Read This Blog!

Or maybe it’s my discovery of vieux jeniver (I hope I have that right — the old stuff, not the new stuff) at the Poster Reception at WWW9 last night. It’s probably a good thing that it took me longer than I planned to go stash my laptop back in my hotel room yesterday afternoon, or I might have used the extra drink tickets I collected and then I know I’d be in trouble!

More later; I’m hoping that getting this writing out of my system and onto Dave’s servers will let me go back to sleep.

Hmmm…just found a little buglet…I adjusted my timezone to “Central Europe (UTC+0100)”, since that’s where I am, and also changed my page to put a byline on the page with the time of last edit. Much to my surprise, UTC+0100 means exactly what it says — no adjustment is made for summer time. When I get home to California, I’ll reset my timezone preference — I wonder if being in the same timezone as the server will cause it to honor daylight time.

Larry Lessig’s keynote

Larry Lessig (Harvard Law School) gave this morning’s keynote speech. He was erudite and polished — possibly too erudite for some of the audience, I’m afraid. What I took as his message is this: government’s proper role in the evolution of the Internet is to ensure that the net itself remains neutral, that it doesn’t discriminate based on who’s using it or what application is being used, and that a balnance must be restored between intellectual property rights and the rights of the community (the users of the intellectual property). When I get home, I’m going to move his book much higher in my stack of books to read!

Afternoon plans

I’m going to miss most of the afternoon here at WWW9 in favor of discussing the possibility of holding a future Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference in Europe, quite possibly in Amsterdam. It’s not clear that the timing will work out for 2002 (2001 is already planned for Cambridge, Massachusetts), since there is a great deal of planning needed to pull off the conference. More later.

I had a pleasant walk through Vondelpark while waiting to go to my meeting; it would have been even nicer had the weather been warmer, but it was still a nice change from concrete. Then onto a crowded and late tram (it appeared that two or three scheduled trams didn’t run) to return to the hotel, pick up my briefcase, and tram to Centraal Station for lunch at the “First Class” restaurant (a former first class waiting room; part of the waiting room was converted to a Burger King, so don’t take the name too seriously!) to discuss CFP in Europe. Details when they become clear; I think we made progress, though.

WWW9 is over

I made it back from the CFP cabal meeting in time to use the Internet connection to fetch e-mail and then catch the closing ceremony — it looks as though the WWW10 committee has their act together. I’m hoping they will be able to get more papers on the effect of the Web on society and the world, not just the usual run of technical papers.

Then a last hit of e-mail (well, this is Amsterdam!) and back to the hotel with Andrew Donoho and Kelvin Lawrence (IBM colleagues from Austin), then to dinner. We all wanted to walk and enjoy the fresh air, so we strolled much of the way towards Centraal Square, then turned around and ended up at Myrabelle (an eet-en drinkcafe) at Vijelgracht 1. We had a very pleasant meal (I discovered that I like Amstel mittlebock (I may have the spelling of “mittlebock” wrong)), with good, friendly, reasonably fast service — this was a pleasant change from the last dinner I’d had with Andrew and Kelvin. Then we walked back to Leidsenplein and tried to go to an Australian ice cream place, but it was closed, so we ended up at Ben & Jerry’s. It felt just like home, though it was a little less crowded (and a few cents cheaper, too).

Tomorrow, I hope to visit Keukenhof if the weather permits. Unlike the web site, the real place does not require Flash to be installed!

Amsterdam pages: [15 May] | [17 May] | [18 May] | [19 May] | [20 May] | [21 May] | [22 May] | [23 May] | [25 May]

Well, I didn’t get a chance to edit anything yesterday (16 May), but that’s OK; I spent the whole day at the conference, so there’s nothing terribly interesting to talk about. :-)

Unless you’re interested in weather, that is — the beautiful weather ended abruptly yesterday evening with a torrential downpour and thunderstorm which reminded me of living in Florida. I haven’t seen so much rain in years — fortunately, the storm was short-lived (maybe an hour) and by the time I was ready to leave, the rain had subsided to a tolerable level. But I was happy to split a taxi with some of my colleagues instead of taking the tram back.

We had dinner last night at an Argentinian Steak House near the hotel. It was a much more drawn-out process than any of us had expected — one of our number ordered soup, which resulted in the main courses being delayed for close to an hour! Silly us — we didn’t realize that it was impossible to start the main courses until he finished his starter and the waiter had picked up the empty soup bowl. It was close to 10pm before we got fed, which was a bit late for a heavy meal — so I had a hard time falling asleep. I finally managed to drift off about midnight; the alarm came awfully early this morning!

I had breakfast with colleagues this morning at the hotel; again, we had some service problems, resulting in our arriving at the conference at 9:15am instead of 8am and so I missed most of the opening plenary panel. But I got to see enough to have an idea of the preceding discussion.

And now I’m in a panel session on “Practice and Experience”. There’s Internet connectivity in the back of the room; but there’s only one power outlet here, and that’s being used by the hub, so I’m on battery power at the moment. More later….

Later….

By popular demand (my mother), here is a picture of me in the terminal room at WWW9.

Amsterdam pages: [15 May] | [17 May] | [18 May] | [19 May] | [20 May] | [21 May] | [22 May] | [23 May] | [25 May]

So far, I like the DC280 quite a bit; I’ll know better after my trip, of course. I am not quite so happy with PhotoDeluxe; after I use it, my display is sometimes fouled up (odd colors all over the place) and there doesn’t seem to be any good way to recover short of a reboot. (A little experimentation shows that I can recover by setting the desktop to 256-color mode and then back to 24-bit color. Whew!)

At any rate, I’ve taken and edited only a few pictures so far. Here’s one of Diane (well after Passover!) and one of Jeffrey in his room.

Now, I should get off the computer and start packing. Oy!

As shown by extensive personal research at the Pen and Parchment, the following ranking is true:

1. Spitfire
2. Old Speckled Hen
3. 6X

There is nothing like doing a live demo.

Happy Purim!

I’m glad to have something to say good about today. Except for the Wizard of Oz Purim Shpiel and Megillah Reading at Shir Hadash, today has been an archtypical Monday — not a day to enjoy.

Besides being very busy at work, and having to rush to get to shul on time, after we got back from services, our son mentioned that he had to finish his Mission report for tomorrow (a standard 4th-grade assignment here in California). There was much more work left to do than he had told us — even with our help, he didn’t finish until nearly 11pm, well past his bedtime (and awfully close to ours!). And there are still some final touches he has to add tomorrow before school — but there was no way he would have been able to do them tonight.

And apparently he has a science project due soon, too. Oh, well; I remember burning sugar as my science project in high school when I’d left it to the last possible night — it didn’t go over very well with the teacher, either. And I also remember putting off an 11th-grade term paper until the day before it was due,then cutting classes to do the research and staying up until the wee small hours typing the paper up — that was probably the first time I ever drank coffee. Perhaps procrastination is inherited!

Yesterday morning, GTE rang the bell very early to tell us that they were ready to install a new data line. Since the installation was entirely outside, we didn’t have to stay around and we didn’t — we took off for Torah Study and Minyan, and then lunch and Love in the Title, an Abbey Theatre of Dublin production at San Jose Rep.

The play was, ummm, different — it takes place in a meadow in Ireland, where three generations of the same family meet: Cat, from 1930 (age 20 or so), Triona, from 1960 (age 30 or so), and Kate, from 2000 (age 37). Cat, the grandmother, hasn’t gotten married yet; Triona has just had Kate. It was a very talky play (difficult to follow because of the authentic Irish accents).

Eventually, we came home, and I discovered that neither of our phone lines worked, though our data line was just fine. So I went next door and borrowed a phone to call GTE, who warned me that there would be huge costs if the problem was inside. I didn’t think this was likely (two lines? Right after a service call?), and I didn’t have much of a choice anyway.

So this morning, after a trip to the Y to exercise, I came home and found GTE here — working inside. There was dialtone at the junction box (there’s no delimiter, so I couldn’t plug a phone in to check myself), but none as soon as he wired up the inside lines. So we dug out the access to the crawl space (it’s in our son’s closet) in case the guy needs it, and he’s busy working under the desk in the other room. And now he’s fixed the lines. I still believe that it was yesterday’s work which caused the problem, but I don’t have any way to avoid paying for the call. *sigh*

Once the service guy leaves, I’m going to go to shul and catch up with the book group, which is discussing I Married a Communist by Philip Roth and picking out books for next year. Then we have the Purim Carnival, and then our havurah is going to see Mission to Mars; we saw part of the filming in Petra, Jordan last year on our trip to Israel.

Mission to Mars would have been a better movie if it were 20 minutes shorter — but I’m not sure which 20 minutes I would have cut. Suffice it to say that I kept checking my watch during the film. And I kept waiting to hear the Blue Danube or Also Sprach Tharathustra! But we did get to see the Mars rovers that we’d seen in Petra, and also some shots shot in the siq (the channel leading to Petra), which is where we were delayed on our trip.

The Purim Carnival was fun, especially for the kids — our son went through $5 worth of tickets and came back with 2 cents worth of plastic toys, and a goldfish. We’ll see how long the fish survives.

This is a vanity and experimental site, pure and simple. It’s unlikely that there will be many frequently asked questions, but if there are, I’ll answer them here.

I’m just starting at this Weblog business; I’m already impressed with what I see other people doing, but I haven’t figured out what to say yet! So if I appear to just be typing random thoughts, you may well be right.

This evening will be somewhat unusual — we’ll be going to services at Shir Hadash, but it’ll be a “regular” service instead of Family Services. It should be a nice change of pace.

Then tomorrow, we have Torah Study and informal services, as usual. And after that, San Jose Rep with Love in the Title.