At a session at foo camp, I went through the tentative chapter outlines of the book I’m plotting. My aim was to ruthlessly use the attendees, getting them to tell me where I’m going wrong and what I should be writing about. And it worked: They poked at the ideas and pointed me in many helpful directions. Thanks, y’all!

And it just keeps going: I’ve been getting incredibly generous email with yet more information and ideas. For example, one came today from Angela Hey chockablock with examples. She writes about some initiatives that have struggled over how human-readable metadata should be. For example, meaningful codes for telephone equipment help field service people save time by avoiding lookups. (Apparently supermarkets have yet to learn this lesson, as we know from watching the register clerk flip through cards to find the code for asparagus.) On the other hand, she says it took the ANSI committee three years to come up with two letter codes for all 50 states — “Maine, Massachusetts, Mississipi, Minnesota and Michgan being the ones that took up most of the time.” Ah, the politics of initials!

I also learned from Angela that the phone companies worked out four-letter codes for each town for use on envelopes, but the Post Office surprisingly nixed it. I wonder if they were worried about the impersonalism of Old Kinderhook turning intoi OLKI or if having only four letters is like having four engines on a plane, quadrupling the risk of failure: “Mayday! Mayday! We’ve lost letter number four to an electrical disambiguation problem — We can’t tell if it’s an I or an L.”

Categories: misc dw