Since at least 2006, Microsoft has given away free Virtual PC disk images of Windows XP (and eventually Vista), with Internet Explorer 6 (and eventually IE7 and IE8) pre-configured on them, so that Web developers can properly test their sites under Microsoft's growing family of browsers.

This has been a boon to the Web developer community, and one that has led that community to express its appreciation by bashing Microsoft when their free gift didn't meet developers' always-growing and sometimes irrational demands.

In providing (and constantly updating) these disk images, Microsoft has done a remarkable thing: giving away copies their flagship products, albeit in a somewhat limited form. Sure, it's a form of enlightened self-interest, because doing so means that developers are more likely to build sites that play nice for Microsoft's customers' computers, but still, it's a big deal.

There are (somewhat unflattering) reasons that Microsoft had to resort to this surprising tactic: each successive version of Internet Explorer replaces the previous version, including portions of the operating system itself. The United States made a federal case out of the deep intertwingling of IE and the OS.

As a result, it is not really possible to have multiple complete, properly-behaving versions of IE on one computer at the same time. There have been various hacks that kinda-sorta let you have multiple versions of IE installed, but as a developer, you want to reproduce the end-user's experience as accurately as practical to be sure that your site works as you expect.

Microsoft overcame this difficulty by making free copies of Windows available, pre-configured with the company's browsers, in the form of disk images that could be run under Microsoft's also free Virtual PC (VPC) software. The disk images were time-limited: after a couple of months, they needed to be replaced with new images from Microsoft.

Even in the face of Microsoft's free tools, the griping began: developers on Macs and various flavors of Linux whined that, because Virtual PC only runs on Windows, they still had to buy Windows-compatible computers and a real copy of Windows in order to use the VPC images.

Well, gee. It's not surprising that Microsoft didn't give away virtual machines that run on competitors' platforms. Other companies make 'em, and some of them are free, too! The commercial VMWare Fusion lets you run Windows on a Mac. VMWare offers similar products for Linux and Windows. In fact, VMWare offers the free VMWare Player (for Windows and Linux). Sun Microsystems also gives away VirtualBox (for Windows, Linux, Macintosh and Sun's Solaris).

In time, people figured out how to convert Microsoft's VPC disk images to run under VMWare and Virtualbox. At first, these still involved a Windows machine at some point, but eventually, all-native Mac and Linux processes emerged.

Still, there was complaining about the fact that the VPC images expired, but people seemed grateful enough to be able to test their sites under IE6, 7 and 8 without having to put more money in Redmond's pockets.

Then, unexpectedly (even to Microsoft, it seems), a line was crossed.

With the August 27, 2009 version of Microsoft's VPC images, converting them to work under VirtualBox or VMWare Fusion began triggering Microsoft's "Windows Activation" copy protection, rendering the converted images useless after a three-day grace period.

Pete LePage (PeteL) at Microsoft blogged about the problems that people were having running the IE VPCs under other virtual hosts, going as far as to invite those who were having trouble to write to him, describing their environment, to see if he could figure out what changed and fix it, if possible.

The reaction was immediate and nasty:

You know... it's decisions like this that truly make me want to express to your organization that if I could stop developing for your stupid f-ing browsers altogether, I would do it in a heartbeat.

I understand the writer's feelings and empathize with his frustration, but this is no way to convince a benefactor (Microsoft) that there is a problem with their gift to you.

I can see why some folks at Microsoft — particularly, the IE development team — want this to be fixed, but I can also see why those who attend to Microsoft's bottom line might be in a position to say, "Hey, we're giving away free copies of Windows XP and Vista. All we ask is that you use our freebies on top of something that underwrites those freebies."

 

I wonder if other computer companies — especially those with unususlly vocal fans — would be as generous? As Apple becomes a bigger player with its cross-platform Safari browser, where is an officially-supported and freely downloadable "Virtual Macintosh" and free downloadable (time or otherwise limited) copies of Mac OS X Leopard or Snow Leopard with pre-configured Safari 3 or Safari 4? Where is the developer community's wrath over that oversight?

What do you think? Does Microsoft have an obligation to make it possible to run IE6, IE7 and IE8 on Windows XP and Vista (and eventually, Windows 7) on competitors' operating systems? Do developers have the right to demand that they do?

I'm reading a book, "Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations" that begins with a chapter on Radical Hospitality. I'm leery of writers who toss around words like "radical". All too often, the writer could have chosen just about any word to serve as an intensifier, and settled on something like "radical" because it's the first one that came to his mind.

I was delighted to discover that is not the case in this fine book: author Robert Schnase not only understands that the word "radical" literally means "from the roots", meaning "from the very orgin", but uses the word "radical" to amplify "hospitality" in ways that show that he considered a number of the word's meanings:

1. Schnase writes that the kind of hospitality that a thriving church will exhibit must arise "from the roots": in a Christian church, that would be Jesus, who always pointed further back to his roots: his father Jehovah. Christian hospitality should be rooted in the extraordinary acceptance, forgiveness and sacrifice that the church finds in Christ.
   
   If a Buddhist church adopted Schnase's model, it would find its origin in the teachings of Siddhārtha Gautama. The idea is that a church's hospitality cannot be a technique aimed at achieving a particular outcome (larger membership, for example), but must authentically stem from the spiritual roots that nourish the church itself.


2. He also draws on the sense of the word "radical" that springs to most people's minds: extreme, thoroughgoing, favoring drastic reformation. The kind of hospitality that he calls "radical" will be extraordinarily generous and thougtful. It will dramatically transform both those who practice it, perhaps undoing some of the damage from years of churches living the stereotype of condemning, critical behavior, and those who experience it, "converting" hesitant visitors into long-time friends and members.


3. "Radical" also means inherent in a person or thing. Schnase's version of radical hospitality isn't "grafted on", but blossoms from natural (perhaps even supernatural) qualities of a church.

As I wrote the above, another word kept trying to push its way forward and onto the screen: fundamental. I could just as easily have written "Shnase's … hospitality … blossoms from fundamental qualities of the church.

I find myself embracing the word "radical" while keeping "fundamental" at bay. Unfortunately, "fundamentalists" (Christian, Muslim, Constitutional or otherwise) tend to be reactionary. They seem to believe that there was a "golden era" when things were right to which we need to return from today, when things are wrong.

But I remind myself that they're just words: they're not the uses to which they've been put (though I'm equally prepared to be convinced that words are precisely and only the uses to which they are put: perhaps that's a subject for a future blog entry).

"Radical" and "fundamental" are not so far apart. They're both "down to earth" words, literally: "Radical" = roots (think "radish"). "Fundamental" = foundation. (I've lived in a part of the country where roots can destroy a foundation, so maybe radical and fundamental actually are at odds with each other….)

In fact, see if you can guess which of the following is a dictionary definition for "radical":

• Being an original or primary source.
• Forming a basis or foundation.

It's not the one you might have guessed: the one that mentions "foundation" is a definition for "radical".

The word "fundamentalism", applied to a religious movement, seems to have originated in 1920, to describe conservative Baptists who wanted to "to restate, reaffirm, and reemphasize the fundamentals of our New Testament faith." Frankly, with that description, I don't see much to argue with. If I'm going to call myself a Christian, don't I want to get in touch with the foundation of my faith?

Now comes "radicalism", with which I first became acquainted through an older brother who protested the American war in Viet Nam. Maybe because I am a word nerd who has long remembered (and cared) that "radical" relates to roots, but I believed that what the '60s radicals wanted was to "restate, reaffirm and reemphasize the roots of our nation", to borrow a phrase.

Few remember that an important part of the Hippie "uniform" was an American flag. I suspect that a good deal of this was because the Hippie "uniform" was often a well-worn US Army or Marine uniform, possibly one's own, earned during a tour of duty in Viet Nam. I also think that the most serious thinkers in the movement believed — as many of us across the political spectrum continue to do today — that we've lost touch with the values on which our country was founded, the roots from which we sprung.

The most serious radicals were — and are — "American Fundamentalists" who wanted to recapture the revolutionary spirit that gave birth to our country. We are a nation born in opposition to the corruption of power. The '60s was a resurgence of our founding passion for turning things over, for shaking things up, for "speaking truth to power".

What's this got to do with Social Media, Dave?

Like any technology company with a mature product, we have to consider radical or fundamental changes to keep ahead of the competition. Maybe Schnase's book, and its thoughtful use of the word "radical" — or whatever set of neural circuits it was that connected "radical" with "fundamental" in my brain — rose in prominence in my thinking because I am in the middle of considering radical/fundamental changes to our product.

Our clients, we hope, do the same as they renew their contracts with us.

What, underneath it all, is a particular online community for? What are its roots? What is its foundation? Why does it even exist? How — and why — should we try to grow it? Whom does it serve? What is its benefit to us? To the members? To the society around it?

Those are exactly the questions that my local church, Wesley United Methodist in San Jose's Japantown, are asking right now, and why it is that I'm reading Schnase's book. We're not an online community (well, not only, but you will find a lot of us on Facebook), we're a real-world community. Our roots are in the Japanese-American immigrant experience: the church was founded in 1895, when Japantown itself was only a teenager.

Those are also the questions that I'm asking about all those 100,000s of lines of code that make up our product. As we re-form it, we get a chance to think about what it is.

It started out as online-forum software. Its roots are in hierarchically-organized categories, subcategories, forums, threads and messages. A lot of what I don't especially love about the way our product works, under the hood, is that it the code still bears a lot of the marks of its origin.

So I look at how can we completely — fundamentally, radically — re-think what our product is. What is an online community? Is it forums and threads and messages and attachments and videos? Not so much, really. Those are things that people share with each other, but is that what the community is?

Maybe Shnase's book will help. The "Five Practices" that he believes are central to a fruitful congregation are these:

1. Radical HOSPITALITY
2. Passionate WORSHIP
3. Intentional FAITH DEVELOPMENT
4. Risk-Taking MISSION & SERVICE
5. Extravagant GENEROSITY

Obviously, those terms are deeply tied to the book's focus on church development, not software development or community management, but they could be applied to community or software development if we reword them a little:

1. Radical HOSPITALITY
   
   A good user experience is inviting, helps you feel comfortable, and is deeply tied to the fundamental purpose of the software. It's not enough that the user interface "get out of your way", but should go out of it's way to encourage you to become more engaged with the community.


2. Passionate ENGAGEMENT
   
   A great church pours its heart out during its gatherings: you feel the loving relationship that the people have with their God. A great online community feels pretty awesome, too: when you show up, you sense that the people really care about each other and the community's reason for being. Great social software creates a place where you can express that passion. It not only facilitates engagement with the functions of the community, it seems to anticipate how you might engage next, which draws you deeper into relationship with the community.


3. Intentional PURPOSE
   
   Churches exist to foster development of faith and relationships between its members and between members and God. An online community should be as intentional about its purpose as a healthy church is about its purpose. The platform that supports it (and the people who develop it) must be similarly committed to its purpose, and its developers need to invest the effort to understand its purpose.


4. Risk-Taking MISSION & SERVICE
   
   No community is an island: it exists in relationship with the real world around it. It doesn't exist just for itself. It can empower its members to get out and do something in the real world, too. The risk-taking aspect calls us out of our comfort zone: whether that's building and maintaining an online community even if the ROI is not clear at the start, or making the effort to make a product with an outstanding user experience.
   
   An excellent community platform doesn't just serve itself: It listens and contributes to the world around it. Facebook and Twitter integration and RSS import capabilities will grow into rich inbound and outbound syndication to makes the community a contributing citizen of the online world.
   
   
5. Extravagant GENEROSITY
   
   Great churches and their members are unusually generous, making significant effort taking unusual pains to lift others out of their difficulties.
   
   An online community — or its host — can go beyond the original scope of the community for the benefit of others. Clients can extend special features of their communities — such as the ability for each member to have a free blog or photo album, video library or LiveWorld Groups "mini-community" in order to show generosity to their visitors and members. Social software developers can attend closely to the needs of guest visitors and members, thoughtfully anticipating their needs, and making certain that the product readily and easily fulfills it.

These ideas are not especially "radical" in the sense of extreme or drastic, but "radical" and "fundamental" in the sense of arising from the source — the human need to connect and communicate and to coordinate to make things happen.

Today in the Google search bar in Firefox, I typed the words "how to", while trying to figure out how to find out what text-encoding is in effect for a JavaScript file being downloaded from one of our servers... I was intrigued to see the list of suggestions that Google offered to complete my search:

how to tie a tie — 45,700,000 results
how to kiss — 59,400,000 results
how to get pregnant — 13,900,000 results
how to lose weight — 17,900,000 results
how to make a website — 276,000,000 results
how to write a resume — 9,620,000 results
how to draw — 41,200,000 results
how to solve a rubix cube — 572,000 results
how to write a cover letter — 8,120,000 results
how to get a passport — 9,150,000 results

(I got the "results" counts for each item with the same "search completion API" used by the search bar -- those numbers are returned by Google, but not normally shown in the search bar.)

Geeks reading this will notice that the list is not sorted by the number of results that the search would return: I think they're sorted by the number of requests that Google has received for those terms. Google doesn't tell you how many requests there were. That probably explains why there are almost 60M results for "how to kiss" but it comes second on the list behind "how to tie a tie".

Seriously, though: "how to tie a tie" is the most popular "how to" search? In 2009? I would never have guessed.

What else do these "how to" search suggestions tell us?

Of course, finding a good answer to "how to kiss" may make it easier for you to figure out "how to get pregnant" on your own. And some people might suggest that answering "how to lose weight" might make it easier to research "how to kiss", but I won't have any of that weight-normative talk on my blog.

It's no surprise to me that there are more results for "how to make a website" than all the others combined, and considering what I do for a living (user interface engineer), that result warms my heart. It's no surprise because the web has always been more about the web than just about anything else. Perhaps knowing how to make a website confers such status that knowing how to kiss, get pregnant, lose weight, solve a Rubik's cube — or even how to tie a tie — become secondary considerations.

Also, "how to make a website" is often a way to make a living: which is why it appears so near to "how to write a resume" and "how to write a cover letter". In these economically challenging times, those skills, combined, could be your ticket to financial well-being.

Even, apparently, if you don't know how to spell: "how to solve a rubix cube" will, no matter how you spell it, teach you how to solve a Rubik's cube, leading you to a blissful world of kisses and and jobs and international travel: leading, naturally, to "how to get a passport".

On the topic of spelling, I recently mistyped "windows" as "womdpws" and found that it's a popular misspelling. So popular that Google suggests all of the following searches for it:

womdpws update — 149,000,000 results
womdpws 7 — 762,000,000 results
womdpws 7 beta — 23,100,000 results
womdpws defender — 6,410,000 results
womdpws live — 477,000,000 results
womdpws media player — 77,700,000 results
womdpws 7 download — 57,400,000 results
womdpws live messenger — 21,300,000 results
womdpws movie maker — 5,820,000 results
womdpws installer — 57,600,000 results

Impressively, choosing "womdpws update" delivers results for "windows update," which is probably what the fat-fingered searcher meant in the first place.

But it leads me to wonder: if someone created a product called "Womdpws" would you even be able to find it? ( And how would you even pronounce it? "Wom-dah-pews"? "Wom-dee-poos"? "Wom-dip-wiz"?)

Maybe the fabulous new "Womdpws" product will even teach you how to draw.

It's part of the etiquette of live jazz and blues music to applaud at the end of solos, even as the next one begins or the whole combo kicks in to restate the melody and wrap up the song. At the end of the song, of course, there's the usual round of applause (and depending on how rowdy the joint or the crowd is, whistles or hoots of praise).

But this is different: it is lighter, more like a golf clap; it happens immediately as the player concludes his few moments at the song's center and it fades out politely to give attention to whatever comes next.

I want that for my coworkers, too.

Why is it more appropriate to applaud three minutes of inspired performance on the keyboard of a Hammond organ than three days of inspired performance at the keyboard of a Mac Book Pro?

Maybe that needs to change.

When a coworker solves a gnarly programming issue, crafts an elegant business solution to a client's problem, signs a difficult deal, or gets a recalcitrant client to pay their bill, how about a tasteful show of appreciation for an especially deft solo effort. It takes no less work to develop the skill to deliver for an elegant software or business solution than it does to learn how to craft a tight solo.

At a Jazz performance, it only takes one person to get a gentle drizzle of applause started, two or three more to make it spread through the room and reach the player. When it does, the audience gets a little nod of thanks from the performer. And that feels good, too: you've connected with the star. You get to bask a little in the reflected glow of the crowd's adulation: which you may have even started.

Next time someone does a star turn at work, why not show him or her some appreciation right then? Don't stop everything: the song needs to keep on playing. Don't wait for an "official recognition" event at the project's conclusion, either, but offer up a little adulation as the next player begins his solo or as the whole team spools up to bring back the melody and take us home.

And when the whole song — or project — is finished, be sure to express your appreciation for the whole thing: the combo deserves thanks as a group, just as each player deserves a little praise at the end of her solo.

Monday, June 22 would have been our first son Kevin's 16th birthday. These two poems, especially Emerson's "Threnody" helped me cope with his death. Emerson wrote "Threnody" to memorialize his son Waldo, who died at age 7. It's not easy reading, but certainly rewarding.


The south-wind brings
Life, sunshine, and desire,
And on every mount and meadow
Breathes aromatic fire,
But over the dead he has no power,
The lost, the lost he cannot restore,
And, looking over the hills, I mourn
The darling who shall not return.

I see my empty house,
I see my trees repair their boughs,
And he, —the wondrous child,
Whose silver warble wild
Outvalued every pulsing sound
Within the air's cerulean round,
The hyacinthine boy, for whom
Morn well might break, and April bloom,
The gracious boy, who did adorn
The world whereinto he was born,
And by his countenance repay
The favor of the loving Day,
Has disappeared from the Day's eye;
Far and wide she cannot find him,
My hopes pursue, they cannot bind him.
Returned this day the south-wind searches
And finds young pines and budding birches,
But finds not the budding man;
Nature who lost him, cannot remake him;
Fate let him fall, Fate can't retake him;
Nature, Fate, men, him seek in vain.

And whither now, my truant wise and sweet,
Oh, whither tend thy feet?
I had the right, few days ago,
Thy steps to watch, thy place to know;
How have I forfeited the right?
Hast thou forgot me in a new delight?
I hearken for thy household cheer,
O eloquent child!
Whose voice, an equal messenger,
Conveyed thy meaning mild.
What though the pains and joys
Whereof it spoke were toys
Fitting his age and ken;—
Yet fairest dames and bearded men,
Who heard the sweet request
So gentle, wise, and grave,
Bended with joy to his behest,
And let the world's affairs go by,
Awhile to share his cordial game,
Or mend his wicker wagon frame,
Still plotting how their hungry ear
That winsome voice again might hear,
For his lips could well pronounce
Words that were persuasions.

Gentlest guardians marked serene
His early hope, his liberal mien,
Took counsel from his guiding eyes
To make this wisdom earthly wise.
Ah! vainly do these eyes recall
The school-march, each day's festival,
When every morn my bosom glowed
To watch the convoy on the road;—
The babe in willow wagon closed,
With rolling eyes and face composed,
With children forward and behind,
Like Cupids studiously inclined,
And he, the Chieftain, paced beside,
The centre of the troop allied,
With sunny face of sweet repose,
To guard the babe from fancied foes,
The little Captain innocent
Took the eye with him as he went,
Each village senior paused to scan
And speak the lovely caravan.

From the window I look out
To mark thy beautiful parade
Stately marching in cap and coat
To some tune by fairies played;
A music heard by thee alone
To works as noble led thee on.
Now love and pride, alas, in vain,
Up and down their glances strain.
The painted sled stands where it stood,
The kennel by the corded wood,
The gathered sticks to stanch the wall
Of the snow-tower, when snow should fall,
The ominous hole he dug in the sand,
And childhood's castles built or planned.
His daily haunts I well discern,
The poultry yard, the shed, the barn,
And every inch of garden ground
Paced by the blessed feet around,
From the road-side to the brook;
Whereinto he loved to look.
Step the meek birds where erst they ranged,
The wintry garden lies unchanged,
The brook into the stream runs on,
But the deep-eyed Boy is gone.

On that shaded day,
Dark with more clouds than tempests are,
When thou didst yield thy innocent breath
In bird-like heavings unto death,
Night came, and Nature had not thee,—
I said, we are mates in misery.
The morrow dawned with needless glow,
Each snow-bird chirped, each fowl must crow,
Each tramper started,— but the feet
Of the most beautiful and sweet
Of human youth had left the hill
And garden,—they were bound and still,
There's not a sparrow or a wren,
There's not a blade of autumn grain,
Which the four seasons do not tend,
And tides of life and increase lend,
And every chick of every bird,
And weed and rock-moss is preferred.
O ostriches' forgetfulness!
O loss of larger in the less!
Was there no star that could be sent,
No watcher in the firmament,
No angel from the countless host,
That loiters round the crystal coast,
Could stoop to heal that only child,
Nature's sweet marvel undefiled,
And keep the blossom of the earth,
Which all her harvests were not worth?
Not mine, I never called thee mine,
But nature's heir,— if I repine,
And, seeing rashly torn and moved,
Not what I made, but what I loved.
Grow early old with grief that then
Must to the wastes of nature go,—
'Tis because a general hope
Was quenched, and all must doubt and grope
For flattering planets seemed to say,
This child should ills of ages stay,—
By wondrous tongue and guided pen
Bring the flown muses back to men. —
Perchance, not he, but nature ailed,
The world, and not the infant failed,
It was not ripe yet, to sustain
A genius of so fine a strain,
Who gazed upon the sun and moon
As if he came unto his own,
And pregnant with his grander thought,
Brought the old order into doubt.
Awhile his beauty their beauty tried,
They could not feed him, and he died,
And wandered backward as in scorn
To wait an Æon to be born.
Ill day which made this beauty waste;
Plight broken, this high face defaced!
Some went and came about the dead,
And some in books of solace read,
Some to their friends the tidings say,
Some went to write, some went to pray,
One tarried here, there hurried one,
But their heart abode with none.
Covetous death bereaved us all
To aggrandize one funeral.
The eager Fate which carried thee
Took the largest part of me.
For this losing is true dying,
This is lordly man's down-lying,
This is slow but sure reclining,
Star by star his world resigning.

O child of Paradise!
Boy who made dear his father's home
In whose deep eyes
Men read the welfare of the times to come;
I am too much bereft;
The world dishonored thou hast left;
O truths and natures costly lie;
O trusted, broken prophecy!
O richest fortune sourly crossed;
Born for the future, to the future lost!

The deep Heart answered, Weepest thou?
Worthier cause for passion wild,
If I had not taken the child.
And deemest thou as those who pore
With aged eyes short way before?
Think'st Beauty vanished from the coast
Of matter, and thy darling lost?
Taught he not thee, — the man of eld,
Whose eyes within his eyes beheld
Heaven's numerous hierarchy span
The mystic gulf from God to man?
To be alone wilt thou begin,
When worlds of lovers hem thee in?
To-morrow, when the masks shall fall
That dizen nature's carnival,
The pure shall see, by their own will,
Which overflowing love shall fill,—
'Tis not within the force of Fate
The fate-conjoined to separate.
But thou, my votary, weepest thou?
I gave thee sight, where is it now?
I taught thy heart beyond the reach
Of ritual, Bible, or of speech;
Wrote in thy mind's transparent table
As far as the incommunicable;
Taught thee each private sign to raise
Lit by the supersolar blaze.
Past utterance and past belief,
And past the blasphemy of grief,
The mysteries of nature's heart,—
And though no muse can these impart,
Throb thine with nature's throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west.

I came to thee as to a friend,
Dearest, to thee I did not send
Tutors, but a joyful eye,
Innocence that matched the sky,
Lovely locks a form of wonder,
Laughter rich as woodland thunder;
That thou might'st entertain apart
The richest flowering of all art;
And, as the great all-loving Day
Through smallest chambers takes its way,
That thou might'st break thy daily bread
With Prophet, Saviour, and head;
That thou might'st cherish for thine own
The riches of sweet Mary's Son,
Boy-Rabbi, Israel's Paragon:
And thoughtest thou such guest
Would in thy hall take up his rest?
Would rushing life forget its laws,
Fate's glowing revolution pause?
High omens ask diviner guess,
Not to be conned to tediousness.
And know, my higher gifts unbind
The zone that girds the incarnate mind,
When the scanty shores are full
With Thought's perilous whirling pool,
When frail Nature can no more,—
Then the spirit strikes the hour,
My servant Death with solving rite
Pours finite into infinite.
Wilt thou freeze love's tidal flow,
Whose streams through nature circling go?
Nail the star struggling to its track
On the half-climbed Zodiack?
Light is light which radiates,
Blood is blood which circulates,
Life is life which generates,
And many-seeming life is one,—
Wilt thou transfix and make it none,
Its onward stream too starkly pent
In figure, bone, and lineament?

Wilt thou uncalled interrogate
Talker! the unreplying fate?
Nor see the Genius of the whole
Ascendant in the private soul,
Beckon it when to go and come,
Self-announced its hour of doom.
Fair the soul's recess and shrine,
Magic-built, to last a season,
Masterpiece of love benign!
Fairer than expansive reason
Whose omen 'tis, and sign.
Wilt thou not ope this heart to know
What rainbows teach and sunsets show,
Verdict which accumulates
From lengthened scroll of human fates,
Voice of earth to earth returned,
Prayers of heart that inly burned;
Saying, what is excellent,
As God lives, is permanent
Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain,
Heart's love will meet thee again.
Revere the Maker; fetch thine eye
Up to His style, and manners of the sky.
Not of adamant and gold
Built He heaven stark and cold,
No, but a nest of bending reeds,
Flowering grass and scented weeds,
Or like a traveller's fleeting tent,
Or bow above the tempest pent,
Built of tears and sacred flames,
And virtue reaching to its aims;
Built of furtherance and pursuing,
Not of spent deeds, but of doing.
Silent rushes the swift Lord
Through ruined systems still restored,
Broad-sowing, bleak and void to bless,
Plants with worlds the wilderness,
Waters with tears of ancient sorrow
Apples of Eden ripe to-morrow;
House and tenant go to ground,
Lost in God, in Godhead found.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson


Death is ugly? Oh, my children. No.
If only you knew the beauty that begins where your sight fails,
You would run, run, run, and leap into the open arms of eternity.
But sad is a harvest of green wheat.
And, so you would feverishly cling to earth and finish your mortal task,
I merely gave death an ugly mask.

— Carol Lynne Pearson

Item 3234: 63-Note "La Cucaracha" Cylinder (Hirschelbaum 243), Ca. 1953

Beginning with his 1947 15-note rendition of "The Muffin Man", Shlomo "Slow-Mo" Hirschelbaum deftly transformed world-famous melodies into mini-masterpieces that all but defined the soundtrack of bygone Summers. His earliest charts graced the prickly brass cylinders of the "Eulalie" Electrically Amplified Mobile Music Box (Cunningham Transportable Musical Advertising Company, Cleveland, OH) of the early 1950s. Few of these precious artifacts survived the musical mass-extinction that accompanied the advent of electronic music boxes. Sadly, most of us know Hirschelbaum's oeuvre only through the tinny bleating of those noisome contrivances.

Item 3234 is a Ca. 1953 Eulalie cylinder bearing Hirschelbaum's magnum opus: his 63-note, (nominally) 25-second "La Cucaracha", still a perennial California-Land favorite. Noted as much for the notes he excised as for those he left behind, Hirschelbaum's "Roach Song" (as he loved to call it) is especially appreciated for his daring decision to set it in Waltz time and for the unusual anacrusis that begins each musical cycle.

A scant 258 of the 63-note Hirschelbaum Cucaracha cylinders were issued, and only in 1953 and 1954, until the publisher withdrew them from production due to complaints from ice cream van drivers, who reported that a full cycle of the song could stretch an entire city block, reducing sales. Indeed, the song's distasteful subject matter (a disabled cockroach) and the fact that it conjured images of spicy Mexican food, rather than refreshing ice cream, probably also contributed to its short run, while dramatically increasing the rarity and value of Eulalie cylinders of the tune. Surprisingly, a slightly modified rendition of the 63-Note Hirschelbaum "Cucaracha" is still available on certain electronic music boxes.

This particular cylinder (serial number 187) has been field-modified by filing or hammering down certain note-pins in measure 5 to reproduce the rhythm of the opening anacrusis and hard-soldering three additional pins after the last measure to provide an (unnecessary) transition between the verse and chorus that would likely have left the otherwise mild-mannered Maestro Hirshchenbaum sputtering with rage. Given the rarity and historical significance of the present item, the Museum's Curator grudgingly acknowledges the modification as an "acceptable variant" of the original cylinder.

A recent audio recording of item 3234, played on a late-model Eulalie unit (with the Morrison traction adapter to accommodate this early-model cylinder's large girth and lack of a gear drive) is available in the Museum Curator's office, and may be auditioned upon written request.

OK, just a quickie today:

Over and over, we're told of the current financial crisis, "No one could have seen it coming."

I disagree. The 2,000 year-old Tao Te Ching, by Lao-Tzu says:

When rich speculators prosper
While farmers lose their land;
when government officials spend money
on weapons instead of cures;
when the upper class is extravagant and irresponsible
while the poor have nowhere to turn-
all this is robbery and chaos.
It is not in keeping with the Tao.

Seems to me that someone — anyone — could have seen this coming.

One of my first posts on this site was a riff on hearing an NPR announcer appear to say that the "Tao was off 16 points in heavy trading". I'm back to the Tao and finances again.

California "Vote by Mail" ballots (formerly "Absentee ballots") have a terrible user interface misfeature that has possibly robbed untold thousands of voters their franchise.

To vote for a particular candidate or "Yes"/"No" choice on a proposition, you are instructed to:

• Connect the arrow pointing to your candidate and measure choices.
• Use one thin line to complete the arrow.
• DO NOT sign or initial your official ballot.
• PLEASE USE BLACK or BLUE color ink only!
• Do not use permanent markers.

The instructions are accompanied by this image:



This is how I have been filling in my ballots:



So, it turns out, have several of my coworkers, including one of our founders, who, calling herself "a good Catholic girl", decided to call the county registrar of voters to find out if her ballot, filled out like mine, would be valid, given that the instructions say "Use one thin line to complete the arrow."

The woman at the registrar told her that, in fact, our solidly-filled-in arrows would not count, and that new ballots would need to be ordered!

This is an example of an extraordinarily poor user interface, as far as I can tell, and it may have cost me every vote I've cast in this county since I declared myself a permanent mail voter years ago.

I understand the concern of the registrar: people do all sorts of bizarre things when they fill out forms. I'm sure that people don't complete their arrows with the nice, solid block of black as I showed on the real ballot above, but some sort of bizarre scrawl that the scanners used to read the ballot can't possibly read.

Still, you'd think that a single solid line like the one above would count.

But you'd be wrong.

An Independent Indiana voter interviewed on NPR claims that he's torn between McCain & Obama, and may resort to a flip of a coin in the voting booth. That is the problem with the so-called wisdom of the common people: It's just not that wise.

Certain kinds of politicians talk about reaching out to Joe Sixpack, "main street common sense" and the "wisdom of real people" as though being educated or accomplished were self-evident signs of moral inferiority, or as though having simply completed high school and working at an entry-level job for twenty years conferred a kind of purity. Use too many "three-dollar words" or have a "big fat resume" and you're an elitist. I'm hope the following post contains sufficient evidence to charge me as such...

The Republican strategy in the 2000s seems to be to put forth candidates who look "just like me" to voters. I am a bright enough guy, but I don't want someone just like me in the White House. I want someone who is much more intelligent than I am, better versed in foreign & domestic affairs, more mature, even-tempered, responsible and informed. In short, I don't want the President to be my equal, I want the president to be my superior in as many respects as possible.

As Americans, we are told from childhood that anyone can grow up to be President.

This was intended to express the boundless opportunities in Our Great Land, the equality of every citizen, the promise of civilian leadership and democratic principles. Oh, and to encourage kids to do well in school, set their goals high and work hard to develop themselves to the point that they could be qualified to be the President.

Also, I think it was supposed to bolster our self-esteem.

A brief digression, if you don't mind: Americans' self-esteem seemed to require a lot of bolstering from about the 1970s through the late 1990s. I don't know why, honestly. The charge most often leveled against Americans abroad is that we're loud, obnoxious, arrogant boors. Sounds like we needed our self-esteem knocked down a couple of pegs, not raised up!

Then again, perhaps the reason that we're seen as a bunch of spoiled brats is that the self-esteem support effort carried out for the benefit of the Baby Boomers was simply too successful? Maybe not: the image of the overbearing boorish American predates the Boomer Booster project by several generations.

An unintended consequence of that project may be that one candidate for ultra-high office appears to be just "anyone." In fact, her presence at the top of her party's ticket is convincing the rest of the world — at least Australians — that Inteligence is a dirty word in America:

Intelligence is now viewed as a threat. Isn't that how Pol Pot operated? Meanwhile, the Republican lobby put pressure on the [VP] debate moderator not to go heavy on foreign policy, perhaps fearing that just avoiding intellectual humiliation would be seen as victory.

Here's another way of looking at it: perhaps we've interpreted our country's equality of all promise so that we've forgotten that world leaders should be qualitatively different from the rest of us. Call me elitist, but I want the guy with the "nuclear football" to be able to pronounce the word "nuclear".

Some take fact that the Republican candidate for Vice-President looks and talks and shoots and thinks like any of a dozen High-Powered Working Moms that you might see pickin' up their brood in the Suburban at the Junior High is a sign that we have arrived, that we have delivered on the promise of equality. I take it as a sign that we got it backwards:

What we missed was the part of the "anybody can grow up to be President" narrative that encourage kids to do well in school, set their goals high and work hard to develop themselves to the point that they could be worthy to be President. Just because anybody can grow up to be President doesn't mean that anybody should.

We weren't supposed to throw "just anybody" into the top offices in the land. We were supposed to have more kids who grew up to be qualified to rule the world. Instead of expecting more and more out of our candidates, we lowered the bar instead.

It used to be that the signs of a leader were thoughtfulness, deliberation and the ability to consider of multiple points of view. Nuance used to be a quality readily recognized and worthy of praise. It demanded something of both the speaker and listener. Diplomacy used to be the way smart people approached difficult situations. Now, using the word "nuance" marks you as a self-superior snob, someone who "ain't like me", and diplomacy is capitulation. A willingness "sit down to negotiate without preconditions" shows that a candidate does not have his country's best interests at heart and is probably a terrorist.

A thoughtful coworker today said that she was thankful for the electoral college, because it puts the final selection of the president in the hands of a small cadre (538, in this election cycle) of elite individuals who may choose any person eligible for the Presidency, but generally vote for the candidate to whom their vote is pledged. This puts a remarkable amount of power into a very few hands: I want those hands to belong to educated, aware, thoughtful, serious-minded people. I don't even want the Electoral College to look like me.

Update 10/29/2008: Errol Morris peopleinthemiddleforobama.org video:

At some point, under normal circumstances, children leave their parents and enter the world on their own, often forever. For some parents, such as Edie in Joanna Trollope's "Second Honeymoon" (as heard on Wisconsin Public Radio's To The Best of Our Knowledge), this is an occasion for trauma;. "My children don't need me any more!", such parents sob... For others, it is cause for celebration: "My children don't need me any more!", such parents cheer.

If your role as a parent as to be needed by your children, you'll probably pine with the first group of parents when your kids take off: your identity is bound to a stage of your child's life that is gone, so you may feel bereft, adrift, not sure what comes next.

If your role as a parent as to prepare your children so they won't need you, you'll likely rejoice with the second group: you've fulfilled your parental responsibilities and are free to enjoy what comes next.

I suppose it comes down to whether parenthood is a permanent assignment or a process that grows and changes as your child matures.

Peggy and I are solidly in the second group: we view our job as taking that mewling and puking infant who popped out one day in 1997 and helping him become whoever it is that he will be, keeping him safe as we can while seeing that he has chances to succeed and to fail and to learn to do both with equal grace. So far, so good: he's eleven years old, knows how to make friends or be by himself, can stand in front of a crowd and tell a joke or be in the audience and show appreciation for someone else's talent.

Our perspective came at a price. Ryan is our only child, but not our first: 13 years ago, we said good-bye to our first only child, Kevin.

Diagnosed at 20 months with an aggressive pediatric brain tumor that we were told would "almost certainly take your son's life," Kevin survived surgery and months of chemo that apparently only killed the weak ones. Six months later, the strong ones came back with a vengeance and he died in our arms, on his grandmother's birthday.

But that's not the end of the story.

Some weeks later, Peggy dreamt about one of those round-the-clock days of care that made up Kevin's last weeks. She and Kevin were in our bedroom, he with the two fluffy Mickey Mouse blankets that were in his hands 24 hours a day during his entire illness: Always two. If we needed to wash one, we'd wait until he was sound asleep and c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y bring the far corner of the other up to try to slip it into his hand in place of the blanket needing a wash. It rarely worked: even sick and sound asleep, he knew he'd been tricked and would testily toss away the "fake" second blanket.

In the dream, one of his precious blankets fell to the floor and he fussed for her to retrieve it. Peering over the side of the bed, she saw nothing but blackness: no floor, no blanket. She flailed around, knowing how important those two blankets were to him. After a few minutes of fumbling in the void, she turned back to Kevin and said, "I'm sorry, I can't find your other blanket."

Kevin answered her, calmly and clearly, "It's OK. I don't need my blanket any more."

Suddenly awake, Peggy knew that Kevin really didn't need his blanket any more. She awoke knowing that wherever he was, his time for needing blankets was past. Whether Kevin spoke through the dream to reassure her or Peggy's own spirit gave her a story to help heal her grief is not important: the fact is, there comes a time when your kid doesn't need his blanket any more.

While he was alive, Kevin's parents didn't have that perspective. Born 18 months after Kevin's death, Ryan's do.

He's 11 years old now, so obviously, he doesn't need his blanket any more. In fact, he was never much of a "favorite-blanket" kind of kid, but in a metaphorical sense, there have been — and will continue to be — any number of blankets that Ryan "doesn't need any more".

Eventually, he'll toss aside the biggest blanket of them all: living with us, being dependent on us.

And it will be OK.

If we've done our job right, he doesn't need that blanket any more, and what's more, we won't need him to need that blanket any more.

In the '80s, the stereotypical Soccer-Mom accessory for the family mini-van was the "Baby on Board" sign, which even made an appearance as a the hit song of Homer Simpson's Barbershop Quartet group, the Be-Sharps:



In the 2000s, it's this thing: a series of cartoons representing the members of a family plastered across the lower-left corner of the family gas-guzzling SUV:



What's up with that? Are people so proud of their reproductive capacity that they have to advertise it on the back of their cars?

Believe it or not, this one is actually from the web site of a company that sells these things: and it's become so popular that people actually put this, just as is appears here, on their cars:

What strange irony that this past week featured both an attack on photosensitive visitors to the Epilepsy Foundation web site and the release of Speed Racer.

First off, the movie is a blast: completely different from the original Japanimation that I grew up with, yet true to its cheesy boy-saves-world-by-driving-a-race-car core. It doesn't try to be serious, it tries—and succeeds in a big, big way—at being way too much fun in an utterly original, extremely manic, totally overstimulating way.

With influences as far from 60s proto-anime as motion photography pioneer Eadweard Muybridge and photographic artist David LaChapelle (I hadn't heard of him, either), colors as bright and saturated as it is possible to put on film, a plot simple enough for the youngest audience member to grasp and the most intense flashing psychodelic imagery I've ever seen on screen, Speed Racer is like nothing you've ever seen before. The Wachowski brothers—as they did with "bullet time" in The Matrix—have created a new visual style that I'm sure we'll be seeing in ads for years to come.

As much as I liked the movie (and I'm old enough to have been a fan of the original as a 9-year-old in 1967), I have to wonder if some of the effects won't send some photosensitive epileptics out of the theater with headaches or in an ictal state. My 11-year-old son, who plays plenty of video games and has never shown the slightest sign of sensitivity to flashing or flickering images, said that he felt slightly queasy and had a headache after the movie. I'm happy to report that it was not due to an overdose of movie snacks, either: we had a proper meal of Lasagne before we went to the theater.

In American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic, Joseph J. Ellis writes:

"There were really two founding moments: the first in 1776, which declared American independence, and the second in 1787-88, which declared American nationhood. The Declaration of Independence is the seminal document in the first instance, the Constitution in the second.The former is a radical document that locates sovereignty in the individual and depicts government as an alien force, making rebellion against it a natural act. The latter is a conservative document that locates sovereignty in that collective called "the people," makes government an essential protector of liberty rather than its enemy, and values social balance over personal liberation." (Emphasis mine)

It occurred to me that this view of the Declaration of Independence, with its focus on individual sovereignty standing against an alien government, is at the core of contemporary (neo-)conservatism, while this view of the Constitution, with its focus on government as representing the collective will of "the people", is at the core of contemporary liberalism (Ellis's application of the word radical to the Declaration and conservative to the Constitution notwithstanding).

Conservatives and liberals alike claim to be the true heirs and defenders of the Constitution: touting its assertion of the right to keep and bear arms on one side, for example, and freedom of (and especially from) religion on the other. Similarly, liberal radicals and conservative radicals alike seek to "reclaim" their concept of founders' intent as enshrined in the Constitution, especially in light of the excesses (as they are viewed by both left and right) of the current administration. But liberals especially embrace the way the constitution formalizes and endorses communal action through government for the benefit of the people.

Liberals might embrace the Declaration's radical spirit of "throwing off the shackles of the old guard grip on power", but conservatives see in it a call to "throw the bums out" and declare independence from the overweening arrogance of wasteful bureaucracy.

At this point, this is just an observation whose full development is represented in the above statement, but it warrants further consideration and discussion.

What do you think?

 This was originally just a test-post to see if blogging-by-email worked from Blackberry devices, but some people expressed interest in its contents, so here it is, now that the post-by-email thing is working:

1. Respect and worship any deity within your faith tradition, if you follow one, and support the right of others to do the same.
   
2. Enjoy and support legal guarantees of freedom of religious belief, practice, assembly and speech for all.
   
   
3. Do not use obscene speech in the name of the deities of any religion.
   
   
4. Follow the guidance of your faith or secular tradition every day of the week: every day is important.
   
   
5. Help to establish social safety nets so that the very young, the elderly, the sick, mentally ill, physically disabled, unemployed, poor and broken will receive adequate medical attention and enjoy at least a minimum standard of living.
   
   
6. Minimize the harm you do to others and yourself. Treat others as you would wish to be treated.
   
   
7. Do not engage in sexual activity with another person that is coercive, unsafe, manipulative, public or outside of a committed monogamous relationship.
   
   
8. Do not steal the property of others, except in case of emergency (and then only if you attempt to replace or pay for it later).
   
   
9. Do not lie, either in or out of court. Be honest and truthful at all times.
   
   
10. Attempt to be satisfied with your current standard of living; do not obsess over the possessions of others: that path leads to unhappiness.

I'm listening to a KQED-FM Forum program spurred by recent telecommunications announcements, including Google's "gPhone", Apple's iPhone and Verizon's pledge to "open its network" in 2008. Much of the discussion revolves around the different ways American and European carriers package their offerings, especially, the carriers' practice of subsidizing handset purchases in exchange for "locking" the handset to the carrier (and having features of the handsets disabled by the carrier).

Rewind about 10 years. I'm working @ Apple IS&T as manager of Web Services, and I need to buy a couple of big Sun servers for www.apple.com. I head on over to www.sun.com and try to find some servers. I'm thinking that I'll be able to shop for some basic server boxes, and expect to find a range of offerings that I can configure with the appropriate amount of CPUs and memory and discs.

Ha.

Instead, I find branded bundles: "Netra" packages and workstation packages: but no bare-bones boxes that I can configure as I want. And certainly no info about how to "size" the configuration to Apple's needs based on millions of web requests per month or megabytes per hour or whatever. I can buy a bundle or I can go to hell, apparently.

I end up hiring a consultant to size it and configure it and buy it for me. Maybe this was Sun's plan all along...

Both the locked-in state of mobile phone selling in the States & my experience with Sun are examples of the curse of "Solutions Selling".

Apple has taken this practice to new heights with the iPhone. You get the applications that Apple decides you get, unless you want to unlock your phone and give up on all future software upgrades at the risk of having your phone "bricked" by an Apple upgrade aimed at stopping you from doing what you want with your property.