I’m in the middle of packing up before I check out of the hotel and head up 101 to the airport. I thought I’d blog for a moment before putting away my PowerBook. It was a good, productive week here in California. Picking out the highlights, I got my annual performance review out of the…
Read More A good weekI’m visiting SeeBeyond in Monrovia, CA* today. SeeBeyond builds enterprise application integration solutions for a wide range of customers using some really cool middleware technology they’ve developed – check out their website for details. They were acquired by Sun last month, and ever since the deal closed I’ve wanted to talk to them. This morning…
Read More Visiting SeeBeyondScanning the HuffPo RSS feeds, I spotted this insightful piece by Jaron Lanier: “I am writing this on a United Airlines flight over the Atlantic. The flight is tense. We had a mechanical delay and United has been having trouble re-routing customers who will miss connections, apparently because it is now understaffed. The major airlines…
Read More Jaron Lanier on the structural gotcha for American businessI flew out from Boston to San Francisco yesterday evening for a week of meetings. Travel has become pretty routine of late, so I’m glad to have three new experiences to relate. First, I flew out of the new Terminal A at Boston Logan. This replaced the old Eastern Airlines terminal, which was used by…
Read More Three new travel experiencesBack in the early 1990s I was a huge fan of Saint Etienne. Their first two albums Foxbase Alpha and So Tough showed up regularly in my car cassette player; songs like “You’re in a bad way” and “Kiss and make up” had an infectious appeal. (And of course there was their wonderful version of…
Read More CD of the… oh, never mind: Tales from Turnpike House by Saint EtienneI always like to think that when I meet someone famous, I can bottle up my enthusiasm, and act cool, calm, collected, and adult. But looking back on each occasion, I have to confess that I’ve failed. Check out this piece by Maralily about her magical airport encounter with Teller (complete with photo). The refreshing…
Read More As cool as one can be… in the circumstancesMy mother is blind. This is a source of great frustration to her, because despite her age and her disability, her mind is as sharp and energetic as ever. She listens to the radio, and books on tape/CD, and subscribes to various audio journals; however, in many cases the only feasible approach is to ask…
Read More Web to text to speech to CD to my mother[Company policy, and contractual obligations, mean that I have to conceal a few details. Never mind – the message will be clear.] I’ve always thought that, next to banking, the most mature kind of applications software was in airline ticketing. Like many of you, I’ve visited airline websites and seen the fare for a particular…
Read More No names, no pack-drillHerewith the nostalgic observations of my colleague Robin Wilton on listening to Bill Clinton on the BBC: “This morning I heard a snippet of an interview with Bill Clinton; he was lucid, intelligent and persuasive. Some of his sentences had several linked clauses. He used words like ‘profound’, ‘disproportionately’ and ‘dislocation’, and used them correctly.…
Read More A profound sense of lossSitting in a crowded 757 on the taxiway at DEN, with a screaming baby behind me, and a 90 minute ground stop before we can take off for Boston. And to cap it all, the captain refuses to turn on Channel 9. At least I can use my Treo to rearrange things by phone and…
Read More Status update