“21 weeks”:http://flickr.com/photos/kennsarah/sets/72157594368971938/ and counting…:)
Category: Family
Update: We’re back to the grind, but writing takes time. In the meantime: photos! “London”:http://flickr.com/photos/kennsarah/sets/72157594313249803/, “Berlin”:http://flickr.com/photos/kennsarah/sets/72157594329081504/, “Frankfurt Day Trips”:http://flickr.com/photos/kennsarah/sets/72157594322198201/, “Munich”:http://flickr.com/photos/kennsarah/sets/72157594329065327/, “Austrian Alps”:http://flickr.com/photos/kennsarah/sets/72157594329053756/, “Florence”:http://flickr.com/photos/kennsarah/sets/72157594346417126/, “Rome”:http://flickr.com/photos/kennsarah/sets/72157594346422642/.
Our first week in Europe has been harrowing and exhilirating. The first two stops — London and Berlin — were vibrant cities rich with history that Sarah and I can relate to and even remember.
London is a bustling center of fashion and high finance, and we found ourselves right at home with the pace of the city that was very much like New York. While the only Londoners we met were people trying to sell us stuff (again, not too unlike NYC), many of the people we interacted with were kind. Our favorite person by far was Alan, our double-decker bus tour guide. With his microtirades on the “Gherkin” building and the Fergie’s pop video “London Bridge”, he was like Ricky Gervais on a bus — his occasionally sarcastic Tour Guide role played very much like David from the BBC comedy, The Office.
I have to admit that it took a while for London’s charms to set in, but it finally happened while we were standing in Trafalgar Square at dusk. Standing in front of the National Gallery as Big Ben lit up in the distance — just breathtaking. That same afternoon, we’d had a delicious High Tea at the historically frou-frou Fortnam & Mason hotel. Even the photos of our food makes me hungry for scones and Earl Grey.
We left London after a break-neck tour of the National Museum, seeing _the_ Rosetta Stone — used by archeologists to translate hieroglyphs and unlock 4000 years of ancient written culture — Assyrian stone tablets and gates, and the greek Elgin Marbles, which the Apostle Paul likely saw in the Acropolis when he arrived in Rome.
We’d run out of cash on the last of our three days in London, so I went to use the ATM. I should have known there was a problem with our card when I had tried to download an album from iTunes just the night before and the transaction was rejected. Sure enough, the ATM gobbled up our card, with no way of getting it back. We had a whole 20 GBP left to make it through the day in crazy-expensive London while we waited for an opportune time to call the bank.
After the museum, we grabbed a cheap lunch from a nearby supermarket, caught the tube to the airport and took a flight to Berlin.
Getting to Berlin is a story in itself as we flew into town at 10:30 PM — apparently past closing time for the ticket counter. With our Eurail pass yet to be validated, we risked having the pass confiscated or facing a 40 Euro fine. With 92 pence left in my pocket, we prayed as we rode the S-Bahn into town that we would be able to avoid either of these dire consequences. No one ever checked our pass.
Berlin is an amazing city with a short and dramatic history. Once the home of Hitler’s totalitarian regime only to become the site of American/USSR tensions during the Cold War, the city is now rebounding under unified Germany. Our efforts to get a new ATM card sent to our next stop killed half a day, sending me trolling around the city for free Wi-Fi. Later that afternoon, though, we were able to take in the sights as we walked through Rick Steves’ do-it-yourself tour on Bus #100. The bombed-out Wilhelm Memorial Church near Bahnhof Zoo and the shelling damage in the marble Victory Column in Tiergarten were not-so-subtle reminders of Berlin’s recent past, and it was eerie to stand there and imagine the sounds of air raid sirens and tanks as American forces bombarded the city during World War II.
Stranger still were the sights of Nazi sculptures nestled in the trees around the Victory Column — which was moved to the “Central Park” of Berlin by Hitler himself in anticipation of the victory marches following the defeat of the Allied forces. Further uptown we found the impressively large Reichstag parlimentary building. The proud hulk of a building stands as reminder of the hope of a unified Germany. Outside the building is the memorial to the early senators who were persecuted and killed because they opposed Hitler as he rose to power. We walked south of the Reichstag to find Brandenburg Gate and, beyond it, Pariser Square. The Berlin Wall once cut right past this gate and, as we crossed into what used to be East Berlin, we were astonished to find a Starbucks. We sat and had a latté from one of the most capitalist of institutions inside of what, only 40 years ago, was one of the most fortified communist strongholds.
From there, we toured Unter den Linden and strolled past fancy car dealerships, embassies, and historic landmarks (including the Hotel Adlom, where Michael Jackson dangled his child from the balcony). We took in the sights and made our way to what used to be known as Checkpoint Charlie, where a replica of the original gate stands alongside a new and bewildering museum remembering the stories of those daring enough to escape into West Berlin.
The next day, still strapped for cash, we stopped short of entering the Pergamon museum to see the Gates of Ischtar — an ancient Assyrian structure which we’d seen pieces of in the Metropolitan Museum of Art just the week before. Not able to pay the 10 Euro admittance for each of us, we settled instead on buying a small cardboard cut-out for our pastor, who is now preaching through the Book of Daniel.
Afterwards, we boarded a train for our next stop, Frankfurt, with a handful of small bills and cheese sandwiches we’d created from our hotel’s breakfast buffet.
Our friends, Tom and Alissa, are getting married next weekend! We couldn’t be more excited for them. They’ve even asked me to particpate in their celebration by being the best man.
Being best man is an honor that I don’t take lightly. Signing the witness statement, encouraging the groom, holding Alissa’s wedding ring, and making the best man speech are important responsibilities for the day to go smoothly.
But, the Bachelor Party: this is something we must ensure brings the greatest nobility and respect to our dear friend, who is about to embark upon a new milestone of adulthood. And, just for the record, I happen to have video evidence of just how my groomsmen — _including_ Tom — brought this same honor upon me. Tom has helped set the bar for the level of dignity which we might now, four years later, be privileged to bestow upon him.
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I can’t wait. 
* ??Mark Glaser?? for ??PBS??: “Should Community-Edited News Sites Pay Top Editors?”:http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2006/07/digging_deepershould_community.html (via “Digg”:http://digg.com/tech_news/Kevin_Rose_Responds_to_Jason_Calacanis_Rant_from_Netscape → “Kevin”:http://krose.typepad.com/kevinrose/2006/07/calacanis.html → “Jason”:http://www.calacanis.com/2006/07/25/kevin-rose-cracks-or-how-to-know-when-youve-won-the-debate/). Aside from the Digg vs. Netscape drama that’s been erupting over the past couple of weeks, Calacanis raises some interesting questions about how people in the *attention economy* are compensated for their time and hard work. The next 18 months as these two players in community-driven news hash it out should be really interesting.
* ??John Gruber??: “Magic 8-Ball Answers Your Questions Regarding Microsoft’s ‘Zune’”:http://daringfireball.net/2006/07/magic_8ball_zune. That 8-ball. He sure knows a lot about the *digital music* industry.
* ??NPR??: “Avoiding the Housing Market ‘Dead Zone’”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5565128 and “Location, Location: What to Buy, and Where”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5565119. The nesting instinct kicks in: these interviews were pretty insightful about the state of the housing market right now. Of course, there are derivations for where you are, but the overall buyer’s recommendation is to wait until some of the *already-present market pressures* (housing surplus, higher interest rates, and exotic mortgages held by peers) bring prices down — perhaps even way down.
* ??Everything Newark??: “‘Newark is an Emerging Market””:http://blog.newarker.info/2006/07/19/newark-is-an-emerging-market/. The ??New York Post??, of all places, has a practically beaming article about Newark’s comeback. Booker’s enthusiasm, that Newark is a place of *untapped potential*, hangs on the very critical results of his stopping crime in the city.
* ??Washington Post??: “Religious Left Gears Up to Face Right Counterpart”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/25/AR2006072500437.html (“via Digg”:http://digg.com/politics/Religious_Left_Gears_Up_To_Face_Right_Counterpart). Favorite quote: ‘I’m an evangelical Christian who thinks that justice is a biblical imperative,’ said Wallis. ‘The *monologue of the religious right* is finally over and a new dialogue has just begun.’
I really hope Wallis is right.
* ??The Motley Fool??: “Opportunity Knocking for Citigroup”:http://www.fool.com/news/commentary/2006/commentary06072514.htm. Citigroup may (or may not) be on the rise if the Fed stops raising interest rates to counteract inflation, which would be nice for shareholders given the “latest anxiety”:http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aWJ3CLLNPUp4&refer=us over rising costs. A thought for Mr. Prince: consumer banking is sucking wind because *the customer experience is just awful*. The ATMs are nice, and the marketing is fun, but customer service just pales in comparison to banks like Wachovia.
* ??37signals??: “Writing Words vs. Writing Software”:http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/writing_words_vs_writing_software.php. I love these guys: Everyone and his cousin is working on a web app. But how many are actually finishing? That’s why we argue for biting off less. Write a short story/small app instead of a novel/massive app. *Shrinking scope means you actually finish*. And finishing is huge. When you finish something, you show up. And, like Woody Allen said, ‘Eighty percent of success is showing up.’
* ??Rosecrans Baldwin?? for ??The Morning News??: “The Maine Attraction”:http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/the_nonexpert/the_maine_attraction.php. Never been, but this sure was funny: Crystal Meth is easier to obtain in rural Maine than it is back home. So are crystals, and posters of *wolves kissing dolphins* in outer space.
* ??Paul Ford?? for ??43folders??: “Are there ‘good’ distractions?”:http://www.43folders.com/2005/10/24/paul-ford-distractions/ Paul’s struggle between accomplishing something with his life vs. “swimming in a sea of data” really touched a chord. I’ll have more thoughts on this later, but, if you read only one of these linky-things, make it this one. When I’m not getting enough done I get unhappy and depressed and think about the billions of years I’ll be dead before the heat death of the universe erases everything. I want to feel like *I did something during my brief life* besides check my email.
* LAUNCHED: Sarah goes independent with “Side by Side Dog Training”:http://sidebysidetraining.com/. The quick-and-not-so-dirty site brought to you by the wonders of “Wordpress”:http://wordpress.org, “Quilm”:http://oriol.f2o.org/qwilm-a-wordpress-theme/ theme, and the “DreamHost”:http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?63570 “1-click install”:http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/Goodies_Control_Panel#One-Click_Installs. Feel free to pass the site along to your friends with dogs — especially the ones that accessorize their dogs with *Louis Vuitton dog carriers and DKNY collars*.
* ??Jon Katz?? for ??Slate??: “The Loneliness of Rose”:http://www.slate.com/id/2146000/. Rose is not cute. She is a working dog, a farm dog. She herds sheep, keeps the donkeys apart from the other animals during graining, alerts me when lambs are born, watches my back when the ram is around. *She battles the donkeys*, the ewes who protect their lambs, and stray dogs who approach the farm. She and I take the sheep out to graze two or three times a day. On Sundays, we sometimes march the flock down to the Presbyterian Church to hear the organ music and present ourselves through the big windows. ‘Hey, Rose,’ the kids sometimes shout after the service is over. With Rose, we don’t need fences. As my friend Peter Hanks said, Rose is the fence.
* ??Washington Post??: “US waives sanctions on Saudi over religious rights”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/19/AR2006071901178.html (“via Angela”:http://hereisangela.com/2006/07/25/galatians-221-turbans-teaching-and-temperance/) The United States has extended a waiver that avoids imposing sanctions on Saudi Arabia because it has made efforts to *improve religious tolerance* in the kingdom, U.S. officials said on Wednesday.
The US ignores the religious freedoms of millions to suck up to one of its few allies in the Middle East.
* ??New York Times??: “What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/fashion/25love.html (via Angela over IM). If you read _two_ of these linky-things, make this the other one. 
It was only a matter of time before he was again tearing around the house searching for his keys, at which point I said nothing and kept at what I was doing. It took a lot of discipline to maintain my calm, but results were immediate and stunning. His temper fell far shy of its usual pitch and then waned like a fast-moving storm. I felt as if *I should throw him a mackerel*.
Incidentally, this is how Sarah trains Dina (and maybe me).
We bowed low and entered the temple of driveling entertainment that is Blockbuster. After searching high and low, we discovered and blew the dust off of the indie flick, “The Squid and the Whale”:http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/squid_and_the_whale/. We enjoyed it, it had this rubbernecking quality about it such that you _had_ to watch it — peeking out between your fingers as you covered your face with your hands.
Jeff Daniels’ and Laura Linney’s performances as the squabbling, separated parents (Bernard and Joan Berkman) were poignantly true-to-life, and writer/director Noah Baumbach teases out the rationalization and self-protection schemes that are all too common in divorce: “I’m hiding these books under your bed so your dad won’t take them — they’re my books, I paid for them.” It’s funny because it’s true.
In a cast interview on the DVD, Linney points out that the story is about a marriage that has reached the end of its lifecycle. Joan has found her voice as a writer, which Bernard, himself a failed writer and her bitter mentor, finds impossible to embrace. In short: she’s self-actualizing and he can’t handle it, so she’s outgrown him.
I thought Linney’s use of the word “lifecycle” was interesting, as if marriages were born into a sort of Hegelian framework: into each is sown the seeds of its own destruction. But, I don’t think that’s a particularly helpful way to think of marriage. Many achieve their highest level of intimacy and mutual respect just before they end in death rather than divorce. That Bernard couldn’t grow beyond himself and celebrate his wife’s achievements isn’t something we should come to expect as a cyclical process in marriage, it’s a dysfunction.
But the idea of a “shelf-life” or “half-life” of a marriage has merit. All marriages have some rate of decay if left unattended and uncultivated. “Entropy”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death is the inevitable result of what theologians call a “fallen world”:http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=romans%208:19-21;&version=31. None of us is very far from that point in our relationships where we disengage completely. The Squid and the Whale was an urgent reminder of the pain and suffering that comes when a marriage is run aground on the shoals of egotism and neglect.
* ??Chris Welch??: “Misconception: Renting is for Suckers”:http://www.investorgeeks.com/articles/2006/05/23/renting-is-for-suckers (“via Matt”:http://photomatt.net/2006/06/25/renting-is-for-suckers/). Many of my friends are reaching that point in their lives where they’re considering buying a home. However it’s unfortunate that so many choose to buy over rent, especially in this expensive market, because many well-intentioned people are buying homes that are actually damaging their finances.
* ??Fresh Pursuits?? “Canvas”:http://www.freshpursuits.com/canvas/. Canvas brings the freedom to express yourself through design without needing to know CSS or PHP. With Canvas and Ink for Wordpress, you can easily rearrange, reconfigure, and colorize your entire blog without ever touching a line of code.
* ??Michael Barrish??: “Hell Freezes Over”:http://lumino.us/weblog/hell_freezes_over. Revamped and redesigned, it uses haikus in place of business copy (I couldn’t bear to write business copy) and features a new weblog about making websites (you’re soaking in it).
Wondering what “Michael”:http://oblivio.com is up to, I find his new, angsty, neurotic web design company website. Brilliant work.
* I’ve really begun to dig “digg”:http://digg.com lately. As usual, I’m behind the curve (“digg just launched version 3 of their site”:http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/06/22/digg-30-to-launch-monday-exclusive-screenshots-and-stats/), but I think I’m just one of those people that has to see something working well before I can grok it. For the uninitiated, digg is a news site that has its content submitted by users. I had initially dismissed it as another “mob rule by the masses” type app (you know, enhancing the “echo chamber”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/23/echo effect of blogs), but it regularly produces some interesting results. Check it out, and “add me as a friend”:.http://www.digg.com/users/kwalker411.
* ??Granite Consulting??: “Late Binding in Microsoft Access”:http://www.granite.ab.ca/access/latebinding.htm. In essence: if you’re exporting to Microsoft Excel from Access programmatically, just use late binding.
* ??Joshua Porter??: “The MySpace problem”:http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/design/the-myspace-problem. Joshua gives some thought to what aspect of “design” MySpace really excels at. Hint: it’s not the graphical type. Instead of wondering what MySpace could be, let’s learn from what it is. Let’s assume (forgetting visuals for a moment) that MySpace is well-designed instead of condemning it as a visual failure. Let’s ask the obvious questions: why is it so popular? What makes it so successful? The answers to these questions might make us rethink our basic assumptions, but will make our future designs stronger as a result.
* ??Jason Calacanis??: “The new publishing model”:http://www.calacanis.com/2006/06/28/the-new-publishing-model-or-on-rafat-om-federated-media-ad/ (“via Matt”:http://photomatt.net/2006/06/28/new-publishing-model/). Here is the new model: 1. Start a blog with adsense and make spare change. 2. Scale a blog to 250k to 1M pages a month and become big enough for Federated Media, AdBrite, and Blogads to care about you (i.e. sell you’re inventory)–now you’re making a living. 3. Scale over 1M pages a month and become big enough that you can afford your own sales group and fire Federated Media for taking 40% of your money because your cost of sales will be 15-20% as a stand alone business.
* YouTube: “Pirates of The Caribbean Ride”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTQ5eWBlApY (“via Mike”:http://overloadednoggin.com/2006/06/28/captain-jack-meets-captain-jack/). Johnny Depp meets an animatronic version of himself as Captain Jack on Disney’s new Pirates ride. Very cool.
* ??Lifehacker??: “Windows Vista Beta: A tour in screenshots”:http://lifehacker.com/software/windows-vista-beta/windows-vista-beta-a-tour-in-screenshots-183883.php. Wow, not bad, Microsoft. I mean, after some five years of development, you’d hope that Vista wouldn’t be incredibly atrocious. There’s quite a bit of OS X influence in the finder here (nudge–hey Apple: time to get past “brushed metal”:http://daringfireball.net/2006/01/brushed_metal in “the finder”:http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/finder/, by the way), and I’m glad they’re getting away from the “Fisher Price”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP#User_interface_and_performance school of design.
* ??Angela Wu??: “So much rage”:http://hereisangela.com/2006/06/29/so-much-rage/. I’ll agree to this mission if I can be assured that your rage level (which was off the charts that unforgettable night which still haunts me) will stay at a reasonable level.
It’s true: I’m hosting Anglela’s website because she strong-armed me into it. Fear the rage.
* ??Jen Poley??: “1966 Plymouth Fury II”:http://sojourn-of-grace.net/2006/06/30/1966-plymouth-fury-ii/. What can I say? Jode and Nathan wanted a car to work on….we found this in Lincoln, and bought it. We hope to restore it, but if you can believe it, for now we are just really enjoying driving it around town.
I can just imagine how much Jode is enjoying this.
Update: if you loaded this page in the last hour or so and saw a bunch of garbage — yeah, that was me. I was trying to set up the “FlickrRSS”:eightface.com/wordpress/flickrrss/ cache so this site would load a little faster. I think I got it working; the the site is loading a lot faster!
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Uninteresting week? Or has Ken been busy? You decide.
* ??Slate??: “The Misunderestimated Man”:http://www.slate.com/id/2100064/fr/podcast/. Fascinating piece about Bush’s “aggressive anti-intellectualism,” viewed through the lens of his relationship with his dad.
* Don’t drink and blog. Some revelers from Portugal day a couple of weeks ago found the Newark blog and “voiced some opinions about the party”:http://blog.newarker.info/2006/06/09/portugal-day-celebration/#comments. I’m glad they found the site, but it looks like they were maybe a wee bit tipsy…
* ??Jen Poley??: “Route 34, three liars, road kill, and the truth”:http://jenny.sojourn-of-grace.net/?p=84. Oh, those Poleys…
* ??Jason Fried??: “Getting in too-much touch (interruption is not collaboration)”:http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/getting_in_toomuch_touch_interruption_is_not_collaboration.php. Being productive isn’t something that just happens. You don’t just sit down and be productive. Real productivity takes time. It’s a process. You make your way into it. Sometimes it takes 15 minutes or a half hour or an hour or more to really get in that zone. And when you’re in that zone you are actually getting real work done.
* ??Mark Liberman??: “PHPEnkoder for Wordpress”:http://www.weaselhat.com/phpenkoder/. Ooh, this could help us fight spam for emails posted on the “Village Church site”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com.
* Oh, and check out “these photos”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/kennsarah/tags/owenpesnell/ of Owen Pesnell from “last weekend”:http://kennsarah.net/2006/06/19/weekend-update-revenge-of-the-babysat/.
Spent Saturday cleaning up the apartment for our guest, whom Sarah brought home with her from Manhattan in a carseat. Owen Pesnell stayed with us overnight Saturday so Darin & Krissy could celebrate their anniversary. Owen did really well with us, and we even returned him mostly-undamaged. A short jaunt down to the Independence Park gave us lots of photo opps as Owen slid, climbed, rocked, and ran himself out of baby-steam.
Unfortunately, with all his frivolity, he (and we) didn’t notice his collision course with an oncoming miniature bicyclist. After bouncing his noggin off of the sidewalk, we thought for sure we were in for a full-fledged freak out. Instead, he shrugged us off and proceeded to the nearest climbing wall. When I told Krissy, she nodded sagely and replied, “Yup, that’s our son.”
Dina was very excited to greet our new guest, who was less-than-enthused to be covered in dog saliva. Most of our effort that night was in helping Dina resist the urge to inspect the squeeling, taunting, food-flinging toddler. Pictures forth-coming.
Sunday at the Village Church, where Darin _rocked_ the “Deuteronomy 8 passage”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/worship/sermons/2006/06/the-meaning-of-the-desert/ he and I had discussed only a few days earlier. It was cool to hear some of our conversations surface in his message. Great job, Pez.
That afternoon we treated Charlie to all the _paella_ and _sangria_ he could consume, and 3 months of Netflix for Father’s Day.
After Charlie and Irene had gone, Dina, Sarah and I collapsed on the bed and napped.
Then I installed “this”:http://roundcube.net/ to replace our “crappy webmail”:http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/RoundCube.
Monday came too soon.
* ??Alissa Clark??: “New York Blessings”:http://www.relevantmagazine.com/life_article.php?id=7212. On love letters for cities.
* “WeatherIcon”:http://www.viper007bond.com/wordpress-plugins/weathericon/. I wanted to use a widget for weather on “Everything Newark”:http://blog.newarker.info, but I realized that my theme, “K2″:http://getk2.com, disappointingly, still doesn’t support plugins.
* ??John Gruber??: “Macworld Expo 2006 in Review”:http://daringfireball.net/2006/01/mwsf_2006. John mentions in passing that you can mount a WebDAV drive in Mac OS X. Seeing that I have 26 GB (!) available on my web-hosting account (“Dreamhost rocks, people”), I thought I might try to investigate that as a backup strategy.
* Play anything on any operating system with “VLC Player”:http://www.videolan.org/vlc/. This thing is awesome. Schmoo and I were set to watch a movie on the Thinkpad-from-work (the lappy is in the shop right now), and I realized that my computer didn’t have software to play it. A quick Google search for “open source watch DVD” led me to this player, which I have also installed on the Mac. A quick download, slapped the DVD back in the drive, and it just worked. Brilliant.
* ??Hugh MacLeod??: “A man’s heart”:http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/002913.html. So true.
* ??Jeffrey Zeldman??: “Silent phone, secret phone”:http://www.zeldman.com/2006/06/12/silent-phone-secret-phone/. Best snarky Verizon complaint, ever. As far as I can tell, the problem involves phone lines, so you can see why it would take one of America’s largest phone companies five days to tackle a brain teaser like that.
* ??Matt Mullenweg??: “Beeping”:http://photomatt.net/2006/06/13/beeping/ Your assignment today is to take a walk around your blog, application, website, whatever you work with on a daily basis, and allow yourself to be supremely annoyed with the beeping smoke detector in the corner.
* ??Wired Magazine??: “Judging Apple Sweatshop Charge”:http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71138-0.html?tw=wn_index_3. Steve Jobs’ Think Different campaign celebrated labor leaders like Gandhi, who used strikes as a form of civil protest, and Ceasar Chavez, who organized poor, migrant farm workers. But a British newspaper at the weekend published a rather shocking report about the factories in China that make his company’s iPods.
* “Quinn Tetris for the Mac”:http://www.simonhaertel.de/quinn/home (“via John”:http://daringfireball.net/linked/2006/june#mon-12-quinn). Free, open source, and oh-so-pretty version of Tetris for the Mac.
* ??Angela Wu??: “How I got here: blogger break-up”:http://hereisangela.com/2006/06/15/how-i-got-here/ All those times you had “outages,” you never explained yourself, and I started to feel insecure. I know you didn’t mean it to be like that, and I still think you’re a good bloghost. You’ll be great for someone after me, I just know it. Maybe I’ve just outgrown you. Maybe it’s me, not you…
Reset your bookmarks to hereisangela.com.
* Breitbart: “Microsoft’s Gates to Leave Daily Role”:http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/06/15/D8I8SD100.html (“via Jason”:http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/gates_plans_his_exit_from_microsoft_whats_next.php) Bill Gates is stepping down from Microsoft. WOW.
* ??John Gruber??: counterpoint, “And Oranges”:http://daringfireball.net/2006/06/and_oranges. ??Mark Pilgrim??: counter-counterpoint, “Juggling oranges”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/06/16/juggling-oranges. The tennis ball has been bouncing between two of my favorite bloggers over this matter of open formats. Pilgrim’s argument — proprietary and DRM formats will, one day, trap _everything you’ve ever enjoyed about your computer_ (music, video, photos, email, documents, etc.) if you let them — has been compelling and got me playing with Linux again. Gruber’s responses to this have been frustrating — he still won’t address the point of lock-in head-on. I wonder if Mark’s ultimate statement about DRM hasn’t already been best stated in his 2001 blog entry, “My crush on Spyro, what Flash animations remind me of, and what the past will look like someday”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2001/07/29/my_crush_on_spyro_what_flash_animations_remind_me_of_and_what_the_past_will_look_like_someday.