Over at her Birthday Party, AZ writes

1995: E. and I crash computer at my office trying to install "Web browser." I get the dreaded "dead Mac" symbol. Woe is us!

In the interests of accuracy, the issue that crashed the beast was updating the TCP/IP drivers on the box so that the early web browser (NCSA Mosaic v. mumble if I recall correctly) could work with the even more antiquated OS on that thing. If memory serves, the issue was that there was a SCSI (?!?) or serial interface to Ethernet involved. And was it 95 or 94?

It was a nightmare. The hardware was older than even Mike's or the stuff we keep stashed in our basement just in case. We're talking an SE/30 I recall. Or maybe a daughtercarded SE... IU was very generous with the editorial staff at the IUAA that year...

Oh the agony.

The preceding post was brought to you by Kitty, the under-recognised (and to her mind underappreciated) member of the KittyJoyce production staff, as a birthday wish to Anne.

I've rewrapped it for legibility. Translation requests via Google have gone unanswered.

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Obviously, the guys at the Onion must have found some breach in the Guardian's security system. How else? I suppose it could be some sort of Fry ploy, or a secret Neil Innes insertion....

aaaaaaargh!

I mean.

*spluttters*

*splutters*

*waves arms in indignant speechlessness*

*sigh*

mutter mutter mutter mutter...

The other day AZ noted that shoots were up in our condo planting here in the city and the crocuses (crocii?) were abirthing in Bloomington.

Today Chris has some swell pictures of the yard as it comes awake.

Lovely stuff, and it makes me go "that's mine, and yet totally not under my control! Keen!"

This trash can, filled at this level every morning when I get off the
train at Washington/Wells, is my favorite argument that the CTA and our
city's newspaper publishers should expand their recycling program beyond
the one box per platform now in place.

Every once in a while we get to ride at the front of the train. It's
fun, and the view is better...

Both Phonezilla and Alex Golub have decent eyewitness coverage of the Chicago protests of last night.

If indeed as reported more protests happen today to go up the Mag Mile, AZ may be in position to report.

Any others?

Jason DeFillippo mentions the Chicago protests here from last night (the first protests for Chicago?).

AZ and I were actually out in the "Indian Summer" section of that rally with some friends visiting from Bloomington. We were around the Water Tower as the police were placing themselves to block and divert all traffic to move the protesters from Oak and Lake Shore back to the Federal Plaza. So there we were, 5 pedestrians (two small children, 3 adults) walking back down Michigan Ave as the street emptied, with police in riot gear on the corners.

Anne remarked on this, and it was very true; you could gauge the intensity of the situation by the demeanor of the police. And to a man, they all appeared to be calm and polite - perhaps the quiet before the storm.

The Chicago Tribune has coverage, of course. Certainly distinct from '68 (the hackneyed by obvious comparison), and apparently less traumatic than Mike's WTO experiences.

AZ further speculates that part of the police demeanor may be due to some sympathetic understanding of the anti-war position. While these means (mindless protest) don't do anything to change the hearts and minds of the American People (they end up using more gas as they idle in the roadways, unfortunately), they are a voice for some views held by a large (if not majority) of Americans. And as that voice is dismissed and unheard, the desperation to fruitless actions rises.

Nobody's Doll has and cites some further ideas on meaningful ways to move forward, which strike me as more meaningful (but more work!) than just ranting and traffic blocking. Or the similarly fruitless 'die-in' like the one cancelled at the University of Chicago for "lack of interest."

Careful to avoid undue publicity...

Is it still mobile blogging if the posting is delayed by months?

If so, we got Brunch with Andy and Ang some time back. It was
delicious, except for the furore caused by me when I tried to retrieve
items dropped under the table.

OK, if we're gonna do it, if we're gonna be small minded ahistorical people who rename foodstuff capriciously and contemplate bringing back the deceased buried in foreign lands, and declining to participate in any air shows held in Paris or otherwise in France,
we need to give a lot back.

I suspect we could resell the Louisiana Purchase and make a profit on the $15M we spent (well, depends on how seriously any prospective buyer would take the pollution, I suppose), we can ship back that big symbolic statue they keep in NYC, and we could even roll back our constitution to the years BEFORE the French loaned us the money to enable a successful revolution. If indeed we would have HAD a successful revolution without the funding (tainted as it was by anti-British fervor on lender and recipient) and philosophical grounding provided.

And the Christian Science Monitor has even provided a nice list of words for us to give back.

Time to write the congressperson...

Ralph Lauren puts on the show...

After the garden show, a bit of calm among the crowds in the sunshine.

A simple simple test

I've spoken with various people over the last couple years about my dislike for all the looky-loos who wander the streets of N Michigan Ave., tourists gazing at the shop windows, families with small packs of kids walking 5 abreast. I can be a bit of a grumpy old man well before my time.

But these obstacles also, I've determined, provide me with a perverse sort of pleasure.

Tonight as I was walking up the avenue to meet up with AZ for our regular Friday dinner and a movie (Tonight's Pick was Old School; summary: dumb but great fun, enlivened by use of creative chestnut songs and jokes, including a credits appearance by the mighty Killdozer. Not a lot of plot, but as good as reported), I realised that as I was bobbing and weaving along, plugged into a nice bouncy compilation I really enjoyed the challenge of it, walking through these crowds of people at a brisk pace, anticipating the near chaotic flows of the people around me, yet seeing all the things as I walked past - the Apple Store to be, the displays in the windows, the itinerent saxophonist who manages to sell CDs... It's no Le Mans, but it's challenge enough for me.

Ah, city living...

Idle Words has launched (akin to the Whybark Special editions), French Week.

Facts and truths to combat francophobia.

Is it a movement? Ask AZ and the others who can see through the empty gestures.

A few days ago while trawling for, well, something or other through Google, I came across a Top Ten List I wrote for Finley Breeze, one of the several Indie-List side projects.

In it I said I couldn't get the song Pardon My French by Band of Susans (on their album "Here Comes Success" out of my CD player. But over the years it had snuck out and onto the new CD shelves (more about audio storage for ES and AZ in a future missive).

Well I pulled it out this morning, and it seems to have gotten stuck again. Rolling beats, slashing and echoing guitars, pan effects, dire lyrics - great fun. It's poised to alarm my co-workers once more.

In a sign of the times I can now MP3 it into my portable, saving the laser of my drive for other things.

So as many of you know, AZ and I have been having some media storage built. You know, 48 linear feet of CDs, 25 linear feet of records, etc etc. No Big Whoop.

This has been great. My records are out of their boxes for the first time in 7 years (since we moved to Chicago, our fair city). So tonight I pulled a record out of a box, and suddenly realised "I haven't listened to this in 7 years. And I bought it 8 years before then. And I bought it because my roomate had a copy 4 years before THAT.

Quick! Ask AZ who Barry Gibb was!

I've had some recent experiences, minor ones, regarding email, collaboration and attention. I'm doing a ThinkOutLoud here, so bear with me.

First, a friend shared with a number of us an email thread he'd been involved in. The small geographically team he's on had fallen into a complaint about too much email coming through the pipe. My friend disagreed, arguing that for a productive development team of the size they are, anywhere between 20 and 100 emails a day would be the norm. The concept of this much input seemed to terrify the colleagues unecessarily.

Meanwhile, thanks to Jon Udell I've come across this piece by Ole Eichorn entitled the Tyranny of Email. This piece, so worth reading it's probably already linked on 35% of the logs pinging weblogs.com (and yes, it's been /.'d), throws a couple issues about managing email tools (rather than them managing you), and then ices the cake by providing some commonsense approaches to managing time and interruption by the "Three Hour Rule."

Finally, in our as much RTC as email communicating workplace, a coworker suddenly decided to run silent and deep without chat for a few hours. We could still contact him by chattering over the cubicle wall, of course, but he claimed it actually did make him more productive for non-interactive tasks. But at the same time, some of our regular co-working habits were briefly interrupted. In most cases this was good - we can still think on our own. But the first case, the "hey, where is he?" case was minorly jarring until we grokked it.

So what does this all mean? On the one hand, we need the interaction of communication, the problem sharing, idea solving, communal thinking it provides. On the other hand, we do (even George Bush below) need some time to think alone.

Our tools can provide the means to solve some of this. For example, one of the big selling points of the tool we worked on at Parlano was the concept of filtering in real-time-chat. Not filtering as "don't let anything in unless it meets some rule" but "let it all in, but stay aside unless it's something I care about. So people would set up ego filters to let them know when they were being discussed, or keywords raised of importance to their daily tasks.

And the tool also allowed - as almost all RTC tools now allow - one to set the level of availability one provided (Online, Away, Offline, etc). So we could broadcast our status as well as manage the input provoked by that status.

This is a good start. Obviously learning and conceptual filters would be a stronger tool. Maybe someone will write that.

In my mind there's the meta-issue to the tools, the concept that people need to be open to collaboration. The other users in the first case seem to be afraid of it, as if the time spent interacting and learning together would take away from the seemingly more pressing tasks at hand.

But open is not defenseless. Use the filters, turn off the alerts, when things need to be done in quiet. Seek the balance of availability, informed and productive at each moment. And make sure you understand the balance for yourself and your coworkers. But don't hide from collaboration.

In her resonating and interesting Fog Index piece, Anne recently cited me in a conversation she and I had following Geo W Bush's "informal" address to reporters with loaded and deferrable questions. She summarized there that my position was that Bush's language use has to do with with his (and his administration's) lowered expectations of the American people. This is in fact a large part of my position, and probably as succinct a statement as I would be able to pull out. But I think there's more to it than that - as I decry Bush's apparent lack of nuance, perhaps I can lend some of my own to the citation.

For me, the issue is that Clinton (and according to some nifty reporting the New Yorker did a few years back, Gore) were willing to actively engage with the public on an individual and group basis and engage with ideas and disputation on a personal basis. Assuredly not perfectly (after all, too much engagement with ideas ahead of action may be part of what lead to the demise of uniform health coverage).

Bush, by contrast, appears interested in engaging only with sources or ideas determined by himself to be trusted. In a recent example, he will take a meeting with (Papal Legate) who he has known for some time, as a connected man. He has not taken a meeting with the minister of the church he attends each week (granted, said minister is a representative of chuches across the spectrum who are in opposition to military action in Iraq - but so was the message from the Pope).

This anecdote comes from this recent article in the NYT regarding Bush's willingness to take big decisions alone and without apparent anguish as expressed by Clinton or the first Bush. And while I, an only child to Bush's family values heritage, can certainly respect the need for solitude, thinking and deciding is as often a collaborative activity as a voice of one.

This isolation is not to imply that Bush is not an intelligent man. He is, in a visceral way. But he doesn't appear to be an abstract thinker to the outside world, no visible jockeying for decision in his own mind. Too much of either is less than a blend of both.