Blog de RoverDaddy

Incoherent ramblings interspersed with gratuitous commercialism. May occasionally descend into self-absorbed reflections or paternalistic lecturing. Use only as directed. If symptoms persist for more than ten days consult a physican.

Saturday, November 26, 2005

Petrificus Totalus

I just finished Half-Blood Prince. No, I'm not telling. I just hope J.K. is writing as fast as she can, because I need to know how this all ends.

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

We interrupt this blog...

What a surprise, I stopped blogging. Well, these past few weeks I have been feeling distinctly non-witty. I didn't even rush to announce the latest installment of Tiki Bar TV, which by the way is real hoot, if not quite in the same style as their previous efforts. Lala's opening dance is worth the price of admission all by itself.

I did manage to post one more design on my threadbare online store, but I've got several other ideas gathering dust. Work's been busy, and this week has brought a number of issues to sop up my spare time.

Well, in the middle of all that, I became motivated to chew up even more time by finally reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, just in time for the theatrical release of Goblet of Fire. This last development finally gave me something to write about. Back when the latest chapter in the Harry Potter saga was nearing release, the Big Deal was the revelation from J.K. Rowling that a major character would die in the book. Of course, nearly half the world population immediately began trying to penetrate the secret. Speculation ran rampant. Numerous theories were posted and reposted all over the Internet. Rowling's garbage man was forced to hire an armed escort.

Well, before I start reading the book, I want to make my own prediction (believe it or not I've managed to avoid the spoilers all this time). I think it has to be Dumbledore to die during Harry's sixth year at Hogwarts. So far, Rowling has done an excellent job at character development. For Harry to really become the hero of the series and come into his own as an adult, he has to stand on his own as well. Rowling has frequently employed different characters as a deus-ex-machina to save Harry from sure defeat, but Dumbledore is the granddaddy of them all. For Potter's ultimate victory over He Who Must Not Be Named to be the great conclusion to the series it should be, it has to be all Harry.

Now don't ask me whether Snape will prove to be good or evil in the end. I still haven't sussed that out at all.

Saturday, November 12, 2005

Lead feet and short memories

Wow, what a difference two months makes. While some pundits predicted the price of gasoline would hit $4 or $5 a gallon, before it ever fell to $2.50, some stations have dropped the price as low as $2.15 in my area. It's gotten so low I've had to pull some of the bumper stickers from my poorly stocked online store, since they just didn't make sense anymore.

I'm sure it's no coincidence that along with this drop in gas prices, I've noticed the driving habits of my fellow commuters start to trend back into Ludicrous Speed territory. The number of cars flying by at 80 mph, 85 mph or even higher has increased quite a bit in the past month. So has the number of impatient jerks who change lanes three times in a minute just to get around everyone else (which BTW is enough to get you pulled over in Massachusetts based on regulations put in place to fight road rage).

Also, due to the vagaries of the petroleum industry, the price of diesel has remained comparatively outrageous ($2.60 to $2.90 around here).

I'll play pundit myself, and predict that a year from now, if the price of gas remains below $2.50, we'll be talking about car makers saddled with enormous inventories of small, efficient cars that nobody wants.

Coming up next, the Hummer H-Zero(tm), twice as large as the original Hummer, because the H3 is for wusses.

Friday, November 11, 2005

Call to be De-wired

I heartily recommend the series of 'anti-technology' articles by Tony Long, being published on Wired News. So far there have been three installments: Dark Underbelly of Technology, You Know What? Just Shut Up and Eat, Sleep, Work, Consume, Die.

I don't go along with everything Tony says. After all, this is the Wired News copy editor who declared in 2000 that "e-mail" must be hyphenated (I notice they've dropped this convention since then), and in 2004 declared that "internet" no longer deserved a capital letter since it's just another medium like radio or television (then why is it still the internet: why don't we talk about things 'on internet' just as they are 'on television'?)

Tony's new series seeks to shine light on the ways technology affects our lives for the worse instead of for the better. Not exactly preaching to the choir on Wired News. In fact, the negative replies to his commentary range from the disagreeable to the histronic. Since I agree with most of what he's saying, I just have to wonder how much of the corporate kool-aid these people have been drinking. Some want to remind everyone that the world was much worse before technology came along (Well duh! Anyone who thinks they would be happier living 100 or 500 years ago is looking at the 'good old days' with rose-colored glasses). But the main point of this series is not that technology is T3H 3V1L, but that our society's fixations with productivity, consumerism, career, instant gratification etc. are.

Check it out, and make sure to read the feedback. It's worth it.

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Welcome to the machine

If you thought breeding humans to be biological power sources, as in The Matrix, was a ludicrious concept, well, you're right, it made no sense at all, even if it made for great drama.

However, imagine you have an idea for a new product or service, but for the business model to work, you need to process terabytes of data in some sophisticated manner that no computer algorithm can manage. For example, categorizing music files by genre, or determining whether a short story is a comedy or romance, or analyzing photos for content (say, does this picture show a teddy bear or Carrot Top?)

The old school way to solve this problem would be to scale back your business, or wait for computers to get faster, or hope that some genius at Carnegie Mellon comes up with the next breakthrough in AI. The Web 2.0 way is to get the Internet hordes to do the job for you.

Wikipedia, del.icio.us and technorati are all examples where 'the power of the computer internet' is really the people that contribute to it. These sites are incredibly useful, but they're too haphazard and democratic for a business to exploit as a computing machine. The community at large decides what is worth talking about and what is not.

The more direct approach is to pay people to process your data, as Amazon.com is doing now. I first learned about this development at Slashdot. Amazon's new beta project, dubbed Amazon's Mechanical Turk, is a system that offers micropayments (a few cents) to people willing to carry out simple tasks (simple for humans that is). It's named after an 18th century hoax, where a Hungarian named Wolfgang von Kempelen demonstrated a clockwork cabinet that could play chess. His 'invention' enraptured audiences across Europe, but the secret was a real live chess master hidden within the cabinet.

I let Amazon's system pick my brain for a short while last week. What I found fascinating is that most of the jobs (they call them HITs for Human Intelligence Tasks) were posted by Amazon to support their A9 mapping service. Amazon has dispatched vans throughout major U.S. cities, photographing everything in sight, correlating the photos with their location via GPS. To take the service to the next level, they want to correlate the photos to specific businesses along the route. That's where the Mechanical Turk comes in. A typical HIT presents the human (user isn't quite the correct term here) with four or five pictures taken in close proximity, and asks the human to identify which picture is, for example, best representative of the Starbuck's at that address.

Sounds like it could be fun and easy, but I quickly grew bored with the game. Many of the HITs ask you to identify a business that would have no visible street presence anyway, such as a consulting firm. The chances that you can successfully answer those are slim. Amazon will have to be lucky to pair the HIT with a person who already knows about that particular business and location.

The subtitle of Amazon's Mechanical Turk is Artificial artificial intelligence. Nice to know your place in the world.

Thursday, November 03, 2005

Theo-bromide

Well, the Red Sox have failed to lock up Theo Epstein and now he's flying away. There are all sorts of angles on this. The 'shoulda-coulda-woulda' angle. The 'what did we do wrong angle'. The 'who's to blame angle'. The 'how will life go on' angle. I'm sure Red Sox Nation will survive, and no, this is not the start of another curse. But let's take this story in another direction. All the background you need is in Bob Ryan's article in this morning's Boston Globe.

Here's my question. Why is it assumed that there must have been some way for management to keep Theo? Why is Bob looking for a deeper answer than 'he couldn't put his heart and soul into it' anymore?

We live in a such a consumer-driven culture that the value of a man is often measured by what he buys or what he earns. Our careers become our purpose. What about the person behind the career. Does he count? Yeah, in this particular case we're all captivated by Theo's incredible accomplishments for the Sox and the potential for more. But he doesn't owe us any more (not even an explanation).

Obviously there are as many answers to the work/life balance as there are people. Just yesterday I was involved in a discussion comparing people who make mega-bucks with the average Joe. What motivates someone making 25 or 50 million a year to keep on going, when us grunts would gladly take a 4 or 5 million dollar nest egg and never set foot in a job again? Certainly, different people have different motivations, and many would say I don't have that 5 million dollar nest egg exactly because I'm not the guy who would maintain a multi-million dollar career.

Maybe, just maybe, Theo is leaving for the simple reason that he doesn't want to do this anymore. I have no idea. What burns me is how quick we are to assume otherwise. What does it say about the rest of us that we can't fathom a person who places anything else above career or money? A celebrity leaves the limelight to take care of her kids. A CEO retires in his 50's to travel the world or take up painting. Why does this shock us?

Don't forget, Nobody lies on their deathbed wishing they spent more time at the office.

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

Peaceful coexistence.

I've been meaning to publish this bit of a 'disclaimer' for a while now. As I become more attached to my RoverDaddy moniker, I want to make sure nobody feels the need to lay claim to it. If you google 'RoverDaddy' today you get about 346 hits, nearly all of which do refer to me. Google also asks you if you meant 'Rover Daddy' (with the space).

It turns out there's one commercial item called 'Rover Daddy'. An office furniture company named Versteel makes a line of products called 'Rovers', and one of those is a 'Rover Daddy'.

Amazingly, that's just about the only collision I've found anywhere on the Internet. The only other case is a defunct eBay account named RoverDaddy which forced me to use a different name.

So for the record, RoverDaddy.com is not affiliated with Versteel, maker of the Rover Daddy. As far as I'm concerned Versteel makes excellent products, and I'd buy some if I had an office to outfit :) Meanwhile, I'm sticking to RoverDaddy in the 'smashed together' configuration.