Month: April 2003

Udell’s book on collaboration

Blogs, scopes, and human routers. Back before there were blogs, my groupthink laboratory was the NNTP protocol, which I used at roughly four levels: workgroup (my new media development team at BYTE Magazine), department (the BYTE editorial team), company (all of BYTE), and world (BYTE’s public newsgroups). I learned something then that was, and still is, quite difficult to describe — but critically important. I call it the principle of scoped collaboration, and I illustrated it in a chapter of my book like so: … [Jon’s Radio]

Judging from the chapter excerpt, Jon’s book looks like it is probably worth a read even though it was published back in 1999.

Last bit of news from the music front is that there’s a new Jayhawks album out. It’s called Rainy Day Music. I was in a restaurant or bar and heard a Jayhawks song I had never heard before. When I checked Amazon they were taking pre-orders. The last time I checked, I had told Amazon how I feel about the Jayhawks so I’m a little pissed that their recommendation engine didn’t let me know about the release.

Also recently arrived from Amazon is the Wilco DVD, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart. I haven’t watched it yet, but oddly enough, I have watched the bonus DVD which contains extra footage and a couple of live performances. I’m looking forward to checking it out. Obviously the band is awesome but the story about how they essentially bought back their own album (Yankee Hotel Foxtrot) and put it out themselves should be good.

The new Ben Harper CD, Diamonds on the Inside, is very cool. After the first track, I was disappointed there weren’t more reggae tunes but he’s such a versatile artist you kind of need the variety to appreciate how talented he is.

Had a weird problem with my WiFi hookup at home

Had a weird problem with my WiFi hookup at home. Some days I’d have perfect connectivity from the living room. Other days it’d be real spotty. The weird thing was that it wasn’t like I had a weak signal. The signal would go from 100% to 0% then back to 100% repeatedly about every 5 seconds. Of course, I ultimately fixed it by trying the obvious solution last. The solutions that did NOT work were disabling all of the cordless phones, adjusting the antennae, turning off WEP, etc. What did work was upgrading the driver on my laptop and the firmware on the access point.

And, the added bonus is that now the built-in wireless bells and whistles with XP are functional. XP keeps track of the wireless networks it has come across. You can configure WEP keys, passphrases, etc. and it keeps track of that hooha for you so can just go from wireless net to wireless net without having to remember the SSID for Starbuck’s or whathaveyou.

Great sailing this weekend

Great sailing this weekend. We moved Dad’s boat (“Ahoy!”) from Eagle Point, where they put it in the water, over to Pier 121. This was the first time I saw her in-person. She’s a 1968(?) Columbia 26 mkII. For the last 34 years, she’s been sitting in Marina Del Rey, owned by the same guy all those years. It’s very different from sailing the J22 for a lot of reasons, but still fun. We didn’t have time to put her through her paces–a storm was moving in. We had a little excitement putting her in the slip. The strong headwind and the boat’s extreme amount of freeboard (and an early turn) caused me to miss the slip. My pride suffered the most damage. I’m looking forward to more spring sailing and some summer evening sails with the fam.