Good heavens, "work for hire"...Just saw that somewhere, perhaps on Instructional Technology. I remember the Intellectual Property contracts I disagreed with and edited the bejabbers out of, that claimed that anything I thought of while employed at X belonged to X, even if I developed the idea years later. (X was everything from Harvard Medical School to Digital Equipment Corporation and its clients.) I tried to leave most of those agreements in shreds, looking like those "declassified" government documents in which everything of interest between "Dear Sir" and "Respectfully Yours" was blacked out.
2:14:20 PM    

Stakeholder interviews. I'm back working with the Area Health Service tomorrow. The next three days will consist entirely of stakeholder interviews, finished [Column Two]

1:06:00 PM    

For example, what if a police department needs to build a database of sexual-assault victims that lets them identify trends but hides personal information? You could use a translucent database where the first column is the hash of the victim's name, and the second column is a hash of their full address, and the third column is a hash of their block and street. You can now group incidents together by grouping entries with identical block hashes; you can see if the incidents refer to the same person by checking to see if those hashes are different.

More on translucent databases. A few weeks back I mentioned Peter Wayner's new book on Translucent Databases. Simson Garfinkel writes about it at more length in this oreillynet.com article: ... [Jon's Radio]

12:57:14 PM    

I've had a couple of comments about my use of the Break Reminder software I mentioned in an earlier posting.  These are to the effect that people think it would be quite disruptive to be interrupted so much, the you lose your flow, and that you are "on break" too much of the time to get anything useful done.  These are all valid concerns.

However for me, priority 1 is not to lose the use of my hands and that means managing my pain levels carefully.  On bad days I use the settings that I indicated, on better days -- like today -- I step down a notch (4 minutes work time, 20 second micropauses, 12 micropauses to a rest break, 10 minute rest break).

Even so it's not as bad as you might think.  A micropause is not a telephone call, it does not involve a "thought interrupt."  I can keep my flow and continue to think about what I am doing.  For example I used a micropause a second ago to form this the though I have just written.  Of course it's not the same as just typing away, but I can't do that or my pain levels get too high.

Rest breaks are more likely to interrupt your flow, but on the lower setting I only get about one of those an hour.  That's probably as long as I could flow usefully without a break anyway.

In summary, yes adding these kind of breaks does impact on the amount of work you can do, yes it interrupts you to some degree but it it also keeps me working without excessive pain.  And that's what it's all about!

12:56:19 PM    

Blogging and Nineteenth Century Pamphlets

Doc Searls points to this journalistic gem from Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times. You need to register to experience the full joy of Rutten's "To Err Is Human, but to Think Out Loud," but the meat of his assertion is this bit:

bloggers are basically a narcissistic throwback to an easily recognizable American type, the 19th century cranks who turned out mountains of self-published pamphlets.
The cranks had all sorts of idiosyncratic preoccupations—single tax schemes, silver-backed currency, vegetarianism and the metaphysical benefits of healthy bowels, for example.

I pontificated earlier about journalists not knowing their own history. Clearly, some of them don't really know nineteenth century literature either. Let's take a closer look at those nineteenth century pamphleteers, shall we?

There's that crank Thoreau, with his nutty pamphlet "On Civil Disobedience," or that goofy Twain guy writing about the abuses of King Leopold in the Congo (1905 is twentieth century, technically, but still . . .), or that goofy Victorian Thomas Carlyle. Aside from scholarly obsessions with nineteenth century pamphlets as primary source documents about the lives and thoughts of everyday cranks as well as the hundreds of household names who were engineers, theologians, artists, poets, essayists, abolitionists and feminists, it's important to realize that pamphlets were published because they were popular. People, all kinds of people, read and wrote them. Sure, there were "cranks," but the vast majority of authors were quite serious, and were perceived that way. The pamphlets were written often enough by "names" to have inspired one of the most successful and expensive literary forgery operations ever, largely executed by one Thomas J. Wise.

As a put-down, comparing bloggers to nineteenth century pamphleteers is less than effective, since so much of the intellectual life of the era was carried out via pamphlets, their publication in turn encouraged by the extensive correspondence between the authors, ultimately leading to several "schools" like the Transcendentalists in New England and the Tractarians in England. Both groups were strongly influenced by Milton, an avid pampleteer in the seventeenth century (writing, among other pamplets, Areopagitica on the freeedom of the press). Bloggers could do far worse in their search for a literary ancestor.

12:09:16 PM    

Rhetoric of weblogs.

The Rhetoric of Web Logs.

The Rhetoric of Web Logs

Meg Hourihan, one of the creators of Blogger, and the author of Megnut, wrote on essay for O'Reilly Network on "What We're Doing When We Blog." Meg makes a number of intelligent, accurate observations about the nature of web logs, including emphasizing their "commonality." She writes:

If we look beneath the content of web logs, we can observe the common ground all bloggers share—the format. The web log format provides a framework for our universal blog experiences, enabling the social interactions we associate with blogging. Without it, there is no differentiation between the myriad content produced for the Web.

Go read her excellent essay, then come back for my piffle, if you must.

Ms. Hourihan has begun to document the beginnings of a rhetoric of web logs. Now, lest you begin foaming at the mouth, at the use of "rhetoric" in reference to blogs, I would like to remind you that the true meaning of rhetoric is the art of persuasion using language, and that a rhetorician is a master of communication, using specific tools, techniques and methods.

Classical rhetorical theory divides the art of rhetoric into five parts (I'm cribbing wildly from Richard Lanham's excellent A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). The five parts of rhetoric are:

•  Invention
  
•  Arrangement
  
•  Style
  
•  Memory
  
•  Delivery
  

Though Classical rhetoricians were largely interested in the spoken word, as any writer will tell you, these divisions, or "steps" if you will, work quite well for modern writing, or even blogging.

Ms. Hourihan, in her anatomy, has neatly presented us with the various attributes of the second part of the blogging ars rhetorica, the arrangement.

•  The basic unit is the "post" rather than the paragraph or page.
  
•  Posts are listed in reverse chronological order, with the newest at the top of the page.
  
•  Posts are date-and-time stamped.
  
•  Posts contain links, often to primary sources.
  
•  Posts are archived, at regular intervals, often by virtue of the software used to create the formatted post and mount/upload it to a web server.
  
•  Posts are associated with a permalink, allowing them to be retrieved in isolation, from the archive.
  
•  Writers' email addresses are prominently featured, allowing immediate contact, and encouraging incorporation of emails into a post.
  

Much of the arrangment of a blog is taken care of by the wonderful tools, Radio, Blogger, MoveableType, that allow us to separate content, our words, from presentation. But the other parts of rhetoric are also slightly changed in blogs as well. Invention, for instance, relies in part on the role of the blogging and Internet community, since blogs depend on linking. Memory is moved largely outside the human cerebellum to silicon, as we utilize Google and other search engines, and bookmarks. Style is perhaps the least changed, since we are still using words and text, albeit presented on the flat-panel pixilelated LCD. Delivery is entirely changed from the format used by Cicero; we upload and the 'net disseminate for us. I'll probably post more about this as I come to grips with blogging rhetorical strategies.

[Instructional Technology]

One of the periodically intimidating aspects of blogging is the standard of excellent thinking you find yourself having to strive for.

[McGee's Musings]

12:00:39 PM    

The point is to make it harder to break up with me, the vendor, than it is to put up with my continual exploitation. There are basically six ways to do this. They get used in the information business all the time.

Number One. A contract. We'll put it on paper. We'll make it a legal, binding relationship. We somehow agreed that we really need each other in order to go on living. We stood in front of witnesses and we agreed to stick it out no matter what. That's normal, it's honest, it works. Unless it doesn't work, in which case it gets really nasty and leaves permanent scars.

Number Two. Brand-Specific Training. I'm really complicated and hard to figure out, but I give you something you just can't seem to get elsewhere. We spent endless days and nights talking over all my painful personal quirks and kinks, and getting all wrapped up in me and my needs. Now that you finally understand me, it just seems exhausting to throw me over and try to date somebody new.

Number Three. Search Costs. There's probably somebody else who would suit you as well as I do, but you're never going to find them – not in a sorry little town like this, anyway.

Number Four. Information Formats. Nobody else can even speak our language around here. We've got a private argot of voodoo keyboard rituals. It's like a private lovers' baby-talk. If you try to ditch me and pick up somebody else talking that way, she'll look at you as if you came from Mars.

Number Five. Durable Purchases. You bought a huge mainframe and special scanners and printers, and a car and a fridge and a house. You can't just walk away from all that. Boy, can I ever make that cost you.

Number Six. Loyalty programs. I seem to like you better every time we go out together. I come up with all kinds of sweet little favors based on how well we're getting to know each other. Your Mom and Dad will love me. So will your friends and family. Look how thoughtful and generous I am with the people who can commit. Let's all get real, real cozy.

Anyway check Bruce's article out. Thanks, Jim.

Sterling on Open Source.

Bruce Sterling: A Contrarian View of Open Source. [Hack the Planet]

Always fun to read something by someone as smart, literate, and funny as Sterling.

[McGee's Musings]

11:42:47 AM