Year: 2002

Categories
Travel

May I see your driver’s license?

“May I see your driver’s license and registration, please.”

I comply.

“Ma’am, are you aware of the speed limit here on the reservation?”

Three days and close to 1800 miles later, I’m in St. Louis — after an 18 hour drive from an hour west of Albuquerque. I spent the first two days wondering Arizona back roads and the Navajo Nation. Good things and bad. And definitely lessons filed under “I’ll never do that again.”

I don’t think a vacation is truly complete if you don’t have at least one incidence of “I’ll never do that again”, do you?

Full trip report — with photos — later. Too big for a posting. Hint: Think Cathedral Rocks, add in getting lost in the desert, mix with seeing who has bigger balls –me or the truckers (figuratively speaking) — and top it off with the Blue Angels.

Categories
Technology

Emerging Technologies Conf

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Dave mentioned today that he’ll be giving a presentation at the Emerging Technologies Conference.

My conference proposal was rejected, which was disappointing — particularly since the session I gave at the first P2P conference was successful. Such is life.

So if you’re going to the conference you can see Dave, but you’ll miss the following session:

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Proposal Information

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Title: Smart Web Services

Conference: O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2002

Type: Paper

Duration: 45m

Audience Level: Experienced

Audience Type: Session is geared towards developers, technology architects, and other technology practioners.

Preferred Date: All

Description:

How’s this for a product: you put it out on the street, and it goes out and finds the customer rather than waiting for the customer to find it.

Web services are handy, but they’re passive and not all that smart. What’s missing in their basic implementation is other functionality such as web service events, transaction management, security, service discovery, verification, as well as service identification.

In particular, web services sit passively waiting for a client to discover them, through UDDI or other publication processes.

This session takes a look at one aspect of smarter web services — service discovery and identification. In particular it looks at the use of Resource Description Framework (RDF) in addition to other technologies to create services that that can actively market themselves. Borrowing from the efforts associated with the semantic web and intelligent agents, in addition to the decentralization research of P2P, these services can then seek out the client, rather than waiting for the client to seek them.

Actual demonstrations of both technology and concepts will be provided in the session.

Categories
Critters Photography

San Diego zoo

Hi! This is your favorite professional writer who hacks a weblog even though we’re not supposed to. I’m bringing you today’s copy of “Where the Blog Turns”.

When last seen our intrepid weblogger was braving the wilds of San Diego zoo. We’ll go live to Burningbird, at the zoo:

Hello? Hello, can you hear me?

The San Diego zoo is everything I’ve ever heard. Wonderful fun. And San Diego is a beautiful city, and the people are very nice. But who designed the freeway system here? Alfred E. Neuman on drugs?

Today’s funniest moment — guy walking around in a plain white t-shirt with masking tape across the back and “Ralph Lauren” printed on the tape.

Second funniest moment — trying to explain to the two older women that, no, there was only one hippo in the water and that the nose above water belonged to the same hippo that’s underwater seemingly right next to the glass.

“Yes, I know that this hippo looks close to the glass and the nose looks further away, but water can bend light and further away objects can appear close.”

“No ma’am, there really is only one hippo in the water.”

“Yes, it is neat how the zoo was able to accomplish this.”

Also, I brought you all a souvenir! A photo of flamingos. What else would someone like me bring back?

And a panda!

Warning: Cat Photo Ahead Three younger tigers were having a great time with a semi-deflated basketball. On in particular was having the best of time with his toy. Big or small, exotic or domestic — cats is cats is cats is cats.

My favorite of all the zoo animals was the Buharan Red Deer, also known as the Bactrian Wapitir. These deer were originally located in Afghanistan and surrounding area, but were hunted to extinction in the former Soviet countries at the end of communist rule. With the religious civil war in Afghanistan every last known member of this species in the wild was killed. Aside from the approximately 100 deer in captivity, this species is extinct.

I was the only person looking at the deer while everyone else was off with the tigers and the gorillas and the pandas. This quiet herd watched me as I watched them. Not sure why, but I started talking to one of the females near the fence. Instead of ignoring me or shying away, she came down to the fence and stuck her nose through it near to where I was standing. Not sure if I sounded like her normal zoo keeper or if she’s just naturally curious. Beautiful, gentle creatures.

I’ve long had a theory that we’ve been visited by members of advanced species from other planets. However, when they get here and see how easily we exterminate species and each other because of such trivial things as political or religious differences, they fly away again, in a state of total disgust.

Anyway, I liked the deer. I hope her species makes it. With that small a gene pool though, chances aren’t good.

Categories
Weblogging

Jonathon Delacour web design

Jonathon is still into CSS land, and Chris has tired of orange. Blue looks pretty good.

Foxy Gary seems busy — a new blogicon item, JOHO, and now he wants to re-design his site. Sigh. Is everyone looking to re-design their sites? Am I the lone bastion of tasteless weblogging design?

The Mighty Geek beat me out for Color Scheme Most LIkely to cause Epileptic Seizures in the anti-bloggie awards. Well, the site does have orange in it.

I like Rogi’s new Radio weblog. However, Rogi, the crowd is out to get anyone doing white on black. Your days are numbered, man.

Sharon got a new car. I understand her excitement. Cool. You’ll have to teach more 3rd graders now, Shar.

From the Treetop has a nice essay on spam. I find that she has this great common sense outlook to life that’s rather refreshing. Problems with spam? Just delete it. End of story.

Allan Moult is talking about trekking through the Northern Territory by camel. Now that is an adventure. This follows on his tale of Dizzy that promises to be a very good story, and which I hope Allan continues, soon.

I’d cover other favorites, but I can’t stand this modem any longer!

G’Nite.

-earlier-

“It’s the words. They’re all that matters”

Jonathon struggled with a new weblog design because folks were having trouble reading his content. That was a cool thing — being more concerned that people were having problems and wanting to resolve said problems than worrying about abandoning his earlier carefully crafted design.

Take a moment, stop by, and tell him you appreciate his effort — or the Orange Worman will get pissed. Very pissed. And you don’t want this because Orange is spreading over the land — damn, even the sky was orange yesterday!

I’m like a plague.

BTW, I also wanted to congratulate Karl on some very tough conversion work lately. Trying to pull sanity out of an insane mess is not easy or trivial. There’s been grumblings about the effort, but any major effort will have ups and downs. Whether it’s the re-organization of a major set of web sites, or the release of a new product such as Radio 8.0, regardless of what you do and the best intentions — someone somewhere won’t like it, and shit happens.

Was that crude? I think that was crude. I’m feeling much better today.

My connectivity sucks, to put it delicately. I’ll post when I can. Today, I’m going to go play at the San Diego zoo. I’ve never been there, and have always wanted to go. If I have time, I’ll hit Seaworld, too

JOHO will be blogless for a day or two, and I can understand where he’s coming from. When you’re used to weblogging, not blogging is the same as leaving the room at a party — you know you’re missing the interesting parts every time you go pee.

Oh that was crude, too. I’m feeling MUCH much better. Time to go feed the fishies.

Categories
Technology

P2P for Radio

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

When I return from vacation land, I’m going to build a true P2P cloud for Radio. I’ve been wanting to test some functionality and needed a good user-interface vehicle. Looks like Radio is a good fit.

I need a golden gateway, but I imagine Userland would provide the server space for that.

One nice thing about long drives, you have a lot of time to think of new and interesting things. Unfortunately, this can lead to driving frantically across 6 lanes of fast and crowded California freeway because the I5 split was to the left, not the right. California drivers are very cool, and made space for my mad manuever.

Or was it just being smart?