It’s News to Me

The Microsoft team has made the Beta 2 version of IE 7.0 available for download to developers and adventurous users. Even if you aren’t brave enough to try that yet, you might find it interesting to view this video of the team leaders who created the new version of the browser. You’ll find it interspersed with a lot of jargon, such as CSS, RSS, etc., but if you’ll just watch the video, you’ll get a sense of the people who make this product and some of the functionality in the new browser. Watching the Channel 9 videos of such interviews as this is a really good way to become familiar with the technology behind the new developments in the industry, providing you can allow yourself to tolerate the ambiguity of not understanding completely what everyone is saying. This is not a problem, by the way, with the video itself but rather with our level of familiarity with the technological explanations of things. I find them fascinating, as I think you will too.

I’ve just completed a Skype call of about an hour and a quarter with my friend, Juan Gutierrez, in which he observed that my blogging has dropped off of late. Like many of you, he checks my blog periodically to see whether 1) I’ve written anything and 2) whether what I have written is of any interest to him.

I confess that periodically I get a “blogging block” where I either can’t think of anything to write or just don’t have the motivation to do so. And when that mood strikes me, I just drop out for a while. But I guess such stumbling blocks impede the progress of everyone from time to time.  So if you see me in one of those phases, just know that after a while I’ll be back and while you are waiting, go read one of the other 8 billion or so web pages that are out there just longing for readers.  Eventually, like a bad penny, I will return, because I’ve been doing this for too long to stop entirely.

Dave Winer has an interesting piece on friendship that I recommend to you. It sparked a number of comments that are also interesting, so don’t overlook those. And others have riffed on the idea. Also recommended to get the ole brain working this Monday morning.

I’m interested in locating any other Flock users here in Knoxville.

The reason for my interest is that over the weekend I exchanged a few messages with Daryl Houston about his recent podcast concerning Flock. During our exchange, I suggested to him that we might meet one evening to get to know one another and to discuss Flock and its progress. He was open to the idea after the next version of Flock comes out in early February, and he suggested that we might invite any other Flock users in our area to attend as well. Then the question arose about how many other users there are that are local to Knoxville. He doesn’t have that information and neither do I.

So I’d like to request that if you are a Flock user who lives in Knoxville or the East Tennessee area and if you think you might be interested in being part of a meet up with one of the staff of developers of Flock (Daryl), please contact me at talktoperry (at) gmail.com so that I can notify you when we have made plans for the get together. In fact, I’d extend this invitation to anyone who may be interested in learning about Flock, even if you haven’t yet downloaded and tried it. The time, date, place, and exact agenda are still to be decided, but we need to know how many of us there are and the level of interest. So far as I know, there is no “critical mass” we have to achieve to hold this event because Daryl and I can meet alone, but I’d like to give you an opportunity to be a part of it in the event you are interested.

Let me hear from you.

Daryl Houston, a fellow Knoxvillian and a Flock community shepherd, has done his first podcast about the new social browser Flock.

I have been using Flock since around the end of October last year and have found it to be quite innovative, despite the fact that the version I am using is a “pre-alpha” version. That means that all the rough edges haven’t yet been smoothed out, but Daryl indicates that a new version will be coming out around the first of February. Designed primarily to make two-way communication with the Web easier, this browser makes it easy for a blogger to locate information on the Web that he wants to quote and add it in to a blog post, using a thing called the shelf that Daryl discusses in his podcast. There are lots of other neat features that you can learn about either from the podcast or from the link to the Flock homepage above.

On Sunday, January 15, I drove to Carole’s home in Lula, GA, to surprise her and help celebrate her birthday. It’s the first time I’ve been down to Georgia in many months, and I did catch her by surprise. We went out in search of a Greek dinner on Tuesday night but when we got to the restaurant, we found it closed because it is only open for dinner from Thursday through Sunday. So despite the fact that we had gotten all geared up for a Greek dinner, we went to a restaurant down the street called Seabones and had a very nice seafood dinner there. I came back home yesterday. While I was in Georgia I didn’t have access to the Internet, so if I missed contacting you, my apologies.

As many of you know, Carole has completed her initial treatments for breast cancer (chemo and radiation) and is now on a maintenance drug. She seems to be doing well and will continue to be closely monitored by her doctors.

Please forgive me as I entertain myself with a romp through my mind.

Last night I woke myself up … laughing. I can’t recall any other time in my life when that has happened. Not just once did I find myself laughing, but three or four times in succession. Every time the thought came to mind, I would chuckle.

And at what were you laughing, you ask? Well, it was the phrase, “The red sheep are coming. Perhaps they’ll be dumber than the white ones,” that struck me as uproariously funny.

In my dream, this phrase occurred after my having had a frustrating dream about being given a simple chore to do by a naval officer involving some celestial navigation task and being totally inept at achieving it. Though I have been trained in celestial navigation during my years in the navy, I recall little or none of it now. And in my dream, try as hard as I might I couldn’t remember anything I had learned or do anything right. I felt the officer’s frustration with me and his derision and contempt for my knowledge and, I felt, for my intelligence as well. I was embarrassed and humiliated. But when he suggested that “The red sheep are coming. Perhaps they’ll be dumber than the white ones,” I found that incredibly funny.

A man’s dreams, of course, make little sense to any one else, outside the context in which they occur. They frequently don’t even make sense to the one who dreamed them. They appear to be merely random symbols trotted out and merged together into a stream of bizarre plot elements or narrative. Interpreting them is, I think, more a black art than a science. But they are the playground of the mind when it is left unchecked by consciousness, as it is when you sleep. And sometimes when symbols from the playground are brought into the classroom of the morning after’s conscious thought, they can provide the raw materials from which insights can be distilled.

So what do these symbols say to me this morning as I think about them? What associations do they evoke?

First and foremost, I have had the experience of having known something at one time that I can no longer recall or put to any meaningful use, and it is not a pleasant one. As I face the realization of my aging, I dread the thought that this kind of experience will only become more common for me to one degree or another. In the nightmare scenario, this is the fear of dementia, of Alzheimer’s disease, that haunts so many of us. And given medical science’s current state of knowledge, for any of us who are so unfortunate as to succumb to this cruel fate, there are no red sheep in sight.

Another association I have to this symbolic statement, “the red sheep are coming,” is that it signifies that the only hope of being intellectually superior is to compete in less demanding circles or fields. Rather than symbolizing aspiration, it signifies compromise, perhaps even resignation to defeat. If the white sheep are too smart for me, then I’ll have to hope that the red sheep come along, because otherwise I am doomed to be left behind intellectually. Because of my interest in technology, I often experience waves of new developments arriving before I have assimilated the old ones. So I have experienced the reverse of the arrival of the red sheep. Again, this association is not a thought or feeling one would normally think would evoke laughter. And yet, for me, last night it did.

So what was it, then, that I found so funny about that statement?

For one thing, it was a terrific put-down, even though I was the butt of the “joke.” Perhaps my amusement at it was with the cleverness of its punch. As a put-down, it’s a pretty powerful slap in the face. I can think of a number of times when I might have been tempted to say that to a clueless customer who was calling for technical support, but courtesy, and to a degree empathy, compelled me to refrain. Plus, despite my amusement with its power as a put-down, it’s just not my style to say something like that to anyone.

My other amusement with it is that it seems to symbolize the futile hope that things will get easier as time goes on. If anything, the reverse is true. Things that used to be simple, like family life, where the next meal was coming from, or how to spend the day, are no longer simple. The great “red sheep” hope is itself a dream. Instead of that, one must prepare for the competition with the smart white sheep and it seems the even-smarter wolves that are just over the horizon. A friend recently said, “the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.” And I can only agree with that.

What’s it all about Alfie? I haven’t a clue. Yet, just as it entertained me last night to laugh at that phrase, this morning it has entertained me to try to make sense of all that non-sense. I guess I’ll just have to wait for the arrival of the red sheep when, with any luck, all will be made clear.

Hugh (Buck) Thompson, Jr. died of cancer yesterday in a veteran’s hospital in Alexandria, Louisana.

I first met Buck when I visited his home on Rockbridge Road in Stone Mountain, GA, when I was about 10 years old and in the Cub Scouts. His older brother, Tommy, was the assistant leader of the Den and was probably a teenager at the time.

Subsequently Buck and I attended Stone Mountain High School together and played on the same football team. I visited his home a number of times during our high school years, and we became close friends, though he was a behind me in school by a year. When I graduated from Stone Mountain High, I lost track of Buck and the two of us never saw each other again.

Buck was an ordinary kid, lanky and a bit uncoordinated like many of the rest of us, and he was left-handed. He played halfback on the football team and would occasionally throw a left-handed pass while running a sweep around left end. He was reasonably fast but not an especially gifted athelete. In fact, little about him in those years would suggest there was anything particularly extraordinary about him at all.

However, when the opportunity arose, he proved to be an exceptional man indeed, even one some have called (and rightly so in my mind) a hero.

The year was 1968 and Buck was flying a helicoptor in Vietnam. I’ll let the Wikipedia entry tell the story from there …

After coming across the dead bodies of Vietnamese civilians outside My Lai on March 16, 1968, Thompson set down their OH-23 and the three men began setting green gas markers by the prone bodies of the Vietnamese civilians who appeared to still be alive. Returning to the helicopter however, they saw Captain Ernest Medina run forward and begin shooting the wounded who had been marked - and the three men moved their ship back over the village where Thompson confronted Lt. Stephen Brooks who was preparing to blow up a hut full of cowering and wounded Vietnamese; he left Andreotta and Colburn to cover the company with their heavy machine guns and orders to fire on any American who refused the orders to halt the massacre. (Needless to say, none of the officers dared to disobey him, although as a mere warrant officer, Thompson was outranked by the commissioned lieutenants.)

Thompson: Let’s get these people out of this bunker and get ‘em out of here.

Brooks: We’ll get ‘em out with hand grenades.

Thompson: I can do better than that. Keep your people in place. My guns are on you.

Thompson then ordered two other helicopters (one piloted by Dan Millians) flying nearby to serve as a medevac for the 11 wounded Vietnamese. While flying away from the village, Andreotta spotted movement in an irrigation ditch, and the helicopter was again landed and a child was extracted from the bodies, and brought with the rest of the Vietnamese to the hospital at Quang Ngai.

Thompson subsequently reported the massacre, whilst it was still occuring, to his superiors. The cease-fire order was then given.

Hugh Thompson, Jr. - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In keeping with the saying, “No good deed goes unpunished,” Buck’s heroism was not immediately rewarded nor even recognized. Indeed according to the Wikipedia entry, he was …

Kept in the dangerous OH-23 Raven Helicopter missions, which some considered punishment for his intervention and the subsequent media coverage, Thompson was shot down a total of five times, breaking his backbone on the last attack. He suffered psychological scars from his service in Vietnam through out the rest of his life.

Hugh Thompson, Jr. - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In reporting his death yesterday, the BBC added …

Although the My Lai massacre became one of the best-known atrocities of the war - with journalist Seymour Hersh winning a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on it - little was known about Mr Thompson’s actions for decades.

My Lai heroes honoured

In the 1980s, Clemson University Professor David Egan saw him interviewed in a documentary and began to campaign on his behalf.

He persuaded people including Vietnam-era Secretary of State Dean Rusk to lobby the government to honour the helicopter crew.

Mr Thompson and his colleagues Lawrence Colburn and Glenn Andreotta were finally awarded the Soldier’s Medal, the highest US miltiary award for bravery when not confronting an enemy.

Mr Thompson was close to tears as he accepted the award in 1998 “for all the men who served their country with honour on the battlefields of South-East Asia”.

BBC NEWS | Americas | My Lai massacre hero dies at 62

Heros, it seems, are just ordinary people who behave in extraordinary ways when life presents them the opportunity. I am honored to have known you, Buck. May you rest in peace.

Today in Las Vegas, hundreds of thousands of people have gathered for the next 3 days for the 2006 CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, the technology industry’s annual orgy of self-congratulation. In 1992, I attended Comdex, the predecessor to this event, and in that year there were 140,000 people in attendance. Comdex has since gone by the wayside, but a rose by any other name, blah, blah, blah.

Why, you may wonder, would anyone want to go to the expense and trouble to be in such a mass of humanity? The answer is that most of us, myself included, are fascinated about what the future holds in the area of technology. I confess it is intoxicating.

Last night, Bill Gates gave the pre-conference keynote speech and that is available online here. Although this video will be more enjoyable if you have a broadband connection, it is also available for those of you with a 56K connection. You’ll just have to wait a bit longer for the download. The focus of Mr. Gates’ presentation is the new Windows operating system, called Vista.

Being able to see this presentation on my PC here at home is a much better way to “attend” this event than having to go to Las Vegas for it. It’s much easier to sit here in the comfort of my home and watch the more than an hour of information (1 hour and 36 minutes). If you are interested in what’s coming next, take the time to see this presentation.

I’ve mentioned Colm Smyth here before. Last night, he called from Dublin (via Skype) and we talked for about 30 minutes.

It was the first Skype call he had placed to anyone, and he noted that it felt a bit like having a blind date. I had to chuckle at that idea. Though we had previously exchanged comments on each other’s blog (his is S’Mythology) and communicated through a few emails, I had to admit that it was a bit strange getting to talk with him for the first time.

This conversation came about because he had offered to assist me, by exchanging instant messages, in learning to program using Java. I had suggested that we could talk instead, if he had Skype installed. Though he didn’t already have that program at the time, he promised to get it installed and get the necessary hardware (a headset and microphone) after the first of the year. True to his word, he fulfilled his promise on January 1, a fact that impressed me with his follow-through. There is nothing particularly remarkable about having a Skype conversation with someone on the other side of the world, except of course that it is free and incredibly clear, but this particular conversation impressed on me, yet again, the wonder of the Internet and how it permits establishing friendships with people you’d never meet or get to know otherwise.

I’ve been using Skype to talk with my friend Paul Moor in Berlin on an almost daily basis for just over a year now, and I’ve also met and spoken with Sean Wong in Sydney, Australia, who found me because of my blog. I’ve spoken with Hans-Christian Steinhoff, Paul’s Berlin computer guru, and with Anthony Morris, a British friend of Paul’s who lives in Bavaria. I’ve used Skype to communicate with James Prudente in Seattle and with Tom Simpson, of Webfeed Central, who lives in Jamestown, ND. And I have had many coonversations with old friends like Phil Petty who lives in the Atlanta area.  All of these contacts have come about through no special effort to expand my circle of friendships around the world but just through being online and actively adding content to my little corner of the Internet.

I find such things as “Dublin calling” make living in these times absolutely fascinating, and I look forward to future conversations with Colm, and others, throughout this and coming years. It’s an exciting time to be alive.