I’ve been to London many times over the years but I have never been around Christmas time and I have to say after being there last week, it suits it. Maybe not quite as much as it suits New York City, but its still quite nice.
The real reason for this trip though was to show my Dad around. He’s never been there and its been a long couple years for him as my Mom has been suffering through very advanced dementia. Since he’d never been we got to do all those things that I hadn’t done in many years: British Museum, Westminster Abbey, etc. Plus we decided to take the Channel Tunnel via train to get a day’s worth of Paris into the mix. While I loved the train ride there, a day is not long enough to see Paris and it really just wore us out trying…. plus, I blame this week’s flu on them, because I can. Nonetheless, I took the camera along and snapped a few photos.
Take a look at the set!
a few of my favs: –>
All Photos in this post originally uploaded by dmason. Used under CC-BY-SA.
Thanks to my friend Ruby for actually remembering to take a camera out and grab a shot of this before it disappears.
These signs are all over Chapel Hill and I love them.
I read today that Apple is going to renovate the Chicago “El” stop across from their store. The run-down stop is in bad repair and the Chicago Transit Authority has no money to do anything about it. In exchange, Apple gets naming rights, control of ad-space in the station, and, of course, a better looking neighbor.
I am of two minds about this news. On the one hand, I think it is a unique model for municipalities (or transit authorities as the case may be) to make some much needed upgrades when our poor economy and our national attitudes don’t provide enough support and funds to do so. At the same time, I cringe at the possibility of the “Apple iPhone North Station”. We have too much corporate sponsorship already. More will dull our senses (not to mention our history and traditions).
This quote from the article sums up the problem well:
“We are selling everything, aren’t we?” says Joseph Schofer, director of Northwestern University’s Infrastructure Technology Institute. “We haven’t come to the point where we recognize how critical the system is to the economy, and provide it with long-term, stable funding.”
Its a choice we have to make as a society – “Macbook Pro Stop West” or preserving our heritage. Unfortunately, in this economy, and with the “tea-baggers” ideas getting the airtime that they do I fear we will simply sell.
When the idea of web-based apps first started to look more viable there was an interesting debate within the open source community. The debate came down to the question of whether it mattered if you had the source-code of web hosted software. For the most part I think it does – especially if the developer wants faster development and more eyes looking at bugs/holes.
Having said that, freedom for a web-app means something completely different when it comes to the users data. This could not be more evident than with the recent news of hapless Microsoft destroying all data on T-Mobile Sidekick phones. After this news broke the tech-blogs were awash with damnation of “the cloud”. How could we ever trust anyone to store our data elsewhere? What were we thinking?
Well, we were thinking that its nice to always have our apps and our data available no matter where we are or what device we are using. We thought, its nice to have someone else provide storage for our ever-growing bits. But they are right in questioning our reliance on others to always get it right when it comes to protecting that data from rookie mistakes, changes in the direction of the app, or becoming evil.
So for the cloud to work, user must always have access to their data. That doesn’t mean the user simply gets to see their data in the app, that means that the user is at all times able to retrieve their data, and in a format that is transferable to other applications. Period. End of story. Anything less than that is a failure due to the reasons the Microsoft case so aptly showcased. Of course this means that the user must also be proactive in retrieving their data from time to time if it is truly important to them, but that has always been the case.
Its important to note that the largest purveyor of apps “in the cloud”, Google, has had a somewhat quiet campaign to provide this type of data retrieval for a while now. Called “Data Liberation” (and tracked at the Data Liberation Blog) they have been slowly making sure all their apps have some way for users to retrieve their data. The newest tool comes to Google Dos which has just added the “Convert, Zip, and Download” feature which allows you to easily grab some or all of your documents as a zip file (converted to whichever available format you would like). This is the most powerful of Google’s data retrieval tools so far and I hope all of their apps make it this easy (including Gmail which can do better than simply offering POP downloads). Still, it is good to point out Google proactively “not being evil” when so many folks currently attempt to disprove their famous motto.
So we are well into the Obama administration now and as is pointed out in this article, Joe Biden is not the gaffe-machine everyone said he would be. To be honest, if it weren’t for that article, I don’t think I would have thought about Joe this week and that’s something the article doesn’t focus on – he’s been well out of the public eye. Whether that is because the White House wants him out of view or its because the press is bored with competence is the question though.
The article is good at showing a strong, confident leader:
Joe Biden had a question. During a long Sunday meeting with President Obama and top national-security advisers on Sept. 13, the VP interjected, “Can I just clarify a factual point? How much will we spend this year on Afghanistan?” Someone provided the figure: $65 billion. “And how much will we spend on Pakistan?” Another figure was supplied: $2.25 billion. “Well, by my calculations that’s a 30-to-1 ratio in favor of Afghanistan. So I have a question. Al Qaeda is almost all in Pakistan, and Pakistan has nuclear weapons. And yet for every dollar we’re spending in Pakistan, we’re spending $30 in Afghanistan. Does that make strategic sense?” The White House Situation Room fell silent. But the questions had their desired effect: those gathered began putting more thought into Pakistan as the key theater in the region.
… but it doesn’t show the great disappointment a great deal of people have at Joe not being a buffoon. Personally, I am glad he is disappointing people.
Just before, and then during, my 2 week vacation I killed two computers. Well… I actually didn’t do anything to them except use them as they were designed to be used – but they still died. As of this post, I now have one back from warranty repair and one still being worked on. This episode has highlighted my current data backup scheme and its success.
I have two ways of backing up my data. First, for everyday items that are not large files I use Dropbox and could not be happier with it. It works on both my Mac and Linux machines seamlessly and fits in well to my workflow. (by the way, if you click on that link and sign up, I get more space – woot! – its free up to 2GB)
Second, for large files like my photos or music I use a Drobo which is a RAID drive setup with some funky new way of doing RAID that allows for uneven sized drives, etc. So far it has been pretty nice though the setup and “Control Center” software is quite clunky. Nonetheless, I have 2TB of RAIDed backup running in a very quiet case.
The upshot of this is that although I have lost two harddrives in two machines, I didn’t really lose much – only some photos from vacation which I didn’t put in the dropbox folder before the crash. Compared to some of the more spectacular crashes I’ve had in my computing past, this is pretty great. Still a pain in the ass, but great.
Is it worthwhile to revive a lingering blog? Well, this is probably the third, fourth, or maybe fifth time I’ve done it… so I guess I see something in it. But then, here’s the deal, now that I’ve decided to revive it I am going to go on vacation for two weeks and probably won’t do much on it besides posting some photos of very pretty Ocracoke. The photo of the ferry is from last year’s trip to said island.
Ocracoke is one of my most favorite places. A small barrier island off the N.C. coast, part of the Outer Banks, there is something very special about it because it has cultivated a great community which many other “beach” destinations here lack. For this reason, we find ourselves going there as much as is feasible for a destination that includes a 2 hour ferry ride.
At any rate, welcome back dear reader… if there are any of you left.
I have pleaded to you, my readers, for the S.S. Minnow, a medium-class icebreaker, and a fort – no such luck (thanks for nothing). But here is my chance… our chance…
That dream to own a large seagoing vessel may be a step closer after Malcolm has pointed me to this article about the Navy trying to get rid of a stealth boat and a barge… for free! All I need is a big-ass slip somewhere and S.S. Dave will be a reality.
Look, don’t think you wouldn’t be welcome on S.S. Dave once its mine, no indeed! Help me find this big-ass slip to tie her up and I promise that you will get a cabin of your own! Just think of it!
I think I am going to at least need to name the captain’s skiff after Malcolm, can’t believe I almost missed this one.
For almost two years now I have been working on a project we have been calling Open. This project started off as a dream to *really* introduce open source applications to African health systems. From its inception in which a few of us were sitting around a table in Open Eye cafe till now there have been many changes and many ideas on how big of a scale it should all be. Despite it all though, the dream to raise money to bring open source health apps to African health workers, while taking time to let African IT students join in on the development of those apps has remained. In addition we hope to take the ideals of open source and apply it to all areas of our work, from open information to gender equality – you name it, and we will be transparent about it.
How we are raising money makes my heart warm too – we have been generously been given a song by Youssou N’Dour (who has been wonderful to us) which is now being released under Creative Commons. We then asked a bunch of other stars to remix the song and we are releasing these remixes on every music distributor who said yes. Isn’t that excellent! The songs are free, but we do ask you for a donation to help our cause out. I think its a pretty fair trade.
So I’d like to officially let all you, my friends, know that today we are finally releasing IntraHealth’s Open.
Please do me a big favor and check out the songs, then donate whatever you can afford to to help us with this dream. If you would like a recommendation – I think the remix by Toubab Krewe is amazingly good and it features one of the original “Last Poets” – plus, their from Asheville, NC! who knew?
By the way, a few of you friends helped me out a great deal by either giving me advices, connecting me to others, or joining the Open Council. To you I am most grateful. Thankyou.
The New York Times has an interesting article about the “news weekly” (think Time, Newsweek, Economist, etc). As with most printed news sources they are finding themselves changing… not failing mind you, but changing (in fact Time made a huge profit last year). They mention that these magazines offer more opinion than news and that is where their success is, but that doesn’t really fit entirely with my impression of them. I’d love to find more analysis of these publication’s supposed success actually.
Nonetheless, what really catches my eye is that Newsweek is starting to hint that they want to compete more with The Economist instead of mirroring every cover and every story Time publishes. This news doesn’t convince me to become a Newsweek subscriber by any means but it makes me wonder if we are going to enter into a new phase of wanting “harder” news. Perhaps the exit of the Bush style of “just keep shopping and we’ll be OK” has been driven into the ground? I certainly hope so. Further, it seems to me that if this is the case and we are entering into a new phase of what we want from our publishers, perhaps there is a glimmer of hope for newspapers.
