Cafe Bucky

I’m far from my favorite NYC subways this morning. If I were there, I’d still ride in a New York Minute. Many New Yorkers feel the same. They won’t be cowed by threats of terrorism.

The B, C, 1, 2, and 3 are the lines that I used most often, and I sure miss being there and getting around, by foot or underground.

I love ya, New York!

Updated!

And let’s not forget the Beer!

I have a wild idea for a party: mix Social, Creative, and Tech types for an evening, and have fun digitizing the gig itself. A main goal is cross-pollination: someone who knows GarageBand can talk to the person that can edit video - a photographer can talk to someone who groks Flickr - writer meets Wiki person, and so on. It’s an intersection of Artists, Yakkers, and Hackers. Part Geek, Part Performance Art.

To back up a bit, I’m inspired by what I’ve been reading about BAR Camp, an impromptu weekend hackfest that took place last month. My thought is to have a party where sites & creative apps are demoed, and there’s WiFi all around, but also to cross pollinate a bit with, say, a few people who can get something going in GarageBand…. take that music and throw it into iMovie, and mix with scenes from the party itself. Now have someone wander around getting stories / commentary from the guests, and have them quickly demo how they do a podcast. Others tap in an entry or two into a Wiki (links to what got demoed). Someone writes funny captions that go in the video. Some are taking photos, and learning (or showing) the bit about making a slideshow.

Whatever … those are just some ideas. Part Geekfest. Part OctoberFest. Part Art. Bad News: can’t do it at my house. Good News: I can come up with a wee bit of $$ & some equipment to help make this happen (monitors, a few airport express/extreme base stations, a midi keyboard, game consoles, charcoal, lighter fluid, etc :-)
More Good News: this will be at my house

Anne Rice writes in tomorrow’s edtion of the New York Times about New Orleans (Do You Know What It Means to Lose New Orleans?):

But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us “Sin City,” and turned your backs.

Well, we are a lot more than all that. And though we may seem the most exotic, the most atmospheric and, at times, the most downtrodden part of this land, we are still part of it. We are Americans. We are you.

This is the last part of grabbing thoughts from the Trip for now. The title is plucked from a quote of Jack Kerouac (I picked up Hip: The History at the Warhol Museum). I say that some cities, states, or other entities (such as a hotel chain) can be Hip in their own fashion, when it comes to Tech (specifically WiFi).

Free WiFi - If you’re a city/state offering free WiFi, you’re well on the way to “getting it”. It’s a way of saying “get some stuff done, or just have fun, but do it in our space - stay a bit”. I say Iowa gets it. The rest stops have free access, with freeway signs touting “wireless internet” from Davenport to Council Bluffs. You go, Iowa!

A tangent to this is how older towns and cities handle urban growth. Some put a fair bit of effort into creating a nice old / historic district, and it flourishes. Maybe they offer free WiFi as an incentive to get people to hang out and generate some economic activity. Other towns (yes, Grand Island comes to mind once again) don’t get it, let their downtowns wither, and let the developers trip over each other on the way out the planning department door on the way to the bulldozers positioned on virgin ground outside downtown. From my limited exposure, at least the inner Iowa City gets it. They have an extensive Pedestrian Area, and the local library offers WiFi coverage outside its boundaries. And there’s more to come.

Denver gets it. I like that they’re putting in a light rail system along the freeway. I like that they have a good shuttle system downtown. It’s not on par with Portland, OR, but it’s a wheel in the right direction. Lots of WiFi in Denver (looks like they’re #13).

Speaking of transportation, Las Vegas doesn’t quite get it. Monorails are Hip, but not if you have to walk and walk and walk to get to them. Why is the system hidden behind the hotels on the east side of the Strip? I smell a massive compromise. If you’re going to get people flowing amongst the resorts, put the damn transportation front and center, right down the middle of the Strip, with stops at every intersection. Is that so hard? On the plus side, I like the elevated walkways. It’d be oh so Hip to put the damn road underground, and turn the Strip into a massive promenade. Maybe within 20 years?

Don’t even get me started on hotels that still charge for Net (yo, Luxor, you kidding me? $180+ a night and you still want to charge for wired access? Later, Luxor). I praise Holiday Inn Express. They’re not the Hippest, but at least they Get It.

It’s been a bittersweet day for London, with the morning after glow of winning the 2012 Olympics, and then this … How cowardly to bomb innocent commuters! My heart goes out to the people in London and the UK.

My own personal experience with Londoners tells me that this will not deter their daily routines. These are the descendents of those who flipped the bird at Hitler’s air raids of 1940. They will prove to be all the more united, in a strange mixture of grief and pride from the big events of the last two days. Woe be to those who would underestimate the “we’re all in this together” spirit of the Brits.

With Microsoft’s “Evolve” campaign, the company toys with new heights of arrogance.

If you haven’t seen the posters & other ads, the campaign depicts a bunch of Office 97-using office workers. They all have dinosaur heads, and the ad suggests that they “evolve”. As in, “upgrade now”.

Maybe I didn’t take Sales & Marketing 101, but it seems to me that depicting your own customers as dinosaurs because they bought your product a while back is something of an insult. Making fun of your competitors is cool (Apple does this all the time, with posters such as “Redmond, start your photocopiers”). Giving your competitors customers a reason to switch is cool. But insulting your own customers, because they haven’t upgraded?

So what Microsoft is saying is “we have so much market share, and control so many of you, that we can peg you as dinosaurs, and that will prod you into giving us even more money!” Wow.

I do hope that Microsoft customers respond to the arrogance of the “Evolve” campaign. They can take a stroll over to OpenOffice.org.

I’ve been wondering how I might express some feelings about the passing of the Pope. I like what Bono said:

“The best front man the Catholic Church ever had. A great show man, a great communicator of ideas even if you didn’t agree with all of them, a great friend to the world’s poor which is how I got to meet him. Without John Paul II its hard to imagine the Drop the Debt campaign succeeding as it did.”

That’s a great sentiment. I knew he’d have something to say about it. On the one hand, I don’t associate with any particular religion (to me, it seems, so much depends on where in the world you happen to be born and raised - who’s to say which way of expressing a faith has “got it right?”) On the other hand, it’s undeniable that the Pope will be missed by over a billion people, and that he did so many positive things. One senses that his shoes will be hard to fill.

I’ve always regarded Daylight Savings Time as an anachronism. Turns out that Benjamin Franklin is credited with coming up with it. I say that the man is entitled to have one stinker of an idea, but I wish we’d stop following it.

“Leave Time Alone!” says I. I don’t like all this mucking about with clocks.

It’s calendars I want to mess with, and the work week in particular. Yes, I want longer weekends, and you do too. We’re going to figure out how to rearrange the calendar … This is part April Foolishness, part thought experiment.

We get 52 weeks a year (364 days), where many of us work 5 days a week (260 work days). The seven day week is basically 5 on / 2 off. Let’s change it! Since many take off two weeks vacation, let’s call it 50 work weeks, times 5 days = 250 work days.

The one constant you can’t play around with is the length of the year. Our little thought experiment doesn’t involve changing the orbit aroud the sun. The 365/366 thing is the Law.

What if we had a 10 day week? 36 weeks per year (360 days), plus 5 or 6 days at the end that are a sort of “holiday week”. In the 10 day week, we’d work 6 days on, and have 4 off. This is great for getting a lot done on the 4 day “weekend”, but it only adds up to 216 work days. Ah, but bump it to 7 days on / 3 off, for 36 weeks, and you get 252 work days, and every “weekend” is 3 days. Hmmm.

The calendar people will love this. They’ve been trying to think of a way to increase sales for the last 500 years … this ought to do it … They get to come up with the names of two or three new weekdays, and this one detail gets tied up in “standards committees” for a good 15 years.

A variant is to think of a 9 day week. 40 weeks a year of 9 days gets you 360 (and then there’s the wild 5 or 6 day party at the end of each year, especially at the calendar companies, which suddenly seem to have unlimited budgets). What if we had 6 on / 3 off? Well, 6 * 40 gets us 240 work days. That’s pretty good, except some Scrooges out there will drag their staff back in during the 5 or 6 day “end of year” party, in order to get closer to the old-fashioned 250 day “ideal”.

The other thought in this is that there would be a lot of overlapping schedules (i.e. “my weekend is not always your weekend”). A plus in this is that traffic gets spread out a bit, and work facilities are used every day. A big minus is that everyone runs around consulting time scheduling programs, trying to figure out the ever-increasing “when is everybody free to get together?” problem. Those that put on weekend-oriented events are pissed off, because 60% of their usual attendees might be working on any given day.

On paper, the math all works out. In real life, I don’t see how society would cope - “7 days” is what we all know, right? It would work pretty well for a subset of jobs (and some do this now: more than 5 days on, more than 2 off). In any case, it all makes more sense to me than the Daylight Savings Time jazz!