Herniated Disk Update

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Things have been steadily improving – the pain in my left leg is no longer constant, nor as bad. It still strikes while standing or sitting too long, or when carrying additional weight on the left side of my body.

A few things I still miss however – I can’t play my guitar for any length of time, and the combination of medication and sudden bouts of pain leaves me continuously drained.

I see light at the end of the tunnel now though. There’s no residual pain in my right foot from my fall – it’s completely healed. And they’ve been adding additional exercises at my physical therapy sessions (three times a week) to both strengthen my trunk and my upper body. Shoot – I’ve lost ten pounds over the last two months.

I’m looking forward to keeping exercise a part of my daily routine. Who knows, maybe by the end of all this, I’ll be healthier then ever.

Then again, I better shut up, or I’ll take another spill!

“Miserable comforters are ye all.”

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LATimes: Editorial: Too terrible for words:

IN THE BIBLICAL Book of Job, the anguished hero is visited by three friends who attempt to comfort him by drawing airy and sententious lessons from his agonies. Of course, they end up adding to his troubles; Job endures not only the real pains of grief and sickness but the indignity of having his suffering milked for rhetorical effect.

If only it were true that Monday’s mass murder on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University was the kind of tragedy that moves us to quiet reflection. In fact, the shootings that killed more than 30 people and wounded nearly 30 others occasioned a blizzard of hasty conclusions, instant position-taking and the rehashing of old arguments. For the sake of the dead, for the sake of the living, and even for the sake of honoring this grim milestone — the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history — we should remember that there are times when silence is the best response.

Events like these are almost impossible to react to sanely. A group of people you don’t know have been killed in a senseless crime. Too young to have established much of a past, they’ve been robbed of present and future; the weight of the offense, the rotten meaninglessness of it, makes it awkward not to have something to say.

So the ghastly death toll — perhaps inflicted by one man with a pair of semiautomatic handguns — becomes an obvious argument for enhanced gun control. Or, conversely, for the right to bear arms because Virginia Tech is a “gun-free zone,” and the Virginia Legislature last year killed a bill that would have allowed students to carry guns on campus.

For those who support universities’ in loco parentis functions, the school’s apparently unconscionable delay in alerting the student body to the presence of a gunman on campus is at the heart of the tragedy. Then there’s the male-violence angle, supported by a shooter’s apparent rage at an ex-girlfriend. Most pernicious of all, perhaps, is the request to put the matter “into perspective.”

“I have heard many such things,” Job says. “Miserable comforters are ye all.” No newspaper is in a position to criticize anybody for capitalizing on tragedy or taking convenient positions. There will be time for both in the days to come. But now is a time to respect, quietly, the tears and the pain of this terrible event.

On Kurt Vonnegut

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Kurt Vonnegut passed away last week, at the age of 84. Wish we had the chance to hear him about this past week’s events, from Imus to the blogger Code of Conduct. But we’ll always have his books, and the innumerable writers he influenced.

NYTimes: Kurt Vonnegut:

…the time to read Vonnegut is just when you begin to suspect that the world is not what it appears to be. He is the indispensable footnote to everything everyone is trying to teach you, the footnote that pulls the rug out from under the established truths being so firmly avowed in the body of the text.

He is not only entertaining, he is electrocuting. You read him with enormous pleasure because he makes your hair stand on end. He says not only what no one is saying, but also what -as a mild young person – you know it is forbidden to say. No one nourishes the skepticism of the young like Vonnegut. In his world, decency is likelier to be rooted in skepticism than it is in the ardor of faith.

So you get older, and it’s been 20 or 30 years since you last read “Player Piano” or “Cat’s Cradle” or “Slaughterhouse-Five.” Vonnegut is not, now, somehow serious enough. You’ve entered that time of life when every hard truth has to be qualified by the sense of what you stand to lose. “It’s not that simple,” you find yourself saying a lot, and the train of thought that unfolds in your mind as you speak those words reeks of desperation.

And yet, somehow, the world seems more and more to have been written by Vonnegut and your life is now the footnote. Perhaps it is time to go back and revisit that earlier self, the one who seemed, for a while, so interwoven in the pages of those old paperbacks.

David Shenk, author of “Data Smog”, posted an interview with him that took place back in the beginning of Shenk’s career, “Duty to One’s Country: A conversation with Kurt Vonnegut about freedom of expression, life, liberty, and happiness”.

InTheseTimes: Joel Bleifuss interviews Kurt Vonnegut back in 2003: “Kurt Vonnegut vs. the !&#*!@”

InTheseTimes: Kurt Vonnegut essay: “Cold Turkey”:

…When you get to my age, if you get to my age, which is 81, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged, what life is all about. I have seven kids, four of them adopted.

Many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.

I put my big question about life to my biological son Mark. Mark is a pediatrician, and author of a memoir, The Eden Express. It is about his crackup, straightjacket and padded cell stuff, from which he recovered sufficiently to graduate from Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” So I pass that on to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer, so you can forget it.

I have to say that’s a pretty good sound bite, almost as good as, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, 500 years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ.

The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula for gunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks. And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew that there was another one.

But back to people, like Confucius and Jesus and my son the doctor, Mark, who’ve said how we could behave more humanely, and maybe make the world a less painful place. One of my favorites is Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute in my native state of Indiana. Get a load of this:

Eugene Debs, who died back in 1926, when I was only 4, ran 5 times as the Socialist Party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning:

As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.
As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it.
As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Doesn’t anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools or health insurance for all?

How about Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. …

And so on.

Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney stuff.

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.

“Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers” in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

Flex, Flash, and Comcast Interactive Media’s Fan 4.0 Alpha

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The team I belong to at Comcast, Comcast Interactive Media, released an alpha version of our video player, The Fan, this week.

You can give it a try here. If I say so myself, it’s pretty sweet.

While more information is available on its official cimLabs page, including links to give feedback, I’d like to point you towards one of its developers, Arpit Mathur, and his blog entry about it.

This version of The Fan was built with Adobe’s Flex and Arpit has a lot to share about the project. Feel free to leave a comment and tell him what you think.

As Arpit mentions, we’re on the lookout for Flash developers. But there’s more to the CIM story than Flash. In fact, the development stack we use at CIM resembles what Bruce Eckel proposed in a piece called “Hybridizing Java” on Artima a while back. We are looking for experienced Web developers of all stripes to join us. Check out cimLife for more.

Update:

Arpit’s post about the new version of the Fan is earning some buzz.

RIApedia: Comcast Launches New Flex Based Video Site

Masable: The Fan – Comcast’s New Flex Video Site

Ryan Stewart: Comcast jumps into Flex 2 for media content

Shelley Powers: Cool Thingie

Update:

Aaron Held, my manager at CIM, checks in with more about Flash, Java, and The Fan.

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Follow the linkage on Techmeme.

Tim O’Reilly == Tipper Gore?

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No of course not.

But this  still looks like  to me.

The push to have blogs adopt a ‘Code of Conduct’, including content warnings for visitors, reminds me of the P.M.R.C. and the “Warning, Explicit Content” stickers that are smacked on on just about every album worthy to buy.

I wonder what Frank Zappa would have to say?

Watch the whole Frank Zappa video. Then read Tim O’Reilly’s post and comments about the proposed ‘Code of Conduct’. Then revisit the conversation taking place about it (more links later). The overtones are there.

Question… where can I find the blogosphere equivalent of the “Filthy Fifteen” so I can subscribe to their RSS feeds?

Update: Frank Paynter has a way forward that sounds right to me – and I think it can still be effective.

Update: I’m not alone in seeing the similarities. I like that icon 🙂

Update: Additional links and commentary:

Jeff Jarvis: No twinkie badges here.; “This effort misses the point of the internet, blogs, and even of civilized behavior. They treat the blogosphere as if it were a school library where someone – they’ll do us the favor – can maintain order and control. They treat it as a medium for media. But as Doc Searls has taught me, it’s not. It’s a place.

deep jive interests: Why Are We Still Confusing “Blogging Code of Conduct” With “Having a Comments Policy”?: What we really mean to discuss is the more mundane aspect of blogging, which is to merely having a comments policy.

Shelley Powers: badges: I’ve seen as many vicious comments in men’s weblogs, as I’ve seen in women’s. I think the perceived ‘threat to all women’ supposedly inherent in weblogging has been exaggerated-not to our benefit, either.

Boing Boing: Blogger “code of conduct” trades freedom for politeness: Tim O’Reilly’s well-intentioned Blogger Code of Conduct is an attempt to come up with a voluntary set of behavioural norms that will keep blogs civil and honest. However, I was very uncomfortable with Tim’s draft, as it seemed to preclude real anonymity and invite censorship.

Dan Gillmor: In Blogosphere, Honor Should Rule: They’re creating a bit of a monster, as they discuss asking people to put logos on their work defining various categories of behavior. Who’d be the judge of it? The government? Libel lawyers? Uh, oh.

Nicholas Carr: Thanks, Tim and Jimbo!: In the future, blogs that can safely be ignored will be marked with a cute little badge..

Dave Winer: O’Reilly’s code of conduct: We all seem to be speaking with one voice today, this code of conduct idea is not a good one.

Robert Scoble: Code of conduct or not?: So, for now, I guess I’d have to wear the “anything goes” badge.

Seth Finkelstein: “Blogging Code of Conduct” – WHO ENFORCES IT?: I am simply shouting to the wind here out of frustration with the failure of blogging to provide any defense whatsoever: WHO ENFORCES THE CODE-OF-CONDUCT?

TNL.net: Blogger’s Code of Conduct: a Dissection: Because of such lapses and because I believe that “the interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship,” I have to say that this code is not only a bad idea but one that should strenuously be rejected by members of the blogosphere.

A comment I left on Tim O’Reilly’s post:

“I think I’m still very concerned that saying you take responsibility for the comments on your blog means you actually take *legal* responsibility for them.

The only people who can take such responsibility are those with time on their hands – with money and resources.

Which leads to thinking that only those with money should enable comments on their blog.

Maybe I’m the only one concerned about this angle because I’m the rare exception of someone still in touch with poverty and being poor and folks that aren’t tech savy – in this discussion mainly filled with technologists and such.

I’m sorry but that and the addition of the badges make this feel like a form of self-segregation – just another way of identifying ‘us’ against whomever ‘them’ is.

Aggregators will be able to use such badging to further filter the Web, keeping other voices from its edges from being heard.

Having commenting policies makes a ton of sense. That’s obvious. But what this is evolving into….

I’m sorry, IMHO it’s reactive and needs a re-think.”

Jeneane Sessum rocks – Why Journalism Matters

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We become part of the stories we discuss on our blogs. We mold, change, and affect the public’s perception of the people, places and events we talk about, via Google’s lasting, aggregating lens.

More and more evidence points to Jeneane Sessum being unfairly connected to the matters I posted about yesterday and her good name has been drug through the mud. That mud leaving trails all over Google.

As Jeneane says:

There are layers and layers of important issues that intelligent people can tackle and use to make meaning out of this. I hope that effort moves forward.

Me too.

So while folks are discussing the code of conduct suggestions over at Tim O’Reilly’s, I’d like to remind folks of The Citizen News Network and Center for Citizen Media project – Principles of Citizen Journalism, and think about that first principal – Accuracy – before passing on information that isn’t proven again.

As Scott Karp says, this entire episode illustrates “Why Journalism Matters”:

I have been watching in silent horror for days as this drama has unfolded – horror not only at Kathy Sierra’s traumatization, but over the total unrestrained free-for-all in the blogosphere. This is a case study in hearsay, innuendo, rumor, defamation, libel, jumping to conclusions and every other negative consequence of unrestrained publishing that the principles of journalism are intended to prevent, and notwithstanding some notable failures, generally do prevent when applied with some seriousness of purpose.

I read dozens of blog posts on this incident, and I still had NO CLUE who might or might not be guilty of what. Each new post I read tangled the web further, layering misinformation on top of disinformation. There was precious little “WHAT do I know” and a whole lot of “WHO do I know and how do I feel about them.”

Then I read this article by a JOURNALIST at the San Francisco Chronicle. I can’t say for sure whether all of the fact here are straight, but this is the only place I came across that actually attempted to ascertain through a coherent process what the facts might be or to lay out a coherent sequence of events. AND, you’ll notice that the only names of those (alleged) to be directly involved in the incident that the article mentions are Chris Locke and Kathy Sierra, both of whom the journalist interviewed and quoted. In the blogosphere, naming names was all about shoot first and ask questions latter.

Update: Anyone can commit acts of journalism. With this story, the fact is, few of us actually did. And the consequences are no good for anyone.

Update: There should be a “Clay Shirky rule” for social software discussion threads…

First person to make a connection to a Clay Shirky piece gets props or insults or something like that….

I bring this up because so much of this series of events recalls an old Clay Shirky piece worth revisiting: “A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy”:

…We’ve had social software for 40 years at most, dated from the Plato BBS system, and we’ve only had 10 years or so of widespread availability, so we’re just finding out what works. We’re still learning how to make these kinds of things.

Now, software that supports group interaction is a fundamentally unsatisfying definition in many ways, because it doesn’t point to a specific class of technology. If you look at email, it obviously supports social patterns, but it can also support a broadcast pattern. If I’m a spammer, I’m going to mail things out to a million people, but they’re not going to be talking to one another, and I’m not going to be talking to them — spam is email, but it isn’t social. If I’m mailing you, and you’re mailing me back, we’re having point-to-point and two-way conversation, but not one that creates group dynamics.

So email doesn’t necessarily support social patterns, group patterns, although it can. Ditto a weblog. If I’m Glenn Reynolds, and I’m publishing something with Comments Off and reaching a million users a month, that’s really broadcast. It’s interesting that I can do it as a single individual, but the pattern is closer to MSNBC than it is to a conversation. If it’s a cluster of half a dozen LiveJournal users, on the other hand, talking about their lives with one another, that’s social. So, again, weblogs are not necessarily social, although they can support social patterns.

Nevertheless, I think that definition is the right one, because it recognizes the fundamentally social nature of the problem. Groups are a run-time effect. You cannot specify in advance what the group will do, and so you can’t substantiate in software everything you expect to have happen.

Now, there’s a large body of literature saying “We built this software, a group came and used it, and they began to exhibit behaviors that surprised us enormously, so we’ve gone and documented these behaviors.” Over and over and over again this pattern comes up. (I hear Stewart [Brand, of the WELL] laughing.) The WELL is one of those places where this pattern came up over and over again.

Well worth reading if you never have, or re-reading if you did a long time ago.