With some trepidation, I’ve posted “Now Go To Damn Sleep,” doggerel for the worn-out parent. Here’s the beginning:

My angels, now, it’s to your room
To dip into sleep’s stream
And let your parents’ life resume.
Fast forward to your dream.
What’s that you say, my angels dear?
The day has not run out?
Tonight you just must-see ER?
And then the title bout?
Oh my dears, my little mites,
Walt Disney’s themed your beds.
And if you’re good and very quiet
I’ll tell my day instead.
Oh, Mikey, Sal and Ted please hear
The story I have to tell
I love each one of you so dear
But you’ve made my life a … well ….

After all, what could be better for the holidays than a little anti-child hostility?

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Doc said that, and he’s right.

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TrackCap.com trackpoint.com sells nothing but the nibs, nubbins, caps or whatever you call them for the IBM ThinkPad Trackpoint – you know, the little sticky-uppy thing between the G and H on Thinkpads. $10 for 2, so maybe they’re doing ok, especially since you can get 6 for $10 from IBM. (Shipping is free at both places.)

Trackpoint.com also sell screws for the IBM Ultrabay at a buck each, so apparently they’re branching out. Radical.

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This makes my head hurt – indirection makes me sweat – but I think that Michael Lenczner is proposing a way to use del.icio.us not only to track the comments we leave on people’s blogs, but to bundle together different people’s comments into one RSS feed so that you can see, for example, where all of the contributors to Many2Many are commenting.

But, I got this wrong in several rounds of correspondence, so I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten it wrong again; I am user but not a power user of del.icio.us. Read Michael’s blog entry to get the straight scoop (and to get the scoop straight).

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Copyscape finds pages that repeat phrases you used on your page. It bills itself first as a way of tracking down the nogoodniks who are plagiarising your valuable content, but the page also mentions its non-violent egosurfing capabilities. [Thanks to Dave Rogers for pointing this out. He found it in Ian Poynter’s newsletter.]

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Interesting article by Di Luo in Computer Gaming world about the government using games not to recruit and train for war (e.g., America’s Army) but to teach more peaceful tactics. Tactical Language Learning System and Virtual Environment Cultural Training for Operational Readiness teach cultural sensitivity. The former is built on the Unreal engine and the latter uses the LithTech engine that brought us so much gamey fun in No One Lives Forever and Tron. For example, VECTOR players learn to understand other cultures’ body language, and also get extra points for head shots.

The article also reports that the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict has created A Force More Powerful that’s designed “to train activists in the planning and tactics needed to bring about political change.” There’s some great stuff on the ICNC page reminding us how successful organized non-violence has been. It makes you wonder what we could have done in Iraq if we had been more imaginative.

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The international version of OhMyNews has a terrific interview with Dan Gillmor about his plans and the future of news. (Thanks to Joi for the link.)

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When I was a boy, during the summers in Great Barrington, Mass., my mother used to take us to the Green Spot bottling plant in town where Maybe 40 years ago, they shut down the plant and that was the end of Green Spot for us.

This afternoon in Singapore, at a food stall in Little India, I drank a can of Green Spot. It’s the same oddly-named, non-carbonated orange drink. The can says it was made in Thailand under the authority of Green Spot International. It seems that, somehow, Green Spot left Great Barrington and landed in Asia.

Ealy globalization? A soft drink whose boot heels went a-wanderin’? Or a Twilight Zone episode in which objects from my childhood reappear in Singapore like the pilots returned by the aliens at the end of Close Encounters?

(A little more info about Green Spot. Another Green Spot reminiscence.)

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Ah, sleep! Amazing what a full night of it can do. For example, it turned my exhaustion into sleepiness.

I work up early and re-wrote my presentation, as I inevitably do before a speech. I’m at the first International Conference on Knowledge Management, a truly international gathering of practitioners and academics. I, of course, am neither, so of course they had me keynote it. Nevertheless, it seemed to go well.

I bugged out at 11 to see if I could see just a little more of the city. After a quick cab ride, I was in Little India, the streets and alleys of which are lined with shops. Compared with Chinatown (look, I’m awkward too about these appellations, but that’s what these sections are called), more of the stores in Little India seemed aimed at residents. I’m a sucker for Indian colors and the smells; I’d love to go back to India someday.

I stopped for lunch at a shiny Indian vegetarian restaurant and had a curry marsala dosa — a big, light ‘n’ crispy crepe filled with delicious spicy meat substitute. If you find yourself in Little India, give it a try: Ananda Bhavan is the restaurant’s name. And tell ’em I sent you! Of course, they won’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.

I came back to the conference just as it was beginning its afternoon session, an “open space” exercise in which people sign up for topics and others cluster around them. It worked out very well. In the sessions and in the hallways I had a bunch of interesting conversations with people from all over about the limits and virtues of KM. Given that the phrase was “KM” was created ten years ago with a daring amount of vacuousness, it’s filled itself in quite nicely.

When it was over, I asked the concierge for a vegetarian restaurant. He told me to walk down Orchard Street until I came to the Orchard Mall and then go upstairs where there was a Chinese veggie restaurant. Unfortunately, Orchard Street is lined with malls, and I never found the restaurant. But I was glad to be out on the street at 8pm. It seemed like the entire population of Singapore had decided to take a stroll. I wandered in an out of malls until I stumbled upon a veggie stall in a food court where I had a dreadful “half chicken” with cold baked beans and a few fries. To tell you the truth, my stomach isn’t feeling so good at the moment. It’ll pass. Of course, I’m not exactly which orifice it’s going to pass through, but my guess is that you’d rather not know.

Tomorrow I lead a full day workshop on “conversational marketing.” I have 165 slides to go through. Pity us all.

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There are something like 15,000 murders every year in the United States. Why is this the one that is headline news for months? I just don’t understand it.

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