Read This Blog!

A long, long time ago, I put my first personal website on GeoCities, for the simple reason that it existed, it didn’t get in my way, and it was free. Over time, the second of those reasons became less true, and I switched to blogging, first at editthispage.com, and then to here. I never bothered moving the GeoCities pages, because that would have been something like work.

But now that Yahoo is going to turn off the lights on GeoCities sometime this year, I decided I didn’t want to lose my earliest web efforts (or at least not the travel stuff), and so I copied all of the actual content to this site.

The only pieces that might be of interest to anyone outside my family are my 1998 trip reports: Australia (mostly for WWW9) and the beginning of a never-completed trip report from Hursley and Paris. I wonder what I was going to write about rugby?

• 38 Ways to Win an Argument from Arthur Schopenhauer's The Art of Controversy
  Not all of these are exactly kosher. In fact, none of them are.
  (tags: argument schopenhauer controversy)

I knew that having a “registered” Starbucks Card gave me 2 free hours of AT&T WiFi access, but I’d never actually needed it before today. When I asked the barista how to use the WiFi, he said “all you need is a registered card” — but my card had been registered since I got it and it had no instructions, and the login screen that AT&T put up was, unsurprisingly, useless.

So I dug out my iPhone and plowed through the Starbucks site, eventually logging in at the Starbucks Gold Card page.

Once logged in, I found a “Wi-Fi” link, which let me set up an AT&T account, which let me get onto the network, just in time to have to leave.

But I’ll be set for next trip.

• Reflections from a "Mutt" on Empathy and Diversity
  (tags: yiddish iwb sotomayor diversity empathy)

I’m just back from performing in my Improv Level II class’s “graduation show” at ComedySportz in San Jose. This was the first time I’ve been on the stage since, oh, probably since the Variety Show during Senior Year of high school, and, unlike that experience, this was not scripted and rehearsed.

I can’t comment on my own performance (I was too busy to take any notes), but it was clear that having an audience brought out the best in my fellow players, so I hope it helped me, too.

Level II is long-form improv, where each “act” lasts 20-25 minutes (not that any one person is on stage the whole time!), unlike the games that ComedySportz plays during their regular shows. We did two acts — one was a modified Harold (three stories, not obviously related, though there were a few leaks between them), and the other was a montage (lots of short bits, sometimes returned to, often not). The montage is fun (and probably has more laugh-out-loud moments for the audience), but the Harold requires actually staying in a character and developing a relationship over several scenes. Both are interesting to do.

Level III starts in a few weeks; I plan to be there!

Here in California, today is yet another special election, called in hopes that the voters will approve six propositions which are billed as temporary fixes to the current budget crisis — but fixes which will not solve the underlying problems (chief of which, in my opinion, are the two-thirds majority requirement in the Legislature for passing a budget or any taxes, as well as the long series of voter-mandated spending requirements from past propositions).

I’m letting Ted Stevens guide me.

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged here — it’s been busy, and it’s about to get busier, with my Extreme Blue interns arriving in just a week, and much to do to get ready for them (not to mention other work-related activities). The good news is that I’m learning a lot — but it would have been easier on me to spread out the learning a bit more. Not realistic, but easier.

My improv class is nearing its end, too, with our show on the 27th (8pm at ComedySportz San Jose, $5, validated parking). It should be fun, and I hope it’s funny.

And Jeff’s back from Tulane, which certainly changes the pace of life at home!

After venting about last week’s meeting in Second Life, I feel obligated to give an update after this morning’s experience there.

This time around was much more pleasant, even though the meeting format was, again, basically a PowerPoint presentation. The timing of the meeting was certainly better (one hour at 9am beats the hell out of three hours at 5am), but there were some other improvements.

For one thing, this time there was only one main speaker, which avoided the problems we’d had the previous week with people moving to and from the stage and wildly variable audio levels. And almost everyone kept their audio off during the meeting, so we didn’t have the feedback loops. The audio was much better during the Q&A, too, even if I wasn’t “near” the avatar speaking.

There was surprisingly little text chat during the meeting (there might have been another back-channel going on — I hadn’t fired up Sametime before the meeting, so if someone set up a back-channel there, I missed it).

We still suffered from slow slide changes; I tried alt-clicking on the slide, as Caliburn Susanto suggested, but it didn’t seem to help much (could it be a different keystroke on a Mac?). But the slides weren’t all that critical (which is good, because people kept getting between me and the slides!) — the real information was carried in the speaker’s voice

I wouldn’t say that this meeting took particular advantage of Second Life as a venue, but it didn’t suffer from the choice, either. It was nice to be able to see who else was in the meeting (thank goodness for virtual nametags), and the higher-quality of the audio in SL made listening much more pleasant than it would have been on the phone. But I am definitely still waiting to see the value of SL.

I spent the first three hours of Wednesday in a meeting in an internal instance of Second Life, and, while it was an interesting experiment, I have to say that I just don’t get it. I’ll try to ignore the technology teething pains (people’s systems crashing, audio feedback, and the like), and I’ll try to ignore the fact that the meeting was scheduled at a “globally-friendly” time of 0500 Pacific (so my crankiness knob was turned up to 11 before I even sat down), and compare the meeting to a traditional teleconference.

What was better?

• When the audio worked, it was high-quality, full-duplex, stereo audio, not the usual mono 300-3000 Hz with half the people using half-duplex speakerphones. Voices sounded more natural, and stereo audio provided spatialization, so, unlike a conference call, the voices in my head came from different spots.

• SL’s “text chat” provided a natural back-channel that was easy to see and use.

What was worse?

• For most of the meeting, we were watching people present slide decks. That meant figuring out how to position myself so that I could see the slides in a sufficiently large size to read them — but that meant that I couldn’t see anything else but the slides without having to maneuver my avatar (or at least the camera), which was just too much trouble.

• Just like in reality, if someone spoke without coming to the podium, you couldn’t hear them — there didn’t appear to be any secondary microphone that could be used.

• Every time the slide changed, it took a long time to come into focus.

• Because everyone had a different audio setup, the levels were very uneven and many speakers had 60-Hertz hum problems (though, to be fair, this is not that uncommon on a conference call)

• Some of the defaults don’t scale to a large group — for example, if you don’t do something to avoid it, everyone near you hears you typing (through a synthesized typing noise). That might be OK for a small group, but fails badly with 75 people in the area.

Maybe it was this meeting?

• This particular meeting probably didn’t gain from being in Second Life. There wasn’t any time for interaction during the heart of the meeting, so there was no real reason to hold it synchronously, much less in Second Life.

• Powerpoint presentations don’t show off Second Life to its best advantage. I am taking it on faith that there is an advantage somewhere.

• If you are going to have a “presentation-based” meeting, it’s critical that the presenters have tested their connection and audio with an audience before the meeting. It’s not necessary to go through the presentation in any detail, but it is important to know that the audio is working properly.

• Headsets are mandatory. People not using them should be shot. Or at the very least, their mikes should be forcibly muted.

I’ve been wrong before

The very first time I saw Mosaic, I thought it was cool but that its bandwidth requirements would keep it from catching on — but that was in the very early days, when people were using graphics strictly for decoration (remember all the pretty colored bullets?), and I was restricted to a 14.4KB modem. Once I saw a properly hyperlinked document and a properly clickable image, I saw the value of using that bandwidth, and I knew that Gopher’s days were numbered.

And when I first read about podcasts, I thought they were a silly idea — who would want to use a medium that you had to listen to in real-time and didn’t easily support skipping around? Especially to hear someone droning on about whatever topic hit him over morning coffee? But eventually, I found some worthwhile podcasts and now I spend much of my driving and exercising time listening to them. I do wish there was a way to listen faster, though!

So I might well be wrong about Second Life (and its relatives). I got into some Twitter and Facebook discussions during the meeting, and some people who disagreed with me made some good points. If you’re interested, here’s the Facebook discussion (I think you have to log in to Facebook to see it); it’s much harder to capture a Twitter discussion, but this Twitter search comes close.

Will I try it again?

I probably don’t have a choice.

After last week’s improv class, our teacher, Bobby August, sent us a note of encouragement, along with a suggestion to read Truth in Comedy.

The encouragement was welcomed (learning improv is hard work!), but the book suggestion was pure gold.

Of course it’ll be useful in improving my improv skills, but I found quite a lot to apply to other areas — mentoring, working with my team, conference calls…even programming. Here are a few of their “key points” that I plan to use offstage (and on).

• Agreement is the only rule that cannot be broken.
• There are no mistakes. Everything is justified.
• Treat others as if they are poets, geniuses and artists, and they will be.
• Yes, and…Accept and build.
• Stay in the moment. What is happening now will be the key to discovery.
• Be specific with your objects.

It’s a quick read - 149 pages - and well worth your time. Check your local library (or feel free to follow this link) for a copy.

And the show is just about four weeks away…yikes!