December 31, 2005
Edward Tufte
There is a nascent conversation on the TECHWR-L list about Edward Tufte's books, and how much influence they have had on technical communication. I liked the comment by one person, who said, "I imprinted on his books early in my career. So I suppose you could say that all my design work since then has been strongly influenced by Tufte's approach." I could say the same thing. I read The Visual Display of Quantitative Information soon after he published the first edition in 1983, and haven't looked at anything graphical in the same way since.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:50 PM
Winter's Closing In
I consider myself a native New Englander, even though I was born outside Philadelphia. But I only lived there for 6 months, and, since then, Massachusetts has been my home. When I was a kid, I liked winter. I skated, played hockey, sledded, had snowball fights. It probably isn't true, but it seems like I was outdoors in winter as much as I was any other season. Some of my most memorable hockey games were on outside rinks--you don't see them much any more--but we would play a few each year outdoors. On the coldest days, the ice was hardest, and the tradeoff always seemed worth it.
Now I am not terribly active in the winter. I stay indoors, even to exercise. Each year it seems I tolerate winter a little less, and look forward to Spring even a little more.
Having said that, I still enjoy one thing about winter, and that is my small rituals of getting the house ready for winter. Putting down the storm windows. Dismantling and taking in the hammock. Putting away the hoses and the rakes and the lawn mower. My older son helped me today. We did some final raking, collected the soccer balls and basktballs from around the yard, and bagged up the leaves. I took out the snow blower, gassed it up, and drove to the gas station to fill the 3-gallon gas tank. It probably won't be enough gas for all the snow, but it makes me feel prepared. Before we went in, I took a few pictures. This one is a stand of elms directly behind the house. They are my shade in the summer.
The title of this entry, by the way, refers to an old Joni Mitchell song, though I've always liked Tom Rush's version. You can hear a brief clip here, and find the complete lyrics here.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:48 PM
December 30, 2005
The iPod of eBook Readers?
Burt Helm, who covers digital publishing for Business Week, has a new article speculating on a new eBook device from Sony. Sony hasn't said much about it yet, but details will be announced at the Consumer Electronics Show on January 4. Helm is reporting that Random House, Harper Collins, and Simon & Schuster will be offering content on the new device.
And guess what the portal will be for the new content? Sony Connect, which I am concluding is, well, not very good.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:27 PM
A Yellow Leaf
I've discussed the American Life in Poetry project before. Here is the latest installment.
American Life in Poetry: Column 40
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
Arizonan Alberto Rios probably observed this shamel ash often, its year-round green leaves never changing. On this particular day, however, he recognizes a difference--a yellow leaf. In doing so he offers us a glimpse of how something small yet unexpected may stay with us, perhaps even become a secret pleasure.
A Yellow Leaf
A yellow leaf in the branches
Of a shamel ash
In the front yard;
I see it, a yellow leaf
Among so many.
Nothing distinguishes it,
Nothing striking, striped, stripped,
Strident, nothing
More than its yellow
On this day,
Which is enough, which makes me
Think of it later in the day,
Remember it in conversation
With a friend,
Though I do not mention it--
A yellow leaf on a shamel ash
On a clear day
In an Arizona winter,
A January like so many.
Reprinted from "The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body," Copper Canyon Press, 2002, by permission of Copper Canyon Press. Copyright (c) 2002 by Alberto Rios, a writer and professor at Arizona State University. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
******************************
American Life in Poetry provides newspapers and online publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary American poems. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry: American Life in Poetry seeks to create a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. There are no costs for reprinting the columns; we do require that you register your publication here and that the text of the column be reproduced without alteration.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:33 AM
December 29, 2005
Thanks
My thanks to Scott Thompson at ContentBiz Blog for naming my blog among ContentBiz's top 13 favorite blogs. In one fell swoop, ContentBiz is now my second biggest referrer after Google.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:46 PM
Central Square
So I have had my office in Central Square, Cambridge, for more than 18 months now. I travel often enough, though, that my actual days in the office are far less than that 18 months suggests. So it is only recently that I have started to feel like Central Square is anything like my turf. If you don't know Central Square at all, I will be at a loss to explain it well. If you do know Central Square well, you will probably find me to be a rank amateur, a rookie.
Central Square is defined by what it is not as much as by what it is. Central Square is not MIT, and it's definitely not Harvard, though it straddles Massachusetts Avenue almost exactly equidistant between the two campuses. But while Harvard and MIT are world centers of power, influence, and intellect, Central Square is the center of the city of Cambridge itself--it's where you will find Cambridge City Hall and the main post office of Cambridge, the headquarters of the Cambridge Police, the Cambridge YMCA and YWCA, and dozens of other municipal and state offices.
Yet Central Square has only a tenuous hold on its role as the municipal center of Cambridge. In the classic tension of town versus gown, Central Square is every bit of town as Harvard and MIT are gown. It has stores that most Harvard and MIT students have never visited and likely never will have to--discount stores and dollar-amas, Goodwill Thrift Stores, and convenience stores that really are Keno parlors that happen to sell cigarettes and candy bars. It has a few bars that attract a younger crowd, but many more that don't--the sort of places that used to be called "Taps"--where older men nurse a few drinks for hours.
And it has street people. I started to write "homeless people," but I honestly don't know if they are homeless or not. Many of them are fighting one demon or more. They talk to themselves. They wander aimlessly. They ask you for money--some of them more menacingly than others. They idle at the benches, at the corners, and in the cavernous Dunkin Donuts where I get my morning coffee. One hot day this August, a giant of a man stood stalk still in the middle of Massachusetts Avenue, stopping all traffic, and then lay down. He didn't budge when first one pair of cops, then another, tried to rouse him. I watched for about 10 minutes, some EMTs arrived, and I moved on. The other day I watched a man wretching into a trash barrel, his female companion, nonplussed, waiting next to him. A couple of months ago, a handsome young black man sprinted by me on the sidewalk, three uniformed cops huffing and puffing behind him. No one took much notice.
You get the picture.
Yet despite these problems, Central Square has a lot of good things to point at. You can find almost any kind of restaurant in Central Square. It cornered the Boston-area market on Indian food ages ago, and you can walk for five minutes through Central Square and find excellent Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Mexican, Bengali, Ethiopian, and Tibetan food. The last few years have seen upscale restaurants move in, but the mix of restaurants is far more interesting than any single one. I have guessed, but have yet to prove, that you could eat at a different restaurant every day for several months before starting to repeat yourself.
And it has vitality. Central Square is never empty, and it is rarely quiet. It has the dollar-amas and the thrift stores, but it also has bookstores, record stores, artisan shops, ethnic food stores, and more liquor stores in a few blocks than any neighborhood should have. Cheapo Records, the first used record store that I haunted, is still there, as are independent book stores and a Ten Thousand Villages, which sells fairly traded handicrafts from around the world.
It is all these things together that make Central Square so appealing to me. It is the good and the bad, the seedy and the hip, the way it struggles and the way it somehow thrives. When I climb the stairs out of the subway in the morning, I know I'm not stepping onto some chic avenue or into the hermetic seal of an office tower. I'll duck in and out of Dunkin Donuts, fend off an angry beggar or two. And then I'll make my way down the wide sidewalk of Massachusetts Avenue, and take in a few minutes of Central Square before reaching my office and the business of the day.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:57 PM
DRM Year in Review
Bill Rosenblatt has a DRM Year in Review up. Meanwhile, a colleague pointed out a dissenting voice to counter my enthusiasm for The Complete New Yorker. The culprit seems to be DRM, even though the unwanted behavior is disk swapping.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:13 PM
December 27, 2005
Sony Connect: How Not to Run a Content Site?
So far, my experience with Sony Connect has been pathetic. We bought my younger son a Sony MP3 player. On Christmas day, I signed up for Sony Connect, after installing the client software from the CD that came with the MP3 player. I then dutifully entered the code for the five free downloads that came with the MP3 player, along with a second coupon for two free downloads that I received from some other shopping. That gave us seven downloads. My son then picked four songs to download, we followed the instructions, tried to download them and--poof!--the download failed with a cryptic popup message. There was no way to abort the download, retrace our steps, or otherwise recover from the failure. The songs didn't download, but our account was debited the four downloads.
So I dutifully found my way to a mechanism to contact technical support with the problem. I filled out the form with a description of the problem, and I also noted that this was not an auspicious start.
OK. This is technology. Shit happens. This is where customer support kicks in. Almost immediately, I get an email response saying they received my report, "Your question has been received. You should expect a response from us within 24 hours." So far so good.
Unfortunately, this was 48 hours ago. Not a peep since.
So I dug out the auto-generated email just now. It includes a place to update the incident report via email, so I did. I wrote the following note, and I wonder what kind of response I will get now.
48 hours and no response…
So my initial attempt to use the site failed miserably, and now I have waited 2 days without a word of response.
Is this what I should expect in terms of quality of the service and customer response? I will wait a few more hours, but then you will lose my business for good.
I should note that I have historically been a big fan of Sony products. I have had Sony televisions, stereos, Walkmen, and other electronics that have served me really well. (I did have a miserable experience with a Vaio purchase this year, but I had decided that was an isolated incident...) But this experience with Sony Connect, so far, is really poor. Wouldn't you imagine that they would have extra staffing around Christmas to deal with the many people who would do exactly what I did--configure a new MP3 player, join their service, and try to download a few tracks? And wouldn't you imagine that they would be ready to respond in their promised timeframe when some of these connections predictably failed? Given the cost of acquiring new customers, wouldn't Sony Connect want to do everything in its power to make these opportunities work well?
UPDATE: 72 hours after my initial contact, Sony Connect emailed me a work-around, but I haven't tried it yet.
MUCH DELAYED UPDATE: I tried the workaround eventually, and it worked. But I was so unimpressed with the initial behavior and so put off by the customer support, that we never did any other business on that site. My son decided to rip his existing CDs onto the Sony MP3 player we bought him, and has made do with that. Now he is shopping for a new MP3 player, and is not looking at Sony. So even though the device is fine, the lack of a decent experience with the Web site made him give up on it right away, and now he is giving up on the device. This doesn't bode well for the Sony eBook device, which apparently will require purchases of content through Sony Connect.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:06 PM
December 26, 2005
Here and There
I continue to update my eForms (RSS here) and Content Management (RSS here) resources pages. Looking at my logs, it is striking how many people go right for the RSS, so I am going to give some thought to making the feeds more prominent. Does it also suggest I should give some thought to combining the feeds (from the blog and the resource pages)?
I also have opened up comments again, sans moderation. This opens me up to some comment spam, but the version of Movable Type I am using seems to guard against this better than previous versions. Despite a steady readership (about 1000 visitors a day) I have never had an abundance of comments. I enjoy them, so I am glad to remove the moderation if it makes posting easier.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:33 PM
Medical Publishing and XML
Medical publishing was an early adopter of SGML and has naturally progressed to using XML for content development and repurposing. MarkLogic, with its Content Server XML repository, has had a laser-like focus on the medical publishing business, winning business from industry giants Elsevier and Wolters Kluwer, among others. They have now added The New England Journal of Medicine to their list of customers.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:27 AM
December 25, 2005
Currently Reading
Hawthorne in Concord by Philip McFarland.
Nathaniel Hawthorne has always been a favorite, and I have mentioned before that the Web has some excellent Hawthorne resources. But this book is revealing Hawthorne the person, and, so far in the telling, he is as loving and kind as a person as he was talented and probing as a writer. The book opens with his marriage to Sophia Peabody. In a love letter to Sophia three years earlier, he had imagined their new life together. "Oh, beloved, if we had but a cottage, somewhere beyond the sway of the East Wind, yet within the limits of New-England, where we could be always together, and have a place to be in--" What more could lovers want? "Nothing-save daily bread, (or rather bread and milk; for I think I should adopt your diet) and clean white apparel every day for mine unspotted Dove. Then... I could not be other than good and happy, when your kiss would sanctify me at all my outgoings and incomings, and when I should rest nightly in your arms."
When I was an undergraduate, a poetry instructor told us to write a poem of place. I was living in a rambling old brick house in New Bedford. It had probably been a nice house once, but now it was student housing, and really, nothing much to write about. But I was a dogged and unimaginative student, so I went with what I had. I learned the house was built in 1842, and the only thing noteworthy I could come up with about 1842 was that it was the year "Hawthorne was married." My poem was a pitiful little thing, but little did I know how important that single detail was. And now I do, thanks to the fine writing of Philip McFarland.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:53 PM
A Brief History of Podcasting
Courtesy of Dave Winer, Christopher Lydon provides a great story of how he got started on podcasting (and, in turn, how podcasting got started). Lydon also mentions one of my favorite people in the business, Bob Doyle.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:35 PM
So It's Christmas
I don't think of myself as someone who is big on holidays. If I were pressed to choose a favorite, I might pick Thanksgiving. I enjoy family and football, in that order, and I like the relative simplicity of Thanksgiving and the sentiment of giving thanks. I'm also in Boston, close to where the holiday began, so I do have that same sense of impending winter, the need to buckle down, and the urge to be thankful for the bounty that is in front of us, at this moment.
I also might pick the Fourth of July, the one summer holiday, since summer is my favorite season. The Fourth of July is also symbolic of great beginnings--the birth of the nation and the beginning of the real hot weather of summer (around here anyway). It also close enough to the end of the school year that I still associate it with commencement--the end of school and the start of a new phase in life.
But Christmas is full of meaning of course. I have some childhood memories that I have touched on here and here. I also have seen Christmas anew over the last 15 years as my sons have gone from babies to toddlers to little boys to big boys and almost young men. My 14-year-old has made this amazing transformation the past few years. At 12, he was still all about what was under the tree for him. Last year, he groped for meaning in the holiday, saying out loud on Christmas day, "I don't know what to think about Christmas this year." And then this year he bought the most thoughtful and generous gifts for his brother, his mother, and me. When I helped him wrap the presents for his mother last night, he said, "I wanted to get two presents each for you and Mom because, you know, you're my parents and you get me so much and do so much for me."
For all his teenage awkwardness, my son is startlingly good at saying out loud what I sometimes only wish I could say. How many times I could have said, "I don't know what to think about Christmas this year"--whether it was because I was 13 or 19 or 46. And how many times I could have expressed my gratitude in such a direct and warm way.
So maybe that is why I hesitate to say Christmas is my favorite holiday. Perhaps it is too hard to know exactly what to think about a day filled with so much meaning. Perhaps it is too powerful to fully consider the obvious--how much we owe to the people most important in our lives. At Thanksgiving, we pause and give thanks, share a meal, watch some football, nap. At Christmas, we are too rushed to merely pause, and we have the extra task of choosing and bringing gifts. We bring these gifts hoping, in our heart of hearts, that we have chosen and are bringing the right gifts, the ones that show how we really feel about the living, breathing, smiling people taking them from our hands.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:53 AM
Whatever You Do...
... don't let the wingnuts who worry about the alleged war on Christmas hear about this.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:38 AM
December 22, 2005
American Life in Poetry
I have written about Ted Kooser before (here and here). One of the things he has done as U.S. poet laureate is to create a new, freely distributed column on poetry called American Life in Poetry. He shares a poem written by an American poet, and comments briefly on it. The following is the most recent column.
American Life in Poetry: Column 39
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
Many of us keep journals, but while doing so few of us pay much attention to selecting the most precise words, to determining their most effective order, to working with effective pauses and breath-like pacing, to presenting an engaging impression of a single, unique day. This poem by Nebraskan Nancy McCleery is a good example of one poet's carefully recorded observations.
December Notes
The backyard is one white sheet
Where we read in the bird tracks
The songs we hear. Delicate
Sparrow, heavier cardinal,
Filigree threads of chickadee.
And wing patterns where one flew
Low, then up and away, gone
To the woods but calling out
Clearly its bright epigrams.
More snow promised for tonight.
The postal van is stalled
In the road again, the mail
Will be late and any good news
Will reach us by hand.
Reprinted from "Girl Talk," The Backwaters Press, 2002, by permission of the author. Copyright (c) 1994 by Nancy McCleery. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
******************************
American Life in Poetry provides newspapers and online publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary American poems. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry: American Life in Poetry seeks to create a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. There are no costs for reprinting the columns; we do require that you register your publication here and that the text of the column be reproduced without alteration.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:07 AM
December 21, 2005
Two Black Dogs
Elsa Dorfman, who is a fine photographer, has said, "The hardest thing to photograph is a black dog. Forgive the word thing." I submit photographing two black dogs is harder. But here's one try. That's Cleo on the left, Petey on the right. Their focus is on some treats I was using to keep them still. Notice the fierce concentration! They know which side their bread is buttered on.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:14 PM
Simplicity
I've been hearing a lot about simplicity as the new driving goal of technology design. Via the MeansBusiness newsletter Ideas in the News, we get these thoughts on simplicity from Jean-Philippe Courtois, president of Microsoft International.
"More is going to happen over the next ten years than it did in the past ten. By 2015, the world will again experience the kind of dramatic shift that the internet brought, which is a pretty exciting notion. A lot of this change is going to happen through software...Workers and organisations are already nearing the point of so-called information overload, where the sheer volume of data and the complexity of the applications necessary to work with it threaten to overwhelm the powers of human cognition. These distractions have a demonstrable effect on the productivity and health of workers. Along with the proliferation of channels and features that IT offers, we are looking to offer simplification and insight with our products. That means we are trying to address things like prioritisation, context, attention management, and also to bring in better and smarter ways to visualise and control volumes of complex data."
I have some better suggestions for Microsoft to accomplish first, beginning with a secure operating system, more stable software, and core applications that aren't bloated with thousands of features most readers never even learn about, let alone use. Any one of these things would dramatically simplify the experience of millions of users around the world. And then Microsoft executives wouldn't have to bloviate about information overload--a topic that has been under discussion for 20 years and this guy presents as if it is brand new.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:55 AM
December 19, 2005
So Tim Berners-Lee Has a Blog
Tim Berners-Lee is admired, of course, for being one of the key people behind the start of the World Wide Web. I also have found him to be a captivating speaker and very funny; I often quote what he said about HTML tagging, "Who would want to type this stuff?". (He is also a Unitarian Universalist, and has written about his faith here.) Now he has a blog, which he is careful to point out, is not about general W3C business but more specifically about his more recent work. "I intend it to be geeky semantic web stuff mostly. For example, it won't be for W3C questions which should really be addressed to working groups."
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:13 PM
XSLT Pays
I happened to learn about this from a posting on the DC-XMLUsers mailing list, but if you live in the DC area and are a highly experienced XSLT programmer, the government has a good job for you.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:50 PM
Around the CM Blogosphere
So I have taken some time over the past few weeks to compile a blogroll of content-management-related blogs (see down the left side of the page), and have also maintained a nearly identical list as part of my Content Management Resources page. It has been well worth the effort, and I hope to add more. If you know of any others I should include, please feel free to email me or post a comment here.
Lisa Welchman continues to impress with her CM-related podcasts. The latest podcast explores "the middle way" in workflow--a balance between un-structured processes and total process automation. GALA, the Globalization and Localization Association, has launched a blog. Over at the Gilbane blog, Frank Gilbane has some thoughts on structured blogging, and Leonor Ciarlone comments on DITA and its clearly broad implications for information architecture and technical writing. Friend and colleague Michael Edson has joined Really Strategies, and has begun blogging about some of the dynamics of technology in the K-12 educational publishing market. Scott Abel hunts down some ideas about DITA and SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) from IBM's DeveloperWorks site, and also provides some helpful additional links and resources. And Micah Dubinko shares a cool piece of technology, "Web Search Without the Web," but then wonders why no one noticed an obvious bug (which he has since fixed).
Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:21 PM
December 18, 2005
Block that Metaphor!
I had been thinking recently about a series of posts along the lines of "what Shakespeare could tell us about content management," or, more broadly, "what Shakespeare could tell us about managing technology." Then I read this piece, and decided to swear off the idea forever.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:19 PM
December 17, 2005
Richard Pryor
Richard Pryor passed away this week. The New Yorker has posted a 1999 profile from its archives, A Pryor Love, written by Hilton Als. Speaking of The New Yorker archive, I spent the past couple of weeks reviewing the disc-based version, The Complete New Yorker, and talking to some of the principals, including Ed Klaris, the project director at The New Yorker, and Murat Aktar, president of Bondi Digital, the company that developed the software and interface. My conclusion: it's great; just buy it.
The full article will be in EContent Magazine in a couple of months.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:50 AM
December 16, 2005
Farewell to Billy Ballgame
Bill Mueller signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers this week, bringing to an end a great three-year run with the Red Sox. Mueller is a class act--a soft-spoken, articulate professional who played every aspect of the game well. He may well be the least-known batting champion of the last decade, and this past year hit .295 with 10 home runs and 62 RBIs, all while playing Gold-Glove-caliber defense at third base.
I love baseball, but grow more cynical about the players themselves every day. Too many of them seem spoiled, self-absorbed, and indifferent to how lucky they are to be making millions of dollars a year to play a game. But Mueller was always thoughtful and self-effacing, and the respect and affection he has from his peers are obvious. Johnny Damon said last year, "Billy Mueller's my favorite ball player. I keep telling my son every time he watches a game to watch this guy because he's a guy who earns every bit of his success out on the baseball field with the way he approaches the game and the way he plays. That's the type of ball player I want my son to be." And Mueller's former manager, Dusty Baker, took his admiration one step further, saying Mueller was the sort of man he would want his daughter to marry.
So good luck to Bill Mueller, and I hope the Dodgers fans appreciate him as much as so many of us in Boston did.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:24 PM
Audio Book Kiosks
Bill Rosenblatt's DRMWatch is reporting on a new product from Overdrive that will allow library visitors to download audio books in Windows Media Audio format. Seems like a good idea to me. I wonder if the satellite radio networks might think of streaming audio book content via a dedicated channel. That and the Bruce channel might turn me into a subscriber.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:18 PM | Comments (1)
December 14, 2005
Phone Content
One area where SVG certainly has legs is in phone technology. Check out this article, which is on a Web site, phonecontent.com. Now there is a URL you might not have envisioned a few years ago.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:29 PM
December 12, 2005
Give My Regards to Broadway
Remember me to Herald Square!
Strictly speaking, this is Greeley Square, but close enough, and the lights were nicer.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:13 PM
Content Audit Templates
I am recommending a client undertake a condent audit, and I wonder if there are some standard templates and tools out there. Please post in the comments here or email me if you have some ideas.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:59 AM | Comments (2)
December 10, 2005
Dad Physics
I have two boys, 12 and 14, both big and athletic, and both very physical. No shrinking wall-flowers here. When someone asks me how they are doing, I often say, "Bigger and meaner everyday." This throws some people off, imagining that I am raising two future Hell's Angels or something. But, in truth, I am just raising boys. They are physical. They are loud. The house shakes when they horse around. Things get broken at times, furniture flies. When my 14 year old is in my third-floor office listening to music, I can hear his foot-tapping in my kitchen two floors down.
Boys being boys, they are also prone to experimenting in what many parents of boys have come to call "kid physics,"--as in, let's try this and see what happens. Let's try bouncing a basketball off the living room wall. Let's try kicking a soccer ball against this picket fence as hard as I can. Let's try kicking the ottoman out from under my big brother when he is dancing on it. Knock on wood. We've had our share of stitches, bruises, and sprains, and we have well-used first aid supplies in all three bathrooms, but we have avoided major injuries. Here's to our continued good luck.
Looking at this picture of my younger son at a Red Sox game this past summer, I realized I have my own physics at work. Let's call it dad physics. That's him, wearing the #28 New England Patriots shirt (Corey Dillon), with the backwards Red Sox cap. He was waiting for autographs before a game. The man next to him is about my size, maybe a little shorter but a little bulkier.
And here's where the dad physics comes in. I am so used to seeing my sons as these big growing boys. I hear their thundering footsteps. I put away their shoes--almost as big as my size 13s already. I watch them, fearless and determined, on the soccer field and on the basketball court. Sometimes I forget they are just boys. Still small in some ways, still measuring themselves against bigger people, still measuring themselves against a big vast world.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:15 PM
December 9, 2005
Books by Friends: Better Thinking
Gerry Waller co-wrote an excellent book, Strategies for Better Thinking : An Advanced Model for Organizational Performance Consultants. The book discusses learning styles, how different people approach problems differently, thinking processes and strategies, and process models for thinking. Gerry is director of Sales Development at Thomas Industrial Network.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:08 PM
Currently Reading (and Reviewing)
The Complete New Yorker, a collection of 80 years of, to my thinking, the greatest magazine of the past century. I had installed it and have been using it for a couple of months, but I am reviewing it now, so I want through the installation process again. Even that is a kick for a fan. As it copies the cover images onto your hard drive, the 20th century goes racing by. (Click on the image to see what I mean.)
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:30 PM
December 8, 2005
The eBook Wars
Writing for Publish.com, Ben Charny has an excellent roundup of the online book efforts at Google, Yahoo, and elsewhere.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:52 PM
The Tie a Day Club
Back in the day, men used to wear ties every day to work. Then they started with Casual Fridays, and, the next thing I knew, I was wearing a tie maybe fours times a year. So here I am with this great collection of ties, and few chances to wear them.
So I am thinking about creating a regular posting, featuring a tie that I might have worn that day had business required me to wear a tie.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:30 PM | Comments (1)
December 7, 2005
Virtual XML Garden
Every now and then I pop over to IBM's alphaWorks site to see about some of their new technology, and I am rarely disappointed. One of the new projects up there is a Virtual XML Garden, which is described as "an implementation of XML processing directly and efficiently over arbitrary, structured data" but is really more than that.
With Virtual XML Garden, users can write scripts in XPath (as well as a subset of the forthcoming XQuery language) that mix and match virtual XML views on a number of provided data sources, including XML access to ZIP archives, the file system, binary formatted data, and hierarchical (Information Management System (IMS)) databases.
Check it out. This strikes me as an incredibly useful thing.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:43 PM
December 6, 2005
More Summer Musing
Every summer my family spends a week at a Unitarian Universalist conference center in Maine called Ferry Beach. It's in Saco, south of Old Orchard Beach, and the beach gives way pretty quickly to these tall, impressive pines. We have an outdoor chapel in the pines, and I sat there one day, looked up, and took the following picture.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:30 PM
Guilty Pleasures
So is anyone else addicted to Sudoku? I don't spend money on anything except necessities, and I have already bought a book and the software. (And look at the book! If Will Shortz likes it, it must be OK!)
After baseball and Law & Order, Sudoku is quickly becoming my third-favorite pasttime.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:28 PM
December 5, 2005
DITA: Just to be Perfectly Clear
When I talk about DITA in this blog, I mean this DITA and not this DITA. Of course, a little glamour is not a bad thing for technology. I always thought this might be one way to beef up the lagging sales for my SVG book.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:43 PM
A Moment...
... before winter settles in. This is from the front of the house sometime in June.
We had a couple of inches of snow yesterday morning, and are expecting a few more tonight. It's 33 degrees out (Farenheit of course) as I write this, and the sun set at 4:12 pm. No surprise that today's tanning index was a 1 out of 10.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:33 PM
Cool Name
And perhaps even a cooler idea. I heard about this last week, and haven't tried it yet, but might come up with something.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:46 PM
December 4, 2005
The eXtensibility Manifesto
Dale Waldt of aXtive Minds and Nick Carr of Allette Systems are two of the movers behind a new initiative, The eXtensibility Manifesto. The overall goal is to create guidelines and a methodology to improve the predictability and success rates of XML implementation, and is modeled, in part, on the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. The guiding principles of the eXtensibility Manifesto are on the home page, and an introductory presentation from XML 2005 can be found here.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:58 AM
December 3, 2005
Content Management Podcasting
Content management guru Lisa Welchman has launched a podcast service related to content management over at CMS Advisor.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:44 PM
December 2, 2005
Some Boston Bests
Boston.com has a roundup of some of Boston's superlatives. Of course, the sports scene comes up, and I am a huge Red Sox fan, but this is just scary.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:07 PM
