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Monday May 05, 2008

"Little Brother" Release Cory Doctorow's Little Brother has been released, and if happen to have anyone in the teenage (oops, Milennial) generation in your house, make this required reading. Doctorow loves to borrow titles and ideas from his favorite writers, turn them on their proverbial listening ear, and remix them with his own view of near-present reality, and Little Brother is an appropriate homage to Orwell's 1984. Writing about Big Brother was de rigeur for anyone of roughly my age and public high school demeanor, a cultural artifact left over from Red Scares and fear of a Communist planet. It was supposed to warn us about what would happen if Democracy with a capital "D" failed.

Dcotorow captures what happens when the representative government fails in the closed, not open position. I think Little Brother should be recommended, social, culturally critical reading for anyone who leaves a digital trail a mile wide on their FaceBook profile. The book is a great read and should incent much-needed conversations about data privacy, data security, and the delicate balance of power that needs to be maintained between privacy, security, trust and public safety.

Best of all, the book is available for download in a plethora of formats, under a Creative Commons license. How better to spread the words of freedom? ( May 05 2008, 08:58:51 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

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Thursday April 24, 2008

Passover as the First Eco Event We're deep in the throes of the Jewish holiday of Passover, a celebration of the Exodus from Egypt, of freedom from slavery, and of the rebirth of spring. Capping the narrative of the Israelites' escape is the chronology of the ten plagues, a series of disasters including rivers of blood, wild beasts, hail, locusts, cattle disease and darkness. The hagaddah (the Passover man pages, if you will) we used on Sunday night referred to the plagues as a series of eco-disasters; that the ten plagues were not just relevant at a point in time 3,500 years ago but force us to re-tell the story in modern times to drive ecological consciousness. Unmitigated greenhouse gas produces darkness and eventually hail in extreme weather conditions; toxicity in the groundwater diseases animals. The idea isn't new, and there is a narrowly circulated academic journal article that puts the ten plagues in an eco-context. What's new is that Passover and Take our Daughters and Sons to Work Day intersect on this year's calendar, and the theme of bringing our children into the workplace this year is "Making Choices for a Better World."

It's a bit difficult to explain to school aged kids who you do if you're a systems engineer. At various times, I've asked kids to name things with computers in them, going through the non-obvious ones like cars, cell phones, and cable boxes, explaining that all of those devices are more useful when they're getting data, and that's the kind of problem that we solve. At other events, I have asserted that online shopping is made possible through your friend the remainder, and suddenly fifth grade math and long division seem more real-world relevant (Only once did I take a detour into the Chinese Remainder Theorem, but that was to prove that some of these ideas are really old. Like older than the scary school nurse old -- sorry, Mom).

It's much easier to explain what systems engineers do in the context of social networking, content (including Moodle) sites, and network-delivered services. My concern is to tie the eco-theme into these discussions in a meaningful way for our kids - so that they think about the long-term consequences of how their personal data is handled, of how they store (and where they store) pictures, text, and meta data, and how the Internet really is the infamous "permanent record" that our principals warned us about. Cory Doctorow's equating personal data and toxic waste is accurate. It's up to us to tell the story, annually, to our kids so they can put a contemporary spin on potential eco-disasters, even those reflected in Biblical terms and proportions. That's the point of bringing our kids to work, just as it's the point of re-telling the Passover story each year. ( Apr 24 2008, 07:32:51 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

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Jon Armstrong's "Grey"
I finished Jon Armstrong's sci-fi novel Grey last night and all I can say is "Wow." I can see why it was nominated for the 2007 Philip K. Dick Award, and at times it reminded me of Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe, William Gibon's Idoru and Pattern Recognition, the Fake Steve Jobs blog and my own horrible sense of fashion, dumped into a blender and set to "puree". It's set in a world in which fashion, heavy metal music, and family politics are all taken to extremes -- a world which is entirely plausible. Armstrong's descriptions of the talking heads on "channels" as forward extrusions of bloggers, and his exquisite use of detail in describing what passes for haute couture are alone worth a few nights spent reading the book. They provide a balance to the violent, morally upsetting scenes through the book, all of which are seen through the protagonist's fashion goggles. I got more than a few chuckles along the way, and I'm convinced that if I were truly able to use radioactive elements as fashion accents (as several characters do) that my inability to pair ties and suits might be overlooked. ( Apr 24 2008, 01:41:43 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

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Tuesday April 22, 2008

Getting a (Second) Life

I'm going to be part of the Sun Microsystems employee event in Second Life next week, and to get emotionally and electronically ready, our comms team has been busy crafting an avatar for me. In some ways, virtual reality has the right amount of malleability: I asked to be six feet tall, and for the first time in my life I've broken that barrier. I have a somewhat accurate portrayal of weight, shape and dress code, down to my favorite orange sneakers. What's kind of cool is going through your 2L inventory to see the components assembled, layered, filtered and otherwise projected on your form. And here's where reality intrudes again, mixing metaphor and meat-for: Several years ago, I asked one of my Chinese-literate friends how you refer to curly hair in Mandarin. Her response was that there's really no phrase for hair like that on people, and the closest thing she could come up with was "curly dog fur." So for a while, she referred to me as "black dog fur" and it kind of stuck as a diminutive. Guess what provides the texture map for my hair in Second Life? I've been shopping in the dog fur store, folks. Folks who are strong proponents of immersive worlds are quick to point out that the worlds aren't completely artificial; they're representations of real people doing real things. And in my case, with the same real world limitations on my shaggy look.

( Apr 22 2008, 02:37:35 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [3]

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Friday April 11, 2008

@ The Generation Gap We're hosting two Israeli teenagers this week as part of the Diller Teen Fellow program between our North Jersey federation and our sister program in Rish L'Zion, Israel. They are articulate, funny, techno-savvy and they don't laugh at my pidgin Hebrew. My command of food-oriented Hebrew and the morning operatives (coffee, ice, good morning, where are you?) was sufficient until I offered to email some pictures to their parents.

One of the girls spelled out her parents' email login then directed me to type a shtruedel. I gave her the look normally reserved for my attempts at this modernized ancient langauge (reality check here: last time I was in Israel I had to ask for toilet paper, and could neither remember the word nor describe it, until I forced a Yiddish-Hebrew couplet and asked, essentially, for "butt serviettes". It worked, but you should have seen the look). Shtruedel is what my Yiddish-speaking grandparents ate on Sunday afternoons after the obligatory trip to the bakery. It's not on my keyboard.

Until the air-drawing, repetition and thinking in metaphors clicked: shtruedel is the @ sign. Looks like a strudel in cross-section. I had to double-check Wikipedia on this, just to be sure I wasn't injected food-related context where none was warranted. Sure enough, the proper Hebrew word for "commerical at" is krukit, which translates to...

Strudel.

I believe this is another one of those Internet generation gap social vignettes, but not one born from students who have never seen a hand-written receipt with a quantity, a "commercial at" sign followed by a price. Nor is it a derivative of pronouncing email addresses in a post-bang addressing Internet. I really think that the current crop of teenagers don't get the notion that you are "at" your email. Your address is an identifier and a place name; it's not necessary for you to be at that named place. When first reading email on the Princeton University VAXen in the mid-80s, you had to be physically in the same building, usually on the other end of a nicely soldered RS-232 cable. The @ was less commercial and more existential: You were at that machine, not at a service, not at the other end of a scalable load-balancing and DDoS defeating L7 switch, but really at a compute node. Today, whether it's shtrudel, snail, round a, fancy a, or monkey, it's merely a token that helps us break a network location into pronouncable parts. Why not put a cooloquial pronunciation on it? Especially if it's food-related, as it improves the probability that I know the word. ( Apr 11 2008, 05:22:04 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

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Wednesday March 26, 2008

Getting the "H" Out Of Yahoo The hullabaloo, hoopla, hearsay and hand-wringing over the Microsoft-Yahoo deal has me more than mildly amused, and not just because it would fill the H-stanza in King Crimson's (entirely appropriate) Elephant Talk. Somehow, Google thinks that the deal will damage the internet in some way that having opaque code that colors our search glasses doesn't. Having one overwhelming path to an answer, whether it's search, email, personal productivity apps (there's a misnomer), or advertising, is bad for the internet. I'm regularly reminded of Larry Wall's comments about the ornate and duplicative nature of perl: it's is about having many ways to accomplish the same thing, it's about having paper and crayons and not just an Etch-a-Sketch with which to express your crudely drawn ideas. That's what makes the internet good, frightening, disruptive, harsh and useful, all at the same time: there are many paths, some of which seem wrong but all equally transparent.

Personally, I think the Microsoft-Yahoo mash-up is a Truly Bad Idea, but not because of competitive or market forces. It's something that "can only end in tears" to quote one of my favorite staff peers. I'm neither a financial analyst nor do I play one in my blog, but on the surface, the deal seems to have interesting, material impacts like accounting for the premium paid, and the minor bump in net income to cover other Microsoft experiments in media. And finally, I don't see how owning an advertising platform makes Microsoft into a media company, if that's where their joint strategic vector is aimed. It's difficult to discern sources of other operational leverage, unless Microsoft wants to re-engineer Yahoo's platforms (pure cost always has a bad return on investment unless the future cost savings are measured in orders of magnitude, not percentages). The New York Times summarized the situation quite neatly by comparing the deal to building a spaceship out of spare parts.

So what bugs me about the whole deal, and makes me smile to see Google grating? It's a long prolegomena to any future meat-physics, built on three premises: (1) The difference between advertising platforms and media companies; (2) Yahoo's creed of "connecting people" and (3) the decreased utility of thinking in hierarchies.

Yahoo is an advertising platform, not a media company. True media companies make their money from end users paying for content, and in a world of long-tail economics, they grow those markets through other types of content -- blogs, linked references, word of mouth, email, tagged content, or just about anything else that expresses opinion or organizes ontologically related thoughts. The "head of the tail" will still be advertising driven, but the long tail doesn't rely on ad displays, click throughs, or content analysis to drive volume. Part of the itchiness here is that Microsoft only makes those "head of the tail" products, and monetizes essentially nothing in the long tail. So buying an advertising platform aimed at other heads seems reasonable -- and is a reflection of the media company == advertising platform structure that brought us the writer's strike.

Yahoo's creed is to connect people to their passions. I love ice hockey, eBay, baseball, the New Jersey Devils, Princeton, and my family, and aside from some very infrequently used Yahoo group-based mailing lists, there's zero net interaction with Yahoo there. I used flickr but switched to SmugMug; anything I want to tag I put on Facebook. I'm not sure where the connections are supposed to come from, and I certainly don't find clumps of targeted ads useful in these narrow, single-topic facets of my life. So Yahoo hasn't helped me find any other parts of my interest taxonomy, nor have its ads stimulated me to buy things based on intersections of those interests. Some might claim that I'm not taking full advantage of the Yahoo experience, but that's because I find the experience too much like using the Yellow Pages (the alphabetical, printed kind, not the maiden name of NIS). I don't want more content, I want more organization. Which leads me to...

The "H" in Yahoo means "hierarchy". Perhaps the root cause of Yahoo's consumption stems from holding on to the "H" in the likely ex post facto Yang and Filo acronym for too long. Hierarchies imply that you start at the general and work your way to the more specific; in the advertising platform of the future (or better yet, the media company growth platform of the future), you'll go from specific to specific. When I do my annual Locus magazine sci-fi shopping run, I'm not starting with "Books" or even "Space Opera" but rather looking for additional input from writers and editors whose output I trust, and in three years of picking my beach reading this way I've discovered half a dozen authors and consumed all of their works. No click-throughs, no banner ads, and no in-store display required.

That, in a nutshell, is the issue: connecting people to concepts (things, communities, ideas, markets) is a graph problem, and if you want to focus on the graph problem, you need to think about the edges of the graph, not the nodes in the graph. Let the nodes (the content sites, the media companies) flourish, and build a better, richer, more wonderful graph traversal experience, and you have succeeded. It's why I read BoingBoing and why getting slashdotted is so powerful. It's why FaceBook has promise, once it figures out how to get around the walls of its content garden.

But unless Microsoft dramatically changes its designs on media company status, I believe the focus will be on the nodes in the graph, and advertisements for those nodes, rather than the edges connecting the nodes. And at some point, the "Yet Another" part of the acronym expansion dominates the end result, while the "Officious" and "Oracle" potentials - to create node-to-node links that nobody suspected were interesting until they discovered passion in their targets - are forever encapsulated in the cells of an M&A spreadsheet. And that's something to cry over. ( Mar 26 2008, 05:12:55 PM EDT ) Permalink

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Jodi Picoult's Change of Heart and Other Voodoo Finished Jodi Picoult's latest novel, Change of Heart, this week. As disappointed as I was with her two previous works, this one is a definite top-three list nominee. It is as rich and detailed as My Sister's Keeper, but rather than what felt like forced literary devices or a plot that rushed to get through difficult turns, this one moves smoothly from start to finish. I didn't guess a single surprise (which makes them surprises), and her new lawyer type is a wonderful character with a neurotic Jewish mother, neither of whom venture into stereotype. Most of all, her treatment of religion and belief is fantastic, in both the fantasy and exemplary use of the word. I think the book should be required reading for anyone who shapes their personal conduct framework on an element of faith.

On the heels of a recommendation, I picked up Neil Gaiman's American Gods next. The themes are similar; but Gaiman deals in non-mainstream religions while also making me question exactly what constitutes true home-grown religion in America -- something faith based, or something consumption oriented, or something we construct? And I'm reminded of William Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive that asked some of the same questions (using some of the same phraseology) in a very different way. ( Mar 26 2008, 04:02:35 PM EDT ) Permalink

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Stars & Stripes Forever I've loved sailing and sailboats since the early 1970s, when my family would spend Sunday afternoons tooling around the Shrewsbury river in our day sailer. My father and I crewed for one of his friends on a 30-foot boat, competing in a summer race series that taught me (at the age of 12) what it was like to perform under pressure. Minus a professional league or local team to root for, we developed an interest in the America's Cup, particularly challenges held in 1974 and 1977. As I reached young adulthood, any thoughts I had of actually joining an America's Cup crew were dashed by three factors strongly against me: weight, strength and Australian affiliation. I had too much of the first, not enough of the second, and no idea on the third.

And so the thought went dormant for 30 years, until this week when we participated in the 12-meter challenge off the coast of St. Maarten. Having acquired both of the American entries in the 1987 Challenge, as well as the entire fleet of Canadian boats, the 12-meter challenge lets you get two sheets to the wind on a racing sailboat that has remained unchanged for 20 years: no bathroom and no shade. However, there was an immensely helpful policy update: no weight limit.

I fulfilled something of a teenage fantasy as I got to be a "main grinder" (half of the winch operating team for the boat's main sail), along with my son, while my wife was a primary (foresail) grinder and my daughter fed the line connected to our winch. Along with a dozen others passengers doubling as crew members, we raced on Dennis Conner's Stars & Stripes, the boat that brought the America's Cup back to the States after a brief stay Down Under, although we didn't duplicate his feats in our race for tourism dollars. Partly that weight and strength thing again, proving that some other things don't change. ( Mar 26 2008, 03:27:51 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

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Monday March 17, 2008

Bear Market for Advice I really, truly, dislike most "financial advice" vehicles. I stopped subscribing to Money magazine about 15 years ago after their year-end tax advice included "consider moving to a lower-tax state." I find interviews with fund managers deceptive, because they talk about specific stocks as if they were the sole focus of a fund's existence, rather than part of a (narrowly) diversified portfolio. But most of all, I despite talking heads, particularly those that aim to be a cross product of ESPN commentators and Barrons in its 1980s glory days.

Take Jim Cramer proclaiming Bear Stearns would be bought for upwards of $12B. That was written two months ago, with a straight face and supposedly valued insight. Huh? Cramer says "I think you will make great money." If you followed his advice, you effectively lost every bit of money you put in, once you subtract transaction costs. Bear was purchased at 99% off, not 90 points below its high of last spring.

Big bets without a surrounding portfolio (risk mitigation or diversification strategy) only increase the risk of ruin -- a phrase for gamblers, not investors. ( Mar 17 2008, 11:06:18 AM EDT ) Permalink

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Thursday March 13, 2008

Who's Afraid of Virginia Postrel? Clearly, not Eliot Spitzer, or perhaps he'd still be governor of the Empire State.

Postrel pretty much called this one five years ago in her blog, when Spitzer was gaining in prominence and power. I ran into that entry when Googling for other references to the so-called Antarctica Liberation Front and found an old classmate had the same funny memories I did of Spitzer's over-the-top self-importance being completely deflated by a bunch of really funny, really smart (and in one case, really short) guys with nice dramatic effect. There's an even more detailed description of the 1980 dismantling of Spitzer-dom, followed a few months later by the true story of why I continue to crack up, 28 years later, genesis of "Daniel P Arovas Hall".

I've tried really, really hard not to devolve into politics here, because my views are my own, and because they tend to be a bit stilted. But I think there's an HR object lesson in all of this: if you're going to be tough, be tough consistently (and not selective in your enforcement); if you're going to claim morality; be consistently moral. But most of all, don't ever, ever get so serious that you forget to have fun. ( Mar 13 2008, 03:11:47 PM EDT ) Permalink

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Monday March 10, 2008

Locus Magazine Recommended Reading for 2007 Every year Locus magazine, the trade journal for science fiction and fantasy writers, puts out a recommended reading list. I usually end up reading about half of it, sometimes based on re-inforcements from sources like Cory Doctorow (himself a frequent name dropped on the list), BoingBoing or a nod from another author whose work I enjoy. The 2007 list has been published, and I just ordered a half-dozen books from the tally in search of new sci-fi authors and genres.

I'm a bit surprised to see Michael Chabon on the list; his work impresses me more like that of E. L. Doctorow than Cory Doctorow (and they're not officially related). Richard Morgan's "Thirteen" and Charles Stross' "Halting State", both great reads, made the "Best Sci-Fi" subsection. Doctorow (Cory flavored) shows up for his "Overclocked" collection and "After the Siege," a novella recently turned into an insanely great comic book, capping the six-part series by publisher IDW. Ellen Klages' "Portable Childhoods" also makes the "Collections" list, and it's freakishly good in the spirit (pun intended) of Neil Gaiman.

One thing I found with last year's list, which was heavy on Vernor Vinge and earlier performances by Doctorow: more of the sci-fi stories involve what might happen, rather than alien races, bending the rules of general relativity, space operas and human extinction. This year's list builds from an historical fiction point of view (especially Jo Walton and Michael Chabon's works), so perhaps the locus of popular science fiction opinion is shifting to helping us understand and plan for eventualities that are easily conceived and potentially instantiated, rather than those which are merely fun fictions. ( Mar 10 2008, 10:24:10 PM EDT ) Permalink

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Everything I Need To Know I Learned In Wind Ensemble Today was one of those "If you can read this, thank a teacher" kind of days. After blogging about the harmonic convergence of a high school band performance and my trip to Korea, I decided to track down Mr. Santoro (my high school band director); turns out he teaches at a school not far from my home, and we traded a few emails. His reaction to my recap of his "Band prepares you for life" mantra was "I didn't think anyone was listening."

Judging from the number of emails and comments I've received, I think quite a few band nerds were listening to Mr. Santoro and other Harry Dinkle-inspired band directors as well. Here's my list of what I remember from high school band:

Not to be too senitmental, there were plenty of amusing things and completely useless trivia that I remember from band as well. I can still walk through most of the downfields we performed in the three years that I marched. Any time I hear "Hey Jude," "Nobody To Depend On," "Smoke On The Water" or the 20th Century Fox movie theme, I get the urge to step off from a nearby end zone and bleat quarter notes from a soggy sax. Perhaps I'm testing the boundary conditions on "sane" there. I learned that the basic laws of supply and demand apply to band fund raisers, despite our attempts to deny them and sell to someone with a last name different from our own. If there was little demand for holiday fruitcakes, then holiday votive candles, holiday decorative bells, and more fruitcakes were highly unlikely to find new markets. Marching bands often seem adept at fund raisers that raise the bar on non-consumption. And finally, while adding completely unnecessary glissandos to holiday music is funny (especially with a "guest conductor", A/K/A substitute teacher who was told he was getting a shop class), it's also artistically and perhaps morally wrong. Eddie Van Halen on the trem arm is a school of rock Eruption (listen about 1:00 in to the clip on the right); when done during a school band rendition of Silent Night it's grounds for ejection. Or perhaps there's a mash-up waiting to be made, and wind ensemble prepared me more for digital life than I would have guessed. ( Mar 10 2008, 08:40:09 PM EDT ) Permalink

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The Snowman Vote Chalk this up to the wonders of Google PageRank and the ability of the net to help convolve people with similarly evolved interests.

Bob Eckstein, author of Today's Snowman blog as well as the History Of The Snowman book, has included yours truly in the current snowman vote. Eckstein found both of my snowman-oriented blogs through a Google search -- for something else, no doubt, as the set pages returned for "snowman" and "chip multithreading" for example, has the cardinality of a carrot nose. He and I have swapped some emails, some snowman pictures, and now I grace his blog in the same outfit that terrorized 4-year olds in our Somerset office.

Good thing they can't vote.

[update] Note that on Eckstein's site, people related to Burl Ives cannot vote either. He's a very funny snowman (Eckstein, not Ives, as the latter has already logged out). ( Mar 10 2008, 04:17:50 PM EDT ) Permalink

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Thursday March 06, 2008

Funky Winkerbean Moment in Korea

As a high school student, the original Funky Winkerbean comic strip captured my life pretty well, especially Harry Dinkle, the world's greatest band director. Mr. Dinkle was fond of proclaiming that "Football fields are for band practice," while Mr. Santoro, my own marching band director, insisted that "Band prepares you for life." For a while, it looked like Funky was winning the art imitates reality race. Funky Winkerbean is in its third incarnation, having touched on serious life issues as well as some of the root causes of band nerd harassment in the last three decades. All of the characters have aged, although being well-drawn means you age more gracefully.

At our staff meeting in Korea this week, we had dinner that featured traditional Korean songs and dance. That's Jim Baty, Susan McMynn, Anand Atre, Bob Sokol and yours truly posing with the band. And no, I didn't holler out "Freebird" before their last song. I was actually humming along with the tune, much to the surprise of Korean GSE manager MJ Sim. I recognized the song as the "Korean Folk Song", a piece that had been arranged for wind ensemble in the mid-1970s and was the centerpiece of Mr. Santoro's branching out from the traditional holiday fare for our winter concert. In one of those weird wrinkle in time moments, I recalled the song, from memory, after not having played it or heard it for 30 years. Partly I think it's because so many other parts of high school were wrapped around band (fuzzy band helmets off to you, Mr. Santoro, wherever you are, because you were right) and partly because truly learning and performing a piece of music is no different than learning an algorithm: forgetting the Korean folk song would be as difficult as forgetting the nuances of e to the i pi which I learned around the same time. Or perhaps, like Funky Winkerbean, I'm just drawn into new situations with my entire history indelibly inked. ( Mar 06 2008, 10:44:15 PM EST ) Permalink Comments [3]

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Wednesday March 05, 2008

Embracing Change
Sometimes we become so accustomed to the way in which we do something, or the tools used in accomplishing the task, that we forget there are continuous improvements available. Current cell phones are significantly better than the 24-month old flip phone with the marred case and cloudy camera lens that I tote around; new inkjet printers are faster and quieter (and seem to have less residue accumulating under them) than the combination scan/fax/print/stuffed animal stand that I've been using for nearly five years.

Changing something requires that we justify the cost of the change, in terms of money, learning curve, and in many cases, exchange of one comfort for another. This sounds trite, but I've now experienced this "ah ha" moment in consumer technology upgrades twice in the last few weeks.

The first was an obvious pain-over-price choice: my inkjet printer was dying a slow and painful death, resulting in a lot of magenta colored hardcopy. I print most things in black and white, draft quality, and this hadn't become a major issue, but at some point I decided that both the acquisition and operation cost of a new printer far outweighed my stubbornness in keeping my six-year old (42 internet years) printer on refurb cartridge life support. A quick trip to Staples returned a new printer that has a better fax modem, full scan capability supported by Mac OS X, and uses cartridges that cost about 2/3 of the old ones, and I had it up and running inside of 20 minutes. What was I thinking? My net cost was about $100 and an hour total of my time. But inherent in making the change was deciding that the new features, improved performance and better printer drivers were worth the effort, and my own time. Kind of obvious when you look at it objectively, but this is exactly the same argument applied to upgrading operating systems, hardware platforms, storage networks, and desktop productivity suites. Once you climb over that small potential hill, you pick up enormous kinetic energy running down the other side. We can't let the local maxima (in terms of angst) hide the more global minima (in terms of cost, frustrutration and badly tinted e-tickets) one upgrade away.

Less obvious, but of much greater personal benefit, was changing the strap on my camera. I have been using a 3-inch wide Disney themed strap since I broke one in Disneyworld 10 years ago. It's perfect Disney: nice graphics, a bit overpriced, and a perfect simulacrum of a real camera strap. But it worked, and I didn't think much about it until I got my SmugMug strap in the mail. It's light, thin, constructed of nylon webbing with some "give" to it, and in the course of replacing Mickey I noticed my old strap had started to fray where it passes through the camera cleats. Yikes. What's the big deal about a camera strap? The new one is much smaller and softer, so it packs flatter and into a smaller case (see photo, that's me taking a picture of Jim Baty taking a picture of me on the Great Wall of China. Recursion is cool). I never gave much thought to the said features until I actually used my camera for a full day. As Buddy Hackett used to say, at the end of the day, at first I thought something was wrong, as I didn't have that burning feeling (not hearburn that Hackett got from his mother's cooking, but chafing of my neck and forearm where I'd wrap the Mickey strap if I wanted flexibility in shooting). I carried my Canon on the canon of Beijing tourism with nary a nick. Second lesson learned: sometimes people who are professionals in an area really do know all of the little things. I started using the new strap on the recommendation of SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill during a side conversation at one of our Sun customer events. I had no idea how right he was -- he was giving the straps away, but in doing so, he increased my comfort in taking pictures, which made me take a ton of pictures on this Asia trip, which of course I've posted to a SmugMug gallery.

Open source camera straps? You bet. I'd make some cranky and oblique convergent comment about how Disney might figure out that open sourcing creates new consumers or drives demand, and given the number of photos taken in Disney properties there'd seem to be some synergy here, but I'm enjoying my post-image-posting without having any red neck effects. ( Mar 05 2008, 11:25:40 PM EST ) Permalink

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