Chatham Light

Late afternoon, at Chatham Light, my phone service is finally working again. It had pretty much failed for most of the beach at Truro and Wellfleet. I'm glad to be reconnected.

With the lighthouse behind me, I'm checking messages, smiling at friendly voice mails, but now I'm lagging behind at the top of the path and I see my husband and son below in the sand, like characters from a diarama, glued to the pretty beach scene. What a beautiful evening.

Near my head, a gull and another gull friend are suspended in the air, looking all the world like two remote control toys from Radio Shack in grey and white plastic. They are doing that lovely friction-free gliding on air jets which they navigate with complete ease, as if held up by a provident hand. With the beach so far below, they are at my eye-level only five feet away — they seem to be hanging there motionless in the stiff breeze, waiting to use my phone when I'm done with it. Sure guys, help yourself.

Hey, Is Cape Cod A State?

My son calls from the back seat as we're headed back to Boston, "hey, is Cape Cod a state?" I turn to look, it's dusk and I see a beautiful boy — he's sandy and sunburned a bit and happy as can be, and like a big brother looking over his shoulder, there's the most gorgeous moon, almost full, winking good bye from Hyannis.

Cape Cod a state, well, you could say, a state of mind, I think. But I give him the right answer instead — a part of the state of Massachusetts actually — this satisfies and soon we are home.

Avez-Vous Goutee Des Canneberges?

Et pour mes amies francais, un lien a propos de Wellfleet et la region de Cape Cod. Venez nous voir a Massachussetts. C'est chouette. Amusez-vous bien ce weekend. C'est un jour de conge lundi ici aux Etats Unis. Jean-Yves, ca va?

Must Read: Jeneane

Very interesting stuff from Jeneane's blog. She's quoting the French writer, Helene Cixioux on an idea she calls an "entredeux", simply translated as "between two" (worlds):

"In this case we find ourself in a situation for which we are absolutely not prepared. Human beings are equipped for daily life, with its rites, with its closure, its commodities, its furniture. When an event arrives which evicts us from ourselves, we do not know how to 'live.' But we must. Thus, we are launched into a space-time whose coordinates are all different from those we have always been accustomed to. In addition these violent situations are always new. Always. At no moment can a previous bereavement serve as a model. It is, frightfully, all new: this is one of the most important experiences of our human histories. At times we are thrown into strangeness. This being abroad at home is what I call entredeux. Wars cause entredeux in the histories of countries. But the worst war is the war where the enemy is on the inside; where the enemy is the person I love most in the world, is myself."

Off to Cape Cod Tomorrow

Off to Wellfleet in the morning. First time ever to Cape Cod, strangely, after living in Boston for two years now. And I don't believe I ever went when I lived here right after college either.

Conference Day Three

Okay David, you win the blogging war with your great conference coverage of Connectivity 2002. Here's another cool site, check out TechDirt.com — Prashant Agarwal was blogging at the conference a few laptops away from me, they do a group blog on technology. Honestly, I spent more time out of the room meeting interesting attendees than inside the room. Thanks to Sarah Stirland, Jordan Cohen, Sy Yules, Chris Herot, Susan Cohen, Jennie Bourne, Patrick Ross for having a minute to chat and a handy business card.

It was especially fun to meet Jennie Bourne and David Burstein, who've authored a new book on DSL. Check it out.

The weather was glorious -- it was one of the most beautiful days we've had in Boston in a long time — just a lovely May day right on the harborside— nice day for watching the water taxis zip back and forth between downtown beantown and the hotel pier.

Wise Men Say

Got on a bit of an ELVIS BINGE today for some reason.

Wise Men Say
Only Fools Rush In ...
But I Can't Help Falling In Love With You.

Such simple perfect lyrics.

Take My Hand
Take My Whole Life Too ...

Technically Speaking

This conference has a fairly technical orientation and we're about knee deep in acronyms. At night, the cleaning crew has to bring in specially designed vacuums to suck up all the ILEC's and CLEC's and DSL's and SIP's and ISP's off the floor -- they're lodged in the carpet. And there's a messy pile of 802's and 11's in the corner that just won't go away.

I was worried I wouldn't be able to "hack" it — that is, understand a single word — but something else is happening. Speaker after speaker suggests not a new complicated technology as a solution, but rather what we need is a new way of thinking about the problem, a new story, a new idea. Reminds me of a book I've been reading.

See you tomorrow.

Guilty As Charged

Dr. Weinberger is now truly taking me to task. Sorry, David, you're a terrific speaker, I wanted to hear more of you and less of the rest of us. Didn't I make up for it at lunch, giving my seat to Kevin Werbach, so you guys could sit together and chew the fat. Speaking of which, did you ever GET any lunch? They may have gone to Hartford to get your vegetarian lunch plate, what took so long?

Yes, my shotty coverage of the conference is an abomination. Thanks for working your fingers to the bone. But David, did you have to toss David Isenberg's underwear DIRECTLY at ME?

The immortal words of Gretchen Pirillo ring through my ears, "Mothers, don't let your boys grow up to be bloggers."

The Priest Weighs In

Getting lots of great email and posts from fellow bloggers, thanks guys. Doc notices we're having too much fun, as does Mary Lu.

AKMA, our Anglican priest blogger, ponders the deeper spiritual question mentioned on my blog today when he emails, "I can't help wondering WHERE those brownies were for the past week and a half."

My thoughts exactly, but then, some things are better left unsaid and unthought.

Big Dig Dessert and Dinner

My six-year-old son and husband just made me dinner — excellent treat. First they go to the D'agostino's Deli in Arlington Heights on Mass Ave. They have killer deli subs. The roast beef is so good on a long sub roll. And it's the best DEAL in town too — about $3.50 for a big sub.

Then they crossed the street and got a quart of BIG DIG ice cream at Brigham's. It's got chunks of chocolate asphalt, gobs of chocolate brownie slurry, caramel sauce rusty ditch water and vanilla snow drifts. They put big scoops of it on heart-shaped brownies they'd bought for Mother's Day but lost and then found again tonight.

Not Enough Diet Coke

I finally figured it out. The conference just doesn't have enough Diet Coke. That's why I've gone nutty. I've been unable to self-medicate today. I'll bring a case tomorrow.

Or maybe I really am Rageboy!

Professor Weinberger Takes Us To Task

Yikes, man! What gives?! I'm sitting there in the conference this morning, FOREVER, keen on hearing you speak and first, they let someone else from the afternoon speakers lineup go ahead of both you and Kevin Werbach, which kindof got on my nerves and then instead of speaking for an hour, you talk for ten minutes and then give us frigging homework! Holy Heck!

And may I add — you didn't even plug your god-darn book! David, David, David, racontez moi, mon vieux, qu'est-ce qui se passe? Qu'est-ce-que ca veut dire!? Je pige que dalle! Qu'est-ce-que tu m'enerve!?

Well, it certainly was more fun than visiting a sick person in a nursing home — but really, I wanna hear the book pitch, not break into groups and do an exercise.

I was in such a bitchy state, you won't believe what I did. And I was so rude to one of the guys in the group, even I was shocked. I interrupted him mid-sentence after about five minutes of his monologue on the RIAA saying, "You used all the words you're allowed to use. You have to STOP now. We need to focus. David will kick our asses if we don't come up with something fast."

To be fair, you have about 4000% more energy and zip as a speaker than anyone there today. You did get us going. And I kinda liked your red crayon-scrawly powerpoints — what font is that? So it wasn't terrible or anything, but wasn't what I was expecting. You know my attitude, "PLUG THAT BOOK, PLUG THAT BOOK!"

But you gave us a near impossible problem — explain to a senator what opportunity the US is about to miss if we can't get it together and create a ubiquitous, pervasive, robust global network infrastructure. Okay, okay, it was fun to talk to the other people in my group. But JesusChristAndChristmas, man, nobody TALKS to senators -- you bribe them or give them blow jobs! Isn't that the American Way?!

Beltway Schmeltway

First of all, I didn't realize Kevin Werbach was at the FCC before his current position as Editor of Release 1.0 w/Esther Dyson at Edventure. That came as a shock. I guess I didn't assume people make it out alive, once they enter such a "regulatorium" as Bob Frankston calls it, much less with the ability to write fresh prose and actually get things done. His talk was really interesting. David, per usual, has blogged majorly about it. Better than I can. It's also on Kevin's site at the link above.

I can sum up today's conference pretty quickly, and this is MY opinion, not the speakers — the FCC is one major Leviathan, an unruly monster with all the wrong ways of thinking about the Net, all the wrong classifications (Per Kevin's great presentation: they think of the whole thing in four buckets -- the wrong four buckets: telecom, broadcast, cable, internet. They should look at it in a whole new "vertical" layered fashion: content, applications/services, logical, physical. )

I still think the FCC's a big stinky monster in Washington, DC ready to eat any comers and I'm glad some people think it can change, doesn't sound like it to me. I think Kevin is right to say we need to dig in and change the regulatory laws over the next decade since this will affect building the infrastructure of the next century, but honestly, does the average Joe really want to spend the next 8 to 10 years pressing congress to draft new telecom law? Our man Joe is just trying to get a six-pack of beer in time to catch the game and figure out how to pay his alimony payments at the end of the month.

It's a perfect monster this FCC, because any normal person would rather run for their life when they see it, than enter the belly of the beast. It speaks to the big conversation — who runs his country (as it has always been) — lawyers, guns and money.

Biz Cards

I always get business cards at conferences and put notes on them to remember the people. Here's some of my notes: "Alan Webber look-alike" "Reporter Woman w/too quiet voice" "Lobbyist, but good guy" "R&D Brainy Lady, sat in front of me" "Wed Lunch guy, on the left" "Wed Lunch guy reporter, on the right past David" "Smart Gutsy Brooklyn-Accent Guy"

David, thanks for taking my picture, but if I were jotting down a self-description from the photo, I'd have to say, "woman in dark cave with straw hut hair."

Connect The Dots

I just linked to my site from Rageboy's page and boy, it's confusing since there was no permalink. He's talking about Paris in the spring and romance. I'm talking about the FCC, Spectrum and Connectivity.

Anyway, if you're looking for Rageboy stuff, try "They Saw Us Dancing In The Gym" below on my blog here from yesterday.

If you want some stuff on the Connectivity 2002 conference today, see immediately below. I'm not blogging about everything, just a few things. I had to leave before David Isenberg spoke which I really regret, he's brilliant. But go check out Weinberger's site for more detail. He's doing a super complete excellent blog of the conference. I know, he was clickety-clacking like mad next to me in a most annoying fashion. I'm rethinking about whether I really like blogging during conferences. It kindof reminds me of people using their cell phones through dinner in restaurants. I hate that. It certainly is great for people who ARE not attending the conference.

The "I Don't Know" Network

Here's part of what David Reed was talking about today at Connectivity 2002. What if you made something really robust, that people could use to build a lot of things and you actually left them alone to build those things, making no assumptions about what those things would look like.

In fact, what if you made a network that was based on the idea that instead of arrogantly assuming you knew exactly what customers would do with it, how they would use it, what they would use it for and THEREFORE designing in "features" based on these assumptions — you designed it to play second-fiddle, to just be there behind-the-scenes and let others design applications at each end that served their needs. It made me think of a quotation I've always liked from Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man.

"The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails." -- James Joyce

Really, think about it, designing an infrastructure that was agressively application neutral, as David Reed put it, and left that app part to others as a starting point for serious innovation — what kind of a network would it be? Perhaps inspired, and surely elegant, simple, and respectful of the contribution others would bring to the table.

And is there anything terrible, or perhaps something great about an engineer designing something and when asked what it will do and what it will cost and what it means, simply answering, "I don't know." Especially when he DOES know that he's creating something that will let others innovate and answer the "I don't know" question for him in a myriad of amazing ways.
This is part of what David Reed was discussing this morning, more soon.

David, What About Lunch?

David Weinberger's doing the most terrific blogging from Connectivity 2002 and while it seems he hasn't left a thing out, I have to mention, sitting with him, David Isenberg (www.isen.com), Joe Plotkin (www.bway.net), and me (halleyscomment) at lunch was the best — especially when Dan Bricklin (www.bricklin.com) came over and we started discussing what David Reed (www.reed.com) had said about the end-to-end argument.. David Reed really was worth the price of the whole conference. More on this soon.

Joe asked me what I did. I said, "I blog." He asked me what my blog was like. Hard to answer, so I asked David Weinberger who was sitting next to us to describe it, DW says, "All Halley All The Time."

Just Connect

Off to Jeff Pulver's Connectivity 2002 for the next three days at the Hyatt Harborside at Logan Airport here in Boston. Bob Frankston clued me into it. Check out the site.

There seems to be a proliferation of speakers named David. I used to think these high-tech conferences never had any women speakers because they were women. Now I get it, these conferences don't feature women speakers unless they're named David.

And BTW, what's with Vortex making Doc sign an NDA and not letting him blog. Give it up guys.

They Saw Us Dancing In The Gym!

Great Rageboy, thanks a lot --

I'm over at AKMA's site, minding my own business,
just trying to build some dinosaurs and you let
everybody know we used the Time Machine, already went
to Blogcon in Vegas next August, got married, flew to
Paris, had our honeymoon, but you wouldn't get your
LAZY BUTT out of bed and get me a few lousy croissants,
so I downsized you, we got divorced next year and now
we're back to May 2002 again and you just felt like
spilling the beans!

This is the last time I go trading brains at the U of
Blogaria prom, with the first guy who looks willing,
much less messing around with the Space/Time Continuum
with you behind the gym.

-- Halley

Have You Been Reading Jeneane Lately?

Get over there. Her posts about Kmart are the best — shopping there recently, shoplifting there a long time ago and later working there as their premier shoplifter-spotter. Wow! There are a few posts, so go back to Blue Light Special to start.

In-Betweeners

Doc likes the way someone is finally getting the Blogs V. Big J Journalism paradigm right. It's not about one versus the other, it's about Blogs AND Big J Journalism as Scott Rosenberg's piece on blogs in Salon reasonably suggest. Thanks for the pointer. There's something insightful in the end of Scott's piece that I find even more important. Check this out:

But blogs can do some things the pros can't. For better and worse, they air hunches and
speculations without the filter of an editorial bureaucracy (or the legal vulnerabilities of a
corporate parent). They trade links and argue nuances, fling insults and shower acclaim. The
editorial process of the blogs takes place between and among bloggers, in public, in real time,
with fully annotated cross-links. This carries pluses and minuses: At worst, it creates a lot of
excess verbiage that only the most fanatically interested reader would want to wade through.
At best, it creates a dramatic and dynamic exchange of information and ideas.

I think the most significant issue is how bloggers PLAY together. What goes on in between blogs is one of the most unique aspects of this art form. We play, we visit, we tease, we hang out our laundry for the neighbors to see and they call back, "hey, who wears the bright red long johns?"

Scott gets the "in between" part of the medium, which is about much more than news or opinion. It's about community. It's about a ground swell of people saying we matter. If there's anything to say about the Blog v. Big J Journalism battle it's about the underlying assumptions of each. Bloggers are reminding Big J Journalism that people matter, we're powerful and we've been ignored, or worse, labelled "consumers" and allowed to subsist on a meager soup of watery editorial content while being force-fed advertising and advertorial slops.

Starting Up a Start-Up

While we're tap-dancing, brain-swaping and generally goofing around over here, Dervala's writing an incredible narrative of how she and her husband started Vindigo. It's really excellent. Don't miss it — Eat Shop and Play — from her blog of Friday 18 May 2002.

I remember the first time I saw Vindigo. I met Seth Godin for lunch in NYC in 2000 and he beamed it into my Palm. It was way cool.

BTW, Dervala's Irish and she writes some great stuff a few posts below this one about living in London, feeling a part of it, until some British girlfriends of hers over beers mention that if they were to marry some guy, of course, he'd have to have a nice big ... British passport. This helped her move quickly to New York City. She's a great writer.