Listics

There’s a book afoot.

Sounds like a tooth condition.  Someone whose judgment I trust sent the Plaxo bot skittering across the net to shake out my details for her address book.  Okay.  I filled in the card and signed up for Plaxo myself.  I was a bit surprised when the free service gave me an immediate opportunity for an upgrade to the tune US$20 per year. 

The Plaxo set-up is simplicity itself.  All your Outlook email contacts get listed in this nice tidy list.  So I look at the list and I realize that most of my peacenik friends are paranoid about stuff like this, so that leaves blogging friends, professional contacts, and a bunch of miscellaneous contacts, friends and family.

It’s not easy to check the little boxes when you should be bed because you have a fever of 102 degrees and your teeth are chattering and the next cough threatens to wipe out your screen in a haze of viral mist, but some things we do because we’d rather not be lying flat on our back wasting time.  So, I left my home in Georgia and found myself sitting on the dock filling in little check boxes hallucinating Otis Redding in the background.

Not everyone feels real mellow about Plaxo.  One of the awkward things to come out of this experience was spamming a professional contact list (Did I really put a check in that box?  When are keyboarding and operating heavy equipment the same thing?)  One of guys says the message I sent that came from Plaxo came with a Mydoom variant attached.  A woman on the list pointed out that "friends don’t let friends drive Plaxo."  Do you have any Plaxo stories you’d care to share? 

The bad news is the list of links you get when you google "Plaxo is evil."  I hadn’t thought to do this before I dove in headfirst.  The good news is that, according to this comment on a post at Judith Meskill’s social software blog,

When you remove your account, all information associated with the account is also removed from our servers. This includes the address book information you were using Plaxo to help manage (ie: your contact information for friends, associates, etc…). Members can remove their account at anytime by going to: https://www.plaxo.com/delete_account and following the simple instructions.

Also: under full disclosure, even after removal, your account information may be stored within a backup or log file as part of normal system maintenance and backup. We maintain log files for 30 days. But your information still falls under the provisions of the Privacy Policy in place at time of collection. As you may already be aware, our privacy principles are:

- Your Information is your own and you decide who will have access to it.
- You maintain ownership rights to Your Information, even if there is a business transition or policy change.
- You may add, delete, or modify Your Information at any time.
- Plaxo will not update or modify Your Information without your permission.
- Plaxo will not sell, exchange, or otherwise share Your Information with third parties, unless required by law or in accordance with your instructions.
- Plaxo does not send spam, maintain spam mailing lists, or support the activities of spammers.

These provisions and more are covered in our Plaxo Privacy Policy found at: http://www.plaxo.com/privacy/policy . If you have any further questions, please let me know. Thanks.

Stacy Martin
Plaxo Privacy Officer
privacy @t plaxo.com   

And so to bed… at least one more day of this thing in front of me.  Seems to have morphed from flu to bronchitis.  Yuch…

It’s Saturday and I’m taking a sick day.  On Wednesday I had a molar removed… fallout from some inept work and bad luck in the wisdom tooth department many years ago.  Felt fine for the rest of the week.  Last night I felt some congestion and coughed a little.  Today I have a monstro fever and a bad cough.  There are a lot of things I’d like to work on, but they’ll have to wait. 

I want to expand on Dave Rogers’ comment in the post below about a billion and a half from the Bush administration being a good thing. I think Dave is right and I think he’s wrong. It’s deeper than that. He can be right based on surface interpretations, but he can be very wrong based on the deeper meaning of the propaganda work that the administration is engaged in.  I wish that someone with a better grasp of the way to acknowledge that a billion and a half spent on marriage counseling is very different from the work that the administration seems to be doing with the money would chime in.   Thanks for your earlier comment Dean.  Now if only I could see the middle ground emerge…

I want to congratulate Susan Mernit for her Bloggie nomination!!  Vote early, vote often.

I have to go back to bed.

Dan Gillmor will appear on Madison’s listener sponsored community radio station, WORT, this Friday between noon and 1pm US Central time.  He’ll be interviewed by Diane Farsetta, a senior researcher at the Center for Media and Democracy and the Friday host of WORT’s program, "A Public Affair."  Dan will talk about his newish book (among other things, I’m sure) "We the Media."  You can download and/or purchase the book here.

Diane has kindly invited a local blogger to join her following Dan’s segment.

Betty writes about the game she is developing:  "The objective of this game is to collect the most happiness for the least amount of work without going broke."  Her cousin Norm posts today a complete essay by Jonathan Rose, "The Classics in the Slums."  Buried deep in this essay, we find the following homage to Thomas Carlyle:

No doubt Thomas Carlyle was a cranky male supremacist, but for
Elizabeth Bryson (b. 1880), the daughter of an impoverished Dundee
bookkeeper, he offered "the exciting experience of being kindled to the
point of explosion by the fire of words." Carlyle’s "gospel of work" so
inspired her that she was driven to win a university degree and become
a distinguished New Zealand physician.

Another cranky male, although no supremacist, has been taking Carlyle to task in these parts for his unmitigated racism, among other things.  The Carlyle/Emerson bond and the puerility of privileged Brahmin transcendentalism rub Chris the wrong way.  There’s a not so subtle irony here considering that Chris Locke, one of our era’s more profound non-conformists, feels such antipathy for one we might judge his intellectual progenitor.

Emerson can’t be all bad.  He gave Thoreau a place to crash more than once.

By his personal example Thoreau put into practice the Transcendentalist
principles of self-reliance, personal integrity, and spontaneous
intuition. About the uplifting spiritual energy within he wrote,
"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable
ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor."
For Thoreau philosophy was not clever logic or formulating a doctrine,
"but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates,
a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust."
He exhorted, "Explore thyself." We must learn to obey
the laws of our own being which will never be in opposition to
a just government. Thoreau’s great innovation is in the ways he
suggested for opposing an unjust government in order to be true
to the higher laws of one’s own being.

Today Dan Gillmor reminds us that Free Speech Belongs to Us All. 

…in a time when the lines are blurring between journalists and the rest
of us, remember that freedom of speech (and religion and the right to
peaceful assembly, etc.) belongs to everyone. It is the foundation of
liberty.

I’ve had some professional training and some higher education (hoo boy was it higher! esp. the part in the sixties~)  but my practice is that of the autodidact.  The sad news is that my memory is shot and my rationality ain’t that grand and I use cheap shot ad hominem debating tactics so all this autodidacticism goes for naught… I am at best a legend in my own mind.  I don’t remember a single line of Rupert Brooke.  The satire of Thomas Love Peacock is lost on me.  When Norm’s uncle loaned me Hersey’s The Child Buyer back in 1960, I read the book and promptly forgot every word. When Betty’s husband loaned me Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions eight or ten years later.  I stashed it and only read it while I was blowing dope.  This is not a course I’d recommend for the serious student.  This is not even a course I’d recommend for someone who simply wants to lead a happy life.  I don’t recall ever returning that book.

Not that I didn’t enjoy it.  The weed I mean… I don’t remember a word of the Kuhn.  But I think I inhaled more deeply and more often than Bill and Hillary and you see where that got us.  I live in this little rat shack on the swamp and they live in the posh totty suburbs not too far from Manhattan.

These days I read all there is to read of Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, and Larry McMurtry… oh and Tom Wolfe, and all the great airport novelists like Grisham and Clancy.  Sometimes I get stuck reading Feynman and recently I’ve been forced to swallow great chunks of theory of mesh wireless networking talk and such, but that’s in hopes of staying employable.

One thing most of these novelists aren’t doing is exercising their rights of free speech very strenuously.  You have to go to bloggers like Chris Locke, Norm Jenson, and Dan Gillmor for that.

I do read a lot of blog posts too I guess.

In December I was taken with the idea of LexThink, an idea about pulling people together in Chicago to create a formula for the "perfect professional services firm."  So I wrote Matt Homann and said, "Please mister, can I come?"  Matt hasn’t written back so I guess I don’t get to go play.  This may be a good thing since I understand there’s a wedding in Honduras on April 2 that I’m expected to attend, but gee…  it sounded like a great idea when I read about it.

Actually, there are hundreds, thousands, millions of  great events that people haven’t invited me to over the years… here’s another one.  Shit.  I think it has something to do with the career thing.  People put these cool CVs together and then they have a concrete expression of merit.  I’ll have to remember that next time I have a life to live.

I lifted the folllowing from a comment I just left at Allied. Here I get a moment to correct most of the typos and add some links.  Lynx.

***

God what great company.  I may be suffering seasonal affective disorder or I may just be sad, but it’s been hard not to just be a grouch lately.

I remember when Fang fairly leapt from my keyboard and then I had to worry about the ethics of populating the doggosphere with fictional mutts.  These last few days, Molly - not a fictional mutt - has consumed our attention here with barfing and diarrhea (I told her to get a Live Journal account for the latter but that was before I had seen Shelley’s Baby Shark warning). 

Anyway Molly got spayed.  Call me a liberal, but I just don’t want the responsibility of puppies.  Next thing you know she’s up all night barfing every hour, unable to keep even water down, licking a few drops off my fingers but dehydrating none-the-less.  Suddenly a miracle occurs and she’s eating and drinking.  Now the barfing turns into a case of the runs and we’re up all night with her taking her out every hour when she whimpers.  Then we finally have a big snow storm, and it’s clear that poopie dog has to stay inside.  We can’t consign her to the kennel in weather like this.  Now we’re working short days and hoping to keep the poop off the floor, as she regains some strength in the intestinal department.  Meanwhile,  it’s been two days now and we can see why the vet said to keep her on a leash for 10 days because she’s ready to go Molly zooming this way and that whenever we go out - which we learned by accidentally dropping the leash and seeing her turn into a lightning bolt.  But lightning bolts frequently don’t heal their little abdominal incisions properly so on a leash she stays.  Indoors she hassles us to let her out.  Outdoors she pulls on the leash like a pair of yoked oxen.  We could plow fields behind this dog.  Shoulders on her as wide as an NFL line person.  Get it?  Line person.  As if women wanted to work in the front line for the Green Bay Packers or something.

What a dog.  What a blog.  I think I just wrote a whole post instead of a comment!  Well, that’s what the copy and paste thinger is for.  Now it’s a comment.  Soon it will be a post at my place.

Thanks for the inspiration Jeneane.

We’re all familiar with the Complete Idiot’s Guides…  the range of topics is incredible, yet the series suffers from a lamentably low GQ (Grandiosity Quotient).  Rather than aim at people who want to learn a foreign language, rewire the garage, or raise lab rats and turn a profit, I’m aiming this new series at people who REALLY want to improve themselves.

I call the series "How Hard Could It Be?"  Some sample titles:  "Rocket Science… How Hard Could It Be?"  "Brain Surgery… How Hard Could It Be?"  "Large Hadron Accelerator Construction… How Hard Could It Be?"  These well written, information laden, nicely bound slim volumes are conceived as a Great Books of the 21st Century collection - something no real post-postmodern renaissance person will want to be without.

While the high volume sales are expected from wire racks near the check-out lines at finer bookstores everywhere, it should be noted that faux-leather bound sets also will be available, complete with engraved bookplates.