In general, I think W3C is doing fairly well. Not perfect, but not bad. It would be nice, though, if the various people working on different working groups knew more about what each other was doing — this is a problem of growth, and one which shouldn’t be a surprise…but when it sneaks up on you slowly, you don’t necessarily realize what’s going on. So that’s one of the areas I think we’ll be looking at over the next few months.

The Advisory Board meets once a month by phone, with very infrequent in-person meetings. Today’s meeting was more productive than all of the phone calls from the past year put together; we’re going to try to do more in-person meetings, even though all of us have more than enough opportunities to travel. *sigh*

I was going to write more, but something has been horrifyingly slow, and it took five minutes (at least) to flip this page — I’m tired and ready to call it a night. Gotta get up moderately early to visit the Extreme Blue East team tomorrow, too.

I’ve gotten lucky and found a good and dependable cab driver, so when I have to go to the airport, I call him up and make arrangements in advance for the trip, rather than take my chances with whoever Yellow Cab sends my way. He’s always on time, has a clean cab, makes interesting conversation, and his shocks even work — this is quite an improvement over the normal Silly Valley taxi experience.

But today, I discovered the downside of pre-planned arrangements. I have a 1pm flight to Boston; I was supposed to have a noon phone call, so I asked Gordon to pick me up early enough to get me to the airport in time to make the call there. No problem. Until my call was cancelled — too late to reschedule with Gordon. So I knew I was going to be at the airport earlier than I needed to be, but the prospect of not having to run through the airport didn’t seem to bad, either.

Gordon came on time; we had a fast trip to the airport (it’s amazing how much faster you can travel when it’s not rush hour!), and as I got out of the cab, I looked at the flight display and discovered that my flight was delayed by an hour. I hadn’t even bothered to check before leaving home, since I knew when I was going to be picked up. Oh, well; at least I was able to find a phone, power outlet, and chair at the Admiral’s Club and now I can catch up on my reading while watching FedEx unloading a truck.

[Later…] For a change, I think that my flight was delayed for a good reason. Apparently a passenger on the inbound flight had a medical problem, and they landed in Chicago to get the person off the plane and to a doctor. Right answer!

English is not always English

Andrea and I are having a chat about the differences between various national dialects of English on her weblog. I find it intriguing that differences which are so obvious to me are invisible to her.

Book of the Day

Actually, it’s yesterday’s Book of the Day, but I didn’t post yesterday. The book is The Cluetrain Manifesto; I feel that I could have written large parts of the book myself (maybe not as entertainingly!), as it talks about the things I’ve been doing at IBM for years. For a long time, I described my job as “tearing down the Blue Curtain” — making it possible for IBMers to join the conversation on Usenet by building gateways between Usenet (and BITNET/Internet mailing lists) and IBM’s natively-developed conferencing tools. The software I developed became mostly irrelevant with better Internet connectivity throughout IBM, but I consider connecting IBMers with the rest of the world to have been one of the most satisfying things I’ve done during my entire career.

BlueLogs

Brent announced the change I’d been waiting for to allow all the BlueLogs sites to share a membership group. I need to update the default “It worked!” and
“about” pages before making the announcement, and it appears that making the changes in the default theme has to be done at the server if I read
that HowTo correctly (since I don’t have remote access to the Frontier menus), so that can’t happen before Thursday.

No, not X-Men — we haven’t seen it yet. The reviewer in the Mercury News really disliked it; but I’m not sure I’ve read a review from him yet for a movie he actually liked, so I’m not convinced that’s significant.

I’m talking about today’s experiment on Mystery Science Theatre 3000, The Girl in Gold Boots. There were many weird things happening in the Sixties; there were also weird tax laws allowing bad movies to be made as tax shelters. This was one of them. Miss it if you can; not even Mike and the ‘bots could save it.

I finished Harry Potter IV this morning, while I should have been getting ready for work. It was a struggle to put it down unfinished last night, but I managed (with help).

In case there’s anyone who’s curious about how the book ends but doesn’t actually plan to read the book, I tell How Harry Potter IV Ends in the next message.

Getting Energized

I spent most of the day talking with the Extreme Blue/West students. I gave a short talk on the value of standards — they kept me honest by asking lots of hard questions. Then I got to meet three of the six teams and learn about their projects; what they’re doing is certainly more interesting and undoubtedly more significant than my summer jobs during college.

Though I guess I was pretty lucky, myself; I worked for The Computer Company (R. I. P.) in their APL timesharing group, doing things to make their offering more competitive. One year, I helped them convert from DOS to OS/360 (writing programs in SNOBOL to help manage the process); another year, I added ASCII terminal support to the system; I also remember writing a text editor in APL which got offered to the customers.

At any rate, I wasn’t able to spend the whole day with them because they had a previous engagement to go see X-Men, and I wasn’t able to come along because I had to go back to the optician and try on new frames. My bifocals should be here in about a week.

Tonight, we go hear about Jewish Bedtime Rituals and Lullabies during services at Shir Hadash. I hope I can stay awake to drive home afterwards.

Shabbat Shalom!

falling out of the most-read yesterday list. Strangely enough, I find myself checking that list on a daily basis and have even included it in the Egoboo Department over on your left. I’m not sure why I find it comforting to know that others are reading what I write, since I do it largely because it helps me put the day in perspective, but I do like it when my reader count goes up (especially when it isn’t because I’ve been playing with the site layout and refreshing the page a lot to see what it looks like!). And the odd contribution to the discussion group is welcome, too, as are pointers from other folks’ blogs (thanks, Jim Roepcke, for the favourites browser).

But some days lend themselves to more interesting entries than others, and I’m afraid today is not one of those days. Instead, I’ve enjoyed the marvels of my office all day (I could talk about the barbecue at lunch, but I’m not sure I want to bring it up again), trying to catch up on various projects, none of which include my internal Manila server. Yup, one of those days.

I’ve only got 200 pages or so of Harry Potter IV left, and I’m eager to find out what happens and how You-Know-Who is foiled for another year. I wonder if it’s too early to pre-order book five?