Read This Blog!

At the Shir Hadash Hard Hat Ball earlier this year, we signed up for “Hike and Havdalah”, and, after a few false starts, the event finally took place yesterday. One of the hosts brought along his GPS, and after the event, sent me a Google image showing where we’d walked (the blue line — downhill, mostly).

Hike and Havdalah Route

My calves have been letting me know that they aren’t used to that kind of downhill walk, but other than that, it was great fun and I’d like to do it again.

(Oh, and even though there are caches indicated on the picture, we didn’t even try to find them.)

Back in September, 2006, I posted the saga of how I’d solved my printing problems on my Mac mini, running Tiger.

But now I’m running Leopard on IBM’s laptop and my new iMac, and I’ve had to revisit the wonderful world of printing. Fortunately, this time around, everything I needed was in one place; downloading all three packages there and installing them solved my problems.

Will I remember this the next time I upgrade or buy a machine? Beats me, but my odds are better if I blog and tweet it than if I don’t!

Day 2 of Denvention is in the history book, at least for us - we went on a Haunted Denver tour and decided to blow off the parties.

The highlight of the day was the Boca Fandom reunion in the Fanac exhibit area (see below, I hope - I’m writing this on my iPhone, so I’m not quite sure how it will turn out).

The panels were ok but not astounding, and the time-keeping was disorganized. Not quite enough for me to volunteer to do it, but close.

I’m looking forward to the rest of the con.

As I write this posting, I am about 38,000 feet above Colorado, on JetBlue flight 169. And, as is usually the case on JetBlue, my TV is on.

What’s unusual is what I’m watching: live coverage of passengers evacuating American 31, which returned to LAX when they found smoke in the cabin.

As far as I can tell, everyone is fine, but it sure makes me think about how much has to go right every flight.

I’m also under-impressed with the amount of speculation that the anchors are doing to keep chattering. The phrase “we don’t know” seems to have vanished from the CNN dialect of the English language.

Of course, by the time this actually gets posted, I will have landed. Then I just have to worry about ground traffic, which is mostly not operated by trained professionals.

Diane and Jeff gave me Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything for Father’s Day, and I finally got around to reading it over the past week. It seemed familiar, and, after a while I realized that I had already read the original (getting it from the library), but it hadn’t made enough of an impression on me to recognize the book soon enough to exchange it.

Like Star Wars, the added material isn’t worth the extra running…err, reading…time. But the basic book is of interest, and the need for an enterprise to find a balance between proprietary and the commons is vital.

Worth a read, or at least a close skim.

I’m in transit at LAX on the way home from my father-in-law’s 90th birthday celebration in Tucson. I flipped on my iPhone after landing and was greeted by an unexpected menu option:

This is an obligatory test posting from WordPress for iPhone.

Move along, move along, there’s nothing to see here.

So far, I’ve resisted the temptation to buy an iPhone 3G, but I did upgrade both my phone and Jeff’s to the new software. I cheated and upgraded mine on Thursday — it was painless, as was the process of picking up some of the free apps from the App Store. So far, I’m unconvinced that NetNewsWire for the iPhone is better than the iPhone-optimized NewsGator site; ditto for Twitterific versus Hahlo. But Remote is great, and AOL Radio is handy, at least in Wi-Fi enabled areas.

Upgrading Jeff’s phone was another story. I waited until late last night, after seeing some success stories on Twitter, because I didn’t want to brick his phone. And it took several tries (I think I had a loose cable) to successfully upgrade, and looking at the system logs during the process was probably more alarming than comforting, especially when I started seeing messages like “MobileDevice: AMDeviceConnect: This is not the droid you’re looking for. Move along, move along.”

But after longer than I expected, his phone was up, running, and activated. Then I tried to download some of the free apps.

Using the online app store was easy, but the application never got loaded — instead, a message popped up telling me to download it on the computer and synchronize the phone. But downloading on the computer failed, with a popup saying “Unable to check for purchases” and suggesting I try later.

So I tried this morning, with the same lack of success. And nothing on the Web gave me any better help. But eventually, I pieced together a solution:

1. I purchased a different free app from the online app store, which
2. Forced me to accept the updated agreement, and then
3. Allowed me to download the new app, after which I could
4. Go back and “check for purchases”, which downloaded the old apps, at which point I discovered that
5. I had to authorize this computer to Jeff’s account, which let me
6. Install the apps on his iPhone.

And now I (or he) can successfully purchase free apps over the air, just as it’s supposed to work.

Apple. “It just works.” Sometimes.

I did notice one other nice feature of the 2.0 software — when typing in a password, it leaves the most recent character visible until you type the next character. That makes the job much easier than it was before, especially when typing a strong password with case changes.

Now, there’s just one problem left — we have to go to the Apple Store tomorrow to buy a computer or two. And I’m not always good at resisting temptation.

Late last year, I started blogging about the books I read. It was easy — I was on vacation. But I had hopes of continuing to do that into this year…those hopes lasted about one week. Even though my reading pace fell off substantially with the return to work, my blogging pace fell off even faster. But I hung on to the dream and kept books that I finished on my dresser, at least the ones I didn’t borrow from the library, knowing that I’d get around to blogging them some day.

Eventually, though, the pile of books got big enough to become unstable, and I had to do something.

I could simply have shelved the books and gone about my life, but that would have been too easy. Instead, I put them into my inbox (yes, I have been paying too much attention to Getting Things Done lately), and now it’s time to deal with them.

So, in no particular order, and with no guarantee of completeness, here are Some of the Books I’ve Read This Year:

• Great Science Fiction by Scientists

  I picked up this book at Rasputin Books in the ex-Tower Records in Palo Alto; Groff Conklin’s anthologies almost always have several good stories, and for 95 cents, how could I go wrong? Some of the stories show their age (1930-1962), but there are classics, too. My favorite in this collection is Miles Breuer’s “The Gostak and the Doshes”, the only SF story I can think of based on grammar, but Clarke’s “Summertime on Icarus”, and Ralph Cooper’s “The Neutrino Bomb” are worthwhile, too. And did I mention I only paid 95 cents?

• All the Colors of Darkness by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.

  I first borrowed this book (and its sequel, whose name escapes me) from my elementary school library. It shone more brightly in memory than in the rereading, but I don’t regret spending the time (or the 95 cents). The story here is simple — humanity is developing teleportation machines, which will lead inevitably to self-teleporting spacecraft and our going out to the stars. However, the Powers That Be out there don’t believe we are worthy, and send a team in to sabotage our efforts, by making the teleportation system appear unsafe by making sure that some number of passengers (all They, of course) don’t arrive at their destinations. Our hero, Jan Darzek, investigates, figures out what’s going on, follows one of Them closely, and winds up on their Moon base. Moral dilemmas follow.

• The Best from F&SF, Sixth Series

  Another Rasputin find, with good stories from Kornbluth (”The Cosmic Expense Account”), Pohl (”The Census Takers”), Anderson (”The Man Who Came Early”), and Sturgeon (”And Now the News…”).

• Three Worlds to Conquer, by Poul Anderson

  A not terribly exciting story of rebellion in the outer Solar System. It feels like it’s three short stories glued together, but the colophon doesn’t list any previous publication data. Perhaps having read it will come in handy at “Trivia for Chocolate” during Denvention — they often ask questions about Anderson’s stories.

• You Can Negotiate Anything, by Herb Cohen

  I picked this book up at last year’s IBM Technical Leadership Exchange — they offered a couple of hundred books for “free” (in other words, the charges were picked up at a level above your department), and they shipped them for you, so I erred on the side of grabbing anything which seemed interesting. This year, the model was different — you had to put the books on a credit card (to be reimbursed on your expense account), and you had to haul them home with you — so I was much more careful in what I chose. And I probably wouldn’t have chosen this book this year.

  The book was published in 1980, and the language shows it, as do many of the examples, but the principles are still valid. Worth a read.

• Power Mentoring, by Ellen Ensher and Susan Murphy

  Another book from TLE 2007. The key insight in this one is that you can have more than one mentor and be a mentor to more than one protege. Not terribly surprising, but there it is.

• Dealing with People You Can’t Stand, by Dr. Rick Brinkman and Dr. Rick Kirschner

  The last of the TLE 2007 haul, at least in this batch. A good tool for understanding what to do about people who drive you nuts — helps you see where they’re coming from, why you can’t stand them, and how to react.

• Work-Life Balancing, by Paul Baffes, Ph. D.

  I must confess to some bias here — I know Paul and work with him occasionally, and I got the book free by asking a question in his session at this year’s TLE. But despite that, I think I can objectively recommend the book — Paul writes about the methods he uses to make his work and the rest of his life support one another instead of being in conflict. The details may not fit your life exactly, but the ideas are sound, especially being “selfFIRST”.

Now I have to figure out where to shelve these books…there’s always something….

We’re in the middle of the graduation fun — so far today, we’ve been to Jeff’s graduation (photos to come, but not tonight) and to a close friend’s graduation party. In a couple of hours, I take Jeff back to school for Grad Night, then tomorrow evening, one of his classmates is having another graduation party. And I think that’s it. So far.

Jeff’s graduation seemed to go well (not that I was an objective observer). Harris Barton, former Super Bowl offensive lineman for the 49′ers, added “commencement speaker” to his resume — his talk wasn’t as intense as Tom Lantos’ (z”l) last year, but it was good and relevant and funny and well-received. And all of the kids’ talks were good, too.

I was very happy to see the school’s first principal, Ms. Peterson, there to see “her” kids graduate (she’d taught English to many of them, including Jeff, during their junior year, as well as having been principal for the first five years of the school). She said her sabbatical was just what she’d needed this year.

There are plans to set up a parents’ alumni network (I think I accidentally volunteered to help with that), and of course the kids will stay in touch via Facebook (and even via email, at least for a while). But Kehillah is no longer the center of any of our existences.

It feels strange.