Bridging Two Cultures I have written about being a bridge between the ink and byte world of publication. I may write something about the digital divide that exists between communities. I walked into a book store in the Juarez International airport in Mexico City, where I usually look for children's books. Then my eye crosses the great books writtern by the great writers of Mexico. How damn lucky I was to be able to take courses on cultture, history, architecture at UNAM while as a seminarian in Colpilco Bajo. Having professors who loved thier area of expertise help me make a paradigm shift on my attitude toward the culture of Mexico. I was always told to respect my culture, but I had no solid basis on the "why?" I have to say my literature course by a young professor was the most energizing literature course I have ever taken. We went author by author of the "good to great" Mexican writers. He knew the literature works like a biblical theologian knows the Bible. When he read passages of a selected story, he When I look back, I have to say that living Mexico City was one best times of my life.
2:17:25 PM  #  comment []

Three reasons Google Web Services are great (if you don't get this now, you will...):

1) I have a ton storage space (even on my shitty laptop -- also known as MSLT).  I want to get data I think is important down to my desktop (it's a trivial storage issue).  I also have tons of excess horsepower.  Most of my apps chew up less than 5% of my processor's power.  I want this expensive processor to do something or its not worth upgrading (hello Intel!!).  Getting data on a regular basis from Google and other sources uses these resources.  It also, most importantly, allows me to manipulate it locally, using powerful desktop tools.

2) Microsoft, BEA, and IBM (except for Sam Ruby and his work on Axis for Apache) aren't needed to make this happen.  Without the big cos at the center of things, this paradigm scales and takes off.

3) I want to be able to publish the data I get (to my Intranet or the Web).  Radio does that for me.  I can leverage a desktop app that allows me to add annotations to the data I collect.  Imagine this applied to everything that changes often: sales data, inventory data, financial data (both corporate and from someplace like Yahoo finance), and systems data.  I would now have the ability to see the data (in real-time -- hello Vinod!), manipulate it using whatever business process I import as a tool (Radio tools are both easy to build and install -- just drop the tool in a folder), and publish the result. Nice. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
5:26:47 AM  #  comment []