Archive | May, 2003

Steve and I saw the 1 PM show of XMen 2 – great fun! Lots of good special effects, stuff blowing up, nasty Wolverine fight scenes, awesome ending. Just like the comic books. Would have liked a little more depth into the characters, a little more acting, but how to fit everything into a movie? It’s tough.

Laura and I watched “Fosse” last night. Whew! Great, great, great dancing! It was really interesting to see Fosse pieces from the 50s against dances from the 70s and 90s. What an evolution. The cast was marvelous. Mini-interviews between acts brought even more depth to the performance. A great evening, a great day. This is what weekends were meant to be!

Sometime over the past few days – the summit had been cloaked in clouds – the Old Man of the Mountain, truly a natural wonder, slid down the side of the mountain, despite years of attempts to stabilize the feature. Heavy rains are blamed, no foul play has been suggested.

Glad I got to see it before it was gone. Sorry my grandchildren won’t get to, though.

Jonathon on social software. “Jonathan puts well why social software is becoming important. I liked what Phil Windley had to say also. (I wrote about this topic here. Dave Winer wrote here about why he thinks it’s over-hyped.)…” from Joho the Blog.

I think Dave Winer is right in pointing out that there’s nothing new here, but what I suspect he might be missing, too close to see, is that there is something new in the attention being given it, in the way it is being used, and in the integration of blogs and forums and wikis into a more cohesive networked whole. Just as design patterns (Gamma, Helm, et al) didn’t change object-oriented programming as much as classify it and provide a new vocabulary for OOP programmers to be able to communicate rich concepts with simpler phrases. Social Software may provide us with new taxonomies and phrases to talk about interrelationships between different posting idioms.

OpenOffice.org: One year, 10 million hits Ten million hits isn’t ten million sales, but 95,000 users have registered. It’s an up-and-coming thing. We installed OO.o on the network admin’s machine when we realized we didn’t have a license of Office for the box, and he worked with it just fine. Posted from CNET News.com

Bruce Bullough was the engineer on the USS Daniel Webster Blue crew, and I served on six patrols with him, including the one where they plucked me off the sail of the ship by helicopter to fly home to see my ailing son. He was a good man, and it’s sad to see his passing at the early age of 54.

Story in The Day and another obituary here. Rest in Peace, Bruce.