Author Archives: Karl

Lyrics matter again

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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – bad times brings good music. Honest music. Read Kelefa Sanneh’s piece in the NYTimes on Dashboard Confessional, and the long existing, just getting noticed (mainstreamed) emo scene. People who say today’s music sucks only look where the marketers tell them to – or where their nostalgia drags them.

Nickel and Dimed

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In my off time I’ve been reading “Nickel and Dimed” by Barbara Ehrenreich. I highly recommend it. Speaking from experience – it is a clear look into reality for the forgotten America – the working poor. Ehrenreich, by jumping in the trenches with those that actually make this country work has written a highly readable book. Not facts and figures, but stories of daily struggle thru the eyes of an observer. The kind of stories that are lost in the daily din.

Are there any related weblogs people would recommend? I’m not talking about hard-core rant sites. I’m talking about sites that are as focused as this book is on the daily struggle, with additional tips on how to not only survive it, but overcome it.

A new job, sinuses, and the ceiling comes down

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I’ve left Knight Ridder and have started work for another company. I need to find out what their policies are on personal sites, so I will leave it at that for now. But I am very happy and it is a great opportunity. With the job market the way it is, and with so many having difficult times, I know I’m blessed to still be on my feet.

For the past week I’ve been cursed with a nasty sinus cold. Won’t go away. Yuch!

And yesterday a leak that must have been going for a while underneath my first floor bathroom decided to make itself known in my finished basement (really our true living area). A quarter of the ceiling had to come down!

An eventful week and apoligies if I’ve been late answering emails.

Tim O’Reilly on Flash and more

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…Well, I’ve just joined the Macromedia board of directors, so that may tell you something about the importance I place on Macromedia. It’s important for Flash to become more open and more standard (even if only to the level of Postscript and Acrobat, which have widely been accepted as standards despite Adobe’s ownership, because of Adobe’s complete and timely documentation of all new releases).

I find Central fascinating, because I do think that we’re deconstructing the browser these days. Central is one of several attempts to take the web apart and put it together in new ways. On Mac OS X, Watson and Sherlock are analogous examples. And of course RSS and related syndication technologies are also deconstructing the web in new ways.

We’re entering a new world in which data may be more important than software. The frameworks that enable the manipulation and distribution of that data are yet to be defined. Flash does enable great cross-platform interfaces using a small client footprint (orders of magnitude smaller than Java), so if we can just open up the right kind of innovation and sharing on top of that platform, a lot of great stuff can happen.

It’s essential that we keep those new frameworks open and cooperative. I used David Weinberger’s wonderful phrase above: “small pieces loosely joined.” This is the current architecture of the internet. Tools like Flash and Central are really useful, but they don’t currently support that architecture. However, I believe there is an opportunity for them to play better on the Internet, and by doing so, to become even more successful than they already are.

Read the rest at stage4.