WebSerf

When I first started using Skype, I was puzzled to receive several calls from people I didn't know who lived in exotic places, couldn't speak English very well, and didn't seem to have anything to say.  A guy in Spain enlightened me: they were using Skype to locate native English speakers and practice English conversation.  In some businesses, in some countries, fluency in English opens doors. 

I admire the bravery it must take to call a perfect stranger and try to strike up a conversation in a language one doesn't speak very well.  It's not something I would feel comfortable doing.  And yet, having studied a couple of languages in high school and gradually having forgotten most of what I'd learned through lack of practice, I kind of wished I did have the nerve to try it.

After a while I stopped leaving Skype on and more or less forgot about the whole thing.  I got sucked into a couple of social networking sites for a while.  I also tried several others that didn't really stick, one of them being Twitter.  I kept hearing about Twitterholics, and of people I respected who were really taken with Twitter, so recently decided to give it another look.  I find it more interesting now.  I still didn't know many people to follow, so I tended to browse the public timeline.  There I found tweets in a multitude of languages, including those I'd studied in school.

I began looking at the profiles and previous tweets from some of these people.  I started following one guy who tweets in German.  He tweets about his iPhone, his young son, and his mundane day-to-day activities.  It's perfect.  Language lessons in 140 characters or less.

At first he followed me too, but then stopped.  Maybe it's because I tweet in English.  Maybe it's because I'm not interesting.  Doesn't matter.  With his tacit assistance (and some help from Babel Fish) I'm learning German again, and I love it.  In time, perhaps I'll even become brave enough to try a few tweets in German.

I spent some time last week at the Web 2.0 Expo, a conference and trade show organized by O'Reilly, the publisher of all those technology books with the animals on the covers.

While roaming the Expo floor, a couple of things really struck me. First, the amount and quality of the swag was phenomenal. It reminded me of the dotcom bubble days. Besides the ever-popular pens, ball caps, and t-shirts, I saw Rubik's cubes, travel mice, gift cards for Starbucks and iTunes, stuffed animals, USB hubs, reusable bags, socks, laser pointers, golf ball sets, retractable power cords, frisbees, iPod speakers, iPod cases, well... you get the idea.

The next thing is that everything is free. I'm not talking about the swag; if you want that, you usually "pay" by watching a spiel or providing your contact information. No, I mean the products the people in these booths are pushing. Ok, not all of it was free - the enterprise stuff is mostly very, very expensive so you know how they are able to afford to pay their developers, rent expensive trade show booths, and give stuff away to almost anyone who walks by. But a very large number of the booths were touting end-user products that people can use on the web for free. Mostly, they appear to be ad-supported. In the case of some of them though, there didn't seem to be any opportunity to insert ads, which left me very curious about how they made money. (If they made money.)

Finally, there were a number of booths that were all about hiring. They weren't really pushing their products at all, just looking for new talent - or were straight out talent search companies. I've heard that Yahoo! is bleeding developers right now because of the Microsoft bid, but also there to hire were Google, Amazon, AOL, and other big and small names. All of this is stuff I hadn't seen since the dotcom bubble burst around 2000, so hmmm.

Thursday evening I attended a meetup with some folks who work for Flock. It was fun to meet some of the people who make a product I like so much, and to see a demo of the next version which hasn't been released yet. While watching a demo at the Expo Friday, I noticed that the IBM booth was using the Flock browser which I thought said something about both Flock and IBM.

While I was at the Expo I picked up lots of literature about some of those free web sites that I mentioned above, and if anything really catches my fancy (like the one that converts your RSS feeds to MP3 files so you can listen to them instead of reading them) maybe I'll blog about it later.

I don't remember when I found my first four-leaf clover. I've found so many, I tell my family it is my superpower. I have found not only four-leaf clovers, but also 5-leaf, 6-leaf, and even a 7-leaf.

Most of these were found when I was a teenager. One of my chores was to mow the front lawn. We lived in a suburban neighborhood - the kind with no sidewalks. It wasn't a huge front yard, but a fairly good size and I mowed it with a hand mower. It was pretty boring work. Now, I would listen to my iPod while I was doing it and the time would probably fly by. Then, I entertained myself as best I could by watching the ground.

We had lots of clover in the yard, and gradually I learned to notice the not-quite-right look of a clover with more than three leaves. To preserve them, I pressed them between the pages of our encyclopedias. Over the course of a couple of summers I filled the encyclopedias with them, each pressed within a folded bit of waxed paper. A few were found in other locations, but I found most while mowing our front yard.

After I left home, I didn't find (or look for) four-leaf clovers very often until about 15 years ago when we moved to a former military base for a while and I lived in a neighborhood with grass and clover again. On my way to my bus stop one morning I noticed some clover that... didn't look quite right. I continued to find 4 and 5-leaf clovers there and I started saving them again. I don't know what happened to the clovers I found as a teen, but now I started framing some of the nicer ones and using them as small gifts and to wish people good luck. I even got an inexpensive flower press.

I've often wondered why it is so much easier to find four-leaf clovers some places than others. Did our front yard (and the military base) contain something in the soil that caused them to mutate? Are some strains more likely to produce clover with 4 leaves or more? Maybe I just needed more luck some places than I did in others.

Now and then I hear someone refer disparagingly to Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, and some other holidays as "greeting card holidays." I completely understand the sentiment that it is better to show the people you care about how important they are to you throughout the year. I even agree with it. And yet, I don't feel an annual reminder hurts either.

I think it's good to get an annual reminder to be thankful for about how fortunate we are by way of Thanksgiving Day. I think it's good to have annual reminders of a lot of things, whether they include a custom of sending greeting cards or not - important events associated with one's faith, events that bring us together as a country, and especially things that bring family and friends together.

And actually, I have grown to love greeting cards. Living far from relatives, I found the sending of greeting cards an easy way to keep my son in touch with grandparents, aunts and uncles, and other relatives that he sometimes didn't see for years at a time. It was a lot less intimidating to him to write a couple of lines in a card than to try to write a letter. Each missive from him was short, but we made up for it in volume - every holiday for which I could find little packets of cards - even St. Patrick's Day. Or sometimes handmade cards. At age 15, he still sends them, and I know it really brightens the day of our elderly relatives especially.

Unquestionably I would have lost touch with many more of my friends and family if it were not for the annual sending of cards. I live far from where I grew up. I have lived and made friends on both coasts and several places in between. And many of my friends and family members have moved elsewhere too. It is often via a card that I learn "we have a new address now." And I have to admit, even my mom would probably not hear from me as much if I didn't have the deadline of writing a letter in time to get her card in the mail so it would get there before the holiday.

Plus, cards are fun. My kids often make their own cards. I really treasure those. I have a girlfriend I used to work with who deserted me to marry a guy on the other side of the state. I get the most wonderful cards from her on "greeting card holidays" - it's her little reminder to keep in touch and I'm always so happy to hear from her. I find it an easy way to share something clever, or funny, or thoughtful to brighten someone's day.

No one should have to celebrate a holiday if they don't want to, but if you feel like it, you can send me a card any time.

Google is evil. This SFGate article doesn't go into any of the things I think make Google evil, but it provides an example of how well evil can pay: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/07/11/BUGSOJSQDR1.DTL

Ah, the things kids find while ostensibly doing homework.

Mona may have been hot for 1500 but today... maybe a little more pouf to the lip, shave a little off that nose... give Mona an extreme makeover at http://www.drcomenge.com/apothia/default.html (don't forget to randomona!).

Of course you've seen Mona Lisa's secret smile, but have you seen her secret look of disappointment? Disgust? That and more at The Interactive Mona Lisa: http://www.cite-sciences.fr/francais/ala_cite/expo/explora/image/mona/en.php#

More seriously, The Exploratorium uses Mona to illustrate how seeing something familiar from an unfamiliar point of view makes one less likely to notice differences: http://www.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/mona/mona.html

At http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/northcounty/20050126-9999-1mi26wifi.html the San Diego Union-Tribune reports that California State Parks are partnering with SBC (which is also in the news today for its offer to buy AT&T) to provide WiFi access at California State Parks.

Folks who subscribe to SBC's "Freedomlink" will have unlimited WiFi access. Others will have free access to park & State government web sites, but will be charged a daily or monthly fee for accessing any other sites - of which the State receives 10%.

If successful after a 2-year trial, other companies could bid to provide the service.

Today's San Francisco Chronicle asks readers which building they would most like to disappear. My vote goes to SFMOMA, "the lamprey building."

       

"Young people just aren't interested in reading newspapers and print magazines. In fact, according to Washington City Paper, The Washington Post organized a series of six focus groups in September to determine why the paper was having so much trouble attracting younger readers. You see, daily circulation, which had been holding firm at 770,000 subscribers for the last few years, fell more than 6 percent to about 720,100 by June 2004, with the paper losing 4,000 paying subscribers every month."

I bet you can guess what they discovered.

Each Thanksgiving there is an Indigenous Peoples ceremony at sunrise on Alcatraz Island.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041108/ap_on_he_me/medical_plan_catholics

In Illinois, the federal government has made a health insurance plan run by a Catholic organization available to its employees. The plan does not cover services which are against church doctrine such as contraception, fertility services, and abortion. Perhaps this makes the proemiums less expensive too.

My first reaction on reading about this was "what about separation of church and state?" but after a little more thought, I think that if we are serious about freedom of religion then we have to be ok with people being free to choose (this is just one of many health insurance options available to these folks) this plan for their own families if they want to. Or there other implications I am missing?

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/brands.html?tw=wn_tophead_5

"The single biggest explanation for fragile brands is the swelling strength of the consumer...Businesses are now dealing with buyers who are armed with both information and harsh expectations."

...which seems to demonstrate a stronger motivation to be informed about consumer products than about election issues.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6411616/

Apparently Microsoft sent out a letter providing "examples of customers who opted to go with the Windows platform rather than Linux" to a mailing list of questionable origin. To meet the opt-out requirement, the letter included a link to the Microsoft Passport sign-in page. In other words, in order to opt out, recipients had to have or create a Microsoft Passport account. Disney was doing the same thing a while ago - I don't know if they still are (thanks to the magic of mail filters).

The guy who did the ubiquitous-at-Halloween song Monster Mash is still around - and he has a few things to say about the current administration's environmental record at www.monsterslash.org. (Yes, there really is a part two.)

Oddly enough, it seems that the first person to try to figure out why/how animals end up with the coat patterns they do was Alan Turing.

I don't think of myself as the type who reads military books, but lately I've done just that. I guess it's because war and war casualties have been in the news day after day after day.

First was Letters from Vietnam by Bill Adler, obviously a collection of letters soldiers (and a few others) in Vietnam sent to family and friends at home. I read this book to find out what the soldiers who were there at the time thought about the whole thing - to take a look at their blogs, in a way. One of the things I discovered is that there are probably better books on this topic than this one. It provided a good enough selection of letters, but after I started reading it, I began to wish the letters had been organized differently because I was interested in observing how soldiers' feelings differed pro & con the war/people or how they changed during the progress of the war. I think it would also have been interesting to know what happened to the writers and whether those who are still alive feel the same way now about their experiences in Vietnam. I couldn't get a good sense of any of that in this book which is instead organized by the type of experience the person is writing about (battle, people, etc.) with little information in most cases about the person who wrote the letter. So though the letters themselves were very interesting, the book was a disappointment.
I may seek out another book of this type later, paying more attention to how it is organized.

A few weeks later, I read Flyboys: A True Story of Courage by James Bradley. It is advertised as a book about 8 airmen shot down and captured near Iwo Jima during WWII, but the author actually tackles a much broader canvas than that. Bradley provides very readable histories of aviation in warfareand of Japan's relations with other countries to provide a background for understanding the war in the Pacific. The result is a book which is interesting on more than one level. I found some of its trivia surprising: Jimmy Doolittle of the famous Doolittle's Raid was not only a popular barnstormer, but also a Ph.D. from MIT. Bradley's interviewees included former President Bush who was shot down in the same area as the 8 flyboys who are the main subject of this book, but was fortunate enough to be rescued, and I still haven't fully integrated the view of George Senior presented in this book with my pervious image of him. The stories of the 8 flyboys themselves are, of course, predictably sad. But Bradley also shows how easy it was for people on each side to see the other as so different as not to be subject to the same rules as themselves, and that the definition of what is an atrocity is a very fluid thing - concepts that are applicable to the current situation as well as to WWII.

Then I read Where They Lay: Searching for America's Lost Soldiers by Earl Swift in which a reporter participates in one of several archeological digs the armed services conduct each year to locate and repatriate the remains of soldiers from the Vietnam War, WWII and other conflicts. We spend hundreds of millions of dollars searching for bits of bone in various parts of the world to satisfy a perceived moral obligation to verify the deaths of men who were killed in action but whose bodies could not be recovered at the time and return whatever bits may be recovered to their families in the US for burial. Most of the cases involve downed jets or helicopters. The book describes in detail how these recoveries are attempted - and why many of them are unsuccessful. Reasons include the amount of time that has passed, disinformation and restrictions to increase local profit, and the presence of many "operational losses" (crash sites where the craft was lost but the crew was not) which makes it difficult to determine whether the team is looking for bones at the site of the correct crash - or one that may be a few yards away. I am sometimes amazed at how huge the military is and by some of the ways it spends money. But it did sound like it might be a kinda cool job.

One big problem was finding appropriate information for a report on Abraham (the guy from the Koran/Bible). An 11-year-old will go to Google and type "Abraham" and get

1. scads of results about many different people who have Abraham as a first or last name (especially Abraham Lincoln)


2. pages written for a wide variety of audiences and of varying authority/reliability

After looking around here are some sites that looked like they would produce better results than a vanilla Google search for a K-8 student with this type of information need:

1. Clustering engines such as
   
   
   
   • Clusty's clustered wiki encyclodedia search
   
   
   • the main Clusty page for clustered meta web searches.
   
   
   • Kartoo's graphically clustered results (kind of a fun interface)
   
   
   
   
2. Google's beta personalized search - you can edit your profile to specify searches of pages which fall within topics such as geographic regions, history, or religion


3. Directories (not search engines) such as the Librarian's Index to the Internet
   

I've been looking at a lot of search-related stuff today, motivated in part by recent experience trying to help an 11-year-old do homework. Here are a couple of things I found interesting:

An account of some things Micorsoft Research is looking into related to search at Joho the Blog.

Kozoru - natural language, encyclopedias, emphasis on finding a correct answer. I do miss the old Ask Jeeves. (How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?) This site reminded me of a former boss telling me years ago that he wanted a single button on his screen he could push to get the information he wanted. He was thinking management info calculations, but I'm sure he feels the same way about search now.

Can't Find It on Google is a web site that wants to point out the weaknesses in Google to help search engines improve. One of the things that's interesting to me is how many different interpretaions there are of the label "Queries tried:"

Google's Personalized Search Beta site

GarfieldRank?