Relevant History

Interesting day

This morning, I was at Castilleja, listening to a symposium on power. It was a pretty good time, and a pretty high-powered crowd. Unlike the Tom Friedman talk, this one was for alumni, so the current students were next door in the chapel, listening to the proceedings on closed-circuit TV (like a pay-per-view sports event).

L to R: Laura Tyson, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Pamela Matson, Jimmy Wales, Marissa Meyer, Kavita Ramdas, John Doerr. Not shown: Mark Hurd and Condoleezza Rice. Via flickr

In the afternoon, I watched my daughter play baseball. She got a couple base hits, and did a pretty good job as catcher.

Then we all went to Maker Faire.

via flickr

Tomorrow is the Peninsula Spring Fair. I'm going to miss part of it, as I'm going back to Maker Faire, but I should be able to get there in time to take some pictures.

[To the tune of U2, "Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own," from the album "How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb".]

Technorati Tags: Little League, Maker Faire, Palo Alto, Peninsula School

Workplace this morning

On NPR

Cyrus Farivar quotes me at the end of his latest NPR Morning Edition piece, "High-Tech Pen Makes Note-Taking Easier."

In my sound bite, I reveal that I like paper because it's harder for me to break paper than the screen on my Nokia N95.

I played the piece for my kids this morning before I took them to school. At the end of it, my son came up to me and said, "You know, Dad, you really do drop your stuff a lot." Gee, thanks kid.

[To the tune of Handsome Boy Modeling School, "The Projects (PJays)," from the album "So...How's Your Girl?".]

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, media

Bird nest on a bike pump

One of the stranger things around the house these days.

The greatest achievement of my life

I now have a score of 2075 in Nintendo Wii tennis. My kids can spend the rest of their life in therapy, I can go broke, I can crash the car into a bus full of nuns and orphans-- none of that matters now.

via flickr

At this stage, it's not enough to beat the machine; you have to win decisively in order to even maintain your score. Which is kind of a pain, but if keeps you interested. A trophy would be nice, too. Even a virtual one.

[To the tune of Lee Ritenour, "Ipanema Sol," from the album "Rio".]

Technorati Tags: games, sports, Wii

Getting ready to grill

At my in-laws this afternoon. The BBQ season is officially starting!

Lady Blue

This evening, while browsing the iTunes store, I rediscovered a song I once loved and probably haven't heard in about 30 years: Leon Russell's "Lady Blue."

There are some songs from that period that I've pretty much had access to constantly, either because they've never gone out of circulation or fashion (you can always find Elton John, the Beatles, Doobie Brothers, Yes, Billy Joel, and David Bowie), or because for some strange reason I always managed to have their albums (Sea Level's "Cats on the Coast" isn't exactly a household name, nor is the 3-disc ELP live album, but I don't think I've ever been without either of them since I was 13). But the long tail of my musical adolescence, the songs that I never owned and which didn't become fixtures on the radio, eventually disappeared.

Forgetting these songs is tough because the most powerful memories of my childhood aren't of places or people: they're of music. I can only vaguely recall  several of the houses (or apartments or trailers) I lived in, and only a few more of the people I went to school with. But I can vividly recall a lot of the music from my adolescent years, and I find that I listen to those songs with the same intensity that I did when I was a kid. So rediscovering a song that I haven't heard is like getting back a little bit of memory.

For me, that's been the brilliant thing about iTunes: the catalog and pricing scheme (and the search functionality) have let me reconnect with a lot of those songs, in a way that would have been otherwise inconceivable.

And Leon Russell's work in the 1970s was pretty amazing, by the way.

[To the tune of Leon Russell, "Lady Blue," from the album "Will o' the Wisp".]

Technorati Tags: itunes, memory, music

Wondermark cartoon

My mail at work is usually pretty dull-- people tend to e-mail me the really cool stuff.

But today was an exception: there was a very nicely-wrapped copy of my all-time favorite Wondermark cartoon, autographed by David Malki.

Late Christmas present? An attempt by the author to get me to stop stalking? Who knows!

But now I've got to find a frame.

And thank you, somebody!

Update: Thanks, Jason!

[To the tune of Al Stewart, "Year Of The Cat," from the album "The Best Of Al Stewart".]

Technorati Tags: humor, wondermark

Social software and nostalgia

Guardian commentator John Harris draws an interesting line from the Led Zeppelin reunion and Police tour, to Hollywood's love of remakes, to social networking software: what connects them, he argues, is "an almost neurotic retrospection" that seems to define this decade.

Across the globe, 18 million people subscribe to Friends Reunited, keen to rekindle playground bonds that are usually best forgotten, and one of the appeals of more cutting-edge social networking to anyone over 20 is much the same.

A case might be made for all this future denial being an inevitable response to our horizons being cast in terms of post-9/11 dread and ecological apocalypse - but past generations had the threat of the cold war going nuclear to deal with, and they managed to keep moving ahead. More relevant, perhaps, is the reinvention of what age entails, and the power wielded by people who affect to stay young by endlessly reviving their past....

[F]xating on the past is an in-built aspect of the human condition, but limited technology used to keep it in check. We had space and productive capacity only for so much stuff: a hidden hand cleared the cultural world of outdated clutter. And now? Bandwidth and memory grow exponentially, TV channels extend into the distance, and providing the means by which the classes of 77, 87 and 97 can get back in touch is a cinch. The same technology that we once thought would propel us into a fast-changing future stokes nostalgic appetites and condemns us to a present so laden with repetition that it's beginning to feed back on itself.

Essentially, the drama that Ellen Ullman described several years ago about the differences between computer and human memory is playing out on a grander, more social and public, scale.

[To the tune of Todd Rundgren, "Dust In The Wind," from the album "Something/Anything? (Disc 2)".]

Technorati Tags: memory, history, social software

I would have so won this

Proving that half of my brain is also filled with game memories.

"Tron Contest Framed," from the fantastic Retro Arcade set on Flickr.

Tags: arcade, videogames, tron