corporate interests. A later group grew frustrated last winter when Facebook seemed to claim perpetual ownership of users’ contributions to the site. (Facebook later adjusted its membership contract, but it continues to integrate advertising, intellectual property and social life.) A third wave of dissenters appears to be bored with it, obscurely sore or just somehow creeped out.

My own activity's dwindled in recent months, mainly for a commingling of annoyances: the binary nature of Facebook Friendship (the offline world is much more nuanced -- friends aren't just yes/no, they're more like varying intensities of yes), the more protective I've generally become of what I do and do not mind sharing online (pictures, videos, etc.), a generalized feeling of over-it-ness of the kind you sometimes feel after being at a party for a bit too long, and a sense, coupled with an overarching distrust of (and disdain for) Mark Zuckerberg, and an awareness that the only way Facebook can make money is by monetizing my time investments, social interactions and personal contributions to its site, that the entire thing's already beginning to disappear into the same swirling vortex that annihilated MySpace.

One of the goals I wanted to achieve during paternity leave, in those brief in-between moments when both my wife and son were asleep or otherwise occupied with one another's breasts or digestive systems, was catching up on the various 'round-the-house tasks that'd managed to pile up over the year or so since we moved to Seattle. One of them was coming up with a solid backup strategy for all of the freaking computers around here.

We have four actual machines here in the house -- two desktops and two laptops -- and I'm ashamed to admit that until now, they've all been flying pretty much by the seat of their individual pants, backup-wise. I'd tried, when we moved in here, to set up backups using the standard Windows backup-and-restore tools, but they were crude, surprisingly blunt instruments (e.g., Back Up Entire Machine, Back Up Only My Documents, and, well, that was about it -- which, for a D: drive guy like me, with lots to back up and lots not to back up (like the high-definition video captures from my camcorder, for instance -- those files are huge, and since I use an HDV camera, I've got the source material archived on tape already)), and they (the backup jobs) never really worked, anyway. Full machine backups over a wireless network are an all but entirely pointless prospect; pushing gigs of information over a wireless connection (which is our only option here -- only one machine, a Windows Media Center PC connected to the television, is connected directly to the router) can take several hours, and since our laptops were generally not even turned on at the moments I'd selected for daily backups, their data would pile up, backup jobs would fail because of huge data queues combining with general wireless-network flakiness, and the whole thing, well, just never seemed to come together.

And for someone like me, not having a backup system firmly in place can be a tremendous source of stress and psychic weight. Back in Orange County, where I worked as a consultant, life was simple: I'd code all day at my office, then push a big, shiny BACKUP button on my Maxtor external, straighten up for a few minutes while the drive did its thing, disconnect it, tuck it into my bag, and go home -- piece o' cake, all backed up. But then mine was the only machine around: now, here, with several active machines (including that same one) needing to be backed up regularly, and the drive's built-in software being unable to handle much more than a single USB data source, the problem suddenly became, well, a lot more complicated -- something I finally had to spend my free time, which I try to reserve for idling and/or drinking beer, actively thinking about.

Indeed it often surprises me just how complicated these kinds of things become -- the very things the marketing people assure us, repeatedly, will be extraordinarily simple, like backups. I have friends, all of them quite savvy computer-wise, whose entire blogs and/or Twitter streams seem devoted to lamenting just how big a pain in the ass using computers can so often be. I can't tell you how many boring cocktail-party conversations I've seen spring magically to life on the mere mention of some computer-related annoyance -- the more obscure or idiosyncratic, the better. "I love my iPhone -- but it doesn't copy-paste! WTF?!" Or, "Why do all the goddamn bullets disappear when I save my Word doc as a PDF?" "How do I get rid of all this spam?" And so on. We all deal with this stuff. It's become the universal headache.

Take digital photos. Rebecca and I both take them -- lots of them, like everyone else. So in an attempt to fend off disorganization and chaos, I proudly set up, last year, a share on a drive I designated the Media Drive (connected to the aforementioned Media Center PC), and instructed Rebecca to save all of her digital photos to that machine, and not to her laptop, when she imported them from her camera. "Sure," she said, no problem -- but then a month later, she'd either forget to do so, or forget quite how or where I'd set up this particular share, or what a share was, or worse, would actually try to use it, but then be shut down big-red-x style because of some obscure and apparently impossible-to-solve problem Windows seems to have remembering mapped-network-drive usernames and passwords -- so the pictures in question, many of them brilliant, print-worthy moments I'd love to have had copies of myself, would wind up living in obscurity on her laptop, usually (but not always) in the My Documents hierarchy somewhere, and I'd have to remember to go looking for them manually somehow. Sure I could set up some sort of a reminder, say, in my Google Calendar (and don't even get me started on the subject of calendar sharing), to tell me to do so -- but this was 2009, for God's sake! Why didn't all this stuff just fucking work?

Fast-forward to a month or so ago, when, in MSDN Magazine, I happened to run across a brief little piece about an app called SyncBack. The writer, a fellow Microsoft hack, had a lot to say about it, but almost nothing that couldn't be translated as either "easy-to-use" or "versatile" or "awesome," so despite my previous experiences with backup applications, I decided to give it a try. And I'm happy to report than SyncBack has, in a word, become my new best friend. SyncBack and I are in love. Not only has SyncBack solved all of my backup problems, but it's also helped me devise a way move files selectively, and without my intervention, between machines -- quite handy, actually, with the Media Center PC, which should really only expose a subset of the digital stuff we collect, not all of it (because indeed, most of it's pretty boring -- even to us).

Here's a sketch outlining out network topology here at the house (and including the Web server I manage off-site, which I use to power this site, along with a few dozen other sites for my clients), and how SyncBack helps me get everything collected and put into its right place:

1: Copy all media (photos, etc.) to the desktop PC (hourly)
2: Copy all media to the desktop PC (hourly)
3: Download all data (FTP, daily)
4: Back up selected files and directories (daily)
5: Back up selected files and directories (daily)
6: Back up selected files and directories (daily)
7: Copy some (not all -- only the good) media to the Media Center PC (hourly)
8: Back up all media (daily)
9: Offload to DVD for longer-term storage (monthly)

This all works, dare I say, perfectly. With things set up like this, Rebecca can import her digital photos onto her laptop, disconnect, and get on with her life, and the SyncBack process (which runs on all four machines, each responsible for its own set of backup- and copy-related tasks) takes care of the rest, pushing the photos over to the desktop PC, where they can be catalogued, tagged, etc., by me (I use Adobe Bridge, by the way), and automatically copied downstairs to the Media Center PC for the televised enjoyment of ourselves and our captive guests. Backups happen also, of course, and because I opted for the pro version ($50), I get e-mail confirmation of every backup task, which I filter appropriately, watching for failures, with Gmail. If I happen to download something interesting with my laptop, I just download it, and then the next time SyncBack runs on that machine, the downloaded thing gets copied over to the desktop, and ends up somewhere on the backup drive as well. The source code I write, while relatively well-protected by Subversion, now gets backed up daily, too. Edited HD video gets copied downstairs as well, and captures get left behind. SyncBack even downloads changes from the Web server, over FTP, and then once a month or so, I offload everything to one or more DVDs (which SyncBack takes care of to boot).

Task complete, balance restored -- psychic weight lifted. Now we can concentrate purely on creating stuff, not on figuring out where and how to store it -- and on drinking all this excellent beer, knowing everything just works. Thanks, SyncBack! You rule. I love you.

In the spirit of the excellent Manbabies, I offer my submission, created this afternoon (and without the aid of alcohol):

Enjoy.

Stuffed robusto (Lola's favorite, actually) courtesy of Josh and Amy.

I've been listening to Alan Alda's audiobook Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself off and on lately, enjoying it while running daytime errands around Seattle in my Jeep. I've always been a fan of Alda (in fact, I don't think I've ever not liked a movie he was in, with the possible exception of David O. Russel's terrible Flirting with Disaster, though Alda helped it suck less), and the book, which is essentially a memoir composed partly of university commencement speeches he's given over the years, is excellent, and made even better by his reading -- the guy's just a pleasure to listen to. Here's a clip I thought I'd share, along with accompanying audio.

It can be surprising when you try to rank your values. Ask yourself what's the most important thing in the world to you -- your family, your work, your money, your country, getting to Heaven, sex, dope .... (Thanks, but I don't need a show of hands on this.) When you come up with an answer to that, ask yourself how much time you actually spend on your number one value, and how much time you spend on what you thought was number five, or number ten. What, in fact, is the thing you value most?

This will matter regardless of what business you go into. When you sell a product that you know will fall apart in a few months, when you sell the sizzle and you know there's no steak, when you take the money and run, when you write an article or a political speech or a television show that excites and titillates, but doesn't lead to understanding and insight, when you're all style and no substance, then you might as well be tossing poison into the reservoir we all drink from.

Listen to the full clip here.

Paul Graham on the unfulfilled promise of the Segway Human Transporter:

The Segway hasn't delivered on its initial promise, to put it mildly. There are several reasons why, but one is that people don't want to be seen riding them. Someone riding a Segway looks like a dork.

My friend Trevor Blackwell built his own Segway, which we called the Segwell. He also built a one-wheeled version, the Eunicycle, which looks exactly like a regular unicycle till you realize the rider isn't pedaling. He has ridden them both to downtown Mountain View to get coffee. When he rides the Eunicycle, people smile at him. But when he rides the Segwell, they shout abuse from their cars: "Too lazy to walk, ya fuckin homo?"

Despite the residual coolness of the Segway (and I believe there still is some), I have to admit I happen to agree -- which is one reason I was drawn, a couple of years ago anyway, to the X2, with its knobby tires and lower profile; it's cooler-looking, less mall-coppish. I'd never actually buy one, but I also wouldn't mind cruising around on one once in a while. When nobody's looking.

For those of you interested in keeping up with what's happening with the kid, we'll be sharing photos and videos on Flickr and Vimeo, respectively. Most of the good stuff will be made available only to family and friends, though, so you might have to register as one of the two on Flickr, and enter a password on Vimeo, to see it; feel free to hit me up for the appropriate instructions and/or info if you haven't been given it already.

Once you're registered as a contact on Flickr, you can modify your preferences to get e-mail notifications when a photo gets posted, which is nice; Flickr will send you a message whenever we upload something new, relieving us from the burden of spamming you, and you from the burden of having to remember to visit Flickr to keep up with our sporadic postings.

Vimeo operates in much the same way with regard to contacts (i.e., formal contacts have to be registered with Vimeo, and can subscribe to be notified of updates as well -- more on how Vimeo contacts work here), although unlike Flickr, it lets you watch password-protected videos without registering, also quite nice. Vimeo also differs from Flickr in that it doesn't (so far as I can tell) send out e-mail, even for contacts -- a bit of a drag, alas, since because we're password-protecting our videos, they won't show up in Vimeo's public RSS feeds, either. So for Vimeo, sadly, you're on your own -- you'll have to check back periodically for updates to that feed. (The great thing about Vimeo, though, is that it makes everything available in full-screen HD, which, of course, is totally awesome.)

Thanks for visiting, and again, if you have any questions about how any of this stuff works, just say the word and I'll do my best to help get you connected. Cheers.

No, my esteemed colleague, code is not art.

Code can be pretty, sure, and aesthetically pleasing, and it can be and usually is uniquely creative, and creatively satisfying, and elegant and brilliant and in some cases even awesome -- it can be all sorts of things that seem, particularly to other coders, tangentially related to the concept of art, or artfulness, or artisanship, or any number of derivatives of the word art, all completely legitimately. But code by itself is not art, it'll never be art, because code has no meaning beyond itself, and by itself has nothing to say about humanity.

Stallman, a coder, said,

I would describe programming as a craft, which is a kind of art, but not a fine art. Craft means making useful objects with perhaps decorative touches. Fine art means making things purely for their beauty.

I think he's got it right.

Code isn't art, it's craft -- it's no more art than is a new set of Legos, a collection of colored pencils, or the words of the English language. It's intellectual, unemotional, a tool, however well-designed it might be. (Design, for that matter, is emotional, or can be emotional, but design is not code; code's products can be art, but code by itself is just code.) Non-artists, for example, can look at a painting, or a photograph, or listen to a song of any style or genre, and be moved inexplicably to tears by it. But no for loop ever pulled any emotion whatever out of a non-coder, not even from its writer's adoring mother. Those who say code is art are coders who fancy themselves artists, or who are artists, in spirit, and maybe in practice in other media (perhaps digital media, created from code). Their code may indeed be beautiful to them, or even to me (and I've seen some beautiful code in my time), but in order to be called art, it really does have to be something more than what it is.

Joyce, an artist, said,

When you have apprehended that basket as one thing and have then analysed it according to its form and apprehended it as a thing you make the only synthesis which is logically and esthetically permissible. You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance of which he speaks in the scholastic QUIDDITAS, the WHATNESS of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley's, called the enchantment of the heart.

When code makes you cry, like the Winged Victory of Samothrace, or the racking scene at the end of Braveheart (which kills me every time), fine -- then you can call it art. When your source gets a week-long run at the Guggenheim, or even your local Starbucks, or earns a brief, even negative mention anywhere in the Arts section of the Times, then you can call it art. Until then, seriously, it's just code. Get over yourself.

Crab cakes and deep-fried alligator. While there, we also had some pickled herring (delicious), but curiously absent was the lutefisk, nowhere to be found this year.

The other day, I was having a chat with a rather high-ranking fellow at Real in which we were discussing application platforms, UI toolkits and such, and the subject of Adobe AIR came up.

"So, what do you think of it?" he asked.

Hm, I thought.  "I like it.  But you're still running inside that box, you know?  It's a slightly bigger box than with just the Flash control and a browser, but you're still inside the box."

"Yeah," he said.  "Sometimes you need low-level access.  You just have to have it."

I was reminded of a recent post on ReadWriteWeb in which writer Sarah Perez calls into question the ultimate utility of Adobe AIR, citing that most of the applications we've seen thus far delivered with AIR could easily be replicated, at least functionally, in a Web browser.  If the AIR apps we're seeing could all be done in a Web browser, she asks, why do we need AIR? 

The question, and the shortsightedness of her argument, got me a tad miffed -- and I replied in kind (essentially that she seemed to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater).  But in thinking about it since, I'm wondering whether Ms. Perez didn't have at least a little bit of a point.

Don't get me wrong -- just having the AIR runtime is fantastic.  Being able to write once and run anywhere really is a great leap forward for desktop applications (Java made this promise, but never quite kept it), and Adobe's done an incredible job bringing the beauty and expressiveness of the ActionScript language and the power of the Flex SDK to the party to create a seriously compelling offering.  It's now ridiculously simple to write and deploy graphically rich, Web-centered desktop applications knowing they'll work on pretty much any PC, Mac or Linux machine around.

But the question remains:  If all we're seeing are Twitter clients, RSS readers and the like, then what's the big deal?  If we already have Flash, why do we need AIR?

I think the answer has two parts: 

1. Developers aren't trying hard enough, and  
2. Adobe's just getting started.

The big selling point for AIR so far has been the desktop-consuming-a-Web-service metaphor.  In nearly every AIR book out there, every tutorial, etc., the feature demonstration generally involves showing how easy it is to connect to a Web server to retrieve some data and render a beautiful, Flashy result.  Consequently, developers have tended to stick within that realm, by building Twitter clients, RSS readers, Flickr tools, and so on -- all applications that could, in many cases, run just as well inside a browser-based Flash control, or even simply as JavaScript, discarding the benefits of Flash altogether.  So in a sense, Perez is right:  we aren't seeing all that much innovation in our AIR apps -- but I think that's largely because our developers seem to be stuck somehow in a mode of thinking that's tied too closely to Web-centered paradigms like the ones they're used to seeing every day, in Web browsers.  If the average developer goes straight to a simple  Twitter client with his AIR skills, we're bound to see a hundred or more basically interchangeable Twitter clients for every truly original AIR application.  In other words, a major part of the problem is that developers just aren't being imaginative enough.

And for that matter even Twitter clients, such as they are, invariably squander the opportunities of building on the AIR platform by replicating, essentially parroting (no pun intended), the functionality of the Twitter site -- listing all posts by date.  How incredibly unimaginative and boring!  In Flash, AIR sits atop one of the finest animation and graphics-rendering platforms available today -- and yet even the most beloved of Twitter clients, Tweetdeck and Seesmic, do almost nothing to exploit that opportunity, choosing instead to populate List controls, and call their work complete. Indeed, the most interesting and imaginative Twitter client I've seen to date, TwitterForBusyPeople, runs inside a browser; nobody's really using Flash to anywhere near its full potential in this space, nor giving much if any real thought as to how to manage, from a design perspective, the deluge of Twitter-based information in a way that acknowledges the complexity of that problem.  Where are all the the three- and four-dimensional Twitter-data visualizations?  Are List controls and next/previous buttons really the best we can do?

But it's also true that the AIR runtime, while an excellent start, isn't quite ready for prime time.  Which is fine -- I mean, I'm definitely not faulting Adobe here, by any means.  But it's probably fair to say that what we're seeing in AIR 1.x is exactly that:  a 1.x product, one that solves a handful of common problems out of the gate, then iterates to add more solutions to the list with each successive revision.  Today, we have a handy little application framework in AIR; sure, it might only do ten things, but it does them all perfectly, and everything "just works."  Tomorrow, it'll be better, and next year, even more so.  What Adobe's presently achieving with AIR is, I think, brand awareness (letting people know what AIR is), public trust (reassuring them it's a safe and trustworthy sandbox within which to run the applications of their choosing), and a foot in the door with which to improve it incrementally.

Maybe it stands to reason that once AIR reaches the level of penetration currently enjoyed by the  Flash plug-in, we could essentially end up with just another kind of browser -- a bigger box, perhaps, but still just another box.  In that light, it'll be interesting to see what happens with HTML5 -- I don't think it'll change the world, myself, but it does seem ambitious, and I generally like the democratic idea behind everything-in-a-browser, too.  But I don't think you can throw out the baby with the bathwater -- the desktop app will always have its place, and while I'm all for the utility of constraint in design, the kind of rich, imaginative, multidimensional experiences our future users are going to demand just aren't going to be possible with markup and JavaScript alone. We need the rich UI. We just need to spend some time dreaming up our UIs in its terms.

An excerpt from the first few pages of The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, a collection of essays and lectures by Richard Feynman, which I picked up, finally, this weekend, at the 40%-off-all-used-books-sale at Third Place in Bothell:

To do real high, real good physics work you do need absolutely solid lengths of time, so that when you're putting ideas together which are vague and hard to remember, it's very much like building a house of cards and each of the cards is shaky, and if you forget one of them the whole thing collapses once again.  You don't know how you got there and you have to build them up again, and if you're interrupted and you kind of forget half the idea of how the cards went together -- your cards being different-type parts of the ideas, ideas of different kinds that have to go together to build up the idea -- the main point is, you put the stuff together, it's quite a tower and it's easy [for it] to slip, it needs a lot of concentration -- that is, solid time to think -- and if you've got a job in administrating anything like that, then you don't have the solid time.  So I have invented another myth for myself -- that I'm irresponsible.  I tell everybody, I don't do anything.  If anybody asks me to be on a committee to take care of admissions, no, I'm irresponsible, I don't give a damn about the students -- of course I give a damn about the students but I know somebody else'll do it -- and I take the view, "Let George do it," a view which you're not supposed to take, okay, because that's not right to do, but I do that because I like to do physics and I want to see if I can still do it, and I'm so selfish, okay?  I want to do my physics.

Ten years ago, I sat in a living room with my friends Dave and Vinh, as we contemplated the starting of our own company, having just left the startup we'd started-up barely a few months earlier, mainly over disagreements with the ownership.  There, I'd been a developer -- a programmer, the sole one, in charge of building our e-commerce infrastructure.  I was 26, it was my first "real" programming job, and while I knew just enough to do the work at hand, I also knew enough to realize how little I really did know about computing and software development.  Nevertheless now, in that fateful living room, Dave and Vinh wanted me to take up the reins of management alongside them -- procuring of a team of developers, managing said team, and designing the suite of products they wanted to form the basis of our awesome new company.

I chose not to.  Instead, I chose to continue on as a lowly developer -- so they founded that company, and it did quite well for a while, then sort of faltered a few years later, the core group disbanded, and while I think it still exists in some form, it never did become the dot-com success story we all hoped it would.  As I recall, they weren't happy with my choice, but I knew it was the right one for me:  what business did I have running a technology effort when I knew so little about technology?  And what did I really want out of my working life -- to write code, or direct others in the writing of their code?  Surely there was more money in the latter, but the former was what got me up in the morning.  I remember Dave's response most vividly:  "You realize it never ends, right?  You realize you'll just end up learning language after language, year after year, forever until you die, right?"  And I knew he was probably right -- but I wasn't sure it mattered to me in the way he seemed to think it should.

So shortly thereafter I took a job writing Tcl at a startup in West Los Angeles.  Before that, I'd written only Visual Basic and Classic ASP in Windows environments, but now I was working in the UNIX and Linux worlds, writing Tcl and shell scripts and Perl and CGI and working with a beast of a publishing framework called Vignette StoryServer.  That lasted a few excellent years -- and from there, I went off and learned some .NET, built a few sites with that, then a little Java and JSP, did some cool stuff there, then some ColdFusion (really -- it's not as ridiculous as it seems), then more Java, then back to .NET (C# this time -- 2.0, then 3.0, then 3.5), over the course of a few different positions and independent-consulting stints, and now, today, at Real, I code almost exclusively in ActionScript using the Flex and AIR frameworks, both of which just released new versions, with more on the way next year.  I'm a Flash developer, by God.  I'm going to MAX next week.  I've learned, easily, a language a year for the past ten years.  I spent over $1,000 last year on tech books alone.  It hasn't stopped -- it's been relentless.  Dave was absolutely right -- it doesn't end.

In-between there, though, I did take one job, briefly, managing a team of developers -- and it sucked.   I had a fancy title -- Director of Software Development!  Check me out, Mom! -- and a dedicated parking space and everything, and it still sucked:  it was all political bullshit, a constant, daily reminder that what I really wanted to be doing was writing code -- scribbling, designing, implementing, compiling, and running.  Managing developers, I learned, is exactly like herding cats.  It's no fun at all.   So I quit. 

Now, I just write code.  My lowly title remains "software developer." And I freaking love it -- I'm happier than I've ever been.  Just this weekend, I built a couple of Flash-based video browsers for Time Warner Oceanic -- not because I had to, but because it sounded like fun.  And it was!  The joy of building remains tough to beat.

I don't know what all this means for my professional career -- my five-year plan, or my "career trajectory," or whatever you choose call it.  God knows I'd probably make way more money in management and administration.  But ten years later, I still don't care.  Ten years later, for me, coding's still where the fun is -- it's my physics.  George can worry about everything else.

A conversation excerpt, after we'd both cast our votes -- me in person, she by mail:

"So.  Governor?"
"Gregoire."
"Okay.  What about the assisted-suicide thing?"
"Yeah," awkwardly.  "I'm not necessarily for it, I just don't think it's my responsibility to tell someone they can't.  Did you vote in favor of the parks thing?"
"No."
"No?  Why?"
"Because we already pay enough in taxes!"
"We don't pay any income tax here!"
"We pay higher sales tax and property tax."
"Fine."
"What about the public-transportation one?"
"For it."
"For it?"
"I'm just saying -- I'd like to see it happen."
[Awkward silence, then audible sigh.]
"What -- you think I'm a jerk, now?"
"No, I just think you're a commie liberal."
"Nice."

Carville and Matalin should be proud.