My fear about the Semantic Web…

…is that it’s based on an engineer’s view of language.

There’s an article about the Semantic Web by D.C. Denison in today’s Boston Globe. Get it before it retreats behind the veil of pay-per-viewness.

Also, Scott Kirsner has a it-makes-total-sense column arguing for the creation of a federal CIO. And I say this not merely to curry favor with Scott before he hosts a Small Pieces interview at Wordsworth Books this Thursday at 7pm in Cambridge, MA.

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Stupidest Robot of the Year

Enfish, which makes a great search engine for your own email and desktop files, has a very responsive email support system. So, when I replied to one of their replies, I was aghast with delight to receive a bounce-back that began as follows:

Your reply did not process correctly. Please REPLY to this message and enter the text between the specified lines. Your message has been included below.

Let’s see. The robot knows what my message was. It knows which lines my message should have been entered between. But it needs a human to do the cutting and pasting for it.

This makes as much sense to me as the phone error message: “Your call could not be completed. You need to dial a 1 before the number.” If they know it needs the one, then put it in for me!

Jeez, do I have to do everything around here myself ?

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Grudge

A reflection prompted by AKMA’s forgiveness blogthread…

My father’s greatest fault was that he held grudges. He held them so long and so deep that he drove wedges in my family. For example, a year after my mother’s sister died of breast cancer at 36, her husband failed to use my father’s legal services to close on a new house. My father never spoke to him again. He would not go to my uncle’s house so that I hardly ever saw my cousins with whom I had spent every summer until then. He would not invite my uncle to my sister’s wedding. My father insisted throughout the slow process of dying of cancer that my uncle not be allowed at his funeral. It’d be funny if it weren’t so destructive.

In my father’s case, this was part of his binary emotional nature. He either loved you or couldn’t talk about you without putting “goddamn” in front of your name. And the door between the two was one way: You could fall from favor but never regain it. As a result, his life had a pattern of always decreasing his circle of friends. It was just a matter of time.

Whatever the cause, if you want to see the social importance of forgiveness, just live with its opposite for a while. I was always on my father’s good side — which meant, by the way, that he forgave me an awful lot because I wasn’t very nice to him — but seeing the irrational bitterness of which he was capable made the love he offered seem just as little deserved and not a little dangerous.

Request for Book:

There’s no logical reason why holding grudges needs to go with this type of bifurcation, although the two are certainly complementary. But I just don’t know if there are grudge holders who are able to maintain a more shaded range of relationships. Also, a psychologist once told me that the trait sometimes skips generations. If someone can point me to an article or a book, I’d be interested. If there aren’t any, then please write one. Call it “Grudge: How the Inability to Forgive Makes You Miserable and Tears Apart the People Around You.” It’s a million dollar idea.

By the way, don’t miss the Head Lemur’s interview of AKMA.

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Hear Me, See Me…

Wordsworth Books, famously in Harvard Square, is hosting an event for Small Pieces on this Thursday, June 13, I think at 7pm. The debonair Scott Kirsner, columnist for The Boston Globe and contributing editor to Wired and FastCompany, will be interviewing me. Afterwards, portions of my roasted flesh will be donated to a local kitchen serving the homeless.

The Internet radio show, Inventing the Future, has posted an hour interview with me from a few weeks ago. The hosts, Janice Maffei and Joanne Spigner, were great. (Hey, it’s over. I don’t have to be nice to them any more, so I must mean it.) BTW, for the first few minutes, I’m real hard to hear. But the technical quality picks up after that. I do remain, however, the longest-winded guest in radio history.

(You will need the RealAudio player. Beware of its spyware/adware.)

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MiscLinks

J. Thomas Vincent blogged a conference on the intersection of digits and entertainment the other day. It’s an excellent report of what sounds like a useful conference. You’ll actually hear people give a more reasonable defense of the Hollings Bill than I’m willing to listen to.

Jeneane‘s husband is blogging from Hong Kong where he’s spending a few months with his band. Diary, letter home, article? I dunno. It’s a blog!

Glenn Fleishman was one of the semi-frozen bloggers on the Geek Cruise into the Cold and Dark. He writes about it — and includes photos — here. (Doc was also along for the blog, amusing as always.)

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Kids version of Small Pieces – It’s an outrage!

Lockergnome — Chris Pirillo‘s daily newsletter of tips, downloads and chitchat — is now offering exclusive access to the PDF of the kids version of Small Pieces as a premium if you download one of the “Gnometomes” of tips for $5. 50 tips for $5 is a good deal. It’s a business model that I hope works.

Meanwhile, Chris has already heard from a reader who is outraged. Outraged! He has correctly surmised that I removed the PDF from www.SmallPieces.com so that Lockergnome would have exclusive access to it. (The HTML and Word versions are still there.) How dare I remove public access to something so that it is now only available as part of a commercial package (if you want to call $5 for 50 tips a “commercial package”)! How tawdry! How, well, commercial!

Damn straight, asshole. You know what else? You could have read my entire book online as I wrote it, but the day that the publisher said it was done, I shut down access to all but the first two chapters. So, pardon me while I move your email into my ToughShit folder.

In less hostile news, I heard yesterday that there will be a Korean edition of Small Pieces. Break out the kim chee!

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Lust for Gadgets

I just got a Pockey 10G external hard drive and I find my geek gland is engorged. It’s a little thinner, longer and lighter than a deck of cards (the Pockey, not my gland, children) , plugs into a USB port, and is letting me free up 10G of space on my laptop. In fact, it is now the main repository of my vast MP3 collection. (I have over 7 gigs of the classical repertoire recreated in dog yips.)

On the minus side, the data transfer is noticeably slow, although it plays back MP3s without a hitch. On the plus side, it’s powered through the USB connection and thus I don’t have to stack another piece of furniture in order to make room for one more transformer plug.

It cost $80 through ReturnBuy, which I found via eBay.

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Homeland Security Page Sucks

I hadn’t been back to the home page of The Office of
Homeland Security since I went to get a copy of
the color-coded alert system to make fun of it. But I had
breakfast yesterday with David
Stephenson, a consultant to companies and
the government on how to use the Internet to change
their ways of doing business. He’s been thinking
about what Might Be when it comes to using the Net
to help protect our country from terrorist attacks.
David reminded me of just how bad the Homeland’s
home page is.

Have I mentioned that it sucks? And in this case,
sucking isn’t a laughing matter.

The basic problem with the page is that it’s
primarily intended as PR for the grand job the
administration is doing. There’s the endless photo
montage of Bush signing legislation and Ridge
looking tough but slightly bewildered at press
conferences. There’s the “Homeland Security Timeline” that lists
speeches and budget increases but somehow misses the
anthrax-based evacuation of the Senate and doesn’t
list a single one of the alerts Ridge’s office has
issued.

Most clearly featured are the press releases:
“Tom Ridge Speaks to the Associated Press Annual
Luncheon,” “Remarks by Homeland Security Director
Tom Ridge to the Electronics Industries Alliance.”
The impression this leaves: the greatest weapon in
the anti-terrorism arsenal is the rubber chicken.

In one of his speeches, Ridge says, “We’re going
to knock down the information ‘stovepipes’
throughout government and turn them into pipelines.”
Excellent and important. So where are those
pipelines on the Homeland home page? Where’s even a
link to the FBI page? How about a link to something
– anything! – that isn’t just more PR about what a
swell job Bush and Ridge are doing?

In that same speech, Ridge says:

The American people must become
active partners in their own protection. More than
30,000 have already signed up for the President’s
new Citizen Corps program. They’ll contribute to
homeland security at the grassroots, neighborhood
level. I urge all Americans to serve.

And how might we serve? Where’s the link to the
Citizen Corps? Where’s a place where we can leave a
tip, get educated about what “be on alert” means and
what “suspicious behavior” is, or ask a simple
question? (I’m too civic minded to make fun of
Ridge’s suggestion that attending a PTA meeting
constitutes an anti-terrorist action.)

In fact, the URL is within the whitehouse.gov
domain, sitting there along with the pages for White
House tours, the first lady, and the “Kids Only”
page – all listed as buttons above the Homeland
Security title, just one click away. Swell.

When a government engages in PR, it’s called
propaganda. And in this case it’s not only disgraceful, it’s dangerous. What a missed opportunity. For shame.

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The Painter of Howls

Frank Paynter has interviewed Denise Howell of the Bag and Baggage blog. “Interview” isn’t the right word, though. More like, um, a one-act play presented as an e-epistolary interchange with the public looking over its shoulder. It’s got anecdotes, banter, theories, jokes, links, poems, photos, a top ten list and therapy. Also homeless people who smell like Dungeness crab.

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Someone else likes Small Pieces

Daniela Elza of the Living Code blog has written a long, thoughtful review of my book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined. Thank you, Daniela.

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