Category: Alec

I spent today hanging out with Alec, doing some shopping and spending far too much time in the reality distortion field of his new MacBook Air. (Kathy has one too, with the SSD option.) I must confess: I desire one deeply. Very, very deeply. If I can just figure out what to do with my iTunes library…
During the afternoon we bumped into an old friend and former Sun colleague, Lisa. That was fun. ((Hi, Lisa!)) And then in the evening we went to Jim and Kathy’s for dinner, where we were joined by Robin (ex-Sun, now of Google). Jim barbecued big prime rib steaks to go with the vegetables that Kathy prepared, while we all rapped about Sun, past and present. After the steaks – but before dessert – Jim got out Kathy’s Segway and we all had a go on it. Initially it was really weird, but after a few minutes it started to feel quite natural. I wonder what the local rules are in Seattle about using Segways; it would be awesome to commute between PacMed and Uwajimaya on one. Oh well…..

Alec blogs about the girl who overdosed on seven double espressos, and writes, “Nowadays I have a hard stop, and move to decaf after a max of four singles.” Hmm. My normal breakfast begins with a quad espresso macchiato, which is just over 300 mg. caffeine. I frequently have another quad EM later in the day, and occasionally a caffeinated drink with lunch. ((However I’m surprised to see that one of my regular choices, WhoopAss, only has 50 mg. of caffeine, about the same as a cup of tea.)) And I’ve never knowingly OD’d on caffeine, though I have experienced caffeine withdrawal. Perhaps it’s a function of body weight…

Here I am, celebrating my first year of working at Amazon and living in Seattle, and feeling thoroughly acclimatized here ((As you can see, I’ve even changed my blog pic from the Boston skyline to the Seattle waterfront)), and then Alec goes and posts a little blog entry that makes me all homesick for England.
Sigh…

Security Alert! If you buy online from Apple, check your e-mail carefully….
You have been warned.

It was a good weekend. On Saturday, I visited Lorna in hospital, then headed off to spend a few hours shopping in Oxford. As I was leaving the hospital, I checked my cell-phone, and saw that I’d missed a call from a UK number. I called back, and found that it was from Jeff Lower. Jeff and I had both attended Essex University in the early 1970s, and had subsequently worked together at a small software startup. We drifted apart after I moved to the States in 1981, and we hadn’t seen each other since about 1985. We recently re-established contact through LinkedIn.
Jeff lives near Newbury, about half an hour south of Oxford, and I drove down to visit for a few hours. It was delightful: Jeff has an idyllic house in the country, and we talked had lunch, listened to music, talked some more… After 22 years I really didn’t think that either of us had changed very much.
About four o’clock I returned to the hospital, and soon afterwards Alec and Adriana arrived. After visiting with Lorna for a while, the three of us took a bus into Oxford and went to Brown’s for dinner. It was, of course, a geek affair: Alec whipped out his Nokia 800 tablet in order to demonstrate the folding BlueTooth keyboard that he uses. I had ordered a Nokia 770 from W00t while I was in Dublin (just $130!), and Alec knew that it was waiting for me in Seattle. Over dinner (and later, waiting for the bus), we had a fine debate about the relevance of classical economic theories to information economies, governed as they are by network effects and the natural monopolies that flow from software platforms and wired infrastructure. It was good to see how complete Alec’s recovery has been – it was exactly a year since his accident in France – and it was great to finally meet Adriana. I’m looking forward to our next dinner.
On Sunday I flew back on a British Airways 747 that has been refitted with the very latest in-flight entertainment system, complete with video-on-demand for all. Once the cabin service director had rebooted the system(!), it was quite impressive. I watched two films: Jim Carrey in The Number 23, and the very funny Hot Fuzz.
One other thought: I spent a little while standing by the aft door as we were crossing Greenland, and I was startled to see so much bare rock, and so many meltwater lakes. The last time I’d crossed this area in summer (about ten years ago), it was pretty much solid ice from coast to coast. Not now.

The media has been all a-twitter about a new report entitled Extensive usage of ‘Web 2.0’ sites opens new business data leakage risks. My first thought was “WTF does this have to do with Web 2.0?” (And of course my second thought was “Oh no, here with go with that stupid Web 2.0 meme again…”) Fortunately Alec has fisked this comprehensively, by playing the word substitution game. As The Who might have put it, “Meet the new vulnerability/Same as the the old vulnerability.” Or perhaps not. Anyway….

Belatedly following Alec, I’ve posted some of my photos from my recent trip to the UK. There are rather a lot of “views from a train window” which capture an utterly typical (but not particularly photogenic) view of England. Oh, well. I particularly enjoy the shots I took in the Covered Market in Oxford with Alec, such as:

and

Oxford itself was as photogenic as ever, e.g.

And finally, here are my mother and Alec in conversation:

Enjoy.

Alec has been doing the email equivalent of dumpster diving, and the result is this delightful piece, covering the launch of www.sun.com and the attempts by Sun IT to beat back the rise of WWW traffic. It all seems so terribly quaint, doesn’t it?

I had planned to spent this morning on a bunch of housekeeping chores that I’ve been putting off. So much for good intentions…. While I was having my first cup of coffee and checking my email, I “accidentally” found myself unwrapping a DVD that had just arrived from Alec, and slipping it into the conveniently-placed slot in the front of my PowerBook. And so for the last couple of hours I’ve been transported across time and the Atlantic….

It’s a wonderful performance, anchored by six songs from the just-released album Absent Friends and including most of the older favourites like “National Express”, “Generation Sex”, “Tonight We Fly”, and “Something for the Weekend”. For me, the highlights are probably “Leaving Today” and “Sunrise”, with which he closes.
The only disappointment is the complete lack of songs from Regeneration. I know that it was a stylistic departure, and doesn’t match the range of the instrumental ensemble in this show, but it would have been nice to hear “Note to Self” or “Perfect Lovesong. Never mind.
Thanks, Alec. And now I guess I’ll have to reschedule the rest of my weekend….

Here‘s the latest podcast from Alec. (536KB MP3, 2:16) You know that he’s glad to be in an English hospital when he inadvertently refers to it as a “hotel”, right? It sounds as if his leg is in a brace rather than a cast, which is good: there’s nothing more miserable than a plaster cast in a heatwave….
Anyway, he doesn’t have Internet access yet (though he’s planning to experiment with GPRS through his mobile), but SMS is working, so if you know his number…. (13375p34k optional.)