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Monday, March 10, 2003

Americans get balanced news from the UK
British news-sites are seeing unprecedented traffic from US IP ranges as Americans, repulsed by the stilted war coverage in the US papers (who have collectively abandoned stories like Rumsfeld's handshake with Saddam and spying on security council members at the UN) turn to Old Europe for Real News.
Jon Dennis, deputy news editor of the Guardian Unlimited web site said: "We have noticed an upsurge in traffic from America, primarily because we are receiving more emails from US visitors thanking us for reporting on worldwide news in a way that is unavailable in the US media."

The American public is apparently turning away from the mostly US-centric American media in search of unbiased reporting and other points of views. Much of the US media's reaction to France and Germany's intransigence on the Iraqi war issue has verged on the xenophobic, even in the so-called 'respectable' press. Some reporting has verged on the hysterical - one US news web site, NewsMax.com, recently captioned a photograph of young German anti-war protesters as "Hitler's children".

Link Discuss (via Electrolite)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:23 permanent link to this entry

Dee Hock on Emergent Democracy
Dee Hock, the founder of Visa and the inventor of "Chaordism," a bottom-up organizational philosophy that mirrors the Internet, has written an amazing response to Joi Ito's "Emergent Democracy" paper.

As you may know, I have been arguing for a decade that the Internet was fatally flawed and would go the way of the telegraph, telephone, radio and television as far as its promise of elevating ideas and discourse, advancing democracy, enhancing liberty or facilitating economic and political justice. I have lived long enough to remember the claims that were made at the advent of radio and television, and read enough of the history of the telegraph and telephone to realize that the claims made by the messiahs of those forms of communication were not dissimilar from the claims made by aficionados of the Internet. The reason, from my perspective, is not complicated.

Culture brings us together, usually at a very small scale through mutual belief, trust and common interest. It educes, not compels, behavior. Culture codified is law. It is as inevitable as the day the night that as scale increases, law increases. Law enforced is government. Government does not, in the main, educe behavior, but compels it. Democratic or otherwise, rarely, very rarely, does any concentration of power or wealth desire to see subjects well informed, truly educated, their privacy ensured or their discourse uninhibited. Those are the very things that power and wealth fear most. Old forms of government have every reason to operate in secret, while denying just that privilege to subjects. The people are to be minutely scrutinized while power is to be free of examination.

Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:19 permanent link to this entry

EEG "cyborg" concert
James sez, "There's going to be a mass collective brainwave concert where a computer uses EEG sensors to measure audience reaction to the music and then regenerate the composition in response on the fly. Also there's an architectural exhibit examining the notion of "building as blog". Its all kicked off by an open discussion between Steve Mann (inventor/pioneer wearable computing) and Stelarc (cyborg performance artist)."
Link Discuss (Thanks, James!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:17 permanent link to this entry

TV ticket gallery
Great gallery of scanned tickets from TV show tapings, with personal stories about each show.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Robert!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:15 permanent link to this entry

Jewish bikers ride out
A Jewish motorcycle club who put mezzuzahs on their Harleys will ride for the first time in the Daytona Bike Week.

wn businesses and have the time and wherewithal to indulge their hobby. "I'm a nice Jewish boy who likes motorcycles, shoots guns from time to time, and kills things for a living," said Seth Tokson, 43, of Armonk, owner of Absolute Pest Management Inc.

They are suspicious of the angst explanation. "There are many reasons we ride," Mr. Rayman said, "and the idea that we're rebelling against our parents after a protected childhood is not one of them."

Howard Rozins, 47, co-owner of the Bagel Emporium on Main Street in Armonk, likes the rush. "The speed, the freedom, the openness of it," he said. "You can't believe the beauty of riding up here."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Chel!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:06 permanent link to this entry

Dow sues Bhopal survivors for protesting
Dow Chemical is suing Bhopal survivors who protested the company's role in one of the worst environmental disaster in history. These guys are more evil than Darth frigging Vader.

On December 2nd a peaceful march of 200 women survivors from Bhopal delivered toxic waste from the abandoned Carbide factory back to Dow's Indian headquarters in Bombay with the demand that Dow take responsibility for the disaster and clean up the site. Dow obviously has other ideas because they are suing survivors for about US$10,000 for "loss of work". That's US$10,000 compensation demanded for a two hour peaceful protest where only one Dow employee briefly ventured out of the Mumbai corporate business park to meet the women protestors.
Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:02 permanent link to this entry

Forgetting your phone is rude in Japan
Gizmodo reports that leaving your cellphone at home is increasingly considered an antisocial act in Japan.

One college student I spoke to described leaving ones phone at home or letting the battery die as "the new taboo." Teens and twentysomethings usually do not bother to set a time and place for their meetings. They exchange as many as 5 to 15 messages throughout the day that progressively narrows in on a time and place, two points eventually converging in a coordinated dance through the urban jungle. To not have a keitai [cellphone] is to be walking blind, disconnected from just-in-time information on where and when you are in the social networks of time and place.
Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:59 permanent link to this entry

Blogging SXSW
There's some excellent blogging going on at SXSW. Some are posting notes and analysis,
Heath Row continues to publish transcripts within minutes each panel's ending, and he promises to do a roundup with analysis when it's all over.

I've barely been making it to any panels besides my own, because I'm really tightly scheduled, and the one panel I did make it to, a presentation by an exec from WayPoint, was depressingly awful. His main thesis seemed to be that community networks would vanish due to their "unreliability" (in Manhattan, it's easier to get an open WiFi signal than it is to get a cellphone signal -- but this is a special definition of "reliability" meaning, "expensive" and "crappy"), and be replaced with expensive, managed networks in McDonalds restaurants in franchise ghettos on freeways near airports -- these networks would be run by the phone companies, who would "own the customer." This is the starkest, most distopian vision of a wireless future imaginable.

Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:52 permanent link to this entry

Valenti's "moral" remix
Canis Lupus has remixed the Valenti "Moral Imperative" speech to very nice ends:

Let’s talk about fair use. What is fair use? Fair use is dead. Why? Why is that so? There are copyright laws in this country (the Digital Millenium Copyright Act). They are unfair and unwise and unwieldy and absolutely, it gives me all this power. Cooool.
1MB MP3 Link Discuss (Thanks, Canis!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:51 permanent link to this entry

Sunday, March 09, 2003

You are what you carry around
I'm interested in hearing what kinds of gadgets you carry around and find indispensible. I hardly ever leave the house without my:

Handspring Visor Edge I use it for my appointments and phone numbers, but I really use it to read article and books from Project Gutenberg and alt.binaries.e-book. When I'm waiting in line, or stuck in an office lobby, it's great to pull out. I'm reading Treasure Island right now. I'm tempted to buy the Sony Clie 665C, which has twice the resolution and is in color, but don't know if I want to spend almost $300. It has some pretty cool features, like being able to control your TV and VCR with the infrared port. It has an MP3 player, to, which would be nice to use when I didn't feel like hauling my iPod around. Anybody have one of these? I saw some beautiful-looking oranges ones at Fry's today.

Sony Cyber-shot U This miniature digital camera is easy to slip into my pocket. I take pictures nearly every day. I think I've taken more pictures in the last two months since I've had it than the last five years without one. It's only two megapixels, but I've gotten decent prints from Ofoto using it. I love this camera.

A crappy T-61 Sony Ericsson phone Why oh why did I ever get rid of my Ericsson T-28 and get this bulky hunk o' junk? Probably becuse the T-28 was rated as having the highest microwave emissions of any cell phone. Still, I think I'd rather have a cooked brain than the T-61. The display is filled with dust, and I can't clean it out, because it's under the plastic screen. Makes it hard to read in daylight. Still, I haven't found a mobile phone tiny enough to goad me into switching.

Things I don't carry with me at all times: iPod (too heavy, too much hassle with the earphones, but I like it when I run), Blackberry (good for short trips when I don't want to bring my iBook with me, otherwise, I keep it at home.)

What do you carry and why? Discuss
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 14:23 permanent link to this entry

Notes from "Doing Good Online"
Lia "Cheesedip" Bulaong took great notes yesterday at my SXSW "Doing Good Online" panel:

chris: with npr since 1998 -- when he got there he did the website, there were six people there. had to do it every day. cut and encoded eight hours of audio every day. what we do is put content on the internet, and in a way so people can't just listen to things, but the specific things that they want. (example, the impeachment hearings, people could listen to snippets of it) ... npr's mission statement has nothing about making money, lucky enough to work in an area where you can have pie in the sky ideas and it's okay. ... "driveway moment" is when you hear something in your driveway and are so enthralled that you can't leave ... one of the top searches we get is for "this american life", which is not an npr program. since we're not concerned with profits but that people get they want on our site, if they came for that then we give them what they want.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Lia!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 14:20 permanent link to this entry

Barks, Stanley, and Clowes in Comics Journal #250
There is a lot of great stuff in the latest issue of The Comics Journal (#250, 272 pages). Besides the interview with Gary Panter (which I already blogged about a while ago), there is a transcript from a 1976 interview with two of my favorite cartoonists, Carl Barks (Disney ducks) and John Stanley (Little Lulu) and an amazing interview with Dan Clowes on the craft of cartooning. Unfortunately, neither of these are online, but you can order a copy online.
Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 13:45 permanent link to this entry

Lab Notes: Research from UC Berkeley
Computationally cracking the secrets of cells, building bomb-resistant buildings, preparing extreme ultraviolet lithography for prime time, and playing data like a musical instrument ... all in my latest issue of Lab Notes: Research from the Berkeley College of Engineering. Please take a look!
Link Discuss
posted by David Pescovitz at 10:40 permanent link to this entry

The rise of R-rated radio
bOING bOING pal Gil Kaufman writes in the Cincinnati Enquirer about how pop songs are getting more risque, forcing radio station censors to work over-time:

"Though the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has strict rules regarding the airing of obscene material over the public airwaves, it has no provisions for songs that have been edited. That might explain why on a recent weeknight more than three-quarters of the hit tracks played on KISS 107.1's (WKFS-FM) 'Freak Show' ('The only show worth a bleep' is its slogan.) between 7 and 8 p.m. featured at least three or more edits."
Can you (bleeping) believe that (bleep)!?!? Link Discuss
posted by David Pescovitz at 10:35 permanent link to this entry

NYT reviews Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
Today's NYT is carrying a half-page, mostly positive review of
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, in the main book-review section. I'm doing a panel tomorrow called "Why I Dig Working in the Cultural Gutter," but this may disqualify me!

Cory Doctorow is an avid Weblogger (he can be found at boingboing.net), and his novel's ad-hocracies of ''twittering Pollyannic castmembers'' who smoke ''decaf'' crack and congratulate one another on ''Bitchun'' ideas offer a knowing, gently satiric view of a once ascendant digital culture. And the impressively imagined world of the novel is tricked out in lively prose.
Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:47 permanent link to this entry

Gashlycrumb Tinies online
Edward Gorey's rhyming, illustrated alphabet of horrible things happening to rotten children (A is for Amy, who fell down the stairs) is online at last. Lovely.
Link Discuss (via Robot Wisdom)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:44 permanent link to this entry

Heath's SXSW transcripts
Heath Row's transcripts of the SXSW panels he attends are stellar. Here are two to be sure to catch:

Dying online: Dana Robinson works for an org that provides network connectivity to chronically ill and dying children in 100 hospitals in the US and Canada. She's observed that online communities have yet to formalize any kind of social norm for coping with the death of community members (indeed, sometimes the community only infers the death from the absence of a login from some ill member over time, and confirms it much later or never) -- some gamers have mass-log-in funerals, some chat systems reserve the deceased's ID and add a RIP and rememberances to her profile, some do nothing. Dana's been studying all the online norms for coping with death she can find, and in this panel, she reports on her research.

Effective Social Networks: It's clear that online communities are capable of bringing large numbers of people with common interests together, but organizing those people into some form of collective action is much harder than just assembling them.

Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:41 permanent link to this entry

Let's take to the trees!
Great NYT story on the growing market for luxury, custom-built treehouses:

The house, built last fall in two cedars and a maple, has one large room with alderwood interior paneling and cedar exterior siding. The unfinished wide-plank floors are made of Douglas fir, and the railing of the staircase is made of tree branches. The family is still figuring out exactly how to use the house. The children have held sleepovers there, and Ms. Shera has used it as an artist's studio. The Sickelses also visited Sydney Mullock's treehouse, hidden in the woods maybe 100 yards from the main house. The leaded-glass windows were salvaged by family members and friends, typical of a TreeHouse Workshop design. The "scrounging aspect" of the process, Mr. Jacob said, is something clients seem to enjoy. Inside, the house is decorated simply: a table with a flowery cloth and a vase of flowers, a hutch with little spice bottles and a futon for sitting or sleeping. It's half bare-bones country inn, half Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother's cottage.
Link Discuss (via /.)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:32 permanent link to this entry

Saturday, March 08, 2003

Nanoethics
The Center for Responsibile Nanotechnology: otherwise, your neighborhood may dissolve into brightly colored machine-parts.
The technology is already on its way. But who will control it? If universal manufacturing is not administered properly, there is great risk of it being used badly—either by the entity that first develops it, or by groups that later gain access to it. Development or control of the technology by a special interest group would probably lead to military or economic oppression. Two competing programs could lead to an unstable arms race. Irresponsible release would make the full power of the technology available to terrorists, criminals, dictators, and teenagers. The safest course appears to be a single, rapid, worldwide development program by an organization that recognizes the necessity of wise administration.
Teenagers? My stars and garters.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Mike!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:31 permanent link to this entry

Left-wing media bias? In your dreams.
Dan Gillmor (who is sitting two seats to the left of me, blogging David Weinberger's SXSW keynote, which is delish) has written a blistering attack on the journalists charged with keeping tabs on George W. Bush.

But where the hell is the press when it comes to the current tenant in the White House? Bush has repeatedly failed to tell the truth, and his past is loaded with the kinds of behavior that have caused major news organizations to go into overdrive when Democrats were doing it. Here's one example. You probably don't know that Bush apparently went AWOL (Dallas Morning News) from his Air National Guard duty in the 1970s. It was covered by a few newspapers, but the story disappeared after he claimed he couldn't remember what happened. Right.
Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:28 permanent link to this entry

Sleep is for the unmedicated
A fascinating diary of one writer's trial of the narcolepsy drug modafinil (creepily marketed as Provigil), a drug that slows the release of GABA, a sleep promoter in the brain.

The seduction of modafinil is that you can feel as peppy after six hours sleep as you would after nine. (It may also have a more drastic effect.) Doctors see modafinil as an occasional pick-me-up. They doubt you could take the drug everyday without consequences: Most sleep researchers agree that the longer sleep is necessary for hormonal regulation, among other essential bodily functions. (Drugs aren't the only way we may steal less sleep. Click here to read about how we may enlist gene therapy to help us stay awake.)

Tired of merely writing about enhancement (and tired, period), I decided to conduct my own unscientific trial of modafinil. As the father of a 2-year-old, I live in a constant haze of sleep deprivation. I vowed to take modafinil for a week and see what happened. Could it transform a lazy, exhausted hack into a brilliant Jeffrey Goldberg? Or recast a grouchy father into Superdad? I persuaded my doctor—and no, you can't have his number—to prescribe me a week's supply of Provigil, seven 200-milligram pills.

Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:37 permanent link to this entry

Mesh today
Glenn Fleishman has written a very cogent piece about the current reality of mesh wireless.

In pure mesh systems, each node routes traffic across the mesh and bridges it to backhaul or a local network. In FHP’s system, nodes route traffic but distribute it through an integral Wi-Fi station. If deployed densely, these systems create a “hot zone” with reduced wiring cost and great flexibility in increasing density or changing coverage.

One FHP product type, currently called SmartPoint, handles mesh routing and Wi-Fi distribution, while another, currently called RoutePoint, bridges backhaul into the system, allowing bandwidth to be added to a mesh in any location. (The company is in the process of rebranding both products.) FHP’s approach relies on existing Wi-Fi client infrastructure.

Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:32 permanent link to this entry

Rubik's Mosaic
Great gallery of mosaics made from Rubik's Cubeses -- the artist says he got his pixelart skills using draw programs on an Apple //e.
Link Discuss (via Geisha Asobi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:29 permanent link to this entry

"Legit" music services still suck
David Pogue rounds up the new "legit" music services and concludes that they all cost too much, have confusing pricing plans, use dumbass DRM, and don't have the selection to compete with the free file-sharing networks.
Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:28 permanent link to this entry

Reservoir Dogs game
A new Reservoir Dogs game will let you play any character, but I suspect that we'll all end up being Mr. Pink.

SCi promises that gamers will be able to play all the film's key characters, including Mr Blonde, infamous for torturing a policeman in one of the movie's most visceral scenes.
Link Discuss (via Robot Wisdom)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:20 permanent link to this entry

Roogle: RSS search
Roogle: an RSS search-tool. Good idea. Stupid name and design (why go out of your way to actually be dilutive? Ha ha, you've wasted your time getting a lawyer-letter and wasted Google's time generating it).
Link Discuss (via Joi Ito)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:18 permanent link to this entry

Stallman's keynote
I missed Stallman's keynote last night at SXSW, but my pal Heath took great running notes through the talk.

The theory of this is that the public pays a price. The public trades away its natural right to copy things and in exchange gets the benefit of getting more things written. The thing we traded away wasn't a right we could use easily. Then printing press technology got more efficient. Printing presses around 1900 got cheaper. Even poor people stopped copying things by hand. People started forgetting that copies could be made by hand. Things went along more or less OK. But the age of the printing press is going away for the age of the computer. Not everybody wants this to be easy for you.

Digital information technology brings us back to a situation more like the ancient world. It's true that mass producing CD's is less expensive than making a one-off CD, but the difference isn't that great. Any computer user can make copies. There's no inherent reason for copies of things to be made centrally. Copyright law now affects every citizen. It no longer affects companies. It takes away freedoms from you and me. Copyright law is no longer painless, easy to enforce, or arguably beneficial. To stop you from sharing something with a friend, the police state needs to intrude into your house. We're no longer trading away something we don't have anyway. We need to renegotiate the deal.

Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:16 permanent link to this entry

Friday, March 07, 2003

e-War: Ring Tones & Screen Savers -- email from Kuwait, by CNN's Kevin Sites
CNN correspondent Kevin Sites has been sharing what amounts to a blogless wartime blog with BoingBoing readers over the past few weeks. An excerpt from the latest in his ongoing series of e-mailed, first-person accounts from Kuwait follows (the rest is
here):
For most of the journalists here in Kuwait, this is the fear and this is the joke; that for all our technology--our videophones and portable dishes, our Thurayas, and Iridiums and Neras, our digital cameras and laptop editing systems--we could end up covering this war with wind up film cameras.

It's on the grapevine that the U.S. Air Force has developed an electro magnetic pulse weapon at Kirtland Air Force that could be used in war against Iraq. The concept is devastating simple; flying over the target area, the military emits a microwave swath, which basically fries the electronics of any appliance or device in its path.

Like a giant switch, when the EMP weapon is flicked on, the lights go out. People, however, are supposedly spared--unless they happened to be wearing a pacemaker or are hooked up to other life sustaining machinery. The EMP weapon does not apparently differentiate between cell phones and hospital respirators.

Tactically, it could help to end the war more swiftly, by denying Iraq any military communications. The order to fire a chemical weapon may be eliminated along with the chain of command.

Link to the complete text; Discuss (Thanks, JP)
posted by Xeni Jardin at 23:55 permanent link to this entry

A coin with a story
This is a fascinating tale about the recent auction of the last known 1933 Double Eagle gold coin (save for the one on echibit in the Smithsonian), a coin whose provenance includes shady Philly grifters, playboy Egyptian princes, and daring Secret Service stings.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Kate!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 19:51 permanent link to this entry

3,000 UK pubs getting WiFi
The BBC reports that WiFi networks will be rolled out in 3,000 British pubs this year. Seems to me that American caffeine jitters will result in fewer coffee spills on laptops than British barfights will lead to beer-spill tragedies.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Gary!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 19:49 permanent link to this entry

Help me run a marathon to benefit the Leukemia Society of America.

cover of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
Woohoo! My novel is finally out! Click here to download the book for free, and find out how you can buy the dead-tree edition!

cover of Mad Professor
Visit Mark Frauenfelder's Mad Professor site!

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A tiny, guest-edited blog!

Jim Griffin is CEO of Cherry Lane Digital. Cherry Lane is dedicated to the future of music and entertainment delivery, and works as a consultant to absorb uncertainty about the digital delivery of art. In addition to serving as an agent for constructive change in media and technology, he is an author, serving as a columnist for magazines, and is on the boards of companies and associations. Before starting Cherry Lane Digital, he started and ran for five years the technology department at Geffen Records. Prior to Geffen he was an International Representative for The Newspaper Guild in Washington, D.C.


The One That Got Away

There is no better place to write about herring than Finland, and so I will. They serve herring here at least a hundred ways, but unlike most things Finnish, I've not yet acquired a taste for it, and so it was with Red Herring the magazine.

Like lots of bad journalism, they followed, oh, yes, they followed very well, but they never led.

They encouraged the bubble, hot on its trail, and had a special reverence for Hollywood. They bought the premise hook-line-and-sinker that analog distribution would bring digital distribution in much the same way that others thought you could port practically anything from the old world to the "new world" and make plenty of money along the way.

I am sad Red Herring is gone because many of my friends liked it, and because at its best it was chock-full-o-numbers and statistics that could prove useful to anyone measuring the dimensions of the bubble. But I will not much miss it, because it ultimately failed to be anything more than new-new-journalism cheering on the sidelines for the next new-new-thing, and both its audience and the revolution deserved better.

Could anyone need more of an example than the August 2002 Red Herring cover story featuring John Fanning?

It claimed that by the end of 2002 Shawn Faning's uncle would launch with Blockbuster's backing a new movie download service that would revolutionize Hollywood. Here's hoping none of you held your breath, or parted with a dollar of investment capital. At the time I laughed out loud and checked the cover to see if it was somehow actually the April issue.

Wrap this dead fish in a newspaper, preferably one with decent digital coverage, like the Financial Times or San Jose Mercury News. The Red Herring started stinking long before it died, it's eyes turning cloudy shortly after its birth. If it had put up more of a fight, it would've been a lot more interesting.

Discuss
posted by Jim Griffin at 3:43 PM | permalink


Avantouinti

I've never particularly enjoyed the company of naked men.

It's true, and has nothing at all to do with sex -- sex is the last thing that crosses your mind at the temperature extremes I experienced today -- though I suspect that the Freudian Chicago psychologist that is my sister (Dr. Ellen Griffin) would say, tsk, tsk, don't you know everything is about sex -- but in this case my recollections of rooms full of naked men have more to do school locker rooms and towel snapping and the Alpha Male behavior of "jocks" than with lust.

Thank you, readers of this blog, for your very existence. If it weren't for you, I might not have done it: Jump into the Avantouinti, the hole in the ice, after exposure to the hottest sauna (say SOW-na) in which I've ever been, with memories of searing pain when the loyly (steam from water hitting the hot, glowing rocks, and I don't mean my balls) rises throughout the room.

I might not have done it if I hadn't written to you and promised I'd do it, because there were so many opportunities to back out, with one Finnish friend opting out, and on the long walk down the pier there were many admonitions about the shock to the system and questions like "Do you have heart trouble? Any history at all of heart trouble in your family?" and so on and then it was down and into the hole and then I remember nothing except wanting to get out so very quickly but instead swimming in a circle and grasping, without my glasses, for anything to hold to bring myself out, and realizing that anything I might grasp would prove to be more ice, more cold, and then hearing Marko tell me that every step down the pier would feel better, and indeed it did, and when he said the sauna would thereafter feel much less searing hot he proved to be so very correct. For about five minutes, and then it was again cooking time, with hot, hot, hot, searing hot until it was time for beer and sausages and then more sauna.

Words fail me here. There isn't really much to say about all this, other than that you should try it sometime if you are even slightly inclined to do so and healthy enough to handle it, but like most loquacious Americans I will write on, sharing with you, though here I must write that it is becoming easier and easier to understand why Finns say less and do more, preferring less small talk and more action or talk about matters of importance.

By comparison, the Irish will talk forever about something so mundane and insipid as kissing the Blarney Stone, though I guess that is the point: When you've kissed the Blarney Stone, it's hard to shut up, and I've kissed it more than once. An Irish-American in Finland is more shock in a cultural manner than the physical shock of jumping into the hole in the ice.

Still, it is in the Finnish nature to go to the woods and be alone when feeling great joy and happiness, or "onni," and under the same circumstances we Americans can often be found beating our chest and yelling at the top of our lungs. Hell, if Americans were into Avantouinti there'd be a photo booth and souveneirs at the end of every pier.

It is now hours later, and I have less desire to discuss it, and more desire to reflect upon it, so there is something working here, the magic is spreading, and I am beginning to understand this country in ways so many trips before failed to communicate, how the cell phone can be extension of the hand and not the mouth.

Discuss


posted by Jim Griffin at 8:20 AM | permalink


Into the Hole

One word focuses my day.

Avanto

It is Finnish and means "hole in the ice."

Sure, I've been to the sauna and back many times, especially Finnish saunas, here in Finland and around the world. Wonderful stuff, and I am always eager to go and sometimes the last to leave.

Today has a twist. I've been invited to Sauna Society, a Helsinki club, ahem, society I've heard discussed but never visited. This afternoon I am the guest of Marko Ahtisaari and am excited about going. But I must say that the word Avanto and the concept of the hole in the ice are familiar to me only through the miracle of vicarious thrill via television, and I am ready to find out and report back here to the Directory of Wonderful Things.

I've been transfixed by holes before, and not just in the way of most teen-age boys. I had the honor of working for Geffen Records, where we worked with Courtney Love and the band Hole, so I know just how beautiful and difficult Hole can be, but none have fixated my attention quite so much as Avanto. Neither could her Hole be described as frigid, and having had nice conversations with Courtney I can guess she would feel fine with me making that clear, and she'd insist I be clear that I do not know this from personal experience.

Stay tuned. Keep the cardiac crash cart at the ready. I am going in, and it certainly won't be pretty!

(No discussion link until after it happens ...)


posted by Jim Griffin at 12:51 AM | permalink


Back from the Brink

I've returned from the long trip North and am now back in Helsinki, enjoying renewed access to tangible newspapers, magazines and huge mugs of Wayne's Coffee that make me forget Starbucks ever existed. Make mine a kupio, not a vente. The Wayne's on Kaisaniemenkatu is an oasis for hungry, caffeine-addicted Finns, and the free, fast net access is great when you've been stuck with a tiny Sony Picturebook with a non-functional USB port.

Sure, I could send it to Sony for warranty service, but many who've experienced what Sony calls service (including me) know better. It isn't service, it's abuse. I sent them a laptop under warranty a few years ago, and they offered two options: Pay over $1,500 to replace the motherboard (they claimed I'd somehow damaged it myself, entirely untrue) or pay about $100 to have it shipped back. I chose the latter when they failed to prove I'd somehow violated the warranty. I complained vociferously, even called the Consumer Electronics Association, and they asked me to ship it back for service, leading to a rinse-wash-repeat scenario where I had to pay to get it back again. Sony are scum when it comes to service, and so for now I am stuck with this beautiful but flawed total product experience. If Sony could match service with product, they'd be close to unstoppable in some markets, but that doesn't appear likely anytime soon.

Enough whining. Here's news: While in Levi, American tech marketing guru Michael Moon tumbled on the tundra and shattered both elbows trodding the same path I walked every morning to breakfast and every night after drinking the only passive recreation the area offers. I feel lucky to get out in one piece, but would happily return, because what it lacks in civilization Levi makes up for in beauty and joyful isolation. Make your limo a snowmobile, try reindeer in your soup or salad.

Tonight I had the distinct pleasure of renewing a decades-old friendship with Finnish editor and Talentum exec Hannu Ollikainen (anteeksi, Tatu, I am abandoning those weird characters attached to Finnish letters that bedevil my font choices, but kiitos for trying to help me generate them). Hannu came from Finland as an exchange student to my Park Forest, Illinois, high school (Rich East), and I gave him an old bicycle I'd replaced weeks before his visit, and he remembers it to this day.

I envy Hannu, and I don't envy much. He has a wonderful family, lives in one of the world's most interesting, vibrant cities in one of its most dynamic countries and is documenting the Federalization of Europe and Nokiazation of the world. He also travels the world working with journalists, learning about media and making education a lifelong process. He is a terrific conversationalist (some say most Finns know six languages but speak none of them) and picked a wonderful seafood restaurant where I learned still more about just how great it can be to eat well and healthy as do so many Finns.

I always lose weight in Finland, even though I eat more and better than usual. One more reason to spend more time here, one more reason the rest of you reading this should be checking out the flights here (less expensive than ever before, with Europe's new airlines attacking bloated carriers previously fat on government protection) and finding one of the fine hotels available at a discount. You're thinking, sure, you can do that when it's winter in a place like Finland, but fortunately it's year-round now. Consider the Savonlinna Opera in the summer (the hall is acknowledged one the world's greatest buildings), or the countryside during the third week of June and what they call Johannus and the rest of us call the holiday of St. John the Baptist.

Blogging is about observing, life is about participating. Keep them in balance: Don't let logging-in for blogging satiate your desire for adventure; instead, let it stimulate your desire to find a corner of the world that's always had you curious. Follow the road less traveled -- it makes all the difference.

Discuss
posted by Jim Griffin at 2:06 PM | permalink


Brass in the Digital Pocket

BoingBoing covered Vertu recently, and I have had an opportunity over the past few days to visit with Frank Nuovo (Vertu founder, chief designer), who handles much of the design work at Nokia. He has much to say about Vertu, enamored of its direction, which takes the instrument from the commodity floor of the cell phone shop to the vaunted halls of fashion and style.

His most interesting comments, though, were directed towards what he calls the Digital Pocket, a concept reminiscent of business school work that expresses market work as a function of fulfilling need or niche in our lives. For example, fast food now refers to share of stomach -- if Taco Bell drops a burrito grande in your mouth and down your throat, they are owning the stomach for a while, with little else headed there.

In much the same way, Nuovo sees the Digital Pocket, with share of digital pocket likely to be held by one device, with a maximum of two or three at most in different pockets, though primarily we are giving the electronics world one pocket with which to work, and whomever grabs that pocket has fulfilled you as a customer.

This seems to me saavy thinking, and compared to the music business it is downright genius, as the denizens of Santa Monica and similar environs seem to have from what I can tell little understanding of the interrelationship of media and entertainment spending. We are competing with the clock for attention, and with a limited wallet for cash. As a result, we need to learn to persuade -- not compel -- customer behavior.

The number one rule of copyright seems to be that you can't take money out of the customer's wallet without permission (unless you manage the compulsories the business rails against unless they are on the buying side, i.e., from songwriters). As a result, we would do well to start thinking about listening to the customer and performing a lot less lecturing them on copyright and the need to make the rich richer.

I hope there is interest in discussing the basics behind the Digital Pocket. It's basic but challenging thinking for industries that can use new ideas for generating money and less defending old ideas for clinging to the old vine in the Tarzan-Economics-like swing we're performing.

Nuovo is a very smart man with experience aplenty in addressing media markets and ph ... ph ... err, instruments, devices, but definitely not phones, unless you have limited imagination and a spare Euro or two laying around. You don't want to be fined a Euro for calling them phones, do you?

On a somewhat less related note, I am gearing up to try a bit of audio blogging, with pictures, too. When I have a day in the week or so ahead I am going to give it a shot, and perhaps I can treat you to a bit of Elvis vs. JXL sung in Finnish. Nothing like it!

Discuss
posted by Jim Griffin at 3:33 AM | permalink


Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?

I am thinking and writing about time these days: What it means, how we measure it, and so forth. Travelling across the earth and tundra does that, as the miles become reminders that gravity and the clock rarely work in reverse. China and the continental U.S. are roughly the same size, but China has only one time zone to the four-plus of North America.

And then my home server crashes -- www.62chevy.com -- and while I'm across the world wondering whatever and however, it turns out it's the power back home and little else and I am thankful for the little things that go right when it seems they've gone quite wrong. Sorry if that threw off anyone's plans to find out more about whom now Mark, Cory and Xeni have collectively given the car keys of Guestbar blog.

Back to the time: Knowing where you are is now and has always been a function of knowing the correct time. Ships used rocket references fired from Greenwich (hence GMT), and now GPS is little more than a very modern, highly accurate update. The satellites broadcast their known position and the precise time, enabling devices below to judge their position relative to the signals received. These are passive devices, incapable of ratting on you, unless tethered to some transmitter or other means of communication.

What happens if an enemy broadcasts false or blocking signals on the GPS frequencies? What effect might this have on GPS equipment in Iraq? Somehow, someway, unfortunately it seems we may well find out, and sooner rather than later.

I learned today that the Swiss have watches in use that sample the music they hear, all the better to help divvy up the pools of money that compensate rights holders in music for the performance and broadcast of their songs. And the Swiss are now apparently levying on photocopy machines, around $30 a year I'm told, to populate a fund for authors.

I like levies for rights compensation, but not on equipment. I think the levy needs to be at an appropriate turnstile point in the delivery chain, and any turnstile that can pick up and leave the country to avoid paying the levy is not appropriate to the task. I'm all for levying on digital providers, but that is a subject for another day, when I am less tired, when time has taken less of a toll, when I don't have to speak the next day. I am headed for a Lappish Village to talk to telecom execs and explain to them why I think they're a good place for levies, and I suspect I will need all the energy I can muster.

Discuss
posted by Jim Griffin at 4:16 PM | permalink


Ole Bluetooth, King Harald of Sweden, Would've Loved This

I am in Levi, Finland, at a meeting where we are talking and playing and working wireless. I pull out my laptop, fire up the bluetooth manager to connect with my cell phone to dial up a connection and ... whoa ... is this slooooow ... where *did* the connection go ... and just when I am about to give up I see hundreds of bluetooth devices on my laptop's bluetooth manager! Headsets, phones, devices, all revealing themselves in low security mode. It's a shock, as I can hardly believe my eyes. Like looking at a Windows Networking window at a LAN party or conference, but these are phones and devices and laptops aplenty. Later I try it in my room and the same thing happens, with a few less connections but the same effect. Tempted to play, I quickly put it away, unsure of the laws surrounding bluetooth hacking in Finland and uninterested in the inevitable confrontation with someone who might later find out I am dialing their phone or listening through their headset.

I like being connected. I like being interconnected. But more and more I am thinking about safe computing, about sending every one of them a business card, about how you could broadcast PowerPoint info via bluetooth. The possibilities, for good and ill, are fascinating, omnipresent and for better or worse they are here and now.

Discuss
posted by Jim Griffin at 9:06 AM | permalink


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