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I guess I missed the announcement that Hilltop Feed was closing so that new development could be done along Hillcrest Drive.
There are fewer and fewer of these types of old Thousand Oaks businesses left.
If you're looking for up to date information on the San Bernardino fire, please visit Susan Kitchens.
It seems that there are times when events just capture you. And then, sometimes you get a little too wrapped up in them.
Doc Searls was talking about various fire related thoughts and hit upon this:
As was pointed out to me not long after I arrived in California in 1985, the redwood— our state tree — is adapted to fire, as are many other forms of vegetation around here.
We have some fast growing, nearly impossible to kill vegetation growing on our hillsides. The second link above says that it's chaparral. I knew that, but what does chaparral really mean?
From the perspective of a curious observer, chaparral seems to be a combination of hard to kill, wildly alive plants and bushes.
Spring in this part of California is stunning. The hillsides are covered in bursting colors — plants and bushes rapidly overcome unused trails. For all the color, most of these plants are far from delicate; they have a variety of nasty defense mechanisms. As summer passes and fall ensues, much of the vegetation appears to die (some of it may, others simply become dormant). It also becomes kindling for a burning cycle which begins anew the seeding process. Yearly floods pose another hurdle which checks the introduction of new varieties (adapt fast or die... with no deep roots to cling to, the flooding and topsoil shift will kill it off). Within a couple years after a fire, a whole new ecology is roaring with life and few traces of the last burn are visible.
Trees seem to take a little while longer to create. They pop up on long untouched portions of our landscape, and eventually weed out much of the unruly wild vegetation because they have much deeper roots (which take a long time to create) and can suckle under all but the most adverse conditions.
We (people are still relatively new to the area really) also influence these growth patterns. We seem to be setting a lot of the fires but we also work really hard to stop them from their normal progress. While there are no more super fires, the time between burns is much shorter and their size is mostly smaller.
Quantity versus quality? Will it make a difference?
Update:
The 3.6 temblor yesterday afternoon was a popular topic of conversation last evening at Harleys along with lots of fire stories. I heard some nervous jokes about the four seasons of SoCal (fire and earthquake being two of them). A lot of people had stories about frantically trying to move horses out of the way the fires. One woman we know was slightly injured when she moved some horses from Simi only to run into another fire out near Happy Canyon outside of Santa Barbara.
The original Piru fire continues to burn up in the Los Padres National Forest. The Simi Valley fire is still burning up in the Newhall area. Neither fire is expected to be contained for several more days. Meanwhile, things in the San Bernardino Mountains and San Diego County are not going as well. Many more lost lives and homes.
The Star has a very interesting graphic showing how Santa Ana winds develop. 
It sprinkled a little here this morning and is raining right now in at least one part of Orange County. This is good and bad. It'll help with fire fighting efforts but may act to quickly destabilize now barren hillsides (leading to mudslides).
This article about the cookie brigade reminds me of something not yet said here...
I'd like to thank the many fire fighters, police officers, officials, journalists, activists and support staff here in Ventura County and elsewhere around Southern California for their hard work and perseverance in the face of what must have seemed at times an impossible task.
The jobs not over yet, but the weather is at least cooperating (cooler temperatures, westerly breezes).
Thank you.
Kurt worked hard to reel me back in from reality by providing a terrific example of Ztuff...
A fellow named Stephen G. Bloom 1 wrote an article for Salon about farting called Dr. Fart speaks some years back.
Yes, it most certainly is that kind of article. But it has a serious side as well. We all fart, all the time... there are reasons why. Many accidental biological emissions are accepted (tears, laughter, a cough 2) by society while others are flatly rejected (do not vomit on or around other humans is a good example).
According to one Dr. Michael D. Levitt, we Americans feel a bit obsessive about 3 farting. So he has spent a lifetime researching the subject and we get a nice encapsulated view.
Gassy food is gassy food for everyone, says Levitt, with a crucial caveat. Some people are able to absorb and tolerate the gas they produce better than others. The single most gas-producing food for most everyone, Levitt says, is -- no surprise -- baked beans. The musical fruit is made up entirely of simple carbohydrates, which are not absorbed in the intestines. Once inside the intestines, the sludge that was once beans is broken down by bacteria and enzymes, and then ferments. In that process, the thick, gooey substance can produce potent gases that have nowhere to go but down -- and out, thank goodness.
and...
Out is important. While Levitt says he has never treated someone who held a fart in too long, there are dangerous side effects (including dizziness and headaches). Your colon becomes bloated, and theoretically, the methane and other lethal gases could add enough toxins to your blood to poison you. Levitt does not recommend holding in farts.
This is what and who we are, even if we choose to run away from it.
1 At that time (early 2000) Stephen G. Bloom taught medical reporting at the University of Iowa. Now?
2 The social acceptance of coughing could change, very quickly. Evolution by law has already happened (how else did we get past the plagues and where do practices of banishment come from?) and will again. Law is the civilized answer to our somewhat distant ancestors laws of the fittest. Darwin saw clearly that humans had already evolved and backtracked that idea...
3 I'm guessing that he refers to our views on cleanliness which most of the world thinks a little weird... but what else are we going to do with all the personal hygiene products we sell? Eat 'em? Or maybe he just meant obsessive this way.
jozjozjoz has posted photos sent by a friend in Simi.
LA Blogs has a whole bunch of links to sites with pictures and commentary on the fires.
Catching up on some skipped articles...
The Cowboys are coming back to Oxnard for training camp next year. I wish they'd come back to CLU. One step at a time I guess...
I've been out all day, and part of the trip involved slogging through the normally bad LA traffic turned into a much more interesting mess by the fires and road closures. If you haven't seen the terrific pictures put up by Doc yesterday (of a fire north of Hearst Castle), do so. I've been offline for the most part and trying to catch up with normal mailbox deluge the rest of the time.
It started with my trip to Pasadena. Umm, yuck. If it hadn't been the quarterly senior staff meeting, I would have passed... oh well. The most surprising part of the whole trip was winding up down around De Soto and 101 and seeing no smoke. A clear sky. Wow, that's unique! I was in lots of traffic so I had plenty of time to admire it. By the time I got to Burbank, it was haze city again. Pasadena itself wasn't all that bad. It wasn't like home and I didn't see a single errant ash all day.
I caught bits and pieces of the fire news through the day, but was mostly in meetings or talking about the meetings. After finally wrapping things up at 7 (when groups come in from out of town, a meeting blizzard ensues), I wandered over to a party where a bunch of people were celebrating some major new functionality that's been built for a partner. Lots of groups have been involved and lot of people worked hard to make it happen, it was nice to see them all happy for a change.
Anyway, I decided to drive back through Simi on the 118 and although it was dark, I opened the windows just to get a sense of things. The smell coming through Santa Susana Pass was so powerful that I find it impossible to describe. It'll fade quickly, as it did after the Greenmeadow fire in 1993, but I can still smell it now. Overwhelming and inescapable are the only things I can think of, and that's not nearly enough. I'm going to have to get out there and see the destruction close up in the daylight soon just to get a real personal perspective.
Also on the way home, KNX informed me that the Val Verde fire has now come full circle and is back up in the Santa Clarita area. We've got some friends up in Stevenson Ranch, which is just east of I-5 and about three miles south of Magic Mountain. There is a pretty amazing picture from that area in this CBS slide show.
For everyone in the family who keeps asking, we're fine... that was why I started putting up this information. I'll leave you with two sets of reader submitted photos at the Star (they're really terrific).
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, events march onward.
Tim Oren has some useful modeling observations on media and business models.
Now it's time to drop the pose. I actually believe the most interesting territory is in the mid-market, both in music and other media. The terrain of foothills and coast ranges, newly exposed as the Internet drains out the water of fixed costs. We may also surmise that the 'net reduces the costs of building new hills, as word-of-mouth and focused advertising augment or supplant conventional PR and promotion. To borrow an ecological metaphor, there are a lot of niches being opened as the water drops. Many that the BigCo peak dwellers may be ill-adapted to exploit. That's where I want to go next.
Find the niches and exploit them in ways that the BigCo's can't do easily and the smaller companies don't have the resources to reach (or in a shifting landscape, in a place that no one has noticed).
The Star has created a nice map
of the fire area in Ventura County.
The fire fighters did a wonderful job of stamping out the fire south of 118 this morning. This story touches on the various high points and status around the county.
The fires in Val Verde and around Piru continue to burn as separate entities with larger flare ups happening from time to time.
The main fire north of Simi continues to rage and there are now live reports coming from the Porter Ranch area (east of the Santa Susana Pass on the LA County side of the line) tracking the eastward progress of the fire storm. It is slowly but surely creeping east.
According to NBC, President Bush has now declared four California counties as major disaster areas which gives displaced residents access to federal aid.
Boing Boing is pointing to a cell phone picture blog of the SoCal fires.
I'm sitting here watching the fire (NBC is focusing on Simi) that has now jumped 118 between Kuehner and Santa Susana Pass and is burning south in the area of Kuehner Drive and Los Angeles Avenue. If the fire gets loose in Box Canyon...
Susan Kitchens (20/20 Hindsight) has links and a great map of the SoCal fires.
I was looking all over the place for that sort of thing.
Various updates on the fires here in Southern California...
It's now reported that there are 10 separate fires burning in California.
Visible smoke in SoCal... 
One of the NOAA sites has a live image (which is dark right now). Here's one I captured Sunday afternoon.
See the satellite page for the National Weather Service (Western Region) for more views.
Doc Searls has been watching some of the affects up the coast in Santa Barbara and pointed to some coverage.
I've found some additional coverage at the Ventura County Star (as I've been pointing out, they are doing a pretty good job with scarce resources). With the Simi Valley fire now spilling east into LA County, the valley based Daily News will probably jump into the act. See @LA News for more information on SoCal news sources.
The Simi fire is now over 80,000 acres and I have heard reports putting it as high as 90,000. With all of that, the fire down south in San Diego County sounds much more out of control and dangerous.
The Times has a pretty nice flash based grouping of a few local pictures. You can access it here at the LA Times and on KTLA's mirror.
Finally, various sources are reporting that the Monday Night Football game is being moved to Arizona (from Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego).
There's not much new in the official news category. Before going to bed last night I called some friends over in the Tapo Canyon area and invited them here if they need to evacuate but they had not heard anything at that point.
The Star has been doing a pretty good job of getting news reports out... but I haven't found anyone else covering Ventura County. According to a report this morning 47,000 acres have been burned.
Sarah was out a couple hours ago and went up 23 to Tierra Rejada where she had to exit and drive west. She indicated that the fire is burning on the ranches on the south side of Tierra Rejada, which would put the fire less than a mile from the Reagan Library.
KCLU (88.3 FM) has been doing full time coverage this morning. Someone just called in from Box Canyon and indicated that they can see fire up in the Santa Susana Pass area. There have also been some reports about a release of Chlorine gas in Moorpark.
According to the latest fire update from the Ventura County Star, this fire burned 10 miles from somewhere outside of Piru to Simi Valley in three hours this afternoon (which explains the sudden, heavy smoke we saw).
It's been a little crazy around here this evening. With the highways closed down and much of the city driving around trying to find a good vantage point to see the fires, this sleepy little city has gone quite crazy (a weekday afternoon traffic flow on Erbes Road at 10 PM is one of many examples &mdash I am quite surprised there aren't cars strewn everywhere after what we saw in a few places).
The best view Adam and I found was over at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. We got stopped (like everyone else) at the circular drive near the top, but parked close to the top and walked back over to the gate. We saw enough there to be scared. The fire had definitely gotten south beyond the 118 in places and appeared to be burning up the ridge just to the north of Tierra Rejada Road. There was a better view of the westernmost end of the fireline further down from the library, but we didn't stop to ogle any longer.
Sarah and I were just discussing what we might want to grab if we need to run for it. Saturday morning that would have been silly, but right now... who knows. If this thing manages to burn it's way onto the ridges around Sunset Hills, we'll be fleeing to somewhere.Here are some photos taken by Steve and I this afternoon when the light suddenly turned orange.
The wind seemed to be blowing almost directly south, which pushed everything in our direction. Jon wanted to go see the fire (how close I asked? about 45 feet was his reply... we had a little talk about the power of fire) but we passed on that. Those folks already have enough problems to deal with.
While working on these pictures I had to turn on the light in my office because I could barely see... 4:30 and it's already twilight.
I went out to pick up Steve from his drivers education class and on the way home we noticed a lot of smoke drifting southwest. It appears to be coming from north west Simi... maybe a little further north.
Update:
So OK, maybe I should check the local news more often. The fire is north of Piru (which is about seven miles north of Simi Valley) somewhere near the lake.
In Is This The Bad Neighborhood Now, Wally?, the writer comments on the deceptive nature of LA's neighborhoods in response to part of a week long series on South Central by Jill Leovy. [via L.A. Observed]
He rightly points out that our middle class oriented ideas about poverty and how the rest of the world judges poverty are not even remotely similar.
The Passion Of Christ (Mel Gibson's movie about the last hours of Jesus Christ) has been heavily criticized and discussed by many. The recent news about additional lightning strikes on the set has created some interesting responses...
I don't recall ever seeing the original Far Side (Gary Larson) panel, but this FARK job made me laugh. It settles playfully on the wrong side of political correctness (from the Couch):
Jamie's readers provide some short thoughts on the state of their lives.
And then... Morph3 versus AOL's Running Man.
It's hard to say what AOL is trying to do with their new mobile logo, but they certainly seem to be working on turning him (it?) into a friend of their customers. The picture shows Boise Idaho mayor Carolyn Terteling-Payne hugging Running at an event held earlier this month where AOL apologized to Boise for making fun of the city in one of its ads.
A friend sent me a funny view of voice recognition (from the Onion).
Voice Recognition Software Yelled At
NEW YORK-Fidelity Financial Services' Gwen Watson, 33, shouted angrily at her IBM ViaVoice Pro USB voice-recognition software, sources close to the human-resources administrator reported Monday. "No, not Gary Friedman! Barry Friedman, you stupid computer. BARRY!" Watson was heard to scream from her cubicle. "Jesus Christ, I could've typed it in a hundredth of the time." After another minute of yelling, Watson was further incensed upon looking at her screen, which read, "Barely Freedman you God ram plucking pizza ship."
I don't read the Onion any more without prompting but it does continue to celebrate the absurdity of the world around us.
If they shifted from shouting to subtlety, would it work better? Probably not.
AOL has been blocking popups on the sly, no real surprise there.
About a year ago, spammers figured out that they, too, could exploit it, making ads automatically appear on users' screens at any time.
I nearly fell out of my chair when I read that. The plague of involuntary browser popups has to be close to three years old, maybe more.
So two weeks ago, AOL began turning the feature off on customers' behalf, using a self-updating mechanism in AOL's software. But the setting changed is on Windows, not AOL's software. Users are not notified of the change, though they may manually turn the feature back on, and AOL won't change it again.
Ah! This isn't browser based popup blocking (not that you'd know). It's the rather ill advised Windows Messenger system shipped in Win2K and XP. When the wide open message system hit consumer desktops in XP, it was almost immediately attacked.
So... AOL turns Windows Messenger service off without asking questions. Call it WinXP Service Pack AOL01?
I really enjoy reading Bill de hÓra.
This discussion about RDF (in reply to a debate about RSS-Data) has piqued my curiosity. I think I'm missing something pretty big about the kinds of relationships you can form and manage with RDF. I get the idea of a single property being able to be linked in many locations, which is powerful in a relational data sort of way.
I don't see IBM and Microsoft heavily involved in things RDF, which makes me wonder. They have significant brain-years invested in this streaming metadata space (CORBA and DCOM, plus all the related products and technologies).
Still, now seems like a good time to figure out the puzzle that is RDF.
In theory, everyone has a doppelgänger.
A friend found someone with the same name and many of the same interests. He was a bit confused (the friend).
I guess that's why I go by Dave.
Stephen managed to break his right wrist today playing softball (a collision on the base path) less than two weeks after breaking a bone in the tip his finger (a small break) on the same hand.
Let's be more specific this time. No more contact sports; that list now includes softball.
Poor kid... a little too much like dad.
Douglas Welch points to rssweather.com which is a darned useful idea.
It was a two minute job to find LA, replace the zip code with something more appropriate, go to the page to make sure it was working and grab the generated RSS URI. If they extend the idea and add more things, like links to more local weather data, I'll probably follow them (when we actually have weather — like we're having right now).
I've changed the rdf feed to a full source feed and am playing around with some others.
I've also added a blog roll to the main page. It looks pretty darned crowded right now, but maybe I'll get used to it.
Jay Rosen's When the Learned Rant at the Times is a good rant about ranting and includes some interesting insights into the reasons people believe the rant is justified.
Even if you've never had the temptation to rant at the New York Times (why not?), it's worth reading.
I found this interesting glossary of weblog terminology today. It seems more complete than others I've stumbled across.
I went out this evening to Minato Sushi (Moorpark and Janss in the north shopping center) with the other real fish lover in the family.
I don't spend as much time with Stephen (the dreaded middle child — he was the baby of family for eight years) as I probably should, but we always enjoying hanging out together and he really likes sushi. It was a perfect combination and made for a nice dinner for the two of us... good food and conversation.
He's still learning. We both learned that he's not ready for Jalapeno Poppers yet. He tried both gifts (baked Saba and some sort of Squid). He loved the Mackerel (I liked it, but I grew up on it, and like raw Mackerel better). The squid he wasn't too happy with, but I actually liked it (I'm not usually a squid kinda guy, I cut too much squid for bait as a kid but this was delicate and had a rich flavor).
If you like sushi and haven't yet tried Minato, you should. They have great service, a nice quiet atmosphere and good food; I recommend it. I've had my own chopsticks there for several months which is a neat feature for regulars. They've got all the normal stuff and tend to have things that smaller sushi bars may not (they cut their own fish, so they've almost always got kama, can do any kind of seared dish you like and have come up with some interesting twists like the pink scallops they had some months ago). If you like cold Sake, try their lemon Sake.
This Linux kernel mailing list summary from nearly two years ago is terrific. Coding Style; Development Philosophy has many many things for me to think about.
Along the way I learned a bit about a book I'd heard of The Future and Its Enemies and the Dynamist Blog. I am going to purchase the book... perhaps it will help me with my own (ever shifting) stasism versus dynamism internal debate.
I'm pretty sure I got there from something on InstaPundit, but that was a while back.
That's the one drawback to never crashing, having lots of memory and just sort of letting things run (at one point I realized I still had some Safari windows open with lots of tabs inside each window from several days ago). Sometimes you really need a clean slate and a do over.
My dear wife has now finished closing down her garage sale and we still have something I really want to get rid of.
When we moved here a few years ago, I argued against bringing the mobile basketball backboard but I lost (I was voted down by our children). We had a large RV area at our old house and that basically became the basketball court. It worked great except for the times when the ball bounced over the fence into the wash, but the kids liked having it as did I. Since moving, it's sat unused (and in the way) and has to go.
The rim is a bit rusty and the net is in tatters, but otherwise it's in good shape. If you've got a flat area and want a backboard cheaply, now is your chance.
Please?
Don Park has gathered some interesting information about SQLLite (casual poking around last weekend indicates that NetNewsWire is using SQLLite for some of it's storage needs).
I guess the thing that impressed me most about SQLLite while looking around on www.sqlite.org is the way that much of D. Richard Hipp's free software and work seems to be tied together. CVSTrac is completely tied into the SQLLite development process and uses the database for its own storage. Tickets are the documentation trail for new items in the wiki. Major wiki entries lead to linking from the top level page.
Yesterday was another in what is becoming a series of strange Fridays.
Lately, I've been completely burned out by Thursday evening and head off to sleep very early. Same thing this time around but at least when I woke up around 2 am I didn't get back up. Instead, I slept until around 7. I also made a pot of coffee, which I don't do at home much anymore and was in the long run, a mistake. The combination of nearly 11 hours of sleep and coffee was more than my system could deal with, so I ended up being awake until the very wee hours of the morning.
It was a fairly normal day, work wise. No major crisis to deal with, a potentially complicated integration actually seems like it was moving in the right direction, etc. After finishing what needed to be done and catching up on some reading, I decided that I have to get a blogroll put together for Ztuff and started poking around to see what was needed.
I ended up doing that until right before leaving for the Lancers game against Agoura. I decided to start with Jeremy's opml2html script, which triggered a decent into CPAN hell (which doesn't play too well on OsX for the casual perl user... inevitably something needs temp support which triggers an attempt to build perl 5.8... yipes!) So I decided to get my TiBook up to date on Fink, which took a while and then I started loading the perl modules I needed. At that point, I was already late for the game and took off.
The game against Agoura wasn't a whole lot of fun. To make things more interesting, I got a $40 parking ticket for parking in a permit only zone. I will never figure out where you can and can not park around the high school. That'll teach me not to go with Sarah (she has a special parking pass).
I hung out for a bit and read after getting home, and then came back to my office to get the whole blogroll thing moving. First things first. I moved over my old OPML file from the Radio site and loaded it into OmniOutliner. That led to some interesting discovery of new RSS options... which eventually led to starting over with a new file generated by NetNewsWire. I made a bunch of tweaks so that I could automatically insert dividers, could insert sites without an RSS feed, that sort of thing. I finally ended up with some HTML that looks like it'll work and a scheme which is repeatable using CVS and cron to rebuild the HTML blob when needed.
The next step is to figure out how to get MT to do dynamic inclusion (I'd toyed with using .shtml files last Christmas when tinkering with MT and decided it could wait for later... oh well). I figured that if all else failed, I'd do something like an <MTInclude> plug-in, but that seems to be covered already. I spent a bunch of time last night wandering around and reading about plug-ins. I think I have a much better handle on things now but a lot more flailing ahead of me.
At times I find myself missing the time I once had to do things like this. And then I wonder when I would find time for all the other important stuff I have to do these days. The simple answer is that there isn't time and everyone has to focus on different things in different ways.
Like any conscientious control freak, I want to do it all. Hrmph!
A strange combination to be sure, but I happened upon one instance today while catching up on my reading:
Peter King: When I asked Warren Sapp if Howard Dean could beat Bush in 2004, he said to me: "Who's Howard Dean?"
Welbourn: I don't know if that's a social commentary or it just says something about Sapp's awareness. Sometimes I think Sapp should be on some medication. It makes me nervous for the future of America that people actually listen to what he says and look up to him.
You might be tempted to ask why is Dave reading Monday Morning Quarterback on Friday? It's just been that kind of week I'm afraid. I was shocked to learn this afternoon from my wife that the Red Sox lost yesterday. I was dead to the world early last night, and at the time of the last update, Boston was leading.
Welcome to Holland, we hope you lose. See the movie...
Thanks Jeff, that was great.
Joshua pointed to the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act of 2003 as a potential savior for researchers. Sounds nice doesn't it? Eventually a watered down law like this might be passed. In California, it would already be a ballot initiative, primed for the short term, high impact media blast.
What we need is a Digital Bill of Rights; a basic list of things we can do, rather than a never ending pile of lists of things we can't do. That conflict is a never ending game of legal whack-a-mole.
The idea has a snow balls chance in hell today... but things change, most often because of ideas.
If our president won't read the news (waiting on the opinions of others for the unfiltered truth) then how in the hell are we going to get our average citizens to actually pay attention and think for themselves? I'm not poking fun at Mr. Bush directly, but it speaks to a larger issue which seems to drive how our system works (or doesn't).
I wandered there from this rather funny bit that Dean Esmay pointed to.
Lisa Williams has written an excellent summary of what local bloggers can do to fill in the news coverage in their communities. [via Ross Notes]
I've been reading la.localfeeds.com (XML) for a couple weeks now and there has been a bit of local event coverage (local in Los Angeles being a rather hard term to wrap ones head around). Given that so many bloggers are young, and haven't yet turned their attention to community events, there is a dearth of focused local reporting. I'm reasonably certain that will change over time.
I know it's hard keeping up with things these days, so it can be pretty easy to let the little things slip through the cracks. That being the case I just thought that I should point out that the city name in front of the Raiders football franchise is Oakland, and has been since June of 1995.
Los Angeles is considered a huge sprawling metro area, but no one has suggested that Oakland is just another suburb.
There are fifteen other teams in the AFC. Many of them are actually worth watching. Like, I dunno, maybe Indianapolis (which hosts Carolina today) or Kansas City (which visits Green Bay). I'm not sure why you decided that we'd like to see Oakland at Cleveland.
Tom thinks that now is the time for Apple to embrace Intel.
Now is the time to strike for Apple. They're running a FreeBSD core (designed for Intel architecture) and had to work to block Intel compatibility. Embrace Intel's architecture and reap the rewards... now is the time if Apple wants a piece of MS' pie. I would buy the OS if I could run it on my PC; I am not going to pay for over-priced Mac hardware. Sculley laments.
Tom might be right, but should we be listening to Sculley? John Sculley was, is and always will be a salesman. RISC, CISC, Intel, Motorola, the AIM group; they were just ingredients in the soda pop he was responsible for selling. His moment in the sun happened with the Knowledge Navigator, an interesting company vision. He failed to make the first version successful (Newton needed more time, he rushed it).
The core of the todays system is Darwin; based on a Mach kernel, with generous doses of FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD code added. There is an x86 version of this code which a group of people keep up to date. The magic of the Mac (and the OS) has always been in the handling of the edge cases (the secret sauce). A lot of secret sauce. The downside has always been the ability of Apple to ignore anything they don't want to hear.
It's not just the system and applications. It's also the drivers, the custom ASICs and for the last few years, very focused adoption of interesting technology. Every new OS revision has a new wrinkle. Since the introduction of the G3, Apple has been driving forward a lot faster than they had been for most of the previous ten years.
Like it or not, Apple is pushing forward MacOS X as fast as it is by owning the environment. They still stumble from time to time even in the closed world they have created.
I love the content, but navigation is overly pretty (along with slow and hard to use in places) and the inconsistent font sizing is a pain in the eyes. It's a lot like being handed a partly complete biography with lots of the original source data. I wish they'd put larger versions of the photographs behind a lot of smaller images. Enough complaining, the site really is a treasure.
The timing of the site introduction seems a bit odd, happening so close to the announcement of another ownership change. I expect that many people throughout the organization (aka the ball club to use O'Malleys term) knew the new site was coming, and the sale does seem to try and borrow a bit from the coattails of a new Dodger fan resource.
I haven't been much of a baseball fan the last few years. I grew up following the Phillies (it was about evenly split between Phillies, Yankees and Mets fans where I lived). After leaving home, I became a casual fan until the kids started playing. As I became more interested, I started following the Dodgers. And then, somewhere in the whole shifting ownership (and management) process, I lost all interest. Still, this information is very compelling to me for some reason. The pages I quote below are from the O'Malley testimony before a House committee investigating antitrust issues in June of 1957 (it's a huge file, but has only 89 pages).
I love this quote (pg 70):
I have never said that baseball was not a business.
I think it is a silly business, but it is business anyway.
Shortly after (pg 71), there is an interesting discussion about when (and if) baseball should come under the auspices of antitrust law. O'Malley seems to have agreed that if baseball ever got to making as money as US Steel, GM or DuPont; baseball might fall under antitrust regulation if anyone was being oppressed or hurt (the players union covers that I suppose). He'd have objected to my putting words in his mouth of course. More so since those requirements have been met.
I'd like to know what happened between O'Malley and Branch Rickey. O'Malley bought all of Rickey's shares in 1950. Branch rode off into the sunset. Why?
The discussion about the parking garage on pg 39 is pretty funny. A fifteen story parking garage sounds about right when you consider the parking at Chavez Ravine and look at pictures of the area surrounding Ebbets Field. O'Malley considered parking for 5,000 utterly ridiculous (he didn't even mention the lack of subway facilities here, he did elsewhere). At Dodger Stadium he managed to create parking for 16,000 vehicles that can be accesssed in under an hour, tops. You can get out in less than 15 minutes from a normal mid-season game.
O'Malley got families early, which meant lots of moms and daughters and that meant ladies rooms. Which no one had. He had to explain to congress where the after tax profits went and he gave one example. From everything I've seen, he had a long, but diverse list. He got his business (more important, he understood his customers) and he was investing in those beliefs all along, turning his profits into pieces of the company and then turning those pieces into reasonably balanced growth and speculative bets.
His TV instincts were tuned far ahead. He seemed to understand (pg 58 or so) where sports licensing rights could go nearly fifty years ago after a short bit of pitching from a company that thought it could create a closed circuit pay per view system (Skiatron Corp.). He helped to create a one year pilot contract (no guarantees?) that could have become a model for baseball had the company been able to deliver even a little bit. Apparently, the Dodgers were part of an experiment in the mid sixties. How strange then that his son had to sell the team to make that vision happen (the sale to News Corp. finally gave the Dodgers a New York [Yankee] style, maximum exposure deal).
O'Malley believed in baseball, he lived it. He also had this crazy dream that he could economically build his own stadium and operate it for a profit. His statement at the end of his congressional testimony is all about what he'd done in a little experiment in Florida and planned to do somewhere if given the opportunity. What a dreamer.
It is still a wonderful place to go see a baseball game today. A detail man, O'Malley was concerned with the air drafts in the stadium — he did fine there. A twilight game is best, as the heat is down by game time, you get a typical LA sunset and the canyon begins to really cool off after dark; bring a sweater (or substitute) for any game that carries over into the evening. Vin Scully agrees, and it's hard to find a better authority than that.
Peter O'Malley (by all reports, a very good baseball administrator himself) has created a wonderful tribute to his late father: Walter O'Malley.
I'd never before heard that Oakland had tried to lure the Dodgers. The letter from the Mayor of South Plainfield, NJ is worth a look. Finally, we have this letter from Jimmy Hahn, now known as James K. Hahn, the Mayor of Los Angeles.
It gives me a better historical perspective (I grew up with the constant harping about the Dodgers moving west). I just wish there were more documents. The June 26, 1957 anti-trust hearing notes indicate a memo from May of that year that's no where to be found.
A friend asked me what I used to manage book marks this morning and recommended that I take a look at Bookmark4U.
I seems like it might make a nice replacement for the static pages that I maintain using CVS and cron jobs.
Today I am more amazed than ever at the power of Hollywood.
I guess that it just doesn't connect for me the same way it seems to for others.
I was worried about the affect that the fabled 'Plastic City' of my childhood would have on me when our young family moved out here in 1987. We'd lived in San Diego a couple years earlier, but that wasn't the same thing at all. As it turned out, the people active and interested in Hollywood live on a different planet, not a nearby zip code.
Maybe getting around helps. Everywhere you go, you'll find shattered dreams if you ask. Many people come here expecting something and eventually have to realize that they have become part of an industry that feeds upon them and they move on.
The only celebrity I've ever had any real lasting interest in is Kim Basinger, who lived a few miles away in Agoura for a while. Doug Basinger (her slightly crazy cousin -- since calmed down) made a big impression on me about 22 years ago. He was convinced (and right as it turns out) that she was going to be a big star. I'd like to meet her, explain how I know Doug and move on.
I wonder... what are they going to do with their power?
I was coming home from Harley's Simi Bowl this evening and was on my own for a change because Sarah and I had taken separate cars.
Being in a bit of an odd mood, I decided to turn off KCLU and put in something loud. I fished around and found BOC's Fire Of Unknown Origin, opened all the windows (moon roof included), cranked the volume and played two favorites on the way back home; Veteran Of The Psychic Wars and Joan Crawford. I hit some slow traffic at the top of Sunset Hills on 23, but it was otherwise clear even for a Wednesday evening at nine. The moon was up and as always the view dropping down into the Conejo Valley was beautiful.
It was carefree fun, the kind you have as a teenager and young adult.
I wonder if the neighbors heard the racket I made coming in?
After being home for a few minutes, I realized that I was pretty cold (I'd worn shorts and a t-shirt as usual). I checked the outside thermometer which said 61. Getting older means getting cold (which just didn't happen to me at one point).
We're going to see part of the November 9th Lunar Eclipse here if I read this thing correctly. Maybe now is the right time to buy those binoculars I've been thinking about.
Tom decided to add himself to GeoURL last night. He was one of the local folks I'd found by doing searches and I've been reading his weblog for a few weeks now. In addition to being local, Tom's one of the team involved in creating the recently announced Blogware (which was written in Ruby).
I'm also going to see if I can figure out how trackback works on this post.
I was doing one final ballot check to make sure we're still voting in the same place and see where McClintock was (I'm still wavering). We have ballot cards A through G, the first having 53, 54 and the recall. That leaves six cards for the candidates.
I don't know if all the district ballots are the same, but McClintock is the next to last name on the last card here in his home of record.
A couple weeks ago I was pretty negative about the Packers after they fell to 1-2 with a loss at Arizona. The win last Monday night against the Bears was good, but expected.
Today the offense did a really good job against what was considered to be a solid Seattle defensive unit. They got going early (on the second drive) and kept it going until very late in the game. The defense (especially against the run) is still shaky, but everything else looked pretty good.
Keeping the offensive balance they had this week (35 rushes out of 61 plays) is probably the biggest thing they need to concentrate on. Little wrinkles like the first half end around helps to keep the other team from cheating.
The train is back on the tracks but next up is Kansas City and their amazing kick returner Dante Hall. There will be a lot of focus on special teams during the week but Priest Holmes could have a field day.
Doc points to a new Anti-Porn Bill that would seem to make it illegal to operate a P2P network without federal licensing and a registration system for all users.
Oh yeah, the FTC is also going to 'give' families ID devices to put on their computers. The clipper chip lives (except that it's portable and personal).
Joshua Drake of Random Mumblings found this 'blog through GeoURL, which is pretty neat (that's the purpose of the system). He doesn't think we're politically compatible, which is probably true, I've not found many who share my eclectic views.
GeoURL data is now being used by Localfeeds but they're not quite there yet. It's an interesting idea, but has some really scary implications as a data gathering tool.
I've found a few other weblogs close to home. But, umm, they don't broadcast their location and that's their right. My way of finding them was rather odd but I've got some ideas of ways to create an automated process. And I'm not too happy about that.
The EFF has published a white paper "Unintended Consequences - Five Years under the DMCA".
It doesn't say nearly enough bad things about DMCA, but it's a start.
I'm one of the stragglers reading the Fortune article Joy After Sun. He's got some wacky ideas to be sure, but he's right in many ways.
His reason for leaving is a lot more easily understood than Eric Raymonds article this week which indicated that people inside Sun think the company is doomed. Sun has been making shifts for a while now and has been here before, I see no reason they can't find a way out of their current slump.
Need to work out a little stress? Go here.
Along with all the hoopla surrounding the recall election for Governor, there are two ballot measures to vote on.
Proposition 53 at least forces the legislature to to spend money on the states sagging infrastructure instead of pissing it away on yet another boondoggle. It may also worsen our already seriously damaged credit rating because it ties the government to fixed spending requirements. There are good arguments for going both ways but I'm still undecided.
Proposition 54 is really hard to understand. If passed, it will certainly ignite a court battle (which we can't afford) and is overridden by a multitude of Federal regulations. Still, I like it. Race and ethnicity are basically a non-issue in the giant melting pot of Southern California (where just about everyone is from somewhere else).
This was a pretty funny repayment for what was originally a pretty funny gag.
Bill Venners has started an interview series with Yukihiro Matsumoto on Ruby and has started a Philosophy of Ruby forum.
