Turtles all the way down

The now-indicted Senator Ted Stevens thought the Internet was all about the tubes. Today, software, communications, and business experts are calling the Internet “The Cloud.” But it’s still just the Internet.

Why are tubes bad and cloud good? Is it because Stevens was clueless about what he was naming while these experts are not?

Note that I’m not taking the smarmy approach that stuff has to have a proper name and that’s how it should be referred to. Mostly, I don’t care what it is called.

I’d prefer to think as the newly-dubbed cloud computing in terms of software-as-a-service. I can access my applications and data from anywhere, via the Internet and my web browser. Other client applications not needed. Unlike some movements, it has the potential to be good for both consumers and for businesses.

But, in order to access the Cloud, you need a big enough tube, even if it is a wireless tube. So maybe Stevens had a point, even if only by accident.

With my wife and kids in New York for another week and a half, I have the house to myself. This gives me the opportunity to spend my evenings working in the yard, weeding the mulch-beds and trimming the trees. There’s a few things I need to organize around the house, there are some bills to pay, papers to go through and calls to return. I’ve got a few hundred CD’s to go through and decide if I want to keep them. And I’ve got a a few hundred albums of music in MP3 format to organize and get onto my backup system.

But all work and no play is boring. I can also read, play Rock Band, and try to get through 10-plus hours of MMA fights on the DVR.

I can go to sleep early, and take naps. I cook a small healthy dinner each night and maybe drink a beer or two. I can work in the office as long as I want, or I can work from home and in the middle of doing so, take a break to get in an extra workout at the gym.

This weekend I’ll have a few friends over for a party.

All of this freedom makes me miss being childless and and single. For about five seconds.

After about one year of off and on back pain (with more on than off) I finally broke down and saw a chiropractor. The result? Nothing structural seems to be wrong. However everything else is wrong.

This particular back doctor is a big believer that it isn’t the one-time events, such as lifting something too heavy, that causes chronic back pain. Instead, he thinks that for most people, it is day to day poor posture that puts minor, but constant, stress on the back. Any exercises you do for strengthening and flexibility are just gravy, it’s the posture that matters.

In other words, I do three things wrong: I sit wrong, I stand wrong, and I bend over wrong. The first session was about learning how to do the above properly for the first time in 39 years.

So this means that my previous theories about my back pain being caused by lifting heavy weights, carrying around too many law school books, and sitting too much is probably just a small part of the story.

After two weeks of correcting my posture dozens of times a day, I’m beginning to agree with the chiropractor. My back feels better. The pain and tingling running down my legs is not as frequent. The numbness in my right foot is gone.

Was it all that simple? Everything I learned in my hour-long session can easily be taught on a web page or in a 10-page pamphlet.

In any case, I’ve got six more sessions before I “graduate” from “back school.” Time will tell.

A cool feature of Rock Band that is missing from Guitar Hero 3 is the ability to do some limited amount of improv. Well, very limited.

How cool would it be to have games like these support a greater degree of improvisation? Maybe the game would rate your improv and grant points based on staying in key and your playing off of what your bandmates are doing. Imagine the replayability - each time you play a song it’s different.

Guitar Hero 4 is promising to allow gamers to compose and share their own music. Hopefully true improv is coming soon as well.

Blood Diamond. Above average fictionalized piece on the Africa diamond trade, its illicit dealings, and its affect on the people of Africa. Perhaps a bit too preachy from time to time, and featuring an over-idealized supporting character, but overall a good story with very good acting. Recommended. A-.

Wall-E. I prefer the edgier or the funnier Pixar pieces, such as The Incredibles and Ratatouille. Having said that, Wall-E is a good way to spend an afternoon, but falls into Pixar’s second tier. The plot is predictable and hits you over the head with environmentalism and health issues. Even if you find yourself agreeing with this advocacy, its heavy-handedness is almost cringe-inducing. The graphics and technical aspects of the film are outstanding, as you might expect. However, brilliant CGI never equates to brilliant storytelling. Mildly recommended. B+.

Night at the Museum. I know this is meant to be a silly, childish movie, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a silly, childish movie. Even with a plot that forces you to suspend your disbelief to begin with, you have to end up suspending it even more to sit through the contrived storyline. Right. Nothing to see here…move along… C.

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. If you don’t like movies that only feature characters you don’t like, then you won’t like this one. A strong cast demonstrate a wide range of human weaknesses in a chain of Murphy’s-Law-inspired events, where everything just keeps going wrong. Very worthwhile. A.

Last night, hurrying to a coach-pitch baseball game starring, among other small children, my son, I stop by a McDonalds for a quick iced coffee so that I can stave off the 85 degree heat.

They make me the coffee and I notice two things about it. First, they added cream, which I usually don’t bother with. And it was sweetened. My subsequent conversation with the McDonalds employee went something like this:

Me: “This coffee is sweetened.”
Her: Blank look.
Me: “I just asked for an iced coffee. I didn’t say anything about sweetener.”
Her: “But it is sugar-free sweetener.”
Me: “That’s not the point. I don’t like my coffee sweetened.”
Her: “But it is sugar-free sweetener.”
Me: “I don’t like the taste of sweetener.”
Her: “I can make another.”

She makes another. It’s sweetened. I give up and accept the inevitable fact that I’m going to be drinking a sweetened coffee whether I like it or not.

Starbucks has nothing to worry about.

We bought Rock Band last weekend. We (the whole family) are having a blast with it, though my wife and I are probably enjoying it the most.

Here’s today’s top ten list of things-I-previously-didn’t-know-but-learned-playing-Rock-Band:

1. My wife is a pretty good singer (five stars on hard).
2. I’m a lousy singer (three stars on easy).
3. Nothing is better than Big Rock Endings on the drum kit.
4. I have slightly better rhythm than I thought (I thought I had none).
5. My 7 year old is doing well on the drums and guitar.
6. My 5 year old hasn’t quite gotten drumming yet, but he’s great at vocal improv (i.e., screaming into the mic).
7. Drumming makes you work up a sweat, even if you suck.
8. Guitars are not the emphasis here.
9. I sure wish the peripherals were wireless.
10. We won’t be going on tour anytime soon. A basement band we will remain.

Joel West writes about how large acquisitions rarely make sense.

I agree, especially having lived through two. There is a long list of so-called “mergers of equals,” or that of near-equals or just big mergers that failed spectacularly. Mergers Gone Bad, if you will.

3Com / US Robotics, Lucent / Ascend (and now Alcatel / Lucent), Nortel / Bay Networks to just list a few equipment providers in the mid 90’s.

The biggest problems are lack of focus, culture clash, overlapping products, overlapping IT infrastructure (read: inefficiency), and pressure to increase revenues for a company of a size that makes organic growth difficult.

For summer session I took an E-Commerce class. Interesting stuff, and highly relevant to my 20 some odd years in software and communications.

Attached is a paper I wrote for the class. It discusses the rather unintuitive current practice of selling licenses to software rather than the software itself, and what might happen if this were not the case. I don’t claim to have any particularly unique insight here, but am happy to share.

Software licensing paper

The well-known FISA Amendments Act of 2008, otherwise known as “telecom immunity,” passed congress yesterday. It essentially forgives large telecom providers for helping the government conduct warrantless spying activities.

I recently heard an interesting perspective on this act, that the new law was to allow the government to be able to legally gather a large amount of data representing “normal” telecom user activity. The government wants this data not so much to spy on innocent citizens, but to have a control data set so that it can detect “abnormal” user activity in part by comparing it to this control data set.

I’m somewhat skeptical of this justification but the argument does makes some technical sense.