Last September my grandfather Stanley Dorn died, and I reflected on his life and that of my grandmother, Louise Dorn. I said then:

We never talked about beliefs, I really don’t know if he thought he’d end up somewhere else when he left us, perhaps reunited, or if he assumed, like I do, that death really the last step. I’d like to think that he found some peace in the end, that he felt he was going to a better place. And for all I know, maybe he has. Regardless, he made a choice in his life and I don’t blame him for it, I can only blame myself, at least a bit, as I look back and think of some of the missed opportunities.

A wise commenter gave comfort on that day, responding in part:

I look through the windshield of life and not the rear view mirror. I do believe we find peace at the end….wherever that may be.

But this is not a post about endings, nor is it a post about beginnings; this is a post about continuances.

In a few hours my family and I are going to a Bat Mitzvah ceremony of a cousin who was only a year old when I myself was a Bar Mitzvah. When was that — twelve years ago this month? So many Septembers ago. I felt so old, it felt sort of Important, an Occasion, you know? And perhaps it was. Now time has passed, years have passed, and the thirteen year old child (young man?) that I was has faded into the distance, although he is still me, I am still him, in a way, in the now.

I look through the windshield of life — so many of us do. But like any conscientious driver, it is important to look into the rearview mirror as well. To glance there frequently, but not to dwell. To see the past in its multifaceted glory, and then to look again towards the future, in all of its wonder.

Today I stumbled upon an email from an old friend, sent on the occasion of another (also perhaps momentous?) occasion: high school graduation. She told me that she expected me to achieve great things, because that is the kind of person I am.

Now greatness can be defined many ways. But still, it is a heavy burden. I look through the windshield of life, at the road ahead, and I see bumps and dust storms and lots of long traffic lights. Do I see greatness out there, in the vast expanse? Hard to tell. But it is funny that once again I find myself, someone who is unabashedly non-religious, reflecting on such things just as the Jewish High Holy days approach: Rosh Hashanah, the head of the year, filled with so much potential, and Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, filled with so much regret.

Google has officially acknowledged Google Chrome, a new open-source web browser that was accidentally leaked yesterday. Chrome, which incorporates Google’s Gears platform, is entering an already-crowded browser space, but with a unique philosophy. Google has built Chrome to behave like each browser window is an independent application — with its own computer memory and processor allocation, which keeps the content of each window separate and sandboxed from the rest, improving stability and security.

It seems pretty clear that, in addition to the straightforward goal of improving the web browsing experience and promoting their Gears platform, Google’s primary goal is to release a browser that is a fully-functional platform, decoupled from the underlying operating system, be it Windows, Mac, Linux, or something else entirely. It has been obvious for quite some time that Google believes that the future is in web-based applications, such as Gmail and Google Calendar, that live in the center of the network, rather than the traditional “edge” applications that live on our computers. Google (and others) call this “cloud computing” in reference to the idea that software code and data is always available from everywhere that a user can access the Internet. Because powerful “cloud” applications require powerful and standardized web browsers in which to run, it is in Google’s interest to improve the browser and expand it, with the ultimate goal of making the desktop operating system obsolete.

I personally disagree with this philosophy, believing that ubiquitous computing is coming and will be very individually-focused, but that is an argument for another day. For today, we can rehash the same old arguments about whether Google is a force for “good” or “evil,” about whether they can unseat Microsoft, etc. The rumor is that Chrome will be officially released tomorrow, and then we can see if the fuss is justified. Of course if Chrome comes out and it is only compatible with Windows, that will be a major strike against Google’s purported goals.

Every time I read Dune, I become hyper-conscious of the water waste all around me, of the beautiful life dripping, roaring, splashing, torrenting down the drain everywhere I look, wasted and ignored, never recognized for its miraculousness.

Now I’m reading The Dispossessed, and I find I can’t finish my dinner. So much for one person, such extravagance! And my possessions! The massive ego that possesses me to decide that I deserve to squander so many resources to travel alone in a hulking multi-ton vehicle that spews out noxious fumes and burns through precious fuel at a prodigious rate, just to get to a massive distribution center where muffins by the dozen and socks by the package and computers and refrigerators and power tools are all mine for the taking just by plunking down a plastic card.

And then after a while I come back to the real world, and I take another bite of my sandwich.

I was thinking today about how much benefit I get from the New York Times, my favorite newspaper. I just got another one of those NPR renewal letters in the mail, and I figured I might as well give to the Times while I’m at it. Then I remembered that the New York Times Co. is a for-profit corporation, and they don’t do membership drives. The only way to give ’em money seems to be to subscribe, but I have no interest in the dead tree version of their product.

Reasons I like working at home:

1. Lots of natural light
2. I can play music out loud instead of wearing headphones
3. The cat keeps me company
4. Really nice chair
5. I can go to work in my pajamas
6. I can make fun lunches in the kitchen
7. If I go for a run or bike ride at lunch time, I can just hop in the shower afterwards

Reasons I like working in the office:

1. The people are nice

I could fulfill all my requisite face-to-face interactions and meetings in one day per week in the office, but in my new position I suspect the number and length of meetings with continue to rise. Which is probably just another argument for staying home…

At present I am in White Plains, New York about to go to a wedding in New Rochelle. Right about now I need to go put on some of the quasi-fancy clothes that I only wear about twice a year. A couple of days ago I went to my closet to check that my suit was in good shape and didn’t need a dry cleaning. I discovered instead that the pants of said suit were full of little holes from moths or beetles or worms or time-traveling miniature raccoons. Oops.

I also don’t have any nice shoes in decent shape, so I decided to go Doctor Who style and wear sneakers. Friends intervened and told me that sneakers Simply Will Not Do, so the lovely Meghan is accompanying me to the mall in an hour for a last-minute shoe shopping excursion.

Right here I would insert some pictures, if I hadn’t forgotten my camera’s USB cable. Ooh look, pretty imaginary pictures! There is Dave on a roller coaster at Six Flags! There is everyone eating strange chocolately decadence at Max Brenner! Here is Amy surrounded by cute little children!

Okay, guess I’d better get dressed.

“Walked to work today for the first time in months. Had forgotten how nice it is to listen to podcasts in solitude.”

That 116 character statement doesn’t really deserve a blog entry of its own. But ever since I got the hang of Twitter, I’ve been posting things like that all the time. Not just posting, but responding to other people’s little snippets, and even having whole conversations. Twitter is a broadcast messaging tool that limits posts to 140 characters. Some people call it a “microblog.” It is different than blogging in that it is easy to update via IM or SMS from your phone, and messages that other people post can be broadcast back out by those same media.

It took me a while to figure out how to use Twitter, to understand what sort of conversations it is good for, but now the constantly popping up messages throughout the day generally serve to amuse, occasionally enlighten, and frequently keep me informed about random minutia in other people’s lives — minutia that I could just as well do without, but its sort of fun to see what people are up to.

Twitter is also assisting my quest to write more cogently: with only 140 characters at your disposal, it is important to be brief. Twitter isn’t for everyone, and I sympathize with many who don’t see the point of it. But I’m having fun with it. For now.

On the second leg of our European tour, Jess and I left the UK and set out for Barcelona, in the Catalonia region of Spain. Nearly all of the 7 million people in Catalonia speak Catalan as their primary language, as well as Spanish. In Barcelona, the majority of people speak and understand some English, which was very helpful to us, since our Spanish was minimal and our Catalan non-existent. Most restaurants offered English menus. None of them offered tap water.

Continue reading “Triplog: Barcelona”

I just ordered Watchmen, Sandman Vol. 1, and Buffy Season 8 Vol. 1. If none of those strike my fancy, I’ll give up. If they do…well, this could become an expensive experience. There are how many issues of Sandman?

This is a placeholder for a blog entry yet to come!

Cardiff | Glasgow and Edinburgh | Barcelona

On this trip I have been inhaling The Time Traveler’s Wife, a beautiful and poignant meditation on fate and free will disguised as romance disguised as science fiction, but which is anything but genre. It has throw me into a familiar funk, a longing for connection. True love and soulmates are concepts so common and easy in the night realm of stories and fairy tales but so rare and difficult in the waking realm we are forced each day to inhabit. I wander the streets of Barcelona, watching all the pretty people hand in hand in their pretty lives, laughing and smiling, and I wonder what amount of it is pure and what is illusion. I make myself another useless set of promises: to find my life’s direction, to get into shape, to broaden my education, to explore the Outdoors, to find an Other who is Significant. But what does any of it mean, in this, a world that is full not of fairy tales but of far more mundane narratives?

I check my email and discover that while I’ve been away, my department at Harvard has been dissolved, something new born from the ashes. A fiery phoenix? Perhaps, with enough imagination and prose, we can force interesting mundanities into the vacant molds of marvelous fairy tales. Perhaps, if we squint and open our minds wide, we can experience our lives as great and beautiful adventures. But can it ever really be the same as the stories we read? Can the longing ever truly be fulfilled?

I got dressed Saturday morning, and then at some point I realized that I had lost a day and it was Sunday afternoon and I was wearing the same clothes.

Boston to JFK by Bolt Bus, which is nice except the lack of seat-back trays is terrible, and then LIRR and then AirTrain, and then I caught up with Jessica, fresh from LAX. A very long time checking in, a very, very long wait on the tarmac, and then a decently long Air India flight to London Heathrow on a big Boeing 777 with lots of on-demand movies (both English and Hindi) on a big seat-back screen. And very tiny cups for water.

The Heathrow Express, it’s tunnel here pictured, took us to Paddington, then onward, after some Chicken Kiev and Sausage Sandwiches (we chose to forgo an English Breakfast) to Bristol. Left out for easy reading: hassles finding trains, hassles finding Hyde Park (we turned back just a block short, after running into a nice gent with bad teeth who gave us a lunch recommendation, i.e. a local), and hassles at our B&B, which we sat outside of for half an hour before another guest let us in, not to mention two hours of customs at the airport.

Ben Folds we found eventually, not where Google Maps told us he would be, and he was great as always and half his audience was Welsh, so he made up a little song about Wales and promised to tour there some day. We’re heading there tomorrow, for a day in Cardiff before a longer spell in Glasgow, where my Jess and Adam’s Jess get to meet and we get to use a computer with a Skype client that actually works and perhaps some adventures will be had and some tasty Indian food eaten, and some fried pizza and fried Mars bars and fried burgers avoided.

The keyboard on my fun new Eee PC is dreadful and driving me batty, and local time is 2 in the AM, so for now adieu. All in all, a generally pleasant, if time-consuming, start to our little holiday. Also, its easier to cope if you just pretend that the £7 pizza take-away was $7, and not $14. Jessica is gradually coming around to my view on this.

I’m off to explore a bit of Europe for the next week and a half: England, Wales, Scotland, and Spain in rapid succession. I’m taking along a tiny computer that is hard to type on and a big camera for pretty pictures, but no guidebooks. I’ve already started things off right, getting behind on both my work and my packing, such that I’m planning to sleep through my 7:30am bus to New York tomorrow and have preemptively booked a second seat for the noon departure. But hey, its only money. Ask me, sometime, about how a not paying attention to a silly JavaScript web page widget cost me $100 in ticket change fees on Ryanair…

Anyway, see you folks on the flip side.

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

— William Butler Yeats

Maintex’s email hosting provider sent me this charming message, subject “We need you!” Yeah, I can’t figure out what they need me for either.

A: …and if he becomes a melon farmer she’ll step in.
B: A melon farmer?
A: You know, ‘Yippee-ki-yay, melon farmer!’
B: I don’t get it.
A: …
B: Wait…was that a Die Hard reference?

I just can’t stop watching the new Where the Hell is Matt? video. In a follow-up to his previous video from 2006, Matt Harding traveled to over 40 countries and danced with the locals everywhere he went. If anything can bring about world peace, this has got to be it. Just…just watch it.

The song was written just for this project, with a fitting message. The lyrics, in English translation: Continue reading “Limbs made glorious”

If there is any doubt that higher fuel prices are going to have a positive impact on the environment, a look at the sort of radical rethinking we’re starting to see at all levels of the supply chain for basic goods should make the trend clear. The New York Times today runs a front page story about a new type of milk jug that is far more efficient to fill, pack, transport, and recycle. The rigid rectangular jugs do not require traditional crates and, due to their efficient shape, can be packed far more tightly and securely onto pallets. This results in faster filling, fresher milk, and fewer deliveries to stores, saving fuel.

Customers are skeptical of the change, because the new milk containers are oddly shaped and can be difficult to pour. But customers will adapt, and other designs will emerge. And these sorts of small changes, these little sparks of innovation, will slowly add up to big impacts on our environment.

Now granted, this new design was being discussed back in 2001, so it didn’t just miraculously appear fully formed due to the current energy crisis. But it is a sign of things to come as more people start to think about these issues and the bottom-line benefit becomes more clear.

The occasion is Jonathan’s new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. The discussion is, as typical of Rose, far-ranging and, as typical of Zittrain, highly informative.