Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

Recent Items
 
Dan Pink | Orange is the New Pink
 
Stationery is bad
 
I Can Tell By Your T-Shirt You're a Commoner Too! Lessig on Bzz
 
We Want Your Feedback - Sure You Do!
 
Fifty is Nifty: Happy Birthday Dave
 
Ask Not What Democracy Can Do For You ...
 
Next: The World Wide Collaborative Grid
 
Bill Gates on Corporate Citizenship
 
Neighborhood Cats
 
The Unreliability of Election Systems is Not Technological

Dan Pink | Orange is the New Pink

Dan Pink | Orange is the New Pink: A Whole New Mind.  I cringe when I see left-brain and right-brain outside of quotes along with the lingering adoption in New-Age Sunday School Social-Psychological thinking about left-brained people and right-brained people.  I hate to tell you, but most of the people I know are whole-brained people, with a smattering of those who manage an adroit pretense at being no-brained people.  One of the remarkable privileges of having a brain is apparently an aptitude for not using it.

Well, by a long-wound [as in winding windy watches, not roads] approach (starting with Tim Leberecht on the Mindjet Blog who hasn’t noticed that “Just One Thing” has been dormant for over two years), I have before me the web page about Dan’s latest book.  Nowhere do I see the cringe-inspiring abuse.  That’s enough to make me want to know more about how to practice six great aptitudes that can be mastered: Design (I could use some of that right now—ask my dissertation advisor), Story, Symphony (awww), Empathy (awwwww), Play (weeee), Meaning (uh?).  I can’t wait to find how meaning is situated.  This fellow crafts his words very finely, gently, and carefully to boot.  I think this is a whole-brained sort whose work I want to see.

So I ordered the book, Dan.  I even clicked the amazon.com link that appears to give you some Amazon Dollars juice.  Now, please respond to my left-brained need for an RSS feed on your site, huh?  That unleashes my playfulness.  Really.  Hey, and it is a bundle with Blink and I get free shipping.  Oh, there are all of these other recommendations.  Umm, yummy.  But I’m done: I have to figure out how to save my pennies for that whole-brained support instrument, Mind Manager, when my free-trial expires.

In honor of this event, I shall have this be my “Just One Thing” for today (here only) That other post was really yesterday for me.  Late yesterday.].  After all, a guy with the playfulness to say “Orange is the new Pink” appeals to my empathic side, and it doesn’t hurt that he looks like Billy Joel as played by the younger Tom Hanks, but we won’t go there:  It doesn’t mean anything [;<).

posted by orcmid at 5/7/2005 10:44:30 AM

Stationery is bad

Stationery is bad.  I suspect that Scoble won’t have any problem giving some of his link-juice to this site.  I felt a mild ickiness at having to drop my firewall’s default rejection of MIME-type integrated objects—something I often have to do—but I laughed so hard I almost hurt myself.   To grasp all of the physical comedy, I had to watch each video 4 times, and I still may have missed something.

Thanks to Craig Pringle and a parade of other TabletPC advocates who now not only feel cool but supported as well. 

 

posted by orcmid at 5/7/2005 12:22:08 AM

I Can Tell By Your T-Shirt You're a Commoner Too! Lessig on Bzz

With a hat-tip to Laurie Anderson.  I guess language really is a virus, huh?

 Lawrence Lessig: Advice Taken.  Larry Lessig and the Creative Commons folk, along with Dave  and BzzAgent, have had an interesting week.  The outburst over CC accepting pro bono support from BzzAgent stirred up a hornet’s nest of a different bzz.  I want to say something about that, because it ties so much into other things that are happening.  But first, …

No, No, Put it on a T-Shirt!  In choosing to decline the offer from BzzAgent, Larry posts a lengthy analysis and appeal in which every paragraph is to be savored.  But I want to start with the opportunity for valuable swag.  Larry says,

If there is power in this movement, it comes from this volunteer economy. That doesn't mean we won't pay people to work for us; it doesn't mean we don't think people should be paid for their work. What it means is that we can't dilute the meaning of what it says when someone says, “I'm a commoner.” (I'm sure no one ever says that, but you know what I mean.) Authenticity is essential. The power of the authentic act — an artist giving up remix rights; an author allowing her book to be shared freely — is the power that makes this movement grow. [my emphasis – dh]

 I want that T-shirt.  I’m a Commoner.  I say it.  I do.  Some restrictions apply: You must publish an accessible work under a Creative Commons license.  Then you be a Commoner too.  I’m paying my dues right now.  There’ll be plenty more where that came from.  Mostly, the idea is to encourage people to try it and see what really happens rather than whatever fears and disbelief (and weird political and ideological interpretations) are evoked by the notion of making public works in the creative commons.  I think of it as a toe in the waters of a rich and diverse trust economy. 

Notice how much the there’s harmony with the conversation of authenticity, authority, and passion also championed by Shel Israel and Robert Scoble in their invitation to business blogging. 

There’s also a connection with Scoble’s triggering a major dialog on corporations as good citizens in civil life, a conversation that shifted from outrage to an under-the-barrage serious and public inquiry over the tension around relationships of employees, managers, corporations, governments, communities, society, civil affairs, and the social contract.  This has impacted the public conversation of Microsoft executives and it has led to interesting expansions of the topic in the media.

I finally think I get what Tim Bray was pointing at when he says anger has a place in blogs.  It doesn’t mean people have stopped listening, at least not the people whose blogs I admire.  Lessig points out that being interesting doesn’t come from a disinterested point of view.

Coming back to Larry’s essay, I want to focus on a critical aspect of living in the commons.  Larry recognizes that Commoners inhabit a conversational and creative space that lies between unrestrained license and the closed, controlled, locked-down notion of possession (like art collectors who jealously keep their treasures only for their own eyes).  It is more than that: a commons doesn’t work without civility.

Larry says, “ … I am sorry for the bile that has been spilled across the wires about this. I wish we could learn to do this less.”  He especially thinks it is important to recognize that “words like ‘creepy’ are unfair weapons in any fair rhetorical fight”  and is unwilling to see evil in those who are looking at things differently.

My friend and associate, Bill Anderson, give copies of P. M. Forni’s Choosing Civility: The Twenty-Five Rules of Considerate Conduct to friends and colleagues.  I think we should do more about creating civility in our participation in social life.  Now that washing mouths out with soap has ceased to be acceptable parenting, we need to practice on ourselves as adults.  We only have our example for the young, now, and that matters more than we can ever know.

There’s probably another T-shirt message in here.  But if we choose a bird as a theme, let’s not have it be flightless, ok?  (Well, I’d make an exception for the platypus.)  I’d prefer Immaneul Kant.  “Citizen of the Commons: Where Human Beings Are Ends, Not Means.”

Thanks Larry.  You do us proud.

posted by orcmid at 5/5/2005 10:33:39 AM

We Want Your Feedback - Sure You Do!

I’m moderately indignant about a local neo-conning counter-culture account of something that serving Governor Christine Gregoire is accused of saying in an interview, and I’m on a fact-checking rampage.  The 2005-05-02 KING5.com Top Stories page does not support the claim at all—no surprise considering the scurrilous quality of the allegation—but I can’t get the video clip to play.  All I get is the toothpaste commercial, not an interview of the governor by Meg Coyle of NorthWest Cable News.  So if you get it to play the interview, would you leave me a comment that let’s me know if

• The interviewer was strange enough to ask Governor Gregoire whether she believed in democracy.
• Whether the Govern answered that question or anything else remotely connected with an expression of belief in democracy or not.

Meanwhile, being the geek geezer that I am, I set out to let the TV station know that I am having a problem with their web-site material.  Naturally, the only contact mechanism provided on the site seems to be a web-based form.  So I provide a nice little bug report with URLs and everything, and click the Submit button:

500 Servlet Exception

500 Servlet Exception
java.lang.NullPointerException
at com.belo.customerservice.servlet.action.CommitTicketAction.execute(Unknown Source)
at org.apache.struts.action.RequestProcessor.processActionPerform(RequestProcessor.java:484)
at org.apache.struts.action.RequestProcessor.process(RequestProcessor.java:274)
at org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet.process(ActionServlet.java:1482)
at org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet.doPost(ActionServlet.java:525)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:165)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:103)
at com.caucho.server.dispatch.ServletFilterChain.doFilter(ServletFilterChain.java:113)
at com.caucho.server.webapp.WebAppFilterChain.doFilter(WebAppFilterChain.java:177)
at com.caucho.server.dispatch.ServletInvocation.service(ServletInvocation.java:221)
at com.caucho.server.hmux.HmuxRequest.handleRequest(HmuxRequest.java:392)
at com.caucho.server.port.TcpConnection.run(TcpConnection.java:331)
at com.caucho.util.ThreadPool.runTasks(ThreadPool.java:464)
at com.caucho.util.ThreadPool.run(ThreadPool.java:408)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:534)

Resin-3.0.8 (built Tue, 08 Jun 2004 02:25:40 PDT)

No that’s an abstraction leak you have to love.  I guess the support folk were too busily sitting around gloating how much Microsoft sucks that they didn’t think about failure modes and what happens when friendly folk (a.k.a geek geezers {or is it geezer geeks, I wonder}) want to let them know there’s a problem.  No, I’m not so friendly that I’m going to debug their server for them.  And if I did, how would I let them know? 

I looked for an e-mail address and came up empty handed.  This is what I call making the friendlies work too hard, and I’m done with it.  I really just want to know what the interview conversation was.  Sheesh.  Please let me know if you find out how to listen to the feed.

posted by orcmid at 5/3/2005 04:29:02 PM

Fifty is Nifty: Happy Birthday Dave

Scripting News: 5/2/2005.  I think Shel Israel and Robert Scoble gave Dave a wonderful birthday present in their posting of draft Chapter 4 on The Red Couch today.

Happy Birthday, Dave!

Thanks for all of the gifts you’ve made to us.  We’ll always remember you.  Go Dave!

posted by orcmid at 5/2/2005 05:18:32 PM