Looking out our window just now, we saw the Good Year Blimp. Really. Click for the photo story....

We had two-way cable before most people (back in 95/96). In 2001, we moved a mere two miles and were kicked back to one-way cable, which means uploads at 56k modem speeds. To a software/web developer, particularly one developing photo software, this is something akin to the sixth level of hell. Every CVS commit in the last four years has been a "let's go to lunch" event. Last week, I saw one of the most wonderful sites in recent memory: Such a small thing to most, but what a difference! I'm two-way at last....

There are moments when technology transcends mere niftiness and reaches high enough to satisfy an age-old human longing, as with the moon landings or first flight. Here's a true eagle cam. Unbelievable. We've been near the bird, but never on the bird....

I work at home, in a comfortable house, with a nice view, on a small mountain. My time is mostly my own. I rarely need to go out, as there's no need for office space, since our staff spans many timezones. We connect by email, IRC, CVS, JIRA, and our in-house wiki. My schedule is flexible, I sleep when I want, I have time to read and relax. So how is it possible that I feel stressed and overworked? I mean, from a mindless exhaustion standpoint, I'm way better off than when I was commuting to Lotus an hour each...

For my birthday, Paula bought me the Winged Migration DVD. We'd seen it in the theaters last summer and loved it. Tonight we watched it again. It's one of the most breathtaking movies I've seen. Over four hundred people spent four years filming birds in flight to make a ninety minute movie with no plot, few humans, and next to no narration. To some, I'm sure this is a very boring movie. "Look, birds flying... whoopee." As for myself, when I came out of that theater, my understanding of birds had fundamentally changed. I'd seen them on the ground, at...

Just watched the movie Boycott, which depicts the beginnings of the American civil rights movement, with Rosa Parks sparking the Montgomery bus boycott, an impressive and effective example of civil disobedience led by a young and uncertain Martin Luther King. The boycott, which eventually led to the repeal of the Alabama segregation laws, got started simply because a small group of people got organized enough to say "we are tired" and "this must change." "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."—Margaret Mead There's a...

This morning, I woke up and looked out on a new landscape: What I love about snow is what I love about writing: the clean sheet of paper. There's that sense of fresh perspective, that anything is possible. The best software design starts the same way: without assumptions. Some call this "thinking outside the box." To me, even that phrase is too constrained. My view is that you've gotta think as if the box never existed, or put another way, do "zero mass design". Zero mass design starts without constraint. You begin with the impossible, then scale it back to...

To prep for my upcoming talk with Dan Brickley, father of FOAF, I figured I'd indulge myself in some wild and irreverant conjecture before hunkering down to a more concise and clear FOAF Tangle Yarn. Imagine someone casts a spell, and we all woke up tomorrow without fear of universal IDs. Let's say Dan bought the domain "humanity.org" and established a worldwide FOAF repository. To make this really wacky, let's say someone invented a cheap way to determine a unique hash ID from our personal genetic code. I can see it now: I walk into my local pharmacy, drop a...

I'm not sure why, but I get along great with Irish and Scottish people. It sounds strange to say, especially having grown up in America where such distinctions are becoming as important as eye color. Much of America is its own kind of monotone, with regional flavor, but a shared sort of sameness. It may have something to do with my grandparents. Arthur Falconer, Sr, left Scotland with the Merchant Marines at age 15 and sailed the world till he settled in New York City, where he met Sally King, herself from Ireland. The fact that my grandparents sounded the...

Anyone who's made software for any length of time will be familiar with the perennial quandary: how do we uniquely identify human beings. First and last names are no good. Home addresses and phone numbers change all the time. People are reluctant to give out Social Security Numbers. This leaves the most unlikely candidate of all: email addresses. How did we arrive at email addresses as our universal identifer? Nearly every web account uses email addresses. PGP uses email addresses. Even FOAF uses email addresses (hashed or not) as the primary key. Seems odd that the thing about us that...

My brother said once, "It's our responsibility to make history." Most of us make the kind of history that lives on in families and friends. We consider ourselves lucky if we make a big difference to small groups. Then there's the few who chase the big dreams to completion, who sidestep the naysayers, and remain true to the task: There's a lot I could say about this photo: the brothers, the beach, the stranger who snapped the shot, the ripples this moment would bring... Instead simply: December 17th 1903, 10:35am ET. Twelve seconds....