Hal Stern's thoughts on the economy, software, services, technology, and snowmen. Hal Stern: The Morning Snowman

I get (at times) grief for investing as much time as I do on Facebook, from creating groups to seeking out friends to thinking about how to build small, vibrant communities. One of my friends claims it's my competitive nature that makes me a "friend hound;" my kids insist I do this mostly to embarrass them (as if other embarrassment vectors weren't sufficient).

As I was reviewing the "Missing Manual" (O'Reilly/Pogue Press) for Facebook, I scribbled notes about business uses for the social networking site, from promoting themes and memes to building a readership to locating new channels for ideas. One of those channels hit me head-on a few weeks ago -- an old friend found me on Facebook, read some of my Sun blog entries that get imported as notes, and decided I might make an interesting interview for the Innovations Exchange for which she consults.

Today that Facebook "friending" turned into about 45 minutes of interview (which I'll recap another evening) and hopefully will show up on their site as a thought piece on where technology can disrupt the healthcare provider market.

For the past two summers I've goofed around about wanting to do a prose adaptation of Bruce Springsteen's Jungleland. Couplets of the song's lyrics have such a wide range of interpretation that you could spin a number of fast-reading short stories; my goal was to make the jump from technical writing (long, but factual) to blogging (narrative but short) to short story -- which is probably a koan of all writers who fail at tackling something novel-lengthed. My problem: I can't write dialogue. Some might argue that's because I rarely participate in dialogues myself, but conveying context through someone else's conversation is difficult.

Inspiration struck about a week ago -- not only would I do a modernization of a 33-year old story of New York hoods, but I'd do it with modern tools. If the Rangers were in fact having a homecoming in Harlem, they'd probably arrange it via Twitter, text messages and perhaps a Facebook group. Idea #1: When I sit down to pound this out, the whole work will be a sequence of Twitters, texts, and Facebook status updates. Map the characters into a vector of phone numbers, Facebook identities and Twitter URLs, and you have the ingredients for a forward story. Problem #1: As with song, there's no way to tell backstory; you enter the storyline in mid-stream and follow along, riding to some conclusion -- in the song it's nearly 10 minutes and a saxophone solo away; in narrative I think it's a shorter short story.

Always eager to find the transitive closure of goofy ideas, I went one step further: what if I actually captured screen shots of each electronic update, with enough time stamp information in subtle corners to indicate the pace of a song that could be the audio equivalent of an episode of 24. Why not go another step: get a half dozen people to create Facebook and Twitter identities for the characters, set up a group to "announce" the live performance of the story, and get up to 5,000 people to friend up and follow along, in real time, as social networking tools make art imitate life for a day.

With microblogging through Twitter and Facebook status updates, and cross-posting of blog entries as notes, we're essentially telling our own stories for a wide audience in real time. Why not tell someone else's story? And before anyone complains that Facebook accounts are for "real people" only, I'll point out that Doogie Howser has a fairly accurate Facebook profile; I doubt that any of the 3 people who claim to be the Devils' Zach Parise really are; and I noticed that a few FBers who might have been corporate or campaign fronts seem to have disappeared (Michelle Obama most notably and recently; she's back in page form). If a real person is following a script, generating a show in real time, then I'd think that the Facebook content kings would be thrilled with the chance to plug advertising into the event stream. Add in comments, wall postings and other content generated by people viewing the production, and you have truly interactive entertainment.

But as with all fun ideas, it starts with Square #1: I still have to write something.

Last week I had the pleasure of catching up with Cory Doctorow over a breakfast orders of magnitude more healthy than the last meal we had shared. Our topics

I've been fascinated by Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory's third book, which someone called "the weirdest book I've ever read." It's not obvious; it's clearly allegorical; it's rich and funny and any reading must include pauses for putting the book down and letting your brain absorb connected lumps of ideas. Each of the main characters has some feature that makes them decidedly not-quite-human; most of the characters go by an alliterative appelation that mirrors a baby name book more than a work of science fiction at times. Eventually you realize that all of the "A" names are the same person, as are the "B" names, and so on. Cory explained that the book is about second generation immigrants, finding themselves between a new, rich world and an old one with its own set of names and rules.

This struck a chord with me: growing up I heard my grandmother speak of Yukisiel, Kusiel and sometimes the slightly more formal but muffled Yezekiel. What I learned later is that those were all variations of Ezekiel, and I never learned if she was referring to my father (Ezekiel is his middle Hebrew name, Yezekiel in Yiddish) or one of her old-world siblings. As Cory pointed out to me, drawing on his own Russian grandparents as inspiration for the story, "everybody had five names." The strange, and often foreign, clothes, foods, tastes (in food and clothing), names, and mixed pronunciations that I heard in the 1960s are no more foreign than Doctorow's character Alan, who has no navel, a mountain for a father, and a washing machine for a mother.

I've previously written that Cory is one of a few Canadians with whom I can talk for an hour and not mention hockey. But in recapping our morning, I have to draw on a favorite hockey book, Roy MacGregor's The Last Season because of the common thread of dealing with the foreign nature of our own cultures as seen a generation or a continent removed from their origins. In MacGregor's book, [spoiler alert] Felix, the Canadian protagonist, is a second generation Polish immigrant, an NHL role player (read: fighter), and in the denouement of his career. Felix cannot fathom why his grandmother refers to him as a monster, and refuses to show him even the least affection; only later when truly desperate for a sense of his identity and some direction does Felix' father share that he was born with a caul, triggering superstitions his parents felt belonged back in the old country. Felix learns that his grandmother insisted that the caul be saved, dried and fed to him, so that young Felix would acquire the strength to ward off the apocryphal evils otherwise awaiting him. His parents rejected this bit of old world wisdom while Felix became a stranger in the strange land of his grandmother.

In Someone Comes To Town, those not-quite-right quirks end up saving the day, at least once, in scenes that you can literally smell coming off the pages. If we understand and respect the cultural bits that got us from Point A to Point B, things work out reasonably well. For Felix, his attempt to appease old school myths is upended by his father's insistence that they live wholly on one side of a cultural weirdness barrier. He grabs an unmarked, unnamed jar convinced he's found what his grandmother stashed decades before, but what Felix mixes with his breakfast is poisonous, not just the storied antidote to a toxic tale. The results make Last Season the saddest hockey book I own (aside from my own, which can't seem to write itself).

I just loaned my copy of Doctorow's book to a teenager, eager to hear how she reacts to the story, having matured in an era of rapidly changing, globally aware Gen Y culture that tends leave those from the "old school" on the other side of the social networking weirdness barrier.
[edits: minor midnight grammar cleanups].

Finished editing my previous entry about providing context in a social networking world to find that my "hobby blog" was sporting new comments for moderation. Normally this is something I take care of about once a week, akin to pulling weeds out of the cracks in the steps leading to my front door: unpleasant content, usually, that smells bad.

Today's comment pile had two gems: first from my own mother, commenting on my exorcism of the demons of the 1972 NLCS, reminding me that my childhood friends' mother lost her battle with breast cancer as few years back. In recalling Glenn & Scott's mom I can overlook the fact that having your parents comment on your blog is somewhere in the embarrassment-weird spectrum between having the school bus chased down the street for a forgotten lunch bag and finding your grandparents on Facebook.

Even better, author Jack Falla, whose books I mentioned as my grace note to the hockey off-season, found and commented on my reference to his writing. Woo-hoo. And I discovered he's got another book in progress (recommendation economy, anyone?) This is the kind of social context that has approximately epsilon probability of creation purely in face to face settings, but happens through a few search engine clicks, trackbacks and blog entries. The fact that Falla is one of the daily dozen readers who happen upon my "other" blog tells me that he is as genuine a person as his writing would lead you to believe.

It's not even 8:00 AM and this is shaping up to be a reasonable Monday.

[edit: fixed missing href tag close]

I can only count one contemporary killed in active military duty -- my middle school and high school classmate Steve Voight, the subject of one of my very first blog entries. While I've had family members who served in active duty in both World Wars, I and my own peers have been a bit young for Vietnam and a bit too old for the Persian Gulf, at least young recruits. When my high school class last got together in 2000, we had few details of Steve's death; a bit of Google work on this Memorial Day reveals more about his active service. An excerpt from his last letter (included on the site) captures the seriousness with which Steve approached even the mundane of his service:

Breakfast: Forty-five minute wait in line. Every meal is the same. Standing in line sweating. That's OK, though. There are people in my country who neither know or care that their freedom is being protected at this very moment. That too is OK, because I do know. I'm doing it.

Steve wrote that in 1996, just days before he was killed in a search and rescue mission. While most of us were watching Top Gun in cable TV syndication, Steve was embedded in reality resembling the last scene of the movie. In the dozen years since, I think most Americans have developed a much deeper sense of what's happening in the Persian Gulf, and we've all formed opinions of our continued presence there. Whatever you believe about the foreign policies of the United States, never for a moment doubt the integrity, courage, patience, and confidence of the men and women of our armed forces.

Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground. -- Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Written during the later days of the Vietnam War, equally applicable to the Persian Gulf wars.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This week has been a wild one for creative and sometimes content-free financial news reporting. On Tuesday, a full 50 hours before Google announced earnings, Forbes.com ran a news-free piece that opened with the line "The Google gravy train is pulling into the station Thursday." Tuesday's piece recapped previous Wall Street estimates and added zero net news or analysis. Two days later, after Google announced that it snuck in under the expectations wire, the headlines tell a different story. Maybe the gravy train was arriving at Wrongville Station. Isn't there some sort of Pauli exclusion principle for financial reporting that prevents different financial quanta from occupying the same online news site? It's supposed to be news, which means it gets analyzed, interpreted and made more valuable than the raw data.

But here's an even better one: After Yahoo! announced earnings earlier this week, a number of financial analysts reduced their opinions of the stock's potential -- that is, once the bad news was out, they said "Sell!" If you followed their advice, you'd be shaking your head on Friday with Yahoo! Up! 50%! On! Microsoft! Bid! Analysts are supposed to do analysis - build models, make predictions, form opinions and derive a reasonable expectation for those variables controlling the stocks and industries they follow. Some of them do the work, in Mark Cuban's words, but some only replay the information underlying the news. Just because we can (and do) get news more quickly online doesn't mean it should suffer from quality or integrity.

I'm off to the Sun Analyst Summit in the morning, our annual conclave for industry and financial analysts -- folks who in fact do build models and ask hard questions. I usually give our Gartner folks a gentle ribbing since they only give breakfast a 0.9 probability, but that's the spirit of the event: good, open discussion of the market, products and strategies with a high probability of food being involved.

Two months ago a cousins forwarded an email asking me to sign an e-petition requesting Google to edit search results. The heart of the matter was that googling for the single word "jew" returned, as the first sorted result, a link to a site full of outright anti-Semitism. Conspiracy theory, moral outrage and commentary followed, and I was struck by the number of people calling for censorship. Having Google edit results to remove things that you find offensive (and I'm delineating offensive and illegal content) is tantamount to asking for third-party censorship. And that precisely infringes on the First Amendment rights that protect a variety of free speech, whether or not you like the subject of that speech. I'm not a big fan of having others tell me what's allowable, provided it's not illegal.

There are two issues at stake: the network mathematics that drive search results and the network behaviors that modulate the content being searched. The first is outside of a network user's control; Google ranks pages based on longevity, number of links to them, quality and ranking of those linking pages, and a number of other factors, none of which are content dependent. The same algorithm that ranks an anti-Jewish site high on the list of "jew" results also puts my own blog in the same search sentence as Sports Illustrated, Czech supermodels and former NHL stars. A tip of the yarmulke to Google for providing a cogent explanation of how search results get sorted. This shows up as a sponsored link (something not covered in their explanation) indicating that Google is picking up on the Jewish single and doing, without censorship, what the Snopes-illuminated petition asked. Bottom line: You can't petition statistics or clickstream analysis, but if you're upset enough you can add your own voice to the mix.

How? It comes down to memetics, again.

Ignore that which bothers you. Very much a "sticks and stones" approach, but it's the alternative to asking a third party to filter information for you. Who's to say that the filtering won't remove content that you want in the future, or that the filtering parties have the same religious, political, social, musical, and sports-oriented views that you do? If you really want to see spirited diatribe, check out your local newspaper's youth sports forum.

Be specific when you query. My wife discovered that the brand name of a barbecue sauce that we like also happens to be name of a porn site. They don't teach such things on Madison Avenue. Googling for the brand name alone is not safe for work (or home); adding "marinade" or "sauce" to the query takes you to the appropriate import store. Non-specific queries increase the probability that you prove Rule 34 exists outside of comics. Add enough description to drive meaningful and useful results; searching for single words out of context derails your train of thought. You can't seriously be overly dramatic about clicking through to the dramatic chipmunk.

Generate your own content. This doesn't mean "flame," because flailing at and eviscerating content that bothers you either further escalates the page ranking of the content in question, or it devolves into an existence proof of Godwin's Law. According to the statistics provided by Google, single-word searches for "jew" (before the "petition Google meme") accounted for about one in ten million searches; that puts the dramatic chipmunk (over five million YouTube views) seven orders of magnitude ahead in terms of audience reach. Memetics doesn't always make sense, it only makes repeatable, micro-scale audiences. Conversely, new memes are generated by micro-scale creators with the tools of internet-scale distribution.

In the two months since I first started thinking about the issue, the "google jew" issue seems to have resolved itself: the offending link has sunk to about fourth on the list, and there's enough commentary and context around it that allow readers to form their own opinions of this type of free speech. Paraphrasing John Gilmore speaking 15 years ago, the internet has always routed around censorship. The better solution, with proof by example, is amplification of new content to create balancing memes and a balanced resulting sort (interpret as you like).

Spoiler alert for Cory Doctorow's "Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow"

Someone asked for my favorite output of Cory Doctorow's. Easy choice for me, as it's the short story "Craphound," the lead-off entry in the "Place So Foreign" short story collection and the piece that lends its name to Cory's website. I love Craphound because of the contrasts it paints, in very short form, reminding us of what it means to be human. Doctorow is a sci-fi author who eschews aliens, at least on space opera stages, and yet an alien figures prominently in this story - not to imagine perfection or advanced evolution, but to serve as a both a sidekick and foil for the human hero.

The story also reminds me of why I collect pucks and hockey cards and Hard Rock Cafe pins and hockey jerseys and biblical era coins and neatly organized and classified other piles of things, because they remind me of my childhood, or a place, or a time. Collecting is about searching, whether for the perfect piece to complete a theme or for the last of an item that you need to have for the sake of having. Sometimes there is perfection in uniqueness. Uniquely and decidedly human, yet touching on perfection. That's why I continue to re-read and listen to the podcast of "Craphound," because Doctorow reminds us of the joys of being human, and of remembering the joys of our childhoods, as expressed through things that trigger that joy in that memory.

Contrast that endpoint with the story line segment drawn by Thomas Klise in "The Last Western," a book referenced by Doug Horning in his baseball tome "The Boys of October." In Klise's book, a poor boy emerges as the ultimate professional baseball pitcher, commander of an unhittable fastball. As the perfect games mount, Willie, the protagonist, goes from hero to villain, reviled by fans for ruining their pastime with his perfection. Most people refer to "The Last Western" as a religious book, part fictional biography and equal elements hagiography, putting perfection into the light thrown by our respective belief systems. When encountered, whether through a perfect fit for that hole in your collection, a perfect baseball game, or a perfect number, perfection reminds us that most of the time, we live in a world of chance and choices, not all of them ideal or best, but all adding to the unpredictability of being human. Perfection in small doses is massively fun; experiencing it creates a short story to be retold of witnessing a perfect game, a perfect goal, or closing the last-minute eBay bid on the perfect bit of historical context. If we believe that sports performance is based on equal mixes of science and intent, it is a small leap of faith to understand how people mix sports and religious metaphors with zero intent of blasphemy. Lake Placid's Miracle on Ice anyone? The Immaculate Reception in Steel Town? Barry Bonds looking up to his father, still, after hitting a home run? Princeton University president and noted researcher Shirley Tilghman said "we must avoid the suggestion that science and faith are mutually exclusive — they are different manifestations of the human experience."

Perfection, faith, science and memories of our youth: there you have the ingredients for Doctorow's "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow." The 3-part story is set in 20-year increments, paralleling the timing of the rotating stage of Disney's Carousel of Progress, a Tomorrowland attraction whose theme songs lend their titles to this story. Jimmy, the protagonist of the story, is given immortality by his father through a set of genetic experiments. It's the stuff of science, not religion. Through the first two parts of the story Jimmy works hard to undo his brush with perfection, at least from a chronological point of view, while simultaneously decoupling his being from the Carousel of Progress itself, which his father had rescued, cared for, and effectively turned into the moss-covered family credenza of Jimmy's lost family. The Carousel isn't just a family heirloom; it's the future perfect, the plus parfait view of what might happen.

Genetic manipulation and immortality conspire against Jimmy, as he ends up in truly virtual form. A scientific and computational view of perfection, perhaps, until Jimmy discovers that there are bugs in his perception of his avatar that make perception clash with his long-lived human experience. Is he perfect, and yet still affected by the work of humans? Is he human, reflected in the tag line and title of the story, always looking to the great big beautiful shining through the night, or at least through some variable transparency in his rendering platform?

I'll admit that at the end of the podcast, I felt elated, that Jimmy had merged immortality and humanity in some way; I felt relieved, that Jimmy's extended family was united in a construct that felt destructive until that point; and I felt confused, in that the resolution felt less human, and therefore less real. I extruded equal elements of Robin Williams in "What Dreams May Come," Chris Moriarity's "Spin State" and the very end of Frank Herbert's "Dune" series, all of which blur the line between perceived experience and physical being. If, as Doctorow suggests, we can rest assured that "now is the best time of our lives," then there's really no difference, and Jimmy should enjoy an endless ride around the carousel, each circuit shared with the ever-changing experience of his family.

I basically did a control-Z on blogging about a month ago. It was completely unintentional, a combination of too much travel, holidays, a short family vacation, a lot of work, and quite honestly, the NJ Devils going on an 8-game winning streak that had me devote significant time to coaching from in front of the television or streaming broadcast of their games. After spending a few solid, uninterrupted days with my family, the best thing I did was plow through a few books.

Doug Hornig's "Boys of October" explores the 1975 Red Sox. I remember their World Series against the Cincy Reds vividly, not because I was a Sox fan but because the Red Machine had eliminated my beloved Pirates for a few years running, and I was happy to cheer against them. It was also the first series in which everyone was an armchair manager; I vividly recall hearing my elementary school friends discussing whether Bill Lee or Luis Tiant would pitch Game 6. It was a fun perspective, penned before the Sox lost the Series in 1986 and eventually won in 2004.

On the sci-fi front, Richard Morgan's "Thirteen" was outstanding, possibly his best yet, and Charles Stross' "Halting State" was even better. Most of Stross' work could be described as the right-oriented cross-product of Hello, Cthulhu t-shirts and Benny Hill-flavored looks at Her Majesty's bureaucracy. "Halting State" is "Numb3rs" meets Wikinomics with a Java jolt, literally, and it's a very fast-moving story. I finished it the same night that "Numb3rs" featured a storyline involving an alternative reality game, which was both ironic and fitting.

I also listened to all seven parts of Cory Doctorow's novella "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow/Now Is The Best Time of Our Lives", a superb riff on the Disney ride of the same name, and polished off Douglas Coupland's "The Gum Thief." I'll admit to thoroughly hating Coupland's "JPod," mostly because I felt like he ran into character development issues and solved for j by writing himself into the equation. But "Gum Thief" made up for his prior detour with sharp writing and characters that blur in and out of story lines. In a week when I spent copious amounts of time thinking about blogging, writing (actually cranking out a paragraph of the now-dormant hockey book), FaceBook, and my hockey team's web site, it seemed an apt metaphor for my own various states of matter(ing).

Finally, John Grisham's "Playing for Pizza." It's not a great book, it pales in comparison to some of the other sports literature I've read, but it was fun. And that was the whole point of bringing reading into the foreground.