It’s News to Me

Today is an especially appropriate day for me to pay tribute to mothers, mine and those in my life, and to my father because today, May 14th, is also my dad's birthday. Had he lived he would have been 96 years old today. The title of a song by Fred Fisher from around the beginning of the 20th century, "Daddy, you've been a mother to me," enables me to tie today's holiday celebrating mothers with the fact that it is his birthday, and I can reflect on them both and their contributions to my life.

Honoring your father and mother just isn't what it used to be. As I was searching for the author of the song I mentioned above, I discovered an interesting piece titled, "I'd walk a million miles for one of your smiles," by Charles Marowitz, written ironically on my birthday last year, in which he traces the de-evolution of American attitudes towards motherhood. He says …

Mom's most ebullient champion was Al Jolson who, folded on one knee with a catch in his throat and a tear in his eye, declared that he would "walk a million miles, for one of her smiles" for she was his irreplaceable "mammy."

In today's popular music, one is more likely to encounter "Mother" with a six letter extension added, an inescapable expletive in rap music. In the minds of most kids between 13 and 21, "mother" is simply an abbreviation for that 12-letter obscenity.

Swans Commentary: I'd Walk A Million Miles For One Of Your Smiles, by Charles Marowitz - cmarow31

I am old enough, and perhaps sentimental enough, to be more in tune with the early 20th Century attitude toward motherhood than I am with the current attitudes, so Mother's Day is a day to enjoy the memory of my own mother, whom I called by her first name, Grace. I don't know how to explain that aberration, except perhaps to note that I followed the lead of my father, Willie, who called her that, and she tolerated it. I never discovered whether she wanted it that way or not. Ironically, I called my dad Daddy, so my parents were known to me as Grace and Daddy. I can only observe that families and their customs are strange.

There are a lot of different ways of mothering, each mother having her own style. There are good ones and bad ones and a few who don't have a clue. But all of them, like all the rest of us I suppose, do the best they can. For that I salute them and honor their efforts to guide their children into adulthood. And I hope they (you) all enjoy being recognized and celebrated today.

And as I was taught to close my nightly prayer on bended knee, I'll close this tribute with the last line of that prayer now. "God bless Grace and Daddy wherever they are."

My son, Jeff, and his wife, Deanna, and my grandson, Dustin, are visiting this weekend from Georgia. Blogging will be light, because they are here to help me do some maintenance and rearranging of my house. I'm looking forward to how things will look after all is said and done. I'll return to my life on the Internet at the beginning of next week. 

On occasion I have been one of the resources to which a friend has turned for help with his computer questions and issues. Last night I received an email from him asking my advice once again. His son, whom we'll call Ben, enters a large midwestern university this fall as a freshman, and he needs a laptop. My friend, whom I'll call Bob, wants advice about what things he needs to consider when making the purchase of a laptop for Ben's college work.

In Bob's email he made this request, "Can you possibly help us in our orientation toward getting him the best, but being sensitive to what he wants as well — the X University is a wireless campus so I guess we'll need that stuff too."

He continued, "Any help, insight, commentary, recommendations would be greatly, greatly appreciated." And then in conclusion he added the line that makes this request really interesting when he said, " … money is really not an object (well, for the most part, you understand I think)."

The constraints should be obvious.

Ben needs a laptop to use as his computer during his college career. It will need to be light enough to maneuver around campus to the library, the dorm, and the classrooms with ease, but it needs to be powerful enough to serve as his primary computer and should have enough storage to meet his needs. Ben intends to be a business major rather than graphics artist or architect or physics major, but he has been a gamer in the past. So a fast machine with good graphics capabilities will make his leisure time more enjoyable, I'm sure. He is also "into" music, so Ben is likely to want to use it to entertain himself or as a processing station for his "tunes" for his IPod. Ben has done some work in his hometown as a disc jockey, so he might even want to do a podcast at some point. He needs to be able to produce written assignments for classes, tie into the university's wireless network, use the resources such as printers and scanners that may exist at school and have a software package that covers all his basic needs at school. He doesn't need to be hassled by having to recover from virus or spyware infestation or hardware malfunction. The laptop needs to be sufficiently current and reliable that it will last him for the next 4 years.

So I turn to you, my readers with experience in choosing and using a laptop, for your comments to help Bob and Ben and me to choose a laptop for Ben. Given the requirements as spelled out by Bob's email, and expanded upon by me, and given the opportunity to choose a laptop without undue concern over cost, what would you choose for your hypothetical 18 year old son, just heading off to college? What factors do you think Bob should take into consideration? And what specific computer would you recommend? (A link to the specific configuration would be great.)

Please be aware that because I have moderation turned on to all comments, it may take a little while for your comment to show up here.   

One final bit of information, Ben himself in his message to his dad suggests a computer that a friend of his has recently gotten, a laptop that Ben says, "looks like pretty much exactly what I envisioned." That laptop is the Dell Inspirion E1505.

Is that laptop the best choice for Ben, or do you have other ideas? Should Ben consider a Tablet PC, a Mac, or what? Any and all comments about this subject will be welcomed and appreciated.

And thanks for your help.

technorati tags: laptop, advice

It was four years ago today that I began It's News to Me on Blogger with this post. I suppose that date in 2002 was the day I became an official blogger, but as I said in that post I had attempted to create a blog on Tripod on Father's day in 2001, so maybe I should celebrate that as the date that I became a blogger. Or maybe I have yet to become a blogger and might be more appropriately considered an Internet litterbug or defacer. In any event, I'm still at it after all these years.

First these comments from the New York Times article "Now Playing on YouTube: Web Videos by Everyone"  …

The most beautiful video, by far, is called simply "guitar," and it has drawn, according to YouTube, nearly two million views. (It’s also the No. 2 most-discussed video on the site.) Like the Nike commercial, and the mesmerizing, disturbing "Knife Skills," in which a sullen young woman wields a butterfly knife at high speed, "guitar" is a display of unalloyed physical virtuosity that preempts criticism. After a black screen, the opening bars of Pachelbel’s Canon begin, and title cards identify the piece, adding, "Arranged by JerryC," and "Played by funtwo." Funtwo, presumably, then shows up: he’s a young-looking guy in a T-shirt and a baseball cap that obscures his face. He’s sitting by a computer and holding an electric guitar. He looks like any introverted kid with frontman fantasies.

Still, the anonymous image is arresting. Bright light shines through a window behind him, surrounding him with a glow; the effect is dreamlike. Funtwo then plays JerryC’s rock embellishment over the classical piece with amazing dexterity, managing to enliven the music and create a lasting work of pop art. As the comments say: "dude teach me how to play," "it is undeniably one of the best solos ive ever see," "u could go up against jimi hendrix." What’s most impressive about the performance is the combination of funtwo’s shyness and his aggressive, guitar-god fingerwork.

Some posters try to suggest that the performance is fake; but someone called fablesoftherest seems to silence most of the skeptics: "I’ll end the guesswork-the kid is for real," adding, "Funtwo’s is the definitive version. This kid is destined to be one of the great guitarists of all time."

Now Playing on YouTube: Web Videos by Everyone - New York Times

Now, here’s the link to the guitar video.  Run time is 5 minutes and 20 seconds.

technorati tags: music, video

I suppose all of us have heard it said many times that “the more you put into something, the more you’ll get out of it.” And my recent experiences in being involved in the Flock community only bears out the wisdom of that statement.

For instance, last night I spent a bit of time proofreading Eli’s newly developed Wiki explanation of how to verify a bug in Flock. In doing so, I rediscovered how to identify which build of Flock you are using, which is needed information if you are going to report a bug. I’ve also learned a bit about participating on IRC by hanging out on the irc-flock channel and observing the dialog that takes place there. Not only do you get a sense of the personalities of the Flock developers, but you also see how hard they work to make a product such as Flock work. So whether it is becoming involved in a church, a political party, or a hobby, jumping in and contributing whatever you have to offer, putting something in leads to a significant return on your investment of time.

And now here’s the point of these observations.

I believe the same principle applies to the Internet itself. You can simply be an observer of it by reading web pages, and from that you’ll derive a certain amount of pleasure and enlightenment, or you can become a participant in it by creating content online, whether through something like Flickr or writing a blog or participating in forums or becoming involved with an open source project. In my experience it is much more educational and clearly more fun to participate in the Internet than just to observe it by reading the content that others contribute. At the risk of committing the crime of using trendy terminology, Web 2.0 is to me far more fun than Web 1.0 was.

technorati tags: Flock, community, involvement

Downtown Louisville, originally uploaded by Dr Reelgood.

Mike’s family visited Louisville, KY, over the weekend for Madison’s Lacrosse game, and while there, he shot this picture of their most famous product (except perhaps for Cassius Clay, aka Muhammad Ali).

Today I’m going to try a slightly different style of blog post. The reason is that today’s post is a “catch up” post, meaning that I’ve allowed a number of days to pass without posting anything here but since those days haven’t been empty, I want to document some of the things I found interesting but didn’t post. Doc Searls and Dave Winer both seem to use a style like this (though they post contemporaneously), in that they post short posts with links to the items and less commentary about those links than I do. So I’ll try that with this one and see how it goes. So here goes.

In a Wired News article titled “Why Data Mining Won’t Stop Terror,” Bruce Schneier says …

We’re not trading privacy for security; we’re giving up privacy and getting no security in return.

Wired News:

Let’s look at some numbers. We’ll be optimistic — we’ll assume the system has a one in 100 false-positive rate (99 percent accurate), and a one in 1,000 false-negative rate (99.9 percent accurate). Assume 1 trillion possible indicators to sift through: that’s about 10 events — e-mails, phone calls, purchases, web destinations, whatever — per person in the United States per day. Also assume that 10 of them are actually terrorists plotting.

This unrealistically accurate system will generate 1 billion false alarms for every real terrorist plot it uncovers. Every day of every year, the police will have to investigate 27 million potential plots in order to find the one real terrorist plot per month. Raise that false-positive accuracy to an absurd 99.9999 percent and you’re still chasing 2,750 false alarms per day — but that will inevitably raise your false negatives, and you’re going to miss some of those 10 real plots.

Wired News:

Daryl Houston, one of the Flock developers, wrote an interesting and, I think, useful post on Monday called “How I am using Flock.” Such posts from the developers help to enrich our understanding of what might be done with the program. For instance, I’ve already incorporated his idea about using the Shelf as a place for notes. Though this tool (the Shelf) isn’t yet as richly useful as it has the potential to be, I find it incredibly useful in blogging.

On a somewhat lighter note, Mike Neel recently blogged about an online version of the Johari Window, a metaphoric way to depict the divergence between our public and private personas. As a result, I was moved to create one for myself. If you are interested in filling out this little exercise about your view of me, visit this link and pick 5 or 6 words from the list to describe me. Once you’ve added your entries, you can see the results by visiting here. If you’d like to create your own Johari Window, go here.

In this entry on March 7, Ray Ozzie talks about an innovation he calls the Clipbook. Some fascinating screen casts of how it operates can be found here.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has posted some screen shots of a Google Calendar that is is said to be in the offing.

Well, I’m sure there are more things I’ve examined and found interesting in the last few days, but that will give you some idea of what has caught my attention for now.

technorati tags: security, Flock, Johari Window, Google calendar, clipbook

For the last few days I’ve been involved in reviewing and editing the documentation for Flock.  After Lloyd seduced me into joining in the effort to produce/improve the documentation for Flock the other night, I read through the documentation that has been created thus far for the purpose of proofreading it.  While do so, I learned a few things I didn’t know.  For instance, I found out …

1. The search bar is a powerful little tool to use when looking through your favorites.  It searches not only by name and description, but also by the tags you set up when marking a web page as a favorite.
2. Click the feed button next to your News Sites collection in the Favorites Manager’s sidebar.  You’ll see an aggregated page.
3. When you’re done with something like Photo browser, Photo Uploader or Maps, you can make your favorites re-appear in the topbar by clicking the tiny arrow icon on the right end of the topbar.  (The arrow is so tiny, I didn’t know it was an arrow.  I had assumed it was an X to close the window.)
4. To see a list of your blog posts and drafts, open the Topbar menu and choose My Blogs.  (I knew you could create a new blog post using the Blog editor, but I had never explored the My Blogs tool.)

This morning I made my first significant contribution to the documentation when I created the Quick maps page for it.  This was my first extensive foray into Wiki editing, and while I was a bit nervous about doing it, I found it to be not all that difficult.  The great thing about wikis is that it’s easy for someone to come along behind you and clean up any messes you make or to correct any misunderstandings you may have introduced by your edits.  Since I’m not a developer/coder, I’m pleased that editing the documentation gives me a way to contribute to a project I believe in.

technorati tags: Flock, documentation

I don’t always watch the CBS Evening News, but I did last night for their final story, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. I was so hoping they would make the story available on the Internet so that I could point you to it too, and today I found it.

Click on the link under Related Video that says “Autistic Teen’s Hoop Dreams” and watch the story yourself. It brought tears of joy to my eyes, and I suspect it will to yours too. Don’t miss seeing this one, please.

It was the stuff of Hollywood, but it was real.

CBS News | Autistic Teen’s Hoop Dreams Come True | February 23, 2006 21:05:05

technorati tags: news, human interest, heart warming