June 30, 2006
It's a Tough Job
Smudge is a constant presence. She follows me into the bathroom, into the kitchen, the bedroom, around my home office. In the morning, she hangs around while I have my breakfast. I like to call her "the supervisor," because she seems to make sure everything happens according to her design. She is so vigilant, though, that she forgets to catnap, and ends up starting to nod off a little on the job.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:11 PM
June 29, 2006
The Copper Beech
Here is the latest installment in the American Life in Poetry series.
American Life in Poetry: Column 66
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
The Copper Beech
Immense, entirely itself,
it wore that yard like a dress,
with limbs low enough for me to enter it and climb the crooked ladder to where
I could lean against the trunk and practice being alone.
One day, I heard the sound before I saw it, rain fell darkening the sidewalk.
Sitting close to the center, not very high in the branches, I heard it hitting the high leaves, and I was happy,
watching it happen without it happening to me.
Reprinted from "What the Living Do," W. W. Norton & Co., 1997. Copyright (c) 1997 by Marie Howe. 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 3:38 PM
Someone Has a Birthday Today
They say he is 75, but I don't think he looks a day over 47.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:34 PM
June 27, 2006
Blog or Perish?
Ernie Landante of Novita Issue Communications has a podcast interview with Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes, who wrote the recent study about blogging, Behind the Scenes in the Blogosphere.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:29 PM | TrackBack
June 26, 2006
Comcast Fires Employee Caught Sleeping on Camera
Since the technician was at a customer's home when he fell asleep after spending an hour on the phone waiting for his own company's customer service, I think the better idea would be to fire Comcast. You can see the video here.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:41 PM
June 24, 2006
Homecoming
Here is the latest installment in the American Life in Poetry series.
American Life in Poetry: Column 65
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
Visiting a familiar and once dear place after a long absence can knock the words right out of us, and in this poem, Keith Althaus of Massachusetts observes this happening to someone else. I like the way he suggests, at the end, that it may take days before that silence heals over.
Homecoming
We drove through the gates
into a maze of little roads,
with speed bumps now,
that circled a pavilion,
field house, and ran past
the playing fields and wound
their way up to the cluster
of wood and stone buildings
of the school you went to once.
The green was returning to
the trees and lawn, the lake
was still half-lidded with ice
and blind in the middle.
There was nobody around
except a few cars in front
of the administration. It must
have been spring break.
We left without ever getting out
of the car. You were quiet
that night, the next day,
the way after heavy rain
that the earth cannot absorb,
the water lies in pools
in unexpected places for days
until it disappears.
Reprinted from "Ladder of Hours: Poems 1969-2005," Ausable Press, Keene, N.Y., 2005, by permission of the author. Copyright (c) 2005 by Keith Althaus. 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 12:17 PM
If You Had 20,000 Image Files...
One of my clients is interested in converting 20,000 or so images that are in perpetual use. They get published in very long-living documents that are under continuous review and get republished every few years on average. Currently, the documents are distributed in print and PDF only, so the client has been content to maintain the images as bitmaps--high-resolution TIFFs. This works fine for print, though it is cumbersome for ongoing review and changes, as most of the images are line art.
So now they are thinking about distributing the documents in other formats besides print and PDF. Candidate formats include HTML, various wireless formats, XML, and so on. This has led some of us to think about converting the line drawings images to SVG. But here is where I pause, despite my interest in SVG. SVG makes a lot of sense--it is standards-based, rich enough for their drawings, convertible to other necessary formats, and displayable directly on many devices. Still, I fret about the lack of overall adoption and momentum. These drawings will be used for years--decades in many cases. Does SVG have those kinds of legs?
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:49 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
More Progress on Digital Publishing Standards
I've discovered a blog, written by Bill McCoy, who is General Manager, ePublishing Business, at Adobe, and therefore keenly interested in the eBook business. He weighs in on some recent announcements from the IDPF.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:48 AM
June 15, 2006
Google Hacks Together a Shakespeare Site
The eWeek headline was actually Google Launches Shakespeare Site, but like so many of Google's efforts, this is thrown together. I had heard a presentation recently about the flaws in Google's scanning processes. It was done by Lofti Belkhir, whose company, Kirtas Technologies, has amazing book scanning equipment that Google does not use. (Watch the video here, if you have never seen this kind of technology at work. It is very cool.)
Belkhir showed some woefully bad examples of scanned pages at Google Books. I have written about this before, but Belkhir's arguments were really good and his examples were hilarious--especially the visible thumbs on scanned pages. So I decided to take a quick look at the Shakespeare titles in the Google site, and the work is very poor. See the following examples, found in only a few minutes of browsing:
-- Check out the smeared type at the bottom of this page, where the book was clearly not placed on the scanner properly.
-- Look at the faint type in several points on this page. You can find hundreds of pages like this, as they clearly have no method of ensuring consistent quality in the scanning. Note the smeared type at the bottom of this page as well.
-- In fact, just keep advancing through that book, and pretty much all the pages have the same problems.
-- Then you get about ten more pages into it and you have this page, which is much more grey than black and white, as if they made a one-time adjustment in the darkness setting and then went back to the setting where the type is barely legible in places.
-- Check out this page, also with the darkness setting set to high, where you can also see the outline of the text from the opposite side of the page.
-- Flip through Othello starting about here and notice the switch back and forth on brightness controls.
-- What is at the bottom of this page? Fingers?
-- I like this page. What kind of QA process allows that to slip through?
-- Look at the right-hand margin of this page, and, yes, I think that is a finger at the bottom.
-- Ouch. Keep browsing forward; it's bad.
Want a better collection of Shakespeare? Just go here. Or here. Or here. Or here. Or here.
Lots of people do far better work than Google at this kind of thing.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:50 PM | Comments (2)
Grandmother Speaks of the Old Country
Here is the latest installment in the American Life in Poetry series.
American Life in Poetry: Column 64
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
Storytelling binds the past and present together, and is as essential to community life as are food and shelter. Many of our poets are masters at reshaping family stories as poetry. Here Lola Haskins retells a haunting tale, cast in the voice of an elder. Like the best stories, there are no inessential details. Every word counts toward the effect.
Grandmother Speaks of the Old Country
That year there were many deaths in the village.
Germs flew like angels from one house to the next and every family gave up its own. Mothers died at their mending. Children fell at school.
Of three hundred twenty, there were eleven left.
Then, quietly, the sun set on a day when no one died. And the angels whispered among themselves.
And that evening, as he sat on the stone steps, your grandfather felt a small wind on his neck when all the trees were still. And he would tell us always, how he had felt that night, on the skin of his own neck, the angels, passing.
Reprinted from "Desire Lines: New and Selected Poems," BOA Editions, 2004, by permission of the author and the publisher. Copyright (c) 2004 by Lola Haskins. 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 11:15 AM
June 14, 2006
Donald Hall
Donald Hall has been named the next US Poet Laureate. I have enjoyed the current poet laureate, Ted Kooser, and his American Life in Poetry column, which I reprint here on the blog.
Donald Hall is a New England institution, as native to New Hampshire as granite even though he was born in Connecticut and went to Harvard. There are some good Hall resources on the Web here and here.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:02 PM
Behind the Scenes in the Blogosphere
Mark Logic CEO Dave Kellogg discusses a new study, Behind the Scenes in the Blogosphere. It offers "advice from established bloggers," and focuses on business blogs. I have only skimmed it, but it looks quite good. It's a pretty big PDF download (1.3MB). Hey, maybe they should blog about it!
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:36 PM
June 12, 2006
Correcting the Record about Microsoft
A List blogger Robert Scoble is leaving Microsoft for a podcasting startup, but wants to correct the record about some assumptions some people are making about what this means for Microsoft.
I have read Scoble for a few months, and maybe I missed his heyday, but I don't find him to be terribly interesting. This is in part, I think, because I don't land very hard on either side of the Microsoft wars--that is, I don't see them as the evil empire or as the greatest organization in the world. As an analyst, I see them as a dominant software company, but not dominant in the areas that I follow most closely--content management and publishing systems. As a small business person, I look at Microsoft the way I look at my accountant and lawyer--as things I have to spend money on. (And, yes, I know that I could go the open source route, but I just have never taken the time to do it--I am too busy doing client work.) I guess my only other opinion about Microsoft is that their products are less reliable than they should be, given the enormous resources of the company. For example, with two million beta users, Vista better work well, and so far it doesn't.
But back to Scoble. I wish him well in his new venture. He sounds excited about it. But I think his value as a blogger just declined precipitously, as he is no longer in the belly of the best.
UPDATE: Scoble was gracious enough to link to me.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:25 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Listen to Bruce
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:06 PM
June 9, 2006
'Viper' Bites at Last
Writing for eWeek, Lisa Vaas has an early look at IBM's Viper upgrade to DB2 and its "breakthrough XML handling."
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:56 PM
June 8, 2006
Keeping Ratings Trustworthy
Barry Graubart asks some good questions about the value of user ratings such as those at Amazon. His thoughts are similar to ones I offered at my NFAIS presentation last week, but he does a better job of explaining it than I did.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:53 PM
The Dancer
Here is the latest installment in the American Life in Poetry series.
American Life in Poetry: Column 63
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
Remember those Degas paintings of the ballet dancers? Here is a similar figure study, in muted color, but in this instance made of words, not pigment. As this poem by David Tucker closes, I can feel myself holding my breath as if to help the dancer hold her position.
The Dancer
Class is over, the teacher
and the pianist gone,
but one dancer
in a pale blue
leotard stays
to practice alone without music,
turning grand jetes
through the haze of late afternoon.
Her eyes are focused
on the balancing point
no one else sees
as she spins in this quiet
made of mirrors and light--
a blue rose on a nail--
then stops and lifts
her arms in an oval pause
and leans out
a little more, a little more,
there, in slow motion
upon the air.
Reprinted from the 2005 Bakeless Prize winner "Late for Work", by David Tucker, Houghton Mifflin, 2006, by permission of the author. "The Dancer" first appeared in "Visions International", No. 65, 2001. Copyright (c) 2001 by David Tucker. 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 3:01 PM
June 7, 2006
Publishing to iTunes
Via PaidContent.org, news of PDF Magazine Downloads in iTunes. I have been hearing rumblings about publishing books and magazines to iTunes and, by extension, iPods. Obviously the screen size is an issue right now, but perhaps this suggests some future directions for iPods and other, similar, devices.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:32 PM
Still crazy after all these years
Micah Dubinko looks in on a not-so-old Windows machine and does battle with Windows XP Service Pack 2. My favorite quote:
The uninstall program helpfully warns me that lots of programs, including “hearts” and “solitaire” toward the top of the list, might stop working, but I bravely press on.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:03 PM
The Gilbane Conference on Content Technologies for Government
Lisa Welcham has a podcast with Frank Gilbane and Tony Byrne, organizers of next week's Gilbane Conference on Content Technologies for Government.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:24 PM
Does Implementing a CMS Help Search Engine Optimization?
Randy Woods of Toronto-based non-linear creations emails with a very solid white paper about this question. I think a new CMS implementation, done well, naturally lends itself to search engine optimization strategies. The mere fact that you are templating the pages encourages you to normalize markup, and that alone can go a long way toward helping the search engines. The white paper has lots of good detail about markup, navigation, site structure, and other issues, and concludes with an interesting case study.
You can download the white paper here (simple registration required).
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:18 PM
Vote Early and Often
So out of the blue I get an email from Mike Hatcher, Cleveland Indians fan and soon-to-be newlywed. Mike writes, "My name is Mike Hatcher from Ohio. My fiancé and I are 1 of 3 finalists for the Cleveland Indians Dream Wedding at Jacobs Field. We have worked very hard to get to this point and now need your help with votes to make sure we win. Please visit the Cleveland Indians official website, then vote for Mike and Janet under fan forum in the wedding giveaway section."
I don't know Mike. I assume he got my name, and wrote to me, because I have written about Coco Crisp, formerly of the Indians and now of the Red Sox. So, good sport that I am, I watched the video, and Mike and Janet got my vote. It's very clever and very cute. Or, maybe I just have a thing for couples where the guy is a big lug and the woman is small.
Oh, and if you are really hooked, you can vote up to 25 times.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:07 PM
Theresa Regli joins CMS Watch
Theresa Regli is joining Tony Byrne at CMS Watch. This brings together two of the smartest--and most decent--people in the business. Congratulations to Theresa, and best of luck in her new role.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:05 PM
June 3, 2006
Coming Soon to a 737 Near You
As long as they do this instead of allowing people to yack on their cell phones, I will be happy.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:03 PM
Bindweed
Here is the latest installment in the American Life in Poetry series.
American Life in Poetry: Column 62
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
Gardeners who've fought Creeping Charlie and other unwanted plants may sympathize with James McKean from Iowa as he takes on Bindweed, a cousin to the two varieties of morning glory that appear in the poem. It's an endless struggle, and in the end, of course, the bindweed wins.
Bindweed
There is little I can do
besides stoop to pluck them
one by one from the ground,
their roots all weak links,
this hoard of Lazaruses popping up
at night, not the Heavenly Blue
so like silk handkerchiefs,
nor the Giant White so timid
in the face of the moon,
but poor relations who visit
then stay. They sleep in my garden.
Each morning I evict them.
Each night more arrive, their leaves
small, green shrouds,
reminding me the mother root
waits deep underground
and I dig but will never find her
and her children will inherit
all that I've cleared
when she holds me tighter
and tighter in her arms.
Reprinted from "Headlong," University of Utah Press, 1987, by permission of the author, and first published in "Poetry Northwest," Vol. 23, No. 3, 1982. Copyright (c) 1982 by James McKean, whose most recent book is "Home Stand," a memoir published in 2005 by Michigan State University 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 8:33 AM
June 2, 2006
User-Generated Content: Where Does it Fit?
I spoke at the NFAIS event today, and it seemed to go well. You can find the slides here.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:27 PM
June 1, 2006
Off to Philadelphia
I am taking the Acela to Philadelphia, but got to South Station (Boston) early to do a conference call from the Acela lounge here. I discovered two new things on my way here. My local MBTA station now has the Charlie Card fare system in place (seemingly months (longer?) since I bought my first one at the Airport Station here), and the Acela lounge now has free wireless. Nice!
Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:58 PM
