Draft Afterwash

So Brady goes at #22 to the Browns. A great story, in the end, but excruciating to watch, even worse to live through, I'm sure.

Must Read story here by Peter King at Sports Illustrated about the whole sequence of events, through the eyes of Phil Savage, the Browns GM.




Money quote:

Savage showed some decency on draft weekend, when lying and deception is
often the norm. That's why I admire him more today than I did Friday; and I had a world of admiration for him before the draft, believe me.
"On Friday,'' he said, "I called [Quinn's agent] Tom Condon. I'd heard some stuff in the press that he might be negotiating with the Raiders for Brady to be picked at number one. And I had so much respect for Brady through this process. He's a great kid, and he's worked so hard, and he's done everything through the draft process
exactly the right way. I told Tom I didn't know if the Raiders were going to
take Brady or not, but I wanted to let him know that we'd decided not to take
him at number three; so if he was talking to the Raiders, he'd know he didn't
have us to fall back on.
"I'd heard Brady talk about having two dreams -- being the No. 1 pick, or playing for the Browns," Savage said. "And I didn't want to see his heart broken twice. We weren't going to take him, so I wanted Tom to be able to do whatever he could to get a deal done with Oakland, if that's what was happening.''
That's class right there.

Walking back from the office

A couple of the sites as I was leaving the office last night at about 8:40pm:

Legislative Plaza

The Capitol Building

The Quinn Spin

The Rock says this: Quinn is like Obi Wan Kenobi-- by striking him down, you only make him stronger. Money quote:

Here's the delicious irony: they've (the Quinn Spin group) made him more
popular and a bigger name than if they just ignored him. In the quest to harpoon
Quinn, they've given him an exponentially large platform proving his endorsement
worth and making him rich long before the draft and Quinn has shined in the
spotlight . In other words, all of that hard work to tear Quinn down has made
him so much bigger than he would have been to this point and actually created a
undercurrent of support for him.

Trend Watching: is Starbucks falling out of favor

Witness this Twitter post from John Gruber... it seems to echo a sentiment I've been hearing from various corners..
As an enjoyer of Starbucks-- I probably stop by there twice a week, at most-- and not someone who claims to be some kind of coffee afficianado-- but I know some who would make that claim for themselves... and they must think this is heresy. I'm not with them.

Starbucks is, for me, a good, if expensive, alternative to the pretty crappy office coffee that's brewed here at work.

Frankly, I'm hoping Dunkin' Donuts puts a location back in downtown...

Corwin Brown: A teacher and a student..

A nice piece here posted on Blue Gray Sky from a guy who attended the recent ND Coaches Clinic about Corwin Brown.

"Who you say you are: that's your philosophy; who we see on film: that's your identity."

The Landlord..

Macs making inroads in the corporate sphere

Came across this article on Digg.I've been developing this sense in recent months-- after seeing a few of the displays on the tradeshow floor at OracleWorld last year, and looking at companies like www.joyent.com.. not to mention all the developers I've worked with who have adopted Macs for their own work...Slowly, slowly.. things are changing...



read more | digg story

Calacanis Rants

Jason Calacanis has an interesting rant here about the evolution (or is it the extinction) of the newspaper trade..

Nice work here..

See here for Ryan Williams' secret to domestic tranquility.. nice work, Ryan.

Last Day of Sweetlessness

It's the Saturday before Easter.
Bryce says he wants Easter to be today. He wants to write the Pope.
"Dear Benedict... for the first time in 2000 years, what do you say we celebrate Easter on a Saturday?..."

So it's the last day of mandated sweetlessness for me.
Haven't looked back to see if I can quantify the affect this Lent has had, but I can tell you this.. although I've had the occasional craving for a bowl of ice cream, I haven't really missed the candy, donuts.. etc. The one hard moment of this whole experience was little Blaine's third birthday party across the street a few weeks ago. Big ole pieces of Lightning McQueen cake being passed around... Cake from Publix is so good and it was hard to pass up.

So here's what worries me: that I'll go back to my old habits. That one thing will lead to another and I'll be eating cookies and ice cream like I always used to. I'm down to ~240 (from somewhere in the mid-260's around the Holidays) and I think I've got something sustainable going here.

220 is the goal. 210 is the "stretch goal" (abhorrent corp-speech). How can I modify my approach to keep this up? Remains to be seen.

Pancakes this morning. Everyone's eaten their share but me. Now Bryce tells me I can "never ever eat [my] pancakes." What a coach.

Joe listens to Rap

Thinking about Prof O'Rourke a while ago took me back to O'Rourke's links on the ND page..and
this article he wrote about his son, Joe's musical taste. When I was around the O'Rourke house, Joe was a pre-schooler, if that-- so it's amusing to me now to read this.. but it's also just a nice piece of writing about being a Dad.. and it teaches me that there are plenty of challenges still ahead of me.. even once I can get my boys to sleep through the night.

43 Folders

Still up... banging away on my work laptop... so late now the thing is trying to phone home for whatever middle-of-the-night updates/eavesdropping data exchange it normally does, I suppose. Frigging thing keeps chiming in with a dialog box, complaining that it can't find it's desired network path...

Reading this note about Google Desktop from Merlin Mann on 43Folders.com does my heart good. It's so nice to read a tech pundit who can use the English Language-- has fun with it, even.


I can remember, during a seminar in graduate school--back in the bad old dial-up days of the mid-90's-- William O'Rourke lamenting the affect he perceived email to be having on the average American's already insufficient proofreading habits: "It's all too easy to just hit Send," he said.

And sadly, with the advent of text messaging, and all the ascii short-hand that all the kids seem to be doing these days [insert basic example here]-- and my own sad examples of often downright poor usage here in this space, I fear curmudgeonly O'Rourke was right.

So while I think my friend, Dr. Funkhole, could give him a run for his money, all the same, it's a refreshing read, whenever I get the chance.

Also-- the more I read from Merlin about Quicksilver, the more I think I may need to look into it.
The thing to do the last couple of days-- following Merlin and John Gruber's example-- has been to install the new Google Desktop for Mac OS X.
I've always thought, much as I like Google's other offerings, that Google Desktop didn't present itself as anything much better than what I already get with Spotlight on my Mac. Of course, on a Windows machine (like this work laptop-- which is STILL trying to phone home, BTW), a better, more intuitive local search utility is MOST desired. But on my Mac? Thanks, but I think I've already got that.
And the reviews so far from both these guys seem to bear that out.
In fact, Gruber's latest note is more severe:

I don't think I could cover all the bets that would be placed on "Uninstalls Google Desktop before it finishes indexing"

But as I said, Merlin's thing is QuickSilver-- and as he says in his note-- if you think you've got everything you need in Spotlight, you haven't been exposed enough to QS.
So put it on the list of things to consider...
after wiping the drive and a cleain reinstall..
which will come after I buy a new, 320+ gig external hard drive so I can store at least one complete image of the hard drive...
which will probably come sometime after Leopard is release...
which may not happen until after the June WWDC... hmmm....

Up late...

Up late tonight.
I had the kids tonight while SleepyMom went out with some of the other Moms in our neighborhood (BTW, every day I love our new neighborhood a little bit more!). The boys were good as gold-- although I wish we could get Bryce to eat more lately. Aidan must be going through a growth spurt, but Bryce seems to be in a lull.. based on his appetite.

So we ate dinner, the boys played, and then put them in bath and bed-- finally around 9:00. I fell asleep with them after storytime (Charlie and Lola and Where the Wild Things Are) and just woke up around midnight, around the time that she came home.

Tried to go back to sleep, but to no avail.. so here I am, reading more about:

• the EMI/DRM story
• Leo LaPorte left Twitter today-- something to do with concerns over the name? Conflict or confusion with his TWiT network of Podcasts? Strange move. But then again, I don't own any trademarks.
• Took a look at Jaiku and I'm just not digging it. Doesn't have the same old-school, clunky feel to it that Twitter does.

When Reporters Set the Agenda

See this note from Michael Gartenberg and then tell me if you still think there's no bias in the media.

(Hat Tip: Merlin Mann)

ND Student Ticket System to Change

According to this story in the Observer, They're putting the student ticket lottery system on-line.. students can register themselves, singly or in groups, and tickets will be distributed accordingly.

This is all well and good and is, I'm sure, a modest cost-savings for the University.
But it's a little sad to see that ND kids will no longer have to sit out on the sidewalk outside the JACC (or I guess they sit outside the Stadium these days), getting there at some unGodly early hour of the morning.. so that Lou Holtz can come out and deliver coffee and donuts... those were some good times waiting on line..

More Apple/EMI DRM Comment

John Gruber this morning, in response to an article by Bill Thompson of the BBC:

When you’re wrong, just admit it. It’s easy, and it adds, not detracts, to your credibility.

Gruber also links to this note by David Weiss making the point I was working toward yesterday so much more elegantly and succinctly.. I really need to get my writing chops back...

Apple has decided that the enormous moat it has in DRM is not as valuable as making customers feel unlimited by their technology....

So what of Buffet’s moats and competitive advantage analysis? I think it
still holds, it’s just that Apple’s sustainable competitive advantage is their
deep trust in the inherent value of their products and the experiences they
provide. Almost no one has that these days.

Is the wall coming down?

Great post here by John Gruber about the announcement by EMI that, beginning in May, they'll be selling DRM-free versions of their licensed music on iTunes.

$1.29 USD for drm-free music with twice the encoding quality. And full albums stay the same price. And iTunes offers upgrades of existing purchased music.

The cracks in the wall really started back in February when Jobs wrote his (maligned in some corners) position paper on DRM and posted it to the Apple website. There were lots of people (Cory Doctorow chief among them) who questioned Jobs' sincerity in that move-- surely this was just another way for apple to increase it's monopoly.

So much for that conspiracy theory. Doctorow doesn't seem to understand that if you make things easy and high-quality, people are willing to pay for that-- not everyone, but a large-enough segment of the population to run a thriving business on. Leave the pirates be-- as Jobs pointed out, for every DRM scheme, there will be a 12-year-old kid who can break it in under 30 minutes. But making music cheap and easily available and easily manageable, once purchased-- not limiting the number of times you can burn your own music to CD, or laborious 'authorization' processes for your different devices-- wipe away all of that and let people pay for their music, and then leave them alone... the services that allow this to happen will be the big winners... Hopefully, Apple continues on this course.