March 31, 2006
Nice Day, Too Much Work
It is a gorgeous day here in Boston, sunny, about 73 F. I have been heads down with some work since 7 AM. Any second now I am putting down this computer and stepping outside...
Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:14 PM | Comments (2)
March 30, 2006
Publishing Strategy and Technology
The Gilbane San Francisco Conference is coming up, and Frank has announced a new special pass for people interested in attending just the Automated Publishing Track. The pass sells for $495 and allows you to attend all the automated publishing sessions April 24th & April 25th, sit in on our opening keynote, visit the exhibits, and join us for the sponsor reception on Tuesday April 25th. For more information on the track, click here.
The sessions with the AP prefix, AP-1, AP-2, etc., make up the Automated Publishing track.
To register for the special pass, click here. To register for the full conference, click here. Of course, don't forget about my DITA tutorial.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:30 PM
A Pot of Red Lentils
Here is the latest installment in the American Life in Poetry series.
American Life in Poetry: Column 53
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
Writing poetry, reading poetry, we are invited to join with others in celebrating life, even the ordinary, daily pleasures. Here the Seattle poet and physician, Peter Pereira, offer us a simple meal.
A Pot of Red Lentils
simmers on the kitchen stove.
All afternoon dense kernels
surrender to the fertile
juices, their tender bellies
swelling with delight.
In the yard we plant
rhubarb, cauliflower, and artichokes,
cupping wet earth over tubers,
our labor the germ
of later sustenance and renewal.
Across the field the sound of a baby crying as we carry in the last carrots, whorls of butter lettuce, a basket of red potatoes.
I want to remember us this way--
late September sun streaming through
the window, bread loaves and golden
bunches of grapes on the table,
spoonfuls of hot soup rising
to our lips, filling us
with what endures.
Reprinted from "Saying the World," 2003, by permission of Copper Canyon Press. Copyright (c) 2003 by Peter Pereira. 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 11:41 AM
March 29, 2006
Speaking of Mark Logic
Dave Kellogg, CEO of Mark Logic, offers this comparison of Google and Oracle in his blog.
Google has one primary revenue source (advertising) and a lot of science projects for PR (e.g., Google Earth, Moon, or -- believe it not -- Google Mars). This is just like Oracle which, for a long time, had one working revenue source (the DBMS) and numerous science projects of its own, such as nCube, the network computer (NC), or video-on-demand...
But the big difference is once you put Oracle inside your company it is very hard to get it out. If moving an IT department from Oracle to DB2 is a liver transplant, moving a user from Google to another search engine is a hangnail. The former requires re-writes of applications, reports, and queries. The latter requires a new bookmark and perhaps a thirty-second toolbar download.
Indeed.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:32 PM
How Gauche
An unintended effect of keyword advertising.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:46 PM
New Book on XQuery
Stephen Buxton, who is Director of Product Management for Mark Logic, has co-authored a new book, Querying XML: XQuery, XPath, and SQL/XML in Context. It's a honking 848 pages, which doesn't surprise me. Along with the folks at DataDirect (who market Stylus Studio and DataDirect XQuery), Mark Logic really represents both the thought leadership and a growing center of excellence on XQuery. They have already done enough work to fill an 848 page book--and more. Buxton's co-author is Jim Melton of Oracle. Both Buxton and Melton are part of the W3C XML Query Working Group.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:56 PM
Madcap Flare
I love a company that is not afraid to come up with bold names. Other than that, I don't know the first thing about this product, but it looks pretty cool. Here's an interview with Mike Hamilton, their VP of Product Development. Apparently, it is a re-formation of many of the people who were behind RoboHelp originally.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:34 PM
Alfresco Founder & CTO starts blogging
Jeff Potts likes the new blog from John Newton, Alfresco Founder and CTO.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:45 PM
Two Things I Like About this Picture
57 = the degrees Fahrenheit on my drove home Tuesday evening
277 = the number of total miles on my new car
And speaking of warm weather.... these crocuses like the sun today.
... and these daffodils are being a little coy, but aren't far behind.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:19 PM | Comments (2)
Infopath hit with first virus - Computerworld
I somehow missed this Computerworld article a few weeks ago: Infopath hit with first virus. Apparently, a Trojan horse virus has been detected that targets Microsoft InfoPath.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:53 AM
March 28, 2006
Search Terms
Maybe my favorite part of looking at my usage logs is seeing what search terms brought people to my site. Some of them are really obvious, some of them funny, and some of them, well, odd. Here is a recent sampling, with the search term followed by the number of visits in the last couple of weeks:
dita+tutorial 25
ebook+device 16
sony+ebook 12
bill+trippe 10
coco+crisp+nationality 9
breece+pancake 6
publishing+white+papers 6
revenue+per+click 6
billy+packer+idiot 5
t-mobile+early+termination 4
coco+crisp+real+name 3
coco+crisp+pictures 3
swiss+spaghetti+harvest 3
cussing 3
%22block+that+metaphor%22 2
everett+hoagland 2
baseball+food 2
andre+dubus 2
hub+fans+bid+kid+adieu 2
chris+herren+iran 2
Coco is so popular, but I love how quickly the Billy Packer is an idiot theme made it out there.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:08 PM
March 27, 2006
LinkedIn Profile
I have discussed LinkedIn before, and have since spent a little more time on my connections and my profile. I decided to publish my LinkedIn profile as a kind of online resume. It's not as detailed as I would like, and clicking almost anywhere then invites you to become a LinkedIn member, but it does have some of the basics. If you are interested in my full resume, click here (PDF).
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:06 PM
How Nerdy Are You?
Via Publishing 2.0, I learned that Newsweek is asking and answering this question with an interactive poll. Apparently, a few people at www.msnbc.com are not terribly nerdy as the link to the poll (and apparently the entire article) cause my Firefox session to crash.
But it works just dandy in Internet Explorer. Coincidence? I think not!
It turns out I am barely a nerd. I scored a 30, which puts me just in the "Heading to Geekdom" (30-60) category and--egads!--on the cusp of "Stuck in the Last Century" (0-29). Well, come to think of it, in the last century we weren't stuck with this doofus, so maybe that isn't such a bad place to be after all. I am going to go shoot for a lower score...
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:19 PM
March 26, 2006
I Shall Be Telling This With a Sigh
Happy Birthday, Robert Frost.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:25 PM
March 25, 2006
Adobe InDesign for Single Source Publishing?
I posted the following to the TECHWR-L list today, and thought I would also post here in case any of you have thoughts about this. Please comment or email me if you have ideas.
I have a client that will be using Adobe InDesign for their documentation. I say "will be" because the decision has already been made for a variety of reasons, so the mission now is to figure out how to support them in this effort. A few points:
--It's a small group. One writer and one editor, supported by a graphic designer who will create the templates.
--Their total volume of documentation is probably a few thousand pagea a year, much of it updates and custom versions of one key deliverable (user documentation for software that runs as both client-server (Windows and Mac) and Web-based.
--They will be using a workflow solution, WoodWing, that will allow the authoring to be done in InCopy, with the templates being maintained by the designer using InDesign.
The print output is straightfoward, but my concern is output to Help without too many manual steps by the small team. From reading the archives, it appears there is no tool that directly supports InDesign-to-Help output, but there are two indirect options:
--Use the XML capabilities in InDesign and InCopy to produce XML output that could than be transformed into Help.
--Produce a PDF file or files that could then be ingested by one of the Help tools (preferences or recommendations here? They use RoboHelp with MS Word now, but are not committed to it) I am assuming this approach means the PDF file needs to have enough hooks, links, etc., in it to make the transformation to Help automatic.
Do I seem to have captured the state of the art? Does anyone have any experience, recommendations, etc? Also, if you are a consultant who does this kind of work, I would be interested in hearing from you offlist.
Many thanks in advance.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:16 PM
"Tell the World What is Happening Here"
Dick Scobie was director of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee from 1972 to 1988. He has recently published a memoir of his time there. For Dick, the defining time in his career at UUSC was the long war in El Salvador. He writes about this time in his book, and in an excerpt just published in UU World magazine.
For centuries the Salvadoran economic and military elite had brutally exploited the peasantry. Then, in the 1970s, the Salvadoran people became caught in a cruel geopolitical struggle between the capitalist West and the communist East. Government-sponsored death squads targeted anyone who supported reform of any kind—priests, professors, students, farmers, union organizers, protesters of election fraud. You didn’t have to do much to get labeled a subversive, and the targets of this nasty campaign included UUSC’s project partners.
In April 1977 I made my first visit to El Salvador with John McAward, the UUSC’s director of international programs. We interviewed victims and witnesses of government-sponsored violence and met with the country’s Catholic archbishop, Oscar Romero. A small man with a scholarly demeanor, Romero saw that his faith would compel him to speak out against the government repression. With grave sadness, he told us about the deepening crisis. “What can we do?” we asked. His response: “Tell the world what is happening here.”
And tell the world they did. Beginning with leading a Congressional delegation to El Salvador later that same year, the UUSC was instrumental in helping to bring peace to the country, but only after a long, bloody struggle.
During the next fifteen years the UUSC sponsored more than twenty delegations, giving more than thirty congresspeople from both parties an incomparable view of the social and political realities in Central America, especially as the Reagan Administration expanded U.S. support for right-wing regimes in the 1980s. A number of the people our delegations met with were murdered—including Romero, who was assassinated while saying mass in 1980. Most were civilian peasants, numbering in the hundreds of thousands in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. Our work for a just peace in El Salvador was recognized in 1992 when Heather Foote, one of McAward’s successors, was invited to represent the UUSC as an observer at the signing of the Peace Accords that formally ended the civil war.
I've come to know Dick the past several years from the time we spend at Ferry Beach in the summer. He is a warm, wonderful guy, and I am proud to be in his circle of friends.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:33 AM
March 24, 2006
March Madness
I am not a huge college basketball fan, but I like the tournament, and am rooting for Boston College. I am watching the game now, and understand why so many people think Billy Packer is an idiot. The BC-Villanova game is happening right in front of him, but he seems to be commenting on a game he watched ten years ago.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:53 PM | Comments (2)
Radiator
Here is the latest installment in the American Life in Poetry series.
American Life in Poetry: Column 52
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
What a marvelous gift is the imagination, and each of us gets one at birth, free of charge and ready to start up, get on, and ride away. Can there be anything quite so homely and ordinary as a steam radiator? And yet, here, Connie Wanek, of Duluth, Minnesota, nudges one into play.
Radiator
Mittens are drying on the radiator,
boots nearby, one on its side.
Like some monstrous segmented insect
the radiator elongates under the window.
Or it is a beast with many shoulders
domesticated in the Ice Age.
How many years it takes
to move from room to room!
Some cage their radiators
but this is unnecessary
as they have little desire to escape.
Like turtles they are quite self-contained.
If they seem sad, it is only the same sadness we all feel, unlovely, growing slowly cold.
Reprinted from "Bonfire," New Rivers Press, 1997, by permission of the author. Copyright (c) 1997 by Connie Wanek. Her most recent book is "Hartley Field," from Holy Cow! Press. 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 10:14 AM | Comments (2)
Live from Raleigh! It's DITA!
I am a little late reporting this, but Scott Abel is alerting folks to a live internet radio show from DITA 2006 today. All times are Eastern.
First hour: 9am-10am
Topic: What is DITA and why is it such a big deal?
Guests: Susan Carpenter (IBM), Dave Schell (IBM)
Second hour: 10am-11am
Topic: Getting started with DITA, specialization, and the DITA Toolkit
Guests: Michael Priestley (IBM), Don Day (IBM)
Third hour: 2pm-3pm
Topic: Alternatives to specialization, advice and lessons learned
Guests: Bernard Aschwanden (Publishing Smarter), France Baril (IXIASOFT)
Fourth hour: 3pm-4pm
Topic: Authoring tools and DITA, DocBook or DITA?
Guests: Bob Doyle (CMS Review), Norm Walsh (Sun Microsystems)
Listen live by clicking here.
Call into the show: 1-866-685-7469
Ask a question via email: radio@mytechnologylawyer.com
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:03 AM
March 23, 2006
Crocuses
You wouldn't know it from the thermometer, but it is Spring here in greater Boston. These crocuses in front of my house seem to know it, though.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:10 AM
Schematron
If you do a lot with XML-encoded content, you should know about Schematron. Betty Harvey also thinks so, and has lauched an email list, the Schematron-love-in.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:53 AM
CM Professionals: Two Items
Tomorrow is the deadline for the call for papers for the CM Professionals Spring Summit, which will be held in conjunction with Gilbane San Francisco.
Also, if you are interested in joining CM Professionals (and you should), now is the time to join. The annual membership fee is $50 now, but is being increased to $100 on March 31. So join now.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:44 AM
March 22, 2006
EclipseZone - Open source Eclipse/SWT XForms engine released
Writing for EclipseZone, Eric Borraco reports that Nuxeo has released the source code for an open source XForms engine for SWT and Eclipse. The technology will be used in the Apogee project to build rich client applications for collaboration and ECM.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:03 PM
AIIM New England (oh, and an iPod)
If you've considered joining AIIM New England, now is a good time. It's free, and they have some very good events and resources. And if you join now through me as your sponsoring member, I have a chance to win an iPod. So email me and I will get you enrolled.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:41 PM
Hosted Content Management: DocZone.com
Hosted content management is not new. There are mature and growing vendors like CrownPeak and Clickability, and Atomz, of course, is now part of Web analytics vendor WebSideStory. But those vendors are focused on Web content management. What about a hosted application for a content management application like XML-based multichannel publishing?
I think the conventional wisdom even a couple of years ago was that XML content management, especially for applications like technical documentation, was simply too complex and too variable for a hosted solution. How could one provider efficiently meet the needs of different customers with different DTDs--and perhaps more significantly, different trasformations to print and Help and HTML?
But then DITA came along, and with it the promise of a single, extensible DTD (or XML schema if you prefer) that many people could use across various industries. So some clever people have come up a hosted service for XML content management called DocZone.com. I got a briefing a few weeks ago from Dan Dube, Managing Director for DocZone's US Operations, and came away very impressed. They have chosen a great suite of technology, and their focus on DITA is a very smart bet. And they had a significant announcement this week, landing Dutch automotive company Spyker Cars as a customer.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:00 PM
Riya Photo Search
This is either cool or scary.
UPDATE: They've gone Beta, and you can sign up now.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:21 AM
Why XForms Matter, Revisited - O'Reilly XML Blog
Why XForms Matter, Revisited - O'Reilly XML Blog
Excellent article, published 3/19/2006, by Kurt Cagle.
(Testing the "blog this" feature on my Onfolio tool, finally.)
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:42 AM
March 21, 2006
Good at Hacking Word Files?
My son created this great menu for a school project, and then the Word file imploded. I have tried pretty much every tool I could find out there, and none of them uncracked it. Interested in giving it a try? Click here for a zip file, with the Word file included. I have tested it for viruses and it is clean. If you can restore the file to its original state (four photos on the front, about 6 pages long), I will send you a copy of my SVG book or the DRM book that I helped write.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:47 PM | Comments (2)
March 19, 2006
American Memory
Next time you find yourself thinking about how amazing Google Print is, go spend an hour or two at the American Memory collection and see how wonderful digital preservation really can be.
This is my fundamental arguement against Google Print, Google Video, Google Scholar, and so many other things Google does. The efforts are mediocre at best. There are far better examples out there in every category. People seem to have this uncritical adoration for anything Google announces or does. It reminds me, eerily, of the uncritical thinking people had at the height of the dot.com boom, where any idea, as long as it was on the Web, was a winner. We all know how that turned out.
At this writing, Google has a good search engine and makes a lot of money through advertising. It also has Google Mail, which seems sturdy, but is not exactly revolutionary. It also has the Google Appliance, which is just goofy, if you ask me. (And if you look at Google's total licensing revenues, which includes the Appliance-related revenues, they total just $73 million dollars for the year just finished, with only a 19% growth year-to-year in revenues for the fourth quarter. There are faster-growing enterprise search companies, which tells me that Google is not really impacting the enterprise search market in a signficant way. In other words, I am not the only person to see little value in the Google enterprise applications.)
But enough grousing and back to American Memory. Check out the Walt Whitman notebooks being featured and a personal favorite, the photography collection from Detroit Publishing.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:27 PM
A Cut Above the Rest
Tim Bray's blog is worth reading for so many reasons. He is smarter than most people out there, he writes really well, and his photography is wonderful.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:08 PM
Comment Dreariness
A month or so ago I mentioned a plague of trackback spam, and the new tool I had installed. The trackback spam immediately got better, but then starting a week or so ago I had a fresh plague of comment spam, which reached a crescendo on Friday. I was away from my computer for a good chunk of the day and came back to a couple of hundred comment spam.
How dreary. I considered for a bit my need to have comments at all. I don't get many, but the real ones I do get are much appreciated. So I decided to tweak the tool settings. At first I could only get it down to a dull roar, where I was still getting a dozen an hour. So I tightened it up more, and have now gone about 24 hours without any.
So now I am fretting I may block a few real comments, so I will monitor the logs. Over the last 24 hours, it blocked 113 comments, and they were all bogus. So far, so good, I guess.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:00 PM
March 18, 2006
Marching
Here is the latest installment in the American Life in Poetry series.
American Life in Poetry: Column 51
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
Walt Whitman's poems took in the world through a wide-angle lens, including nearly everything, but most later poets have focused much more narrowly. Here the poet and novelist Jim Harrison nods to Whitman with a sweeping, inclusive poem about the course of life.
Marching
At dawn I heard among bird calls
the billions of marching feet in the churn and squeak of gravel, even tiny feet still wet from the mother's amniotic fluid, and very old halting feet, the feet of the very light and very heavy, all marching but not together, criss-crossing at every angle with sincere attempts not to touch, not to bump into each other, walking in the doors of houses and out the back door forty years later, finally knowing that time collapses on a single plateau where they were all their lives, knowing that time stops when the heart stops as they walk off the earth into the night air.
"Marching," from Jim Harrison's "Saving Daylight" (2006) is reprinted by permission of Copper Cayon Press. 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.
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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 10:16 AM
Google and Amazon
John Battelle suggests Amazon and Google are on a collision course. I get his point, especially given the example he cites. But Amazon has built perhaps the best eCommerce engine in the world, and Google has coughed up dross like this.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:54 AM
March 16, 2006
XForms 1.0 (Second Edition)
The W3C has released the Second Edition of XForms 1.0, and Mark Birbeck has a valuable roundup of the new document and some related news.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:14 PM
March 15, 2006
An "Oh-My-God Level of Deliciousness"
That's what Zagat says about my nephew Max's cooking at Frascati in San Francisco (PDF download). If you want to see his the cover of the newspaper (also PDF), click here.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:30 PM
Recommended Reading
DRM expert Bill Rosenblatt tells me that if you really want to know how systems get compromised and hacked, you should read Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World by Bruce Schneier.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:37 AM
March 14, 2006
In the Mail
Jonathan Lazar's Web Usability: A User-Centered Design Approach. Lazar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Information Sciences, in the Fisher College of Science and Mathematics at Towson University. He is also founder and director of the Universal Usability Laboratory at Towson University. I didn't find a blog by Dr. Lazar, but I did find an impressive list of published research papers, many of which are available online.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:35 PM
March 13, 2006
New York Scene
A couple of weeks ago I took my two sons to New York, and we did one of those tour buses around lower Manhattan. I snapped this shot along the way. I believe it was the Flatiron Building, but I am not sure. Might be from a building we passed in the Village.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:48 PM
Sunny Day in NoHo
It was a beautiful afternoon in New York, so after my meetings today I walked up Broadway a bit before jumping back on the subway and then the Acela back to Boston. Just north of Houston Street, this building caught my eye.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:40 PM
XMP
I have been taking (thus far a cursory) look at XMP on behalf of a client, but I note a number of resources seem to be emerging. IDEAlliance is holding an XMP Open Day later this month in New York City. Meanwhile, Adobe has announced a Public Beta of the XMP Toolkit, Version 4.0, Prerelease 1. (It's interesting that the XMP Toolkit URL is at Adobe
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:24 PM
March 11, 2006
More XForms
Preview Release Version 0.4 of Mozilla XForms is out.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:18 PM
I Kid You Not
XForms: The Movie!
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:13 PM
Against Lawn
Here is the latest installment in the American Life in Poetry series.
American Life in Poetry: Column 50
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
Thousands of Americans fret over the appearance of their lawns, spraying, aerating, grooming, but here Grace Bauer finds good reasons to resist the impulse to tame what's wild: the white of clover blossoms under a streetlight, the possibility of finding the hidden, lucky, four-leafed rarity.
Against Lawn
The midnight streetlight illuminating
the white of clover assures me
I am right not to manicure
my patch of grass into a dull
carpet of uniform green, but
to allow whatever will to take over.
Somewhere in that lace lies luck,
though I may never swoop down
to find it. Three, too, is
an auspicious number. And this seeing
a reminder to avoid too much taming
of what, even here, wants to be wild.
Reprinted from the literary journal, "Lake Effect," Volume 8, Spring 2004 by permission of the author. Copyright (c) 2004 by Grace Bauer, whose new book, "Beholding Eye," is forthcoming from Wordtech Communications in 2006. 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 12:29 PM
Currently Reading
Actually--even better--my younger son is currently reading Darcy Frey's Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams. This is one of at least three great books in a special genre--nonfiction stories of urban youth who are gifted basketball players and might be able to use basketball as their ticket out of their challenging lives. It's a wonderful book, sad and wise and beautifully written. My younger son is not a big reader, but the night we bought it he sat down and read the first 40 pages, and has been plowing through it ever since.
The more famous book in the genre is Hoop Dreams: The True Story of Hardship and Triumph, made famous by the excellent documentary that was based on the book. I think Frey's book is the most well written, but my favorite book in this genre is the least known, Fall River Dreams: A Team's Quest for Glory, A Town's Search for Its Soul. It tells the story of can't-miss Fall River, MA basketball star Chris Herren. Herren did manage to miss, though he had brief stints in the NBA, including with my home-town Celtics. But drugs got in Herren's way, and last I heard he was playing professional basketball in Iran.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:09 PM
March 8, 2006
The More Things Change
My old company, Xyvision, just moved back into a building it occupied--egads--17 years ago when I first when to work there. It was a great building. I can still picture my office there, and the grounds around it were woodsy and pleasant. In the summer, you could take a long walk and see little or no pavement, and in the winter a group of us would grab our skates and sticks and play hockey on the frozen pond outside the cafeteria. I wish my friends and colleagues there well. Maybe I could bring my skates by sometime?
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:37 PM
Slow Blogging, Redux
I have been quiet lately, which almost always happens with some combination of being too busy, traveling a lot, and technical problems. Yes, yes, and yes. Yesterday my primary notebook failed (almost simultaneously with my fax machine--how weird is that?), and I have just been swamped with work.
In the meantime, if you are an eContent subscriber, you can read my just-published review of The Complete New Yorker (quick version--I liked it).
You can also read a brief blog entry I wrote over at Gilbane on Microsoft's acquisition of Onfolio. More thoughts here from Richard MacManus at ZDNet.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:17 PM
March 2, 2006
On A Moonstruck Gravel Road
Here is the latest installment in the American Life in Poetry series.
American Life in Poetry: Column 49
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
This fine poem by Rodney Torreson, of Grand Rapids, Michigan, looks into the world of boys arriving at the edge of manhood, and compares their natural wildness to that of dogs, with whom they feel a kinship.
On A Moonstruck Gravel Road
The sheep-killing dogs saunter home,
wool scraps in their teeth.
From the den of the moon
ancestral wolves
howl their approval.
The farm boys, asleep in their beds,
live the same wildness under their lids; every morning they come back through the whites of their eyes to do their chores, their hands pausing to pet the dog, to press its ears back, over the skull, to quiet that other world.
>From "A Breathable Light," New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2002, and first published in Sou'wester. Copyright (c) 2002 by Rodney Torreson and reprinted by permission of the author. 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 5:04 PM
Napster Points a Finger at Microsoft
From PaidContent.org, I learned that Napster CEO Chris Gorog "blames the Microsoft partner device makers and Microsoft for Napster's inability to make great strides in its battle with Apple's iTunes."
My recent experience tells me Naspter is right to be frustrated with Microsoft, but I don't blame the device makers as much as Gorog does. So I offered the following comment over at PaidContent.org:
I just spent the better part of a couple of days dealing with a Napster/Microsoft DRM/Creative Zen Micro problem. It began with a hiccup in my son's Napster account, and after essentially zero help from the Napster technical support team, it took an excellent technical support engineer from Creative to walk me through a labyrinth of Microsoft DRM upgrades and driver changes. The upshot was that I _still_ had to reinstall the Creative firmware and resynchronize the device with my son's Napster library. I was left convinced that the real culprit was the Microsoft DRM technology _and_ how it is implemented in the Napster client.
So there is plenty of guilt to go around here, but let's not forget that Microsoft has a long and famous history of not dealing well with third-party devices. This goes back to the earliest days of Windows. So if Microsoft intends to be a serious player in the music and entertainment business, it needs to master this requirement of its operating systems.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:46 PM | Comments (1)
Overheard at Broadway and 33rd
"Look, I'm on probabtion. It all depends on what the court allows me to do."
Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:42 PM
